A HUSBAND IMPRISONED.

Joseph the Second, the Emperor, was so kind and so philanthropic that he excited the unbounded love of most of his subjects. He abolished serfdom, established toleration and lived in the happiness of his people. One day while on his way to Ostend to declare it a free port, and while at the head of a great procession, he saw a woman at the door of her cottage in dejection. The Emperor dismounted and asked the cause of her grief. She said that her husband had gone to Ostend to see the Emperor, and had declined to take her with him; for, as he was an alien, he could not understand her loyal enthusiasm, and that it was the one great desire of her life to see the ruler for whose kindness and goodness and greatness she had an unspeakable admiration; and her disappointment in not being able to go and see him was simply unbearable.

The Emperor Joseph took from his pocket a box decorated with diamonds surrounding a picture of himself and presented it to her, and when the picture revealed to whom she was talking she knelt in reverence and clapped her hands in gladness before him. The Emperor took the name of her husband and the probable place where he might be found at Ostend, and had him imprisoned for the three days of the Emperor's visit, so that the husband returning home found that the wife had seen the Emperor while he had not seen him.

In many families of this earth the wife, through the converting grace of God, has seen the "King in His beauty," and He has conferred upon her the pearl of great price, while the husband is an "alien from the covenant of promise, without God and without hope in the world," and imprisoned in worldliness and sin. Oh, that they might arm in arm go this day and see Him, who is not only greater and lovelier than any Joseph of earthly dominion, but "high over all, in earth, and air, and sky!" His touch is life. His voice is music. His smile is heaven.



DUTIES OF WIVES TO HUSBANDS.

"The name of his wife was Abigail; and she was a woman of good understanding and of a beautiful countenance."—1 SAMUEL 25:3.

The ground in Carmel is white, not with fallen snow, but the wool from the backs of three thousand sheep, for they are being sheared. And I hear the grinding of the iron blades together, and the bleating of the flocks, held between the knees of the shearers, while the clipping goes on, and the rustic laughter of the workmen. Nabal and his wife Abigail preside over this homestead. David, the warrior, sends a delegation to apply for aid at this prosperous time of sheep-shearing, and Nabal peremptorily declines his request. Revenge is the cry. Yonder over the rocks come David and four hundred angry men with one stroke to demolish Nabal and his sheepfolds and vineyards. The regiment marches in double quick, and the stones of the mountain loosen and roll down, as the soldiers strike them with their swift feet, and the cry of the commander is "Forward! Forward!"

A FAIR PROPITIATOR.

Abigail, to save her husband and his property, hastens to the foot of the hill. She is armed, not with sword or spear, but with her own beauty and self-sacrifice, and when David sees her kneeling at the base of the craig, he cries: "Halt! Halt!" and the caverns echo it: "Halt! Halt!" Abigail is the conqueress! One woman in the right mightier than four hundred men in the wrong! A hurricane stopped at the sight of a water-lily! A dewdrop dashed back Niagara! By her prowess and tact she has saved her husband, and saved her home, and put before all ages an illustrious specimen of what a wife can do if she be godly, and prudent, and self-sacrificing, and vigilant, and devoted to the interests of her husband, and attractive.

As, Sabbath before last, I took the responsibility of telling husbands how they ought to treat their wives—and, though I noticed that some of the men squirmed a little in their pew, they endured it well—I now take the responsibility of telling how wives ought to treat their husbands. I hope your domestic alliance was so happily formed that while married life may have revealed in him some frailties that you did not suspect, it has also displayed excellencies that more than overbalanced them. I suppose that if I could look into the heart of a hundred wives here present and ask them where is the kindest and best man they know of, and they dared speak out, ninety-nine out of a hundred of them would say: "At the other end of this pew."

ABIGAIL'S BAD BARGAIN.

I hope, my sister, you have married a man as Christian and as well balanced as that. But even if you were worsted in conjugal bargain, you cannot be worse off than this Abigail in my text. Her husband was cross and ungrateful, an inebriate, for on the very evening after her heroic achievement at the foot of the hill, where she captured a whole regiment with her genial and strategic behaviour, she returned home and found her husband so drunk that she could not tell him the story, but had to postpone it until the next day. So, my sister, I do not want you to keep saying within yourself as I proceed: "That is the way to treat a perfect husband;" for you are to remember that no wife was ever worse swindled than this Abigail of my text. At the other end of her table sat a mean, selfish, snarling, contemptible sot, and if she could do so well for a dastard, how ought you to do with that princely and splendid man with whom you are to walk the path of life?

First, I counsel the wife to remember in what a severe and terrific battle of life her husband is engaged. Whether in professional, or commercial, or artistic, or mechanical life, your husband from morning to night is in a Solferino, if not a Sedan. It is a wonder that your husband has any nerves or patience or suavity left. To get a living in this next to the last decade of the nineteenth century is a struggle. If he come home and sit down preoccupied, you ought to excuse him. If he do not feel like going out that night for a walk or entertainment, remember he has been out all day. You say he ought to leave at his place of business his annoyances and come home cheery. But if a man has been betrayed by a business partner, or a customer has cheated him out of a large bill of goods, or a protested note has been flung on his desk, or somebody has called him a liar, and everything has gone wrong from morning till night, he must have great genius and forgetfulness if he do not bring some of the perplexity home with him. When you tell me he ought to leave it all at the store or bank or shop, you might as well tell a storm on the Atlantic to stay out there and not touch the coast or ripple the harbor.

RESPECT SELF-SACRIFICE.

Remember, he is not overworking so much for himself as he is overworking for you and the children. It is the effect of his success or defeat on the homestead that causes him the agitation. The most of men after forty-five years of age live not for themselves, but for their families. They begin to ask themselves anxiously the question: "How if I should give out, what would become of the folks at home? Would my children ever get their education? Would my wife have to go out into the world to earn bread for herself and our little ones? My eyesight troubles me; how if my eyes should fail? My head gets dizzy; how if I should drop under apoplexy?" The high pressure of business life and mechanical life and agricultural life is home pressure.

Some time ago a large London firm decided that if any of their clerks married on a salary less than L150—that is, $750 a year—he should be discharged, the supposition being that the temptation might be too great for misappropriation. The large majority of families in America live by utmost dint of economy, and to be honest and yet meet one's family expenses is the appalling question that turns the life of tens of thousands of men into martyrdom. Let the wife of the overborne and exhausted husband remember this, and do not nag him about that, and say you might as well have no husband when the fact is he is dying by inches that the home may be kept up.

BE LOVABLE.

I charge also the wife to keep herself as attractive after marriage as she was before marriage. The reason that so often a man ceases to love his wife is because the wife ceases to be lovable. In many cases what elaboration of toilet before marriage, and what recklessness of appearance after! The most disgusting thing on earth is a slatternly woman—I mean a woman who never combs her hair until she goes out, or looks like a fright until somebody calls. That a man married to one of these creatures stays at home as little as possible is no wonder. It is a wonder that such a man does not go on a whaling voyage of three years, and in a leaky ship. Costly wardrobe is not required; but, O woman! if you are not willing, by all that ingenuity of refinement can effect, to make yourself attractive to your husband, you ought not to complain if he seek in other society those pleasant surroundings which you deny him.

DO NOT COMPLAIN.

Again, I charge you never talk to others about the frailties of your husband.[1] Some people have a way, in banter, of elaborately describing to others the shortcomings or unhappy eccentricities of a husband or wife. Ah, the world will find out soon enough all the defects of your companion! No need of your advertising them! Better imitate those women who, having made mistake in affiance, always have a veil to hide imperfections and alleviations of conduct to mention. We must admit that there are rare cases where a wife cannot live longer with her husband, and his cruelties and outrages are the precursor of divorcement or separation. But until that day comes, keep the awful secret to yourself—keep it from every being in the universe except the God to whom you do well to tell your trouble. Trouble only a few years at most, and then you can go up on the other side of the grave, and say: "O Lord, I kept the marital secret! Thou knowest how well I kept it, and I thank Thee that the release has come at last. Give me some place where I can sit down and rest awhile from the horrors of an embruted earthly alliance, before I begin the full raptures of heaven." And orders will be sent out to the usher angels, saying: "Take this Abigail right up to the softest seat in the best room of the palace, and let twenty of the brightest angels wait on her for the next thousand years."

AVOID MEDDLERS.

Further, I charge you, let there be no outside interference with the conjugal relation. Neither neighbor nor confidential friend, nor brother, nor sister, nor father, nor mother, have a right to come in here. The married gossip will come around, and by the hour tell you how she manages her husband. You tell her plainly that if she will attend to the affairs of her household you will attend to yours. What damage some people do with their tongues! Nature indicates that the tongue is a dangerous thing, by the fact that it is shut in, first by a barricade of teeth, and then by the door of the lips. One insidious talker can keep a whole neighborhood badly stirred up. The Apostle Peter excoriated these busybodies in other people's matters, and St. Paul, in his letter to the Thessalonians and to Timothy, gives them a sharp dig, and the good housewife will be on the lookout for them, and never return their calls, and treat them with coldest frigidity. For this reason, better keep house as soon as possible. Some people are opposed to them, but I thank God for what are called flats in these cities. They put a separate home within the means of nearly all the population. In your married relations you do not need any advice. If you and your husband have not skill enough to get along well alone, with all the advice you can import you will get along worse. What you want for your craft on this voyage is plenty of sea-room.

BE INTELLIGENT.

I charge you, also, make yourself the intelligent companion of your husband. What with these floods of newspapers and books there is no excuse for the wife's ignorance either about the present or the past. If you have no more than a half-hour every day to yourself you may fill your mind with entertaining and useful knowledge. Let the merchant's wife read up on all mercantile questions, and the mechanic's wife on all that pertains to his style of work, and the professional man's wife on all the legal, or medical, or theological, or political discussions of the day. It is very stupid for a man, after having been amid active minds all day, to find his wife without information or opinions on anything. If the wife knows nothing about what is going on in the world, after the tea-hour has passed, and the husband has read the newspaper, he will have an engagement and must "go and see a man." In nine cases out of ten when a man does not stay at home in the evening, unless positive duty calls him away, it is because there is nothing to stay for. He would rather talk with his wife than anyone else if she could talk as well.

ADORN THE HOME.

I charge you, my sister, in every way to make your home attractive. I have not enough of practical knowledge about house adornment to know just what makes the difference, but here is an opulent house, containing all wealth of bric-a-brac, and of musical instrument, and of painting, and of upholstery, and yet there is in it a chill like Nova Zembla. Another home, with one-twentieth part of the outlay, and small supply of art, and cheapest piano purchasable, and yet, as you enter it, there comes upon body, mind, and soul a glow of welcome and satisfied and happy domesticity. The holy art of making the most comfort and brightness out of the means afforded, every wife should study.

At the siege of Argus, Pyrrhus was killed by the tile of a roof thrown by a woman, and Abimelech was slain by a stone that a woman threw from the tower of Thebes, and Earl Montfort was destroyed by a rock discharged at him by a woman from the walls of Toulouse. But without any weapon save that of her cold, cheerless household arrangement, any wife may slay all the attractions of a home circle. A wife and mother in prosperous circumstances and greatly admired was giving her chief time to social life. The husband spent his evenings away. The son, fifteen years of age, got the same habit, and there was a prospect that the other children, as they got old enough, would take the same turn. One day the wife aroused to the consideration that she had better save her husband and her boy. Interesting and stirring games were introduced into the house. The mother studied up interesting things to tell her children. One morning the son said:

"Father, you ought to have been home last night. We had a grand time. Such jolly games and such interesting stories!" This went on from night to night, and after a while the husband stayed in to see what was going on, and he finally got attracted, and added something of his own to the evening entertainments; and the result was that the wife and mother saved her husband and saved her boy and saved herself. Was not that an enterprise worth the attention of the greatest woman that ever lived since Abigail at the foot of the rock arrested the four hundred armed warriors?

THE TRUE SPHERE.

Do not, my sister, be dizzied and disturbed by the talk of those who think the home circle too insignificant for a woman's career, and who want to get you out on platforms and in conspicuous enterprises. There are women who have a special outside mission, and do not dare to interpret me as derisive of their important mission. But my opinion is that the woman who can reinforce her husband in the work of life and rear her children for positions of usefulness is doing more for God and the race and her own happiness than if she spoke on every great platform and headed a hundred great enterprises. My mother never made a missionary speech in her life, and at a missionary meeting I doubt whether she could have got enough courage to vote aye or no, but she raised her son John, who has been preaching the Gospel and translating religious literature in Amoy, China, for about forty years. Was not that a better thing to do?

Compare such an one with one of these dieaway, attitudinizing, frivolous, married coquettes of the modern drawing-room, her heaven an opera box on the night of Meyerbeer's "Robert le Diable," the ten commandments an inconvenience, taking arsenic to improve the complexion, and her appearance a confused result of belladonna, bleached hair, antimony and mineral acids, until one is compelled to discuss her character, and wonder whether the line between a decent and indecent life is, like the equator, an imaginary line.

A PRESSING WANT.

What the world wants now is about fifty thousand old-fashioned mothers, women who shall realize that the highest, grandest, mightiest institution on earth is the home. It is not necessary that they should have the same old-time manners of the country farm-house, or wear the old-fashioned cap and spectacles and apron that her glorified ancestry wore; but I mean the old spirit which began with the Hannahs and the Mother Lois and the Abigails of Scripture days, and was demonstrated on the homestead where some of us were reared, though the old house long ago was pulled down and its occupants scattered, never to meet until in the higher home that awaits the families of the righteous. While there are more good and faithful wives and mothers now than there ever were, society has got a wrong twist on this subject, and there are influences abroad that would make women believe their chief sphere is outside instead of inside the home.

A DEADLY SIN.

Hence in many households, children instead of a blessing are a nuisance. It is card case versus child's primer, carriage versus cradle, social popularity versus domestic felicity. Hence infanticide and antenatal murder so common that all the physicians, allopathic, hydropathic, homoeopathic, and eclectic are crying out in horror, and it is time that the pulpits joined with the medical profession in echoing and re-echoing the thunder of Mount Sinai, which says: "Thou shalt not kill," and the book of Revelation, which says: "All murderers shall have their place in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." And the man or the woman who takes life a minute old will as certainly go straight to hell as the man or woman who destroys life forty years old. And the wildest, loudest shriek of Judgment Day will be given at the overthrow of those who moved in the high and respected circles of earthly society, yet decreed by their own act, as far as they could privately effect it, the extermination of the advancing generations, abetted in the horrid crime by a lot of infernal quacks with which modern medicine is infested. When, on the Last Day, the crier of the Court shall with resounding "Oyez," "Oyez!" declare the "Oyer and Terminer" of the Universe opened, and the Judge, with gavel of thunderbolt, shall smite the nations into silence, and the trial of all the fratricides, and parricides, and matricides, and patricides, and uxoricides, and regicides, and deicides, and infanticides of the earth shall proceed, none of my hearers or readers can say that they knew not what they were doing. Mighty God! arrest the evil that is overshadowing this century.

THE HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD.

I charge you, my sister, that you take your husband along with you to heaven. Of course this implies that you yourself are a Christian. I must take that for granted. It cannot be possible that after what Christianity has done for woman, and after taking the infinitely responsible position you have assumed as the head of the household, that you should be in a position antagonistic to Christ. It was not a slip of the tongue when I spoke of you as being at the head of the household. We men rather pride ourselves as being at the head of the household, but it is only a pleasant delusion. To whom do the children go when they have trouble? When there is a sore finger to be bound up or one of the first teeth that needs to be removed to make way for one that is crowding it out, to whom does the child go? For whom do children cry out in the night when they get frightened at a bad dream? Aye, to whom does the husband go when he has a business trouble too great or too delicate for outside ears? We, the men, are heads of the household in name, but you, O wives! are the heads of the household in fact, and it is your business to take your husband with you into the kingdom of God, and see that house prepared for heaven.

You can do it! Of course God's almighty grace alone can convert him, but you are to be the instrument. Some wives keep their husbands out of heaven, and others garner them for it. If your religion, O wife! is simply the joke of the household, if you would rather go to the theatre than the prayer-meeting, if you can beat all the neighborhood in progressive euchre, if your husband never sees you kneel at the bedside in prayer before retiring, if the only thing that reminds the family of your church relations is that on communion-day you get home late to dinner, you will not be able to take your husband to heaven, for the simple reason that you will not get there yourself. But I suppose that your religion is genuine, and that the husband realizes that there is in your soul a divine principle, and that, though you may be naturally quicker tempered than he is and have many imperfections that distress you more than they can any one else, still you are destined for the skies when the brief scenes of this life are over. How will you take him with you? There are two oars to that boat—prayer and holy example.

But you say he belongs to a worldly club, or he does not believe a word of the Bible, or he is an inebriate and very loose in his habits? What you tell me shows that you don't understand that while you are at the one end of a prayer, the omnipotent God is at the other end, and it is simply a question whether Almightiness is strong enough and keeps His word. I have no doubt there will be great conventions in heaven, called for celebrative purposes, and when in some Celestial assemblage the saints shall be telling what brought them to God, I believe that ten thousand times ten thousand will say: "My wife."

A CONTRAST.

I put beside each other two testimonies of men concerning their wives, and let you see the contrast. An aged man was asked the reason of his salvation. With tearful emotion he said: "My wife was brought to God some years before myself. I persecuted and abused her because of her religion. She, however, returned nothing but kindness, constantly maintaining an anxiety to promote my comfort and happiness; and it was her amiable conduct when suffering ill-treatment from me that first sent the arrows of conviction to my soul." The other testimony was from a dying man: "Harriet, I am a lost man. You opposed our family worship and my secret prayer. You drew me away into temptation and to neglect every religious duty. I believe my fate is sealed. Harriet, you are the cause of my everlasting ruin." How many glorious married couples in heaven—Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Lapidoth and Deborah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Zacharias and Elizabeth, Joseph and Mary, and many whom we have known as good as the most of them!

As once you stood in the village or city church or in your father's house, perhaps under a wedding-bell of flowers, to-day stand up, husband and wife, beneath the cross of a pardoning Redeemer, while I proclaim the banns of an eternal marriage. Join your right hands. I pronounce you one forever. The circle is an emblem of eternity, and that is the shape of the Wedding Ring.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] As Abigail did (1 Sam. 25:25).



COSTUME AND MORALS.

"Moreover the Lord said, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: in that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, and nose-jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils,"—ISAIAH 3:16, 18-23.[2]

This is a Jerusalem fashion plate. It puts us two thousand six hundred years back, and sets us down in an ancient city. The procession of men and women is moving up and down the gay streets. It is the height of the fashionable season. The sensible men and women move with so much modesty that they do not attract our attention. But here come the haughty daughters of Jerusalem! They lean forward; they lean very much forward—so far forward as to be unnatural—teetering, wobbling, wriggling, flirting, or, as my text describes it, they "walk with stretched-forth necks, walking and mincing as they go."

See! That is a princess. Look! That is a Damascus sword-maker. Look! That is a Syrian merchant. The jingling of the chains, and the lashing of the headbands, and the exhibitions of universal swagger attract the attention of the Prophet Isaiah, and he brings his camera to bear upon the scene, and takes a picture for all the ages. But where is that scene? Vanished. Where are those gay streets? Vermin-covered population pass through them. Where are the hands, and the necks, and the foreheads, and the shoulders, and the feet that sported all that magnificence? Ashes! Ashes!

That we should all be clad is proved by the opening of

THE FIRST WARDROBE

in Paradise, with its apparel of dark green. That we should all as far as our means allow us be beautifully and gracefully apparelled is proved by the fact that God never made a wave but He gilded it with golden sunbeams, or a tree but He garlanded it with blossoms, or a sky but He studded it with stars, or allowed even the smoke of a furnace to ascend but He columned, and turreted, and doled, and scrolled it into outlines of indescribable gracefulness. When I see the apple orchards of the spring and the pageantry of the autumnal forests, I come to the conclusion that if nature ever does join the Church, while she may be a Quaker in the silence of her worship, she never will be a Quaker in the style of her dress. Why the notches of a fern leaf or the stamen of a water lily? Why, when the day departs, does it let the folding doors of heaven stay open so long, when it might go in so quickly? One summer morning I saw an army of a million spears, each one adorned with a diamond of the first water—I mean the grass with the dew on it.

When the prodigal came home his father not only put a coat on his back, but jewelry on his hand. Christ wore a beard, Paul, the bachelor apostle, not afflicted with any sentimentality, admired the arrangement of a woman's hair, when he said in his epistle: "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory unto her." There will be fashion in heaven as on earth, but it will be a different kind of fashion. It will decide the color of the dress; and the population of that country, by a beautiful law, will wear white.

THE GODDESS OF FASHION.

I say these things as a background to my sermon, to show you that I have no prim, precise, prudish, or cast-iron theories on the subject of human apparel; but the goddess of fashion has set up her throne in this country and at the sound of the timbrels we are all expected to fall down and worship. Her altars smoke with the sacrifice of the bodies and souls of ten thousand victims.

When I come to count the victims of fashion I find as many masculine as feminine. Men make an easy tirade against woman, as though she were the chief worshipper at this idolatrous shrine, and no doubt some men in the more conspicuous part of the pew have already cast glances at the more retired part of the pew, their look a prophecy of a generous distribution. My sermon shall be as appropriate for one end of the pew as for the other.

MASCULINE FOLLIES.

Men are as much the idolaters of fashion as women, but they sacrifice on a different part of the altar. With men the fashion goes to cigars, and club-rooms, and yachting parties, and wine suppers. In the United States the men chew up and smoke one hundred millions of dollars' worth of tobacco every year. That is their fashion. In London not long ago a man died who started in life with $750,000; but he ate it all up in gluttonies, sending his agents to all parts of the earth for some rare delicacy for the palate, sometimes one plate of food costing him three or four hundred dollars. He ate up his whole fortune, and had only one guinea left. With that he bought a woodcock, and had it dressed in the very best style, ate it, gave two hours for digestion, then walked out on Westminster Bridge and threw himself into the Thames and died, doing on a large scale what you and I have often seen done on a small scale.

But men do not abstain from millinery and elaboration of skirt through any superiority of simplicity. It is only because such appendages would be a blockade to business. What would sashes and trains three and a half yards long do in a stock market? And yet men are the disciples of custom just as much as women. Some of them wear boots so tight that they can hardly walk in the paths of righteousness, and there are men who buy expensive suits of clothes and never pay for them, and who go through the streets in great stripes of color, like animated checkerboards. I say these things because I want to show you that I am impartial in my discourse, and that both sexes, in the language of the surrogate's office, "share and share alike."

INDELICATE APPAREL.

As God may help me I am going to set forth the evil effects of improper dress or an excessive discipleship of costume. It is a simple truth that you all know, although the pulpit has not yet uttered it, that much of the womanly costume of our time is the cause of the temporal and eternal damnation of a multitude of men. There is a shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided reformation in womanly costume. I am in full sympathy with the officer of the law who, at a levee in Philadelphia last winter, went up to a so-called lady, and because of her sparse and incompetent apparel, ordered her either to leave the house or habilitate herself immediately. It is high time that our good and sensible women make vehement protest against fashionable indecency, and if the women of the household do not realize the deplorable extremes of much of the female costume, that husbands implead their wives on this subject, and that fathers prohibit their daughters. The evil is terrific and overshadowing.

STAGE COSTUMES.

I suppose that the American stage is responsible for much of this. I do not go to the theatres, so I must take the evidence of the actors and managers of theatres, such as Mr. John Gilbert, Mr. A.M. Palmer, and Mr. Daniel E. Bandmann. They have recently told us that the crime of undress is blasting the theatre, which by many is considered a school of morals, and indeed superior to the Church, and a forerunner of the millennium. Mr. Palmer says: "The bulk of the performances on the stage are degrading and pernicious. The managers strive to come just as near the line as possible without flagrantly breaking the law. There never have been costumes worn on a stage of this city, either in a theatre, hall, or 'dive,' so improper as those that clothe some of the chorus in recent comic opera productions." He says in regard to the female performers: "It is not a question whether they can sing, but just how little they will consent to wear." Mr. Bandmann, who has been twenty-nine years on the stage, and before almost all nationalities, says: "I unhesitatingly state that the taste of the present theatre-going people of America, as a body, is of a coarse and vulgar nature. The Hindoo would turn with disgust at such exhibitions, which are sought after and applauded on the stage of this country. Our shop windows are full of and the walls covered with show cards and posters which should be a disgrace to an enlightened country and an insult to the eye of a cultured community." Mr. Gilbert says: "Such exhibition is a disastrous one to the morals of the community. Are these proper pictures to put out for the public to look at, to say nothing of the propriety of females appearing in public dressed like that? It is shameful!"

I must take the testimony of the friends of the theatre and the confirmation which I see on the board fences and in the show windows containing the pictures of the way actresses dress. I suppose that those representations of play-house costume are true, for if they are not true, then those highly moral and religious theatres are swindling the public by inducing the people to the theatre by promises of spectacular nudity which they do not fulfill. Now, all this familiarizes the public with such improprieties of costume and depresses the public conscience as to what is allowable and right.

DRAWING-ROOM RIVALRY.

The parlor and drawing-room are now running a race with the theatre and opera bouffe. They are now nearly neck and neck in the race, the latter a little ahead; but the parlor and the drawing-room are gaining on the others, and the probability is they will soon be even and pass the stand so nearly at the same time that one half of Pandemonium will clap its hands because opera bouffe has beaten, and the other half because the drawing-room has beaten. Let printing-press, and platform, and pulpit hurl red-hot anathema at the boldness of much of womanly attire. I charge Christian women, neither by style of dress nor adjustment of apparel, to become administrative of evil. Show me the fashion plates of any age between this and the time of Louis XVI., of France, and Henry VIII., of England, and I will tell you the type of morals or immorals of that age or that year. No exception to it. Modest apparel means a righteous people. Immodest apparel always means a contaminated and depraved society.

EXTRAVAGANCE.

It is not only such boldness that is to be reprehended, but extravagance of costume. This latter is the cause of fraud unlimitable and ghastly. Do you know that Arnold of the Revolution proposed to sell his country in order to get money to support his home wardrobe? I declare here before God and this people that the effort to keep up expensive establishments in this country is sending more business men to temporal perdition than all other causes combined. It was this that sent prominent business men to the watering of stocks, and life insurance presidents to perjured statements about their assets, and some of them to the penitentiary, and has completely upset our American finances.

But why should I go to these famous defaultings, to show what men will do in order to keep up great home style and expensive wardrobe, when you and I know scores of men who are put to their wit's end and are lashed from January to December in the attempt? Our Washington politicians may theorize until the expiration of their terms of office as to the best way of improving our monetary condition in this country. It will be of no use, and things will be no better until we learn to put on our heads and backs and feet and hands no more than we can pay for.

AN INCENTIVE TO DISHONESTY.

There are clerks in stores and banks on limited salaries who in the vain attempt to keep the wardrobe of their family as showy as other folk's wardrobes are dying of muffs, and diamonds, and camel's-hair shawls, and high hats, and they have nothing left except what they give to cigars and wine suppers, and they die before their time, and they will expect us ministers to preach about them as though they were the victims of early piety; and after a high-class funeral, with silver handles at the side of their coffin of extraordinary brightness, it will be found out that the undertaker is cheated out of his legitimate expenses! Do not send to me to preach the funeral sermon of a man who dies like that. I would blurt out the whole truth, and tell that he was strangled to death by his wife's ribbons! The country is dressed to death.

You are not surprised to find that the putting up of one public building in New York cost millions of dollars more than it ought to have cost, when you find that the man who gave out the contracts paid more than five thousand dollars for his daughter's wedding dress. Cashmeres of a thousand dollars each are not rare on Broadway. It is estimated that there are eight thousand women in these two cities who have expended on their personal array two thousand dollars a year.

What are the men to do in order to keep up such home wardrobes? Steal—that is the only respectable thing they can do! During the last fifteen years there have been innumerable fine business men shipwrecked on the wardrobe. The temptation comes in this way: a man thinks more of his family than all the world outside, and if they spend the evening in describing to him the superior wardrobe of the family across the street that they cannot bear the sight of, the man is thrown on his gallantry and his pride of family, and without translating his feelings into plain language, he goes into extortion and issuing of false stock and skillful penmanship in writing somebody else's name at the foot of a promissory note; and they all go down together—the husband to the prison, the wife to the sewing machine, the children to be taken care of by those who were called poor relations. Oh, for some new Shakespeare to arise and write

THE TRAGEDY OF CLOTHES!

Act the first of the tragedy: A plain but beautiful home. Enter the newly married pair. Enter simplicity of manner and behavior. Enter as much happiness as is ever found in one home.

Act the second: Discontent with the humble home. Enter envy. Enter jealousy. Enter desire to display.

Act the third: Enlargement of expenses. Enter all the queenly dressmakers. Enter the French milliners.

Act the fourth: The tip-top of society. Enter princes and princesses of New York life. Enter magnificent plate and equipage. Enter everything splendid.

Act the fifth and last, winding up the scene: Enter the assignee. Enter the sheriff. Enter the creditors. Enter humiliation. Enter the wrath of God. Enter the contempt of society. Enter death. Now, let the silk curtain drop on the stage. The farce is ended, and the lights are out.

Will you forgive me if I say in tersest shape possible, that some of the men in this country have to forge, and to perjure, and to swindle to pay for their wives' dresses? I will say it whether you forgive me or not.

CURTAILS BENEVOLENCE.

Again, extravagant costume is the foe of all Christian alms-giving. Men and women put so much in personal display that they often have nothing for God and the cause of suffering humanity—a Christian man cracking his Palais Royal gloves across the back by shutting up his hand to hide the one cent he puts into the poor box! a Christian woman at the story of the Hottentots crying copious tears into a twenty-five dollar handkerchief, and then giving a two-cent piece to the collection, thrusting it down under the bills, so people will not know but it was a ten-dollar gold piece! One hundred dollars for incense to fashion—two cents for God! God gives us ninety cents out of every dollar. The other ten cents, by command of His Bible, belong to Him. Is not God liberal according to this tithing system laid down in the Old Testament—is not God liberal in giving us ninety cents out of a dollar when he takes but ten? We do not like that. We want to have ninety-nine cents for ourselves and one for God.

Now, I would a great deal rather steal ten cents from you than God. I think one reason why a great many people do not get along in worldly accumulation faster is because they do not observe this Divine rule. God says: "Well, if that man is not satisfied with ninety cents out of a dollar, then I will take the whole dollar, and I will give it to the man or woman who is honest with me." The greatest obstacle to charity in the Christian church to-day is the fact that men expend so much on their table, and women so much on their dress, they have got nothing left for the work of God and the world's betterment.

DISTRACTS ATTENTION.

Again, extravagant costume is distraction to a public worship. You know very well there are a good many people who go to church just as they go to the races, to see who will come out first. Men and women with souls to be saved passing the hour in wondering where that man got his cravat, or what store that woman patronizes. In many of our churches the preliminary exercises are taken up with the discussion of wardrobes. It is pitiable. Is it not wonderful that the Lord does not strike the meeting-houses with lightning? What distraction of public worship! Dying men and women, whose bodies are soon to be turned into dust, yet before three worlds strutting like peacocks. People sitting down in a pew or taking up a hymn book, all absorbed at the same time in personal array, to sing:

"Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings, Thy better portion trace; Rise from transitory things Toward heaven, thy native place!"

I adopt the Episcopalian prayer, and say: "Good Lord, deliver us!"

MENTAL IMPOVERISHMENT.

Extravagant costume belittles the intellect. Our minds are enlarged or they dwindle just in proportion to the importance of the subject on which we constantly dwell. Can you imagine anything more dwarfing to the human intellect than the study of dress? I see men on the street who, judging from their elaboration, I think must have taken two hours to arrange their apparel. After a few years of that kind of absorption, which one of McAllister's magnifying glasses will be powerful enough to make the man's character visible? What will be left of a woman's intellect after giving years and years to the discussion of such questions? They all land in idiocy. I have seen men at the summer watering-places through fashion the mere wreck of what they once were. Sallow of cheek. Meagre of limb. Hollow at the chest. Showing no animation save in rushing across a room to pick up a lady's fan. Simpering along the corridors the same compliments they simpered twenty years ago.

BARS HEAVEN.

Yet, my friends, I have given you only the milder phase of this evil. It shuts a great multitude out of heaven. The first peal of thunder that shook Sinai declared: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," and you will have to choose between the goddess of fashion and the Christian God. There are a great many seats in heaven, and they are all easy seats, but not one seat for the devotee of costume. Heaven is for meek and quiet spirits. Heaven is for those who think more of their souls than of their bodies.

Give up this idolatry of fashion or give up heaven. What would you do standing beside the Countess of Huntingdon, whose joy it was to build chapels for the poor; or with that Christian woman of Boston, who fed fifteen hundred children of the street, at Fanueil Hall, one New Year's Day, giving out as a sort of doxology at the end of the meeting a pair of shoes to each one of them; or those Dorcases of modern society who have consecrated their needles to the Lord, and who will get eternal reward for every stitch they take?

PERPETUAL ENVY.

Oh, men and women, give up the idolatry of costume! The rivalries and the competitions of such a life are a stupendous wretchedness. You will always find some one with brighter array, and with more palatial residence, and with lavender kid gloves that make a tighter fit. And if you buy this thing and wear it you will wish you had bought something else and worn it. And the frets of such a life will bring the crow's feet to your temples before they are due, and when you come to die you will have a miserable time.

I have seen men and women of excessive costume die, and I never saw one of them die well. The trappings off, there they lay on the tumbled pillow, and there were just two things that bothered them—a wasted life and a coming eternity. I could not pacify them, for their body, mind, and soul had been exhausted in the worship of costume, and they could not appreciate the Gospel. When I knelt by their bedside they were mumbling out their regrets, and saying: "O God! O God!" Their garments hung up in the wardrobe never again to be seen by them. Without any exception, so far as my memory serves me, they died without hope, and went into eternity unprepared. The two most ghastly death-beds on earth are the one where a man dies of delirium tremens, and the other where a woman dies after having sacrificed all her faculties of body, mind and soul in the worship of costume.

JUDGMENT TO COME.

My friends, we must appear in judgment to answer for what we have worn on our bodies as well as for what repentances we have exercised with our souls. On that day I see coming in Beau Brummell of the last century without his cloak; Aaron Burr, without the letters that to old age he showed in pride, to prove his early wicked gallantries; and Absalom without his hair; and Marchioness Pompadour without her titles; and Mrs. Arnold, the belle of Wall Street, when that was the centre of fashion, without her fripperies of vesture.

And in great haggardness they shall go away into eternal expatriation, while among the queens of heavenly society will be found Vashti, who wore the modest veil before the palatial bacchanalians; and Hannah, who annually made a little coat for Samuel at the temple; and Grandmother Lois, the ancestress of Timothy, who imitated her virtue; and Mary, who gave Jesus Christ to the world; and many of you, the wives, and mothers, and sisters, and daughters of the present Christian church who, through great tribulation, are entering into the kingdom of God. Christ announced who would make up the royal family of heaven when He said: "Whosoever doeth the will of God, the same is my brother, my sister, my mother."

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The list of feminine treasures given by the Revised Version is more intelligible. It is: "Their anklets, and the networks, and the crescents; the pendants, and the bracelets, and the mufflers; the head-tires, and the ankle chains, and the sashes, and the perfume boxes, and the amulets; the rings, and the nose-jewels; the festival robes, and the mantles, and the shawls, and the satchels; the hand-mirrors, and the fine linen, and the turbans, and the veils."



HUSBANDS AND WIVES.

"Let every one in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband."—EPHESIANS 5:33.

All this good advice by a man who never married. He lived on to fifty-eight years of age, in eminent bachelorhood. Indeed, it was better for Paul to remain in single life, because he went on such rapid missionary expeditions that no companion could have endured the hardship. Celibacy in some cases is better. Such persons accomplish under such circumstances that which could not be accomplished in the other style of life.

I have known men who remain unaffianced in order that they might take care of the children of a deceased brother; and what would become of the world without the self-sacrifice and helpfulness of the maiden aunts I cannot imagine.

Among the brightest queens of Heaven will be those who took care of other people's children. Alas for that household which has not within easy call an Aunt Mary! I know that there are caricatures, and ungallant things sometimes said; but so far as my observation goes, they are quite equal in disposition to their married sisters. The state of celibacy is honored again by such persons as Macaulay and Washington Irving in literature, and Florence Nightingale and Miss Dix in philanthropy.

But while Paul remained in the single state, he kept his eyes open, and he looked off upon the calm sea of married life, and upon the chopped sea of domestic perturbation. He comes forth in my text to say, "Let every one in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband;" implying that the wife ought to be lovable, so there might be something to love, and the man ought to be honorable, so there might be something to reverence.

It is

A MOST CONGRATULATORY THOUGHT

that the vast majority of people in the married state are well mated. When the news is first announced in the outside world of the betrothal, there may be surprise and seeming incongruity, but as the years pass by it is demonstrated that the selection was divinely arranged. There may be great difference of temperament, great difference of appearance, great difference of circumstances. That is no objection. The sanguine and the phlegmatic temperaments make appropriate union, the blonde and the brunette, the quick and the slow, the French and the German. In the machinery of domestic life there is no more need for the driving wheel than for the brakes. That is the best union generally which has just the opposites.

The best argument in behalf of marriage as a divine institution is the fact that the vast majority of conjugal relationships are the very best things that could have happened. Once in a while there is a resounding exception to the good rule, the attempt being made to marry fire and gunpowder, with the consequent explosion in the divorce courts; but in the vast majority of instances the conjugal relation is a beautiful illustration of what the Psalmist said when he declared, "God setteth the solitary in families."

Taking it for granted, then, that you are well mated, I proceed to give you some

PRESCRIPTIONS FOR DOMESTIC HAPPINESS;

and, first of all, I remark:

I. A spirit of compromise must be dominant. You must remember that you were twenty or thirty years forming independent habits and having your own way. In the marriage state these habits must be brought into accord, and there may be some ingenuity necessary. Be determined to have your own way, and there will be no peace. Let the rule be: In all matters of moral principle your determination shall be iron, and in all unimportant matters, willow. Whatever you may think of the word compromise in politics, without compromise there is no domestic peace. A great many people are willing to compromise, if you will do just as they want you to do; but there is no compromise in that. The rule ought to be: In all domestic matters, all social matters, all ecclesiastical matters, all political matters, firm adherence to fundamentals, easy surrender in non-essentials. Be not too proud or too stubborn to give up. Compromise! Compromise!

II. I remark, again, that in order to domestic happiness there must be a spirit of

CONSULTATION.

The home ought to be a cabinet, where all the affairs of the household and all the affairs of business life come under comparison, inspection and advisal. That is an absurd rule we hear abroad in the world, that men ought never to take their business home. Ten thousand financial failures would have been avoided if men had consulted with their wives.

In the first place, woman has a capacity to judge of moral character which man has not. Before you invite into your business partnership any man, you ought to introduce him to your wife, and get her judgment as to his capacity and his integrity. After five minutes' conversation she will tell you as much about him as you will know at the close of twenty years, and perhaps you may find out too late.

A man proposes to come into your business partnership. You take him to your home. He tarries a little while, and is gone. You say to your wife, "Well, what do you think of him?" She says, "I don't like him at all." You say, "It's an absurd thing to form a prejudice against him on so short an acquaintance. I have known him for years, and I have never known any bad against him." "Well," she says, "I don't know why I have formed that opinion, but I tell you to beware. Put none of your financial interests in that man's keeping." Ten or fifteen years pass by. You come home some night and say, "Well, my dear, you are right; that man swindled me out of my last dollar." It is not because woman is wiser than man. It is because God has given her that peculiar intuition in regard to human character.

Now, you have no right to go into an enterprise which involves the homestead, or the education of your children, or the fate of your entire family, without home consultation. Of course, all this implies that you did not marry a fool. If at the marriage altar you committed suicide, you had better keep all your business affairs in your own heart and head. But let us hope that you have sound common sense presiding in your household.

A BEAUTIFUL INCIDENT.

How much a wife may help a husband's business affairs was well illustrated in the case where the wife saved from the allowance of herself and the allowance of the family, a certain amount of money for a rainy day. After some time the husband, coming home, said: "Well, I'm going to suspend payment to-morrow. A few dollars would get me through, but I can't get the few dollars, and I'm going to ruin." That evening the wife said: "I wish you would hunt up the definition of the word 'independence' in Webster's Dictionary. Hunt it up for me." He opened Webster's Dictionary, and found the word "independence," and right opposite was a $100 bill. "Now," she said, "I would like to have you find the word 'gratitude.'" He turned to the word "gratitude," and there was another $100 bill. And before the evening was past she asked him to read a verse of a certain chapter of the Bible. He opened to the verse in the Bible, and there were $500, and before the evening had passed, the man had financial relief to tide him over his disasters. You call that dramatic. I call that beautifully Christian.

In all expenditures there ought to be consultation. Do not dole out money to your wife as though she were a beggar. Let her know how much you have, or how little. Appeal to her intelligent judgment, and she will be content, and your own disposition will not be irritated. As long as you keep a mystery about your business matters she will wonder that the allowance is so small. No honorable woman wants to spend more money than can be afforded. Come into consultation with her on this matter. Show what are all your necessary outside expenses, all the money you have for cigars and dinners at Delmonico's, and how much it takes for the club-house and for the political campaign, and then have her present all the domestic expenses, and then, after consultation do your best.

It is a bad sign when a man dare not tell his business transactions to his wife. There is something wrong. Suppose you that the gigantic forgeries which have been enacted in this country would ever have taken place if the wife had been consulted? The wife would have said, "Stop! Let us live in one room in the poorest house on the poorest street of the poorest town, and have nothing but dry bread rather than that you should make yourself culpable before God and the law." In the vast majority of cases where there has been exposure of great frauds, the wife has been the most surprised person in the community.

A BANKER

some time ago misused trust funds, and he went from fraud to fraud, and from knavery to knavery, until it was necessary for him to leave home before daylight. His wife said: "Where are you going?" "I am going to New York," said he "I am going on the early train." "Why, isn't this sudden?" she asked. "Oh, no; I expected to go," and then he left the room and went up to the room where his daughters slept, looked upon their calm faces for the last time, as he supposed, and started. He was brought back by the constables of an outraged law, and is now in the penitentiary.

Do you suppose that man, with a good wife, as he had, an honest wife, as he had, a Christian wife, as he had, could have got into such an enormity if he had consulted in regard to her wishes? Consultation is the word—domestic consultation.

III. Again: in order to domestic happiness, there must, in the conjugal state, be

NO SECRETS

kept one from the other. What one knows both must know. It is a bad sign when one partner in the conjugal relation is afraid to have the letters opened or read by the other partner. Surreptitious correspondence is always dangerous. If a man comes to you and says, "I am going to tell you a great privacy, and don't want you to tell anybody, not even your wife," say to him, "Well, now, you had better not tell me, for I shall tell her as soon as I get home."

There must be no secrecy of association. You ought not to be unwilling to tell where you have been, and with whom you have been. Sometimes an unwise wife will have a lady confidante whom she makes a depository of privacies which they are pledged to keep between themselves. Beware! Anything that implies that husband and wife are two and not one implies peril, domestic peril, social peril, mighty peril.

In the vast majority of cases of domestic infelicity coming to exposure in the courts, the trouble began by the accidental opening of a letter which implied correspondence which was never suspected. In the conjugal relations, secrets kept one from another are nitro-glycerine under the hearthstone, and the fuse is lighted!

IV. Again: in order to your happiness there must be a spirit of

FORBEARANCE.

In the weeks, the months, the years that you were planning for each other's conquest, only the more genial side of your nature was observable, but now you are off guard, and the faults are all known the one to the other. You are aware of your imperfections, unless you are one of those self-conceited people who are quickly observant of faults in others, but oblivious to faults in yourself; and now having found out all of each others imperfections, forbear.

If the one be given to too much precision, and the other disorderly in habits; if the one be spendthrift and the other oversaving; if the one be loquacious, and the other reticent, forbear. Especially, if you both have inflammable tempers, do not both get mad at once. Take turn about! William Cowper put it well when he said:

"The kindest and the happiest pair Will find occasion to forbear; And something every day they live To pity, and perhaps forgive."

V. Again: in order to your happiness, let there be no interfering with each other's peculiar

RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS.

If you are a Baptist and your wife a Pedo-Baptist, do not go to splashing water into each other's faces! If you are a Presbyterian and your husband is a Methodist, when he shouts "Hallelujah!" do not get nervous.

If you have strong denominational proclivities, one of you had better go to one church, and the other had better go to another church; or, surrendering some of your intensity on that subject, as in hundreds of cases, come to some such church as the Brooklyn Tabernacle, where, while we adhere to the fundamentals of the Gospel, we do not care a rye straw for the infinitesimal differences between evangelical denominations—putting one drop of water on the brow, if that is enough baptism, and if not, then plunging the candidate clear out of sight, if that is preferred—not caring whether you believe you have been foreordained to be saved or not, if you are only saved; nor whether you believe in the perseverance of the saints or not, if you will only persevere; nor whether you prefer prayer by Episcopal liturgy or extemporaneous supplication, if you only pray.

Do not let there be any religious contests across the breakfast table or the tea table. It makes but little difference from what direction you come toward the riven heart of Christ, if you only come up to the riven heart. Yet, I know in many families there is constant picking at opposite religious beliefs, and attempt at proselytism. You, the father, fight for Episcopacy, and you, the mother, fight for Presbyterianism, and your children will compromise the matter and be Nothingarians!

VI. Again: I counsel you, in order to your domestic happiness, that you

CULTIVATE EACH OTHER'S RELIGIOUS WELFARE.

This is a profoundly agitating thought to every fair-minded man and woman. You live, together on earth; you want to live together forever. You do not want ten, or twenty, or fifty years to end your association, you want to take your companion into the kingdom of God with you. If this subject is irritating in the household, it is because you do not understand Christian stratagem.

Every Christian companion may take his or her companion into glory. How? Ask God, and he will tell you how. Perhaps by occasional religious remark. Perhaps by earnest prayer. Perhaps by a consistent life. More probably by all these things combined. Paul put it forcefully when he said: "How knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband? how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy wife?" In this house, how many have been remarried for the skies!

It has become so much the general rule that when in my congregation, as I often do, I find a family in which the wife is a Christian, and the husband is not, I just say frankly to him: "Now you have got to come in. You might just as well try to swim up against Niagara rapids as against the tide of religious influence which in this church is going to surge you into the kingdom of God. You must come in. You know that your wife is right in this matter of religion. She may be quick of temper, and you may sometimes lose your patience with her, but you know she is better than you are, and you know when she dies she will go as straight to heaven as a shot to a target.

"And, if to-day, on the way home, a vehicle should dash down the street, and she should fall lifeless, with no opportunity for last words, you might have a doubt about what would become of you, and a doubt about what would become of the children, but you would have no doubt about her eternal destiny. Somewhere under the flush of her cheek, or under the pallor of her brow is the Lord's mark. She is your wife, but she is God's child, and you are not jealous of that relationship. You only wish that you yourself were a son of the Lord Almighty. Come and have the matter settled. If I die before you, I will not forget in the next world how you stood together here, but I will expect both of you. You must come.

"I say it in all Christian love and emphasis, as a brother talks to a brother. You must come. You have been united so long, you cannot afford to have death divorce you. How long it is since you began the struggle of life together! You have helped each other on the road, and what you have done for each other God only knows. There have been tedious sicknesses, and anxious watching, and here and there a grave, short but very deep; and though the blossoms of the marriage day may have scattered, and the lips that pronounced you one may have gone into dust, you have through all these years been to each other true as steel.

"Now, to-day, I am going to remarry you for heaven. This is the bridal day of your soul's peace. Here is the marriage altar. Kneel side by side, take the oath of eternal fidelity, clasp hands in a covenant never to be broken. I pronounce you one on earth, I pronounce you one for eternity. What God by His grace hath joined together, let not earth or hell put asunder. Hark! I hear a humming in the air—an anthem—a wedding march—organs celestial played upon by fingers seraphic."

I do not think I ever read anything more beautiful and quaintly pathetic than

COTTON MATHER'S DESCRIPTION

of the departure of his wife from earth to Heaven: "The black day arrives. I had never seen so black a day in all the time of my pilgrimage. The desire of my eyes is this day to be taken from me at a stroke. Her death is lingering and painful. All the forenoon of this day she was in the pangs of death, and sensible until the last minute or two before her final expiration. I cannot remember the discourse that passed between us, only her devout soul was full of satisfaction about her going to a state of blessedness with the Lord Jesus Christ. As far as my distress would permit, I studied to confirm her satisfaction and consolation.

"When I saw to what a point of resignation I was called of the Lord, I resolved, with His help, to glorify Him. So, two hours before she expired, I knelt by her bedside and took into my hands that dear hand, the dearest in the world, and solemnly and sincerely gave her up to the Lord. I gently put her out of my hands and laid away her hand, resolved that I would not touch it again. She afterward told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation, and though before that she had called for me continually, after it she never asked for me any more. She conversed much until near two in the afternoon. The last sensible word she spoke was to her weeping father: 'Heaven, Heaven will make amends for all!'"

Now let us be faithful in this relation of which I have been speaking. Do you want to know

WHAT THE LORD THINKS OF IT?

Read the sixty-second chapter of Isaiah, where he says: "As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee." There is a wedding coming which will eclipse all the princely and imperial weddings the world ever saw. It was a great day when Napoleon took Josephine; it was a great day when Henry VIII. led Anne Boleyn over the cloth of gold on the street, the cloth of gold reaching up to the palace; it was a great day when the King of Spain took Mercedes; but there will be a greater time when the Lord shall take His bride, the Church, to Himself.

Long time ago they were affianced, but she has been down in the wilderness. He has written her again and again, and the day of marriage is fixed. She has sent word to Him. He has sent word to her. But, oh! was there ever such a difference in estate? The King on the one side, the bride of the wilderness, poor and persecuted, on the other. The wealth of the universe on the one side, the obscurity of the ages on the other. The pomp of heaven on the one side, the poverty of earth on the other. But He will endow her with all His wealth, and raise her to sit with Him on a throne forever.

Come, thou bridal morn of the ages! Come! and there shall be the rumbling of great wheels, great chariot wheels down the sky, and there shall be riders ahead and mounted cavalry behind, the conquerors of heaven on white horses. Clear the way! A thousand trumpets blare. "Behold! the bridegroom cometh: go ye out to meet Him."

Then the charioteers shall rein in their bounding steeds of fire, and the King shall dismount from the chariot, and He shall take by the hand the bride of the wilderness, all the crowded galleries of the universe, the spectators. Ring all the wedding bells of heaven. The King lifts the bride into the chariot and cries, "Drive on! drive up!" and the clouds shall spread their cloth of gold for the procession, and the twain shall go through the gates triumphant, and up the streets, and then step into the palace at the banquet, where ten thousand potentates and principalities and dominations, cherubic and archangelic, with ten thousand gleaming and uplifted chalices, shall celebrate the day when the King of Heaven and earth brings home His bride from the wilderness. Make haste, my beloved. Be thou like to a roe, or a young hart upon the mountains of spices.



MATRIMONIAL DISCORDS.

"Can two walk together, except they be agreed?"—AMOS 3:3.

A church within a church, a republic within a republic, a world within a world, is spelled by four letters—Home! If things go right there, they go right everywhere; if things go wrong there, they go wrong everywhere. The door-sill of the dwelling-house is the foundation of Church and State. A man never gets higher than his own garret or lower than his own cellar. In other words, domestic life overarches and undergirds all other life. The highest House of Congress is the domestic circle; the rocking-chair in the nursery is higher than a throne. George Washington commanded the forces of the United States, but Mary Washington commanded George. Chrysostom's mother made his pen for him. If a man should start out and run seventy years in a straight line he could not get out from under the shadow of his own mantelpiece. I therefore talk to you this morning about a matter of infinite and eternal moment when I speak of your home.

THE SOCIAL BALANCE.

As individuals we are fragments. God makes the race in part, and then he gradually puts us together. What I lack, you make up; what you lack, I make up; our deficits and surpluses of character being the cog-wheels in the great social mechanism. One person has the patience, another has the courage, another has the placidity, another has the enthusiasm; that which is lacking in one is made up by another, or made up by all. Buffaloes in herds, grouse in broods, quail in flocks, the human race in circles. God has most beautifully arranged this. It is in this way that he balances society; this conservative and that radical keeping things even. Every ship must have its mast, cutwater, taffrail, ballast. Thank God, then, for Princeton and Andover, for the opposites.

I have no more right to blame a man for being different from me than a driving-wheel has a right to blame the iron shaft that holds it to the centre. John Wesley balances Calvin's Institutes. A cold thinker gives to Scotland the strong bones of theology; Dr. Guthrie clothes them with a throbbing heart and warm flesh. The difficulty is that we are not satisfied with just the work that God has given us to do. The water-wheel wants to come inside the mill and grind the grist, and the hopper wants to go out and dabble in the water. Our usefulness and the welfare of society depend upon our staying in just the place that God has put us, or intended we should occupy.

A RELIC OF EDEN.

For more compactness and that we may be more useful we are gathered in still smaller circles in the home group. And there you have the same varieties again; brothers, sisters, husband and wife; all different in temperaments and tastes. It is fortunate that it should be so. If the husband be all impulse, the wife must be all prudence. If one sister be sanguine in her temperament, the other must be lymphatic. Mary and Martha are necessities. There will be no dinner for Christ if there be no Martha; there will be no audience for Jesus if there be no Mary. The home organization is most beautifully constructed. Eden has gone; the bowers are all broken down; the animals that Adam stroked with his hand that morning when they came up to get their names have since shot forth tusk and sting and growled, panther at panther; in mid-air iron beaks plunge till with clotted wing and eyeless sockets the twain come whirling down from under the sun in blood and fire. Eden has gone, but there is just one little fragment left. It floated down on the River Hiddekel out of Paradise. It is the marriage institution. It does not, as at the beginning, take away from man a rib. Now it is an addition of ribs.

THE HOME ASSAULTED.

This institution of marriage has been defamed in our day, and influences are abroad trying to turn this earth into a Turkish harem or a great Salt Lake City. While the pulpits have been comparatively silent, novels—their cheapness only equalled by their nastiness—are trying to educate, have taken upon themselves to educate, this nation in regard to holy marriage, which makes or breaks for time and eternity. Oh, this is not a mere question of residence or wardrobe! It is a question charged with gigantic joy or sorrow, with heaven or hell. Alas for this new dispensation of George Sands! Alas for the mingling of the nightshade with the marriage garlands! Alas for the venom of adders spit into the tankards! Alas for the white frosts of eternal death that kill the orange blossoms! The Gospel of Jesus Christ is to assert what is right and to assert what is wrong.

THE ASSAULT OF THE SORDID.

Attempt has been made to take the marriage institution, which was intended for the happiness and elevation of the race, and make it a mere commercial enterprise; an exchange of houses and lands and equipage; a business partnership of two, stuffed up with the stories of romance and knight-errantry, and unfaithfulness and feminine angelhood. The two after a while have roused up to find that, instead of the paradise they dreamed of, they have got nothing but a Van Amburgh's menagerie, filled with tigers and wild-cats. Twenty thousand divorces in Paris in one year preceded the worst revolution that France ever saw. It was only the first course in that banquet of hell; and I tell you what you know as well as I do, that wrong notions on the subject of Christian marriage are the cause at this day of more moral outrage before God and man than any other cause.

There are some things that I want to bring before you. I know there are those of you who have had homes set up for a great many years; and then there are those here who have just established their home. They have only been in it a few months or a few years. Then there are those who will, after awhile, set up for themselves a home, and it is right that I should speak out upon these themes.

THE BENEFICENT GUEST.

My first counsel to you is, have Jesus in your new home, if it be a new home, and let Him who was a guest at Bethany be in your household; let the divine blessing drop upon your every hope and plan and expectation. Those young people who begin with God end with heaven. Have on your right hand the engagement ring of the divine affection. If one of you be a Christian, let that one take a Bible and read a few verses in the evening-time, and then kneel down and commend yourselves to Him who setteth the solitary in families. I want to tell you that the destroying angel passes by without touching or entering the door-post sprinkled with the blood of the everlasting covenant. Why is it that in some families they never get along, and in others they always get along well? I have watched such cases, and have come to a conclusion. In the first instance, nothing seemed to go pleasantly, and after awhile came devastation, domestic disaster or estrangement. Why? They started wrong! In the other case, although there were hardships and trials, and some things that had to be explained, still things went on pleasantly until the very last. Why? They started right!

FORBEARANCE NEEDED.

My advice to you in your home is to exercise to the very last possibility of your nature the law of forbearance. Prayers in the household will not make up for everything. Some of the best people in the world are the hardest to get along with. There are people who stand up in prayer-meetings and pray like angels, who at home are uncompromising and cranky. You may not have everything just as you want it. Sometimes it will be the duty of the husband, and sometimes of the wife, to yield; but both stand punctiliously on your rights, and you will have a Waterloo with no Blucher coming up at nightfall to decide the conflict.

A GRANDFATHER'S APOLOGY.

Never be ashamed to apologize when you have done wrong in domestic affairs. Let that be a law of your household. The best thing I ever heard of my grandfather, whom I never saw, was this: that once, having unrighteously rebuked one of his children, he himself having lost his patience, and, perhaps, having been misinformed of the child's doings, found out his mistake, and in the evening of the same day gathered all his family together, and said: "Now I have one explanation to make, and one thing to say. Thomas, this morning, I rebuked you very unfairly. I am very sorry for it. I rebuked you in the presence of the whole family, and now I ask your forgiveness in their presence." It must have taken some courage to do that. It was right, was it not? Never be ashamed to apologize for domestic inaccuracy. Find out the points; what are the weak points, if I may call them so, of your companion, and then stand aloof from them.

Do not carry the fire of your temper too near the gunpowder. If the wife be easily fretted by disorder in the household, let the husband be careful where he throws his slippers. If the husband come home from the store with his patience all exhausted, do not let the wife unnecessarily cross his temper; but both stand up for your rights, and I will promise the everlasting sound of the war-whoop. Your life will be spent in making up, and marriage will be to you an unmitigated curse. Cowper said:

"The kindest and the happiest pair Will find occasion to forbear; And something every day they live, To pity, and perhaps forgive."

I advise, also, that you make your chief pleasure circle around about that home. It is unfortunate when it is otherwise. If the husband spend the most of his nights away from home, of choice, and not of necessity, he is not the head of the household; he is only the cashier. If the wife throw the cares of the household in the servant's lap, and then spend five nights of the week at the opera or theatre, she may clothe her children with satins and laces and ribbons that would confound a French milliner, but they are orphans. Oh, it is sad when a child has to say its prayers alone because mother has gone off to the evening entertainment! In India they bring children and throw them to the crocodiles, and it seems very cruel; but the jaws of New York and Brooklyn dissipation are swallowing down more little children to-day than all the monsters that ever crawled upon the banks of the Ganges!

A GODLESS MOTHER'S GRIEF.

I have seen the sorrow of a godless mother on the death of a child she had neglected. It was not so much grief that she felt from the fact that the child was dead as the fact that she had neglected it. She said: "If I had only watched over and cared for the child, I know God would not have taken it." The tears came not; it was a dry, blistering tempest—a scorching simoon of the desert. When she wrung her hands it seemed as if she would twist her fingers from their sockets; when she seized her hair it seemed as if she had, in wild terror, grasped a coiling serpent with her right hand.

No tears! Comrades of the little one came in and wept over the coffin; neighbors came in, and the moment they saw the still face of the child the shower broke. No tears for her. God gives tears as the summer rain to the parched soul; but in all the universe the driest and hottest, the most scorching and consuming thing is a mother's heart if she has neglected her child, when once it is dead. God may forgive her, but she will never forgive herself. The memory will sink the eyes deeper into the sockets, and pinch the face, and whiten the hair, and eat up the heart with vultures that will not be satisfied, forever plunging deeper their iron beaks. Oh, you wanderers from your home, go back to your duty! The brightest flowers in all the earth are those which grow in the garden of a Christian household, clambering over the porch of a Christian home.

MATRIMONIAL CONGENIALITY.

I advise you also to cultivate sympathy of occupation. Sir James Mackintosh, one of the most eminent and elegant men that ever lived, while standing at the very height of his eminence, said to a great company of scholars: "My wife made me." The wife ought to be the advising partner in every firm. She ought to be interested in all the losses and gains of shop and store. She ought to have a right—she has a right—to know everything. If a man goes into a business transaction that he dare not tell his wife of, you may depend that he is on the way either to bankruptcy or moral ruin. There may be some things which he does not wish to trouble his wife with; but if he dare not tell her, he is on the road to discomfiture.

On the other hand, the husband ought to be sympathetic with the wife's occupation. It is no easy thing to keep house. Many a woman that could have endured martyrdom as well as Margaret, the Scotch girl, has actually been worn out by house management. There are a thousand martyrs of the kitchen. It is very annoying, after the vexations of the day, around the stove or the table, or in the nursery or parlor, to have your husband say: "You know nothing about trouble; you ought to be in the store half an hour." Sympathy of occupation!

If the husband's work cover him with the soot of the furnace or the odors of leather or soap factories, let not the wife be easily disgusted at the begrimed hands or unsavory aroma. Your gains are one, your interests are one, your losses are one; lay hold of the work of life with both hands. Four hands to fight the battles; four eyes to watch for the danger; four shoulders on which to carry the trials. It is a very sad thing when the painter has a wife who does not like pictures. It is a very sad thing for a pianist when she has a husband who does not like music.

GENTEEL BUSINESS.

It is a very sad thing when a wife is not suited unless her husband has what is called a "genteel business." So far as I understand a "genteel business," it is something to which a man goes at ten o'clock in the morning, and from which he comes home at two or three o'clock in the afternoon, and gets a large amount of money for doing nothing. That is, I believe, a "genteel business;" and there has been many a wife who has made the mistake of not being satisfied until the husband has given up the tanning of the hides, or the turning of the banisters, or the building of the walls, and put himself in circles where he has nothing to do but smoke cigars and drink wine, and get himself into habits that upset him, going down in the maelstrom, taking his wife and children with him.

There are a good many trains running from earth to destruction. They start all the hours of the day, and all the hours of the night. There are the freight trains; they go very slowly and very heavily; and there are the accommodation trains going on toward destruction, and they stop very often and let a man get out when he wants to. But genteel idleness is an express train; Satan is the stoker, and Death is the engineer; and though one may come out in front of it and swing the red flag of "danger," or the lantern of God's Word, it makes just one shot into perdition, coming down the embankment with a shout and a wail and a shriek—crash, crash! There are two classes of people sure of destruction: First, those who have nothing to do; secondly, those who have something to do, but are too lazy or too proud to do it.

LOVE TO PRESIDE.

I have one more word of advice to give to those who would have a happy home, and that is, let love preside in it. When your behavior in the domestic circle becomes a mere matter of calculation; when the caress you give is merely the result of deliberate study of the position you occupy, happiness lies stark dead on the hearthstone. When the husband's position as head of the household is maintained by loudness of voice, by strength of arm, by fire of temper, the republic of domestic bliss has become a despotism that neither God nor man will abide. Oh, ye who promised to love each other at the altar, how dare you commit perjury? Let no shadow of suspicion come on your affection. It is easier to kill that flower than it is to make it live again. The blast from hell that puts out that light leaves you in the blackness of darkness forever.

A HOUSE NOT A HOME.

Here are a man and wife; they agree in nothing else, but they agree they will have a home. They will have a splendid house, and they think that if they have a house they will have a home. Architects make the plan, and the mechanics execute it; the house to cost one hundred thousand dollars. It is done. The carpets are spread, lights are hoisted, curtains are hung, cards of invitation sent out. The horses in gold-plated harness prance at the gate; guests come in and take their places; the flute sounds; the dancers go up and down; and with one grand whirl the wealth and the fashion and the mirth of the great town wheel amidst the pictured walls.

Ha! this is happiness. Float it on the smoking viands; sound it in the music; whirl it in the dance; cast it on the snow of sculpture; sound it up the brilliant stairway; flash it in chandeliers! Happiness, indeed! Let us build on the centre of the parlor floor a throne to Happiness; let all the guests, when they come in, bring their flowers and pearls and diamonds, and throw them on this pyramid, and let it be a throne; and then let Happiness, the Queen, mount the throne, and we will stand around and, all chalices lifted, we will say: "Drink, O Queen! live forever!"

LIGHTS OUT.

But the guests depart, the flutes are breathless, the last clash of the impatient hoofs is heard in the distance, and the twain of the household come back to see the Queen of Happiness on the throne amid the parlor floor. But, alas! as they come back the flowers have faded, the sweet odors have become the smell of a charnel-house, and instead of the Queen of Happiness there sits there the gaunt form of Anguish, with bitten lip and sunken eye, and ashes in her hair.

The romp and joyous step of the dancers who have left seems rumbling yet, like jarring thunders that quake the floor and rattle the glasses of the feast, rim to rim. The spilled wine on the floor turns into blood. The wreaths of plush have become wriggling reptiles. Terrors catch tangled in the canopy that overhangs the couch. A strong gust of wind comes through the hall and the drawing-room and the bed-chamber, in which all the lights go out. And from the lips of the wine-beakers come the words: "Happiness is not in us!" And the arches respond: "It is not in us!" And the silenced instruments of music, thrummed on by invisible fingers, answer: "Happiness is not in us!" And the frozen lips of Anguish break open, and, seated on the throne of wilted flowers, she strikes her bony hands together, and groans: "It is not in me!"

HAPPINESS IN POVERTY.

That very night a clerk with a salary of a thousand dollars a year—only one thousand—goes to his home, set up three months ago, just after the marriage-day. Love meets him at the door; love sits with him at the table; love talks over the work of the day; love takes down the Bible, and reads of Him who came our souls to save; and they kneel, and while they are kneeling—right in that plain room, on that plain carpet—the angels of God build a throne, not out of flowers that perish and fade away, but out of garlands of heaven, wreath on top of wreath, amaranth on amaranth, until the throne is done. Then the harps of God sounded, and suddenly there appeared one who mounted the throne, with eye so bright and brow so fair that the twain knew it was Christian Love. And they knelt at the throne, and, putting one hand on each head, she blessed them, and said: "Happiness is with me!" And that throne of celestial bloom withered not with the passing years; and the queen left not the throne till one day the married pair felt stricken in years—felt themselves called away, and knew not which way to go, and the queen bounded from the throne, and said: "Follow me, and I will show you the way up to the realm of everlasting love." And so they went up to sing songs of love, and walk on pavements of love, and to live together in mansions of love, and to rejoice forever in the truth that God is love.



HOTELS VERSUS HOMES.

"And brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee."—LUKE 10:34, 35.

This is the good Samaritan paying the hotel bill of a man who had been robbed and almost killed by bandits. The good Samaritan had found the unfortunate on a lonely, rocky road, where, to this very day, depredations are sometimes committed upon travelers, and had put the injured man into the saddle, while this merciful and well-to-do man had walked till they got to the hotel, and the wounded man was put to bed and cared for. It must have been a very superior hotel in its accommodations, for, though in the country, the landlord was paid at the rate of what in our country would be four or five dollars a day, a penny being then a day's wages, and the two pennies paid in this case about two days' wages. Moreover, it was one of those kind-hearted landlords who are wrapped up in the happiness of their guests, because the good Samaritan leaves the poor wounded fellow to his entire care, promising that when he came that way again he would pay all the bills until the invalid got well.

THE VALUE OF HOTELS.

Hotels and boarding-houses are necessities. In very ancient times they were unknown, because the world had comparatively few inhabitants, who were not much given to travel, and private hospitality met all the wants of sojourners, as when Abraham rushed out at Mamre to invite the three men to sit down to a dinner of veal; as when the people were positively commanded to be given to hospitality; as in many of the places in the East these ancient customs are practiced to-day. But we have now hotels presided over by good landlords, and boarding-houses presided over by excellent host or hostess, in all neighborhoods, villages and cities, and it is our congratulation that those of our land surpass all other lands. They rightly become the permanent residences of many people, such as those who are without families, such as those whose business keeps them migratory, such as those who ought not, for various reasons of health or peculiarity of circumstances, take upon themselves the cares of housekeeping.