QUEENLY CATERERS.

Many a man falling sick in one of these boarding-houses or hotels has been kindly watched and nursed; and by the memory of her own sufferings and losses the lady at the head of such a house has done all that a mother could do for a sick child, and the slumberless eye of God sees and appreciates her sacrifices in behalf of the stranger. Among the most marvelous cases of patience and Christian fidelity are many of those who keep boarding-houses, enduring without resentment the unreasonable demands of their guests for expensive food and attentions for which they are not willing to pay an equivalent—a lot of cranky men and women who are not worthy to tie the shoe of their queenly caterer. The outrageous way in which boarders sometimes act to their landlords and landladies show that these critical guests had bad early rearing, and that in the making-up of their natures all that constitutes the gentleman and lady were left out. Some of the most princely men and some of the most elegant women that I know of to-day keep hotels and boarding-houses.

But one of the great evils of this day is found in the fact that a large population of our towns and cities are giving up and have given up their homes and taken apartments, that they may have more freedom from domestic duties and more time for social life, and because they like the whirl of publicity better than the quiet and privacy of a residence they can call their own. The lawful use of these hotels and boarding-houses is for most people while they are in transitu: but as a terminus they are in many cases demoralization, utter and complete. That is the point at which families innumerable have begun to disintegrate. There never has been a time when so many families, healthy and abundantly able to support and direct homes of their own, have struck tent and taken permanent abode in these public establishments. It is an evil wide as Christendom, and by voice and through the newspaper press I utter warning and burning protest, and ask Almighty God to bless the word, whether in the hearing or reading.

PROMOTERS OF GOSSIP.

In these public caravanseries the demon of gossip is apt to get full sway. All the boarders run daily the gauntlet of general inspection—how they look when they come down in the morning and when they get in at night, and what they do for a living, and whom they receive as guests in their rooms, and what they wear, and what they do not wear, and how they eat, and what they eat, and how much they eat, and how little they eat. If a man proposes in such a place to be isolated and reticent and alone, they will begin to guess about him: Who is he? Where did he come from? How long is he going to stay? Has he paid his board? How much does he pay? Perhaps he has committed some crime and does not want it to be known; there must be something wrong about him, or he would speak.

The whole house goes into the detective business. They must find out about him. They must find out about him right away. If he leave his door unlocked by accident he will find that his rooms have been inspected, his trunk explored, his letters folded differently from the way they were folded when he put them away. Who is he? is the question, asked with intenser interest, until the subject has become a monomania. The simple fact is, that he is nobody in particular, but minds his own business. The best landlords and landladies cannot sometimes hinder their places from becoming

A PANDEMONIUM

of whisperers, and reputations are torn to tatters, and evil suspicions are aroused, and scandals started, and the parliament of the family is blown to atoms by some Guy Fawkes who was not caught in time, as was his English predecessor of gunpowdery reputation.

The reason is that while in private homes families have so much to keep them busy, in these promiscuous and multitudinous residences there are so many who have nothing to do, and that always makes mischief. They gather in each other's rooms and spend hours in consultation about others. If they had to walk a half mile before they got to the willing ear of some listener to detraction they would get out of breath before reaching there, and not feel in full glow of animosity or slander, or might, because of the distance, not go at all. But rooms 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 are on the same corridor, and when one carrion crow goes "Caw! Caw!" all the other crows hear it and flock together over the same carcass. "Oh, I have heard something rich! Sit down and let me tell you all about it." And the first guffaw increases the gathering, and it has to be told all over again, and as they separate each carries a spark from the altar of Gab to some other circle, until from the coal-heaver in the cellar to the maid in the top room of the garret all are aware of the defamation, and that evening all who leave the house will bear it to other houses, until autumnal fires sweeping across Illinois prairies are less raging and swift than that flame of consuming reputation blazing across the village or city.

Those of us who were brought up in the country know that the old-fashioned hatching of eggs in the hay-mow required four or five weeks of brooding, but there are new modes of hatching by machinery, which take less time and do the work in wholesale. So, while the private home may brood into life an occasional falsity, and take a long time to do it, many of the boarding-houses and family hotels afford a swifter and more multitudinous style of moral incubation, and one old gossip will get off the nest after one hour's brooding, clucking a flock of thirty lies after her, each one picking up its little worm of juicy regalement. It is no advantage to hear too much about your neighbors, for your time will be so much occupied in taking care of their faults that you will have no time to look after your own. And while you are pulling the chickweed out of their garden yours will get all overgrown with horse-sorrel and mullen stalks.

A WRONG TO CHILDREN.

One of the worst damages that comes from the herding of so many people into boarding-houses and family hotels is inflicted upon children. It is only another way of bringing them up on the commons. While you have your own private house you can, for the most part, control their companionship and their whereabouts; but by twelve years of age in these public resorts they will have picked up all the bad things that can be furnished by the prurient minds of dozens of people. They will overhear blasphemies, and see quarrels, and get precocious in sin, and what the bartender does not tell them the porter or hostler or bell-boy will.

Beside that, the children will go out into this world without the restraining, anchoring, steadying and all-controlling memory of a home. From that none of us who have been blessed of such memory have escaped. It grips a man for eighty years, if he lives so long. It pulls him back from doors into which he otherwise would enter. It smites him with contrition in the very midst of his dissipations. As the fish already surrounded by

THE LONG WIDE NET

swim out to sea, thinking they can go as far as they please, and with gay toss of silvery scale they defy the sportsman on the beach, and after a while the fishermen begin to draw in the net, hand over hand, and hand over hand, and it is a long while before the captured fins begin to feel the net, and then they dart this way and that, hoping to get out, but find themselves approaching the shore, and are brought up to the very feet of the captors, so the memory of an early home sometimes seems to relax and let men out further and further from God and further and further from shore—five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years; but some day they find an irresistible mesh drawing them back, and they are compelled to retreat from their prodigality and wandering; and though they make desperate effort to escape the impression, and try to dive deeper down in sin, after a while are brought clear back and held upon the Rock of Ages.

If it be possible, O father and mother! let your sons and daughters go out into the world under the semi-omnipotent memory of a good, pure home. About your two or three rooms in a boarding-house or a family hotel you can cast no such glorious sanctity. They will think of these public caravanseries as an early stopping place, malodorous with old victuals, coffees perpetually steaming, and meats in everlasting stew or broil, the air surcharged with carbonic acid, and corridors along which drunken boarders come staggering at one o'clock in the morning, rapping at the door till the affrighted wife lets them in. Do not be guilty of the sacrilege or blasphemy of calling such a place a home.

WHAT A HOME IS.

A home is four walls enclosing one family with identity of interest, and a privacy from outside inspection so complete that it is a world in itself, no one entering except by permission—bolted and barred and chained against all outside inquisitiveness. The phrase so often used in law books and legal circles is mightily suggestive—every man's house is his castle. As much so as though it had drawbridge, portcullis, redoubt, bastion and armed turret. Even the officer of the law may not enter to serve a writ, except the door be voluntarily opened unto him; burglary, or the invasion of it, a crime so offensive that the law clashes its iron jaws on any one who attempts it. Unless it be necessary to stay for longer or shorter time in family hotel or boarding-house—and there are thousands of instances in which it is necessary, as I showed you at the beginning—unless in this exceptional case, let neither wife nor husband consent to such permanent residence.

HAZARDOUS TO MORALS.

The probability is that the wife will have to divide her husband's time with public smoking or reading room, or with some coquettish spider in search of unwary flies; and if you do not entirely lose your husband it will be because he is divinely protected from the disasters that have whelmed thousands of husbands with as good intentions as yours. Neither should the husband, without imperative reason, consent to such a life unless he is sure his wife can withstand the temptation of social dissipation which sweeps across such places with the force of the Atlantic Ocean when driven by a September equinox. Many wives give up their homes for these public residences so that they may give their entire time to operas, theatres, balls, receptions and levees, and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise and shoots off into a tangent. But the difference is, in one case it is a top and in the other a soul.

THE LARES AND PENATES.

Beside this there is an assiduous accumulation of little things around the private home which in the aggregate make a great attraction, while the denizen of one of these public residences is apt to say: "What is the use? I have no place to keep them if I should take them." Mementoes, bric-a-brac, curiosities, quaint chair or cosy lounge, upholsteries, pictures, and a thousand things that accrete in a home are discarded or neglected because there is no homestead in which to arrange them. And yet they are the case in which the pearl of domestic happiness is set. You can never become as attached to the appointments of a boarding-house or family hotel as to those things that you can call your own, and are associated with the different members of your household, or with scenes of thrilling import in your domestic history. Blessed is that home in which for a whole lifetime they have been gathering until every figure in the carpet, and every panel of the door, and every casement of the window has a chirography of its own, speaking out something about father or mother, or son or daughter, or friend that was with us a while. What a sacred place it becomes when one can say: "In that room such a one was born; in that bed such a one died; in that chair I sat on the night I heard such a one had received a great public honor; by that stool my child knelt for her last evening prayer; here I sat to greet my son as he came back from a sea voyage; that was father's cane; that was mother's rocking chair." What a joyful and pathetic congress of reminiscences!

HOSPITALITY CURTAILED.

The public residence of hotel and boarding-house abolishes the grace of hospitality. Your guest does not want to come to such a table. No one wants to run such a gauntlet of acute and merciless hyper-criticism. Unless you have a home of your own you will not be able to exercise the best rewarded of all the graces. For exercise of this grace what blessing came to the Shunamite in the restoration of her son to life because she entertained Elisha, and to the widow of Zarephath in the perpetual oil well of the miraculous cruise because she fed a hungry prophet, and to Rahab in the preservation of her life at the demolition of Jericho because she entertained the spies and to Laban in the formation of an interesting family relation because of his entertainment of Jacob, and to Lot in his rescue from the destroyed city because of his entertainment of the angels, and to Mary and Martha and Zaccheus in spiritual blessing because they entertained Christ, and to Publius in the island of Melita in the healing of his father because of the entertainment of Paul drenched from the shipwreck, and of innumerable houses throughout Christendom upon which have come blessings from generation to generation because their doors swung easily open in the enlarging, ennobling, irradiating, and divine grace of hospitality. I do not know what your experience has been, but I have had men and women visiting at my house who left a benediction on every room—in the blessing they asked at the table, in the prayer they offered at the family altar, in the good advice they gave the children, in the gospelization that looked out from every lineament of their countenances; and their departure was the sword of bereavement.

The Queen of Norway, Sweden and Denmark had a royal

CUP OF TEN CURVES,

or lips, each one having on it the name of the distinguished person who had drank from it. And that cup which we offer to others in Christian hospitality, though it be of the plainest earthenware, is a royal cup, and God can read on all its sides the names of those who have taken from it refreshment. But all this is impossible unless you have a home of your own. It is the delusion as to what is necessary for a home that hinders so many from establishing one. Thirty rooms are not necessary, nor twenty, nor fifteen, nor ten, nor five, nor three. In the right way plant a table, and couch, and knife and fork, and a cup, and a chair, and you can raise a young paradise. Just start a home, on however small a scale, and it will grow. When King Cyrus was invited to dine with an humble friend the king made the one condition of his coming that the only dish be one loaf of bread, and the most imperial satisfactions have sometimes banqueted on the plainest fare.

Do not be caught in the delusion of many thousands in postponing a home until they can have an expensive one. That idea is the devil's trap that catches men and women innumerable who will never have any home at all. Capitalists of America, build plain homes for the people. Let this tenement-house system, in which hundreds of thousands of the people of our cities are wallowing in the mire, be broken up by small homes, where people can have their own firesides and their own altar. In this great continent there is room enough for every man and woman to have a home. Morals and civilization and religion demand it.

SMALL HOMES NEEDED

We want done all over this land what George Peabody and Lady Burdett-Coutts did in England, and some of the large manufacturers of this country have done for the villages and cities, in building small houses at cheap rents, so that the middle classes can have separate homes. They are the only class not provided for. The rich have their palaces, and the poor have their poorhouses, and criminals have their jails; but what about the honest middle classes, who are able and willing to work, and yet have small income? Let the capitalists, inspired of God and pure patriotism, rise and build whole streets of small residences. The laborer may have, at the close of the day, to walk or ride further than is desirable to reach it, but when he gets to his destination in the eventide he will find something worthy of being called by that glorious and impassioned and heaven-descended word, "home."

SOMETHING TO SAVE FOR.

Young married man, as soon as you can buy such a place, even if you have to put on it a mortgage reaching from base to cap-stone. The much abused mortgage, which is ruin to a reckless man, to one prudent and provident is the beginning of a competency and a fortune, for the reason he will not be satisfied until he has paid it off, and all the household are put on stringent economies until then. Deny yourself all superfluities and all luxuries until you can say: "Everything in this house is mine, thank God!—every timber, every brick, every foot of plumbing, every door-sill." Do not have your children born in a boarding-house, and do not yourself be buried from one. Have a place where your children can shout and sing and romp without being overhauled for the racket. Have a kitchen where you can do something toward the reformation of evil cookery and the lessening of this nation of dyspeptics. As Napoleon lost one of his great battles by an attack of indigestion, so many men have such

A DAILY WRESTLE

with the food swallowed that they have no strength left for the battle of life; and though your wife may know how to play on all musical instruments, and rival a prima donna, she is not well educated unless she can boil an Irish potato and broil a mutton-chop, since the diet sometimes decides the fate of families and nations.

Have a sitting-room with at least one easy chair, even though you have to take turns at sitting in it, and books out of the public library or of your own purchase for the making of your family intelligent, and checkerboards and guessing matches, with an occasional blind man's buff, which is of all games my favorite. Rouse up your home with all styles of innocent mirth, and gather up in your children's nature a reservoir of exuberance that will pour down refreshing streams when life gets parched, and the dark days come, and the lights go out, and the laughter is smothered into a sob.

CHRIST IN THE HOME.

First, last and all the time, have Christ in your home. Julius Caesar calmed the fears of an affrighted boatman who was rowing him in a stream by stating: "So long as Caesar is with you in the same boat no harm can happen." And whatever storm of adversity or bereavement or poverty may strike your home all is well as long as you have Christ the King on board. Make your home so far-reaching in its influence that down to the last moment of your children's life you may hold them with a heavenly charm. At seventy-six years of age the Demosthenes of the American Senate lay dying at Washington—I mean Henry Clay, of Kentucky. His pastor sat at his bedside and the "old man eloquent," after a long and exciting public life, trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic, was back again in the scenes of his boyhood, and he kept saying in his dream over and over again: "My mother! mother! mother!" May the parental influence we exert be not only potential but holy, and so the home on earth be the vestibule of our home in heaven, in which place may we all meet—father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, grandfather and grandmother, and grandchild, and the entire group of precious ones, of whom we must say in the words of transporting Charles Wesley:

"One family we dwell in Him, One church above, beneath; Though now divided by the stream— The narrow stream of death; One army of the living God, To His command we bow; Part of the host have crossed the flood, And part are crossing now."



EASY DIVORCE.

"What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder."—MATTHEW 19:6

That there are hundreds and thousands of infelicitous homes in America no one will doubt. If there were only one skeleton in the closet, that might be locked up and abandoned; but in many a home there is a skeleton in the hallway and a skeleton in all the apartments.

"UNHAPPILY MARRIED"

are two words descriptive of many a homestead. It needs no orthodox minister to prove to a badly mated pair that there is a hell; they are there now. Sometimes a grand and gracious woman will be thus incarcerated, and her life will be a crucifixion, as was the case with Mrs. Sigourney, the great poetess and the great soul. Sometimes a consecrated man will be united to a fury, as was John Wesley, or united to a vixen, as was John Milton. Sometimes, and generally, both parties are to blame, and Thomas Carlyle is an intolerable scold, and his wife smokes and swears, and Froude, the historian, is mean enough, because of the shekels he gets for the manuscript,[3] to pull aside the curtain from the lifelong squabble at Craigenputtock and Five, Cheyne Row. Some say that for

THE ALLEVIATION

of all these domestic disorders of which we hear, easy divorce is a good prescription. God sometimes authorizes divorce as certainly as He authorizes marriage. I have just as much regard for one lawfully divorced as I have for one lawfully married. But you know and I know that wholesale divorce is one of

OUR NATIONAL SCOURGES.

I am not surprised at this when I think of the influences which have been abroad militating against the marriage relation.

For many years the platforms of the country rang with talk about a free-love millennium. There were meetings of this kind held in the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, Cooper Institute, New York, Tremont Temple, Boston, and all over the land. Some of the women who were most prominent in that movement have since been distinguished for great promiscuosity of affection. Popular themes for such occasions were the tyranny of man, the oppression of the marriage relation, women's rights, and the affinities. Prominent speakers were women with short curls and short dress and very long tongue, everlastingly at war with God because they were created women; while on the platform sat meek men with soft accent and cowed demeanor, apologetic for masculinity, and holding the parasols while the termagant orators went on preaching the gospel of free love.

That campaign of about twenty years set more devils in the marriage relation than will be exorcised in the next fifty. Men and women went home from such meetings so permanently confused as to who were their wives and husbands that they never got out of the perplexity, and the criminal and the civil courts tried to disentangle the Iliad of woes, and this one got alimony, and that one got a limited divorce, and this mother kept the children on condition that the father could sometimes come and look at them, and these went into poorhouses, and those went into an insane asylum, and those went into dissolute public life, and all went to destruction. The mightiest war ever made against the marriage institution was that free-love campaign, sometimes under one name and sometimes under another.

Another influence that has warred upon the marriage relation has been

POLYGAMY IN UTAH.

That is a stereotyped caricature of the marriage relation, and has poisoned the whole land. You might as well think that you can have an arm in a state of mortification and yet the whole body not be sickened, as to have those territories polygamized and yet the body of the nation not feel the putrefaction. Hear it, good men and women of America, that so long ago as 1862 a law was passed by Congress forbidding polygamy in the territories and in all the places where they had jurisdiction. Twenty-two years have passed along and five administrations, armed with all the power of government, and having an army at their disposal, and yet the first brick has not been knocked from that fortress of libertinism.

Every new President in his inaugural has tickled that monster with the straw of condemnation, and every Congress has stultified itself in proposing some plan that would not work. Polygamy stands in Utah and in other of the territories to-day more entrenched, and more brazen, and more puissant, and more braggart, and more infernal, than at any time in its history. James Buchanan, a much-abused man of his day, did more for the extirpation of this villainy than all the subsequent administrations have dared to do. Mr. Buchanan sent out an army, and although it was halted in its work, still he accomplished more than the subsequent administrations, which have done nothing but talk, talk, talk.

I want the people of America to know that for twenty-two years we have had a positive law prohibiting polygamy in the territories. People are crying out for some new law, as though we had not an old law already with which that infamy could be swept into the perdition from which it smoked up. Polygamy in Utah has warred against the marriage relation throughout the land. It is impossible to have such an awful sewer of iniquity sending up its miasma, which is wafted by the winds north, south, east, and west, without the whole land being affected by it.

Another influence that has warred against the marriage relation in this country has been a

PUSTULOUS LITERATURE,

with its millions of sheets every week choked with stories of domestic wrongs, and infidelities, and massacres, and outrages, until it is a wonder to me that there are any decencies or any common-sense left on the subject of marriage. One-half of the news-stands of Brooklyn and New York and all our cities reeking with the filth.

"Now," say some, "we admit all these evils, and the only way to clear them out or correct them is by easy divorce." Well, before we yield to that cry, let us find out

HOW EASY IT IS NOW.

I have looked over the laws of all the States, and I find that while in some States it is easier than in others, in every State it is easy. The State of Illinois through its legislature recites a long list of proper causes for divorce, and then closes up by giving to the courts the right to make a decree of divorce in any case where they deem it expedient. After that you are not surprised at the announcement that in one county of the State of Illinois, in one year, there were 833 divorces. If you want to know how easy it is you have only to look over the records of the States. In Massachusetts 600 divorces in one year; in Maine 478 in one year; in Connecticut 401 divorces in one year; in the city of San Francisco 333 divorces in 1880; in New England in one year 2113 divorces, and in twenty years in New England 20,000. Is that not easy enough?

If the same ratio continue, the ratio of multiplied divorce and multiplied causes of divorce, we are not far from the time when our courts will have to set apart whole days for application, and all you will have to prove against a man will be that he left his slippers in the middle of the floor, and all you will have to prove against a woman will be that her husband's overcoat was buttonless. Causes of divorce doubled in a few years, doubled in France, doubled in England, and doubled in the United States. To show how very easy it is I have to tell you that in Western Reserve, Ohio, the proportion of divorces to marriages celebrated is one to eleven; in Rhode Island is one to thirteen; in Vermont is one to fourteen. Is not that easy enough?

I want you to notice that frequency of divorce always goes along with the dissoluteness of society. Rome for five hundred years had not one case of divorce. Those were her days of glory and virtue. Then the reign of vice began, and divorce became epidemic. If you want to know how rapidly the Empire went down, ask Gibbon. Do you know how the Reign of Terror was introduced in France? By 20,000 cases of divorce in one year in Paris.

WHAT WE WANT

in this country and in all lands is that divorce be made more and more and more difficult. Then people before they enter that relation will be persuaded that there will probably be no escape from it except through the door of the sepulchre. Then they will pause on the verge of that relation until they are fully satisfied that it is best, and that it is right, and that it is happiest. Then we shall have no more marriage in fun. Then men and women will not enter the relation with the idea it is only a trial trip, and if they do not like it they can get out at the first landing. Then this whole question will be taken out of the frivolous into the tremendous, and there will be no more joking about the blossoms in a bride's hair than about the cypress on a coffin.

What we want is that the Congress of the United States at this present session move for the changing the national Constitution so that a law can be passed which shall be uniform all over the country, and what shall be right in one State shall be right in all the States, and what is wrong in one State will be wrong in all the States.

HOW IS IT NOW?

If a party in the marriage relation gets dissatisfied it is only necessary to move to another State to achieve liberation from the domestic tie, and divorce is effected so easy that the first one party knows of it is by seeing it in the newspaper that Rev. Dr. Somebody, on April 14, 1884, introduced into a new marriage relation a member of the household who went off on a pleasure excursion to Newport or a business excursion to Chicago. Married at the bride's house. No cards. There are States of the Union which practically put a premium upon the disintegration of the marriage relation, while there are other States, like our own New York State, that has the pre-eminent idiocy of making marriage lawful at twelve and fourteen years of age.

The Congress of the United States needs to move at the present session for a change of the National Constitution, and then to appoint a committee—not made up of single gentlemen, but of men of families and their families in Washington—who shall prepare a good, honest, righteous, comprehensive,

UNIFORM LAW

that will control everything from Sandy Hook to Golden Horn. That will put an end to brokerages in marriage. That will send divorce lawyers into a decent business. That will set people agitated for many years on the question of how shall they get away from each other to planning how they can adjust themselves to the more or less unfavorable circumstances.

More difficult divorce will put an estoppal to a great extent upon marriage as a financial speculation. There are men who go into the relation just as they go into Wall Street to purchase shares. The female to be invited into the partnership of wedlock is utterly unattractive, and in disposition a suppressed Vesuvius. Everybody knows it, but this masculine candidate for matrimonial orders, through the commercial agency or through the county records, finds out how much estate is to be inherited, and he calculates it. He thinks out how long it will be before the old man will die, and whether he can stand the refractory temper until he does die, and then he enters the relation; for he says, "If I cannot stand it, then through the divorce law I'll back out." That process is going on all the time, and men enter the relation without any moral principle, without any affection, and it is as much a matter of stock speculation as anything that transpired yesterday in Union Pacific, Wabash, and Delaware and Lackawanna.

Now, suppose a man understood, as he ought to understand, that if he goes into that relation there is no possibility of his getting out, or no probability, he would be more slow to put his neck in the yoke. He should say to himself, "Rather than a Caribbean whirlwind with a whole fleet of shipping in its arms, give me a zephyr off fields of sunshine and gardens of peace."

Rigorous divorce law will also hinder women from

THE FATAL MISTAKE

of marrying men to reform them. If a young man by twenty-five years of age or thirty years of age has the habit of strong drink fixed on him, he is as certainly bound for a drunkard's grave as that a train starting out from Grand Central Depot at 8 o'clock to-morrow morning is bound for Albany. The train may not reach Albany, for it may be thrown from the track. The young man may not reach a drunkard's grave, for something may throw him off the iron track of evil habit; but the probability is that the train that starts to-morrow morning at 8 o'clock for Albany will get there and the probability is that the young man who has the habit of strong drink fixed on him before twenty-five or thirty years of age will arrive at a drunkard's grave. She knows he drinks, although he tries to hide it by chewing cloves. Everybody knows he drinks. Parents warn, neighbors and friends warn. She will marry him, she will reform him.

If she is unsuccessful in the experiment, why then the divorce law will emancipate her, because habitual drunkenness is a cause for divorce in Indiana, Kentucky, Florida, Connecticut, and nearly all the States. So the poor thing goes to the altar of sacrifice. If you will show me the poverty-struck streets in any city I will show you the homes of the women who married men to reform them. In one case out of ten thousand it may be a successful experiment. I never saw the successful experiment. But have a rigorous divorce law, and that woman will say, "If I am affianced to that man it is for life; and if now in the ardor of his young love, and I am the prize to be won, he will not give up his cups, when he has won the prize, surely he will not give up his cups." And so that woman will say to the man, "No, sir, you are already married to the club, and you are married to that evil habit, and so you are married twice, and you are a bigamist. Go!"

A rigorous divorce law will also do much to hinder hasty and

INCONSIDERATE MARRIAGES.

Under the impression that one can be easily released people enter the relation without inquiry and without reflection. Romance and impulse rule the day. Perhaps the only ground for the marriage compact is that she likes his looks and he admires the graceful way she passes around the ice cream at the picnic! It is all they know about each other. It is all the preparation for life. A man not able to pay his own board bill, with not a dollar in his possession, will stand at the altar and take the loving hand, and say, "With all my worldly goods I thee endow!" A woman that could not make a loaf of bread to save her life will swear to cherish and obey. A Christian will marry an atheist, and that always makes conjoined wretchedness; for if a man does not believe there is a God, he is neither to be trusted with a dollar nor with your lifelong happiness.

Having read much about love in a cottage people brought up in ease will go and starve in a hovel. Runaway matches and elopements, 999 out of 1000 of which mean death and hell, multiplying on all hands. You see them in every day's newspapers. Our ministers in this region have no defence such as they have in other cities where the banns must be previously published and an officer of the law must give a certificate that all is right; so clergymen are left defenceless, and unite those who ought never to be united. Perhaps they are too young or perhaps they are standing already in some domestic compact.

By the wreck of ten thousand homes, by the holocaust of ten thousand sacrificed men and women, by the hearthstone of the family which is the corner-stone of the State, and in the name of that God who hath set up the family institution and who hath made the breaking of the marital oath the most appalling of all perjuries, I implore the Congress of the United States to make some righteous, uniform law for all the States and from ocean to ocean, on this subject of marriage and divorce.

ADVICE TO LOVERS.

Let me say to the hundreds of young people in this house this morning, before you give your heart and hand in holy alliance, use all caution; inquire outside as to habits, explore the disposition, scrutinize the taste, question the ancestry, and find out the ambitions. Do not take the heroes and the heroines of cheap novels for a model. Do not put your lifetime happiness in the keeping of a man who has a reputation for being a little loose in morals or in the keeping of a woman who dresses fast. Remember that while good looks are a kindly gift of God wrinkles or accident may despoil them. Remember that Byron was no more celebrated for his beauty than for his depravity. Remember that Absalom's hair was not more splendid than his habits were despicable. Hear it, hear it! The only foundation for happy marriage that ever has been or ever will be, is good character.

ASK FATHER AND MOTHER'S COUNSEL

in this most important step of your life. They are good advisers. They are the best friends you ever had. They made more sacrifices for you than any one else ever did, and they will do more to-day for your happiness than any other people. Ask them, and, above all,

ASK GOD.

I used to smile at John Brown of Haddington because when he was about to offer his hand and heart in marriage to one who became his lifelong companion, he opened the conversation by saying, "Let us pray." But I have seen so many shipwrecks on the sea of matrimony, I have made up my mind that John Brown of Haddington was right. A union formed in prayer will be a happy union, though sickness pale the cheek, and poverty empty the bread tray, and death open the small graves, and all the path of life be strewn with thorns, from the marriage altar with its wedding march and orange blossoms clear on down to the last farewell at that gate where Isaac and Rebecca, Abraham and Sarah, Adam and Eve, parted.

And let me say to you who are in this relation, if you make one man or woman happy you have not lived in vain. Christ says that what He is to the Church you ought to be to each other; and if sometimes through difference of opinion or difference of disposition you make up your mind that your marriage was a mistake, patiently bear and forbear, remembering that life at the longest is short and that for those who have been badly mated in this world, death will give quick and immediate bill of divorcement written in letters of green grass on quiet graves. And perhaps, my brother, my sister, perhaps you may appreciate each other better in heaven than you have appreciated each other on earth.

In the "Farm Ballads" our American poet puts into the lips of a repentant husband after a life of married perturbation these suggestive words:

"And when she dies I wish that she would be laid by me, And lying together in silence, perhaps we will agree. And if ever we meet in heaven, I would not think it queer If we love each other better because we quarrelled here."

And let me say to those of you who are in happy married union,

AVOID FIRST QUARRELS;

have no unexplained correspondence with former admirers; cultivate no suspicions; in a moment of bad temper do not rush out and tell the neighbors; do not let any of those gad-abouts of society unload in your house their baggage of gab and tittle-tattle; do not stand on your rights; learn how to apologize; do not be so proud, or so stubborn, or so devilish that you will not make up. Remember that the worst domestic misfortunes and most scandalous divorce cases started from little infelicities. The whole piled-up train of ten rail cars telescoped and smashed at the foot of an embankment one hundred feet down came to that catastrophe by getting two or three inches off the track. Some of the greatest domestic misfortunes and the widest resounding divorce cases have started from little misunderstandings that were allowed to go on and go on until home, and respectability, and religion, and immortal soul went down in the crash, crash!

And, fellow-citizens as well as fellow-Christians, let us have a divine rage against anything that wars on the marriage state. Blessed institution! Instead of two arms to fight the battle of life, four. Instead of two eyes to scrutinize the path of life, four. Instead of two shoulders to lift the burden of life, four. Twice the energy, twice the courage, twice the holy ambition, twice the probability of worldly success, twice the prospects of heaven. Into that matrimonial bower God fetches two souls. Outside the bower room for all contentions, and all bickerings, and all controversies, but inside that bower there is room for only one guest—the angel of love. Let that angel stand at the floral doorway of this Edenic bower with drawn sword to hew down the worst foe of that bower—easy divorce. And for every Paradise lost may there be a Paradise regained. And after we quit our home here may we have a brighter home in heaven at the windows of which this moment are familiar faces watching for our arrival and wondering why so long we tarry.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Dr. Talmage, in common with many critics, here censures Mr. James Anthony Froude for making the disclosures. It is, however, due to that eminent historian to say that he gives a different explanation of his motives than that suggested by Dr. Talmage of a regard for "shekels." He states that as Mr. Carlyle had selected him as his biographer and given the materials for the work into his hands, he conceived that his duty as a conscientious man was to tell the whole truth. He did it also as a matter of policy as well as of principle. Had he kept back any part, it would have been told with less accuracy by others who knew some of the facts but not all of them.—ED.



MATERNITY.

"Moreover his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice."—I SAMUEL 2:19.

The stories of Deborah and Abigail are very apt to discourage a woman's soul. She says within herself: "It is impossible that I ever can achieve any such grandeur of character, and I don't mean to try;" as though a child should refuse to play the eight notes because he cannot execute a "William Tell." This Hannah of the text differs from the persons I just now named. She was an ordinary woman, with ordinary intellectual capacity, placed in the ordinary circumstances, and yet, by extraordinary piety, standing out before all the ages to come.

THE MODEL CHRISTIAN MOTHER.

Hannah was the wife of Elkanah, who was a person very much like herself—unromantic and plain, never having fought a battle or been the subject of a marvelous escape. Neither of them would have been called a genius. Just what you and I might be, that was Elkanah and Hannah. The brightest time in all the history of that family was the birth of Samuel. Although no star ran along the heavens pointing down to his birthplace, I think the angels of God stooped at the coming of so wonderful a prophet.

As Samuel had been given in answer to prayer, Elkanah and all his family, save Hannah, started up to Shiloh to offer sacrifices of thanksgiving. The cradle where the child slept was altar enough for Hannah's grateful heart, but when the boy was old enough she took him to Shiloh and took three bullocks, and an ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, and made offering of sacrifice unto the Lord, and there, according to a previous vow, she left him; for there he was to stay all the days of his life, and minister in the tabernacle.

Years rolled on, and every year Hannah made with her own hands a garment for Samuel, and took it over to him. The lad would have got along well without that garment, for I suppose he was well clad by the ministry of the temple; but Hannah could not be contented unless she was all the time doing something for her darling boy. "Moreover his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice."

I. Hannah stands before you, then, in the first place, as

AN INDUSTRIOUS MOTHER.

There was no need for her to work. Elkanah, her husband, was far from poor. He belonged to a distinguished family; for the Bible tells us that he was the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph. "Who were they?" you say. I do not know; but they were distinguished people, no doubt, or their names would not have been mentioned.

Hannah might have seated herself with her family, and, with folded arms and dishevelled hair, read novels from year to year, if there had been any to read; but when I see her making that garment, and taking it over to Samuel, I know she is industrious from principle as well as from pleasure. God would not have a mother become a drudge or a slave; He would have her employ all the helps possible in this day in the rearing of her children. But Hannah ought never to be ashamed to be found making a coat for Samuel.

Most mothers need no counsel in this direction. The wrinkles on their brow, the pallor on their cheek, the thimble-mark on their finger, attest that they are faithful in their maternal duties. The bloom, and the brightness, and the vivacity of girlhood have given place for the grander dignity, and usefulness, and industry of motherhood. But there is

A HEATHENISH IDEA

getting abroad in some of the families of Americans; there are mothers who banish themselves from the home circle. For three fourths of their maternal duties they prove themselves incompetent. They are ignorant of what their children wear, and what their children eat, and what their children read. They intrust to irresponsible persons these young immortals, and allow them to be under influences which may cripple their bodies, or taint their purity, or spoil their manners, or destroy their souls.

From the awkward cut of Samuel's coat you know his mother Hannah did not make it. Out from under flaming chandeliers, and off from imported carpets, and down the granite stairs, there has come a great crowd of children in this day, untrained, saucy, incompetent for all practical duties of life, ready to be caught in the first whirl of crime and sensuality. Indolent and unfaithful mothers will make indolent and unfaithful children. You cannot expect neatness and order in any house where the daughters see nothing but slatternness and upsidedownativeness in their parents. Let Hannah be idle, and most certainly Samuel will grow up idle.

Who are the industrious men in all our occupations and professions? Who are they managing the merchandise of the world, building the walls, tinning the roofs, weaving the carpets, making the laws, governing the nations, making the earth to quake, and heave, and roar, and rattle with the tread of gigantic enterprises? Who are they? For the most part they descended from industrious mothers, who, in the old homestead, used to spin their own yarn, and weave their own carpets, and plait their own door-mats, and flag their own chairs, and do their own work. The stalwart men and the

INFLUENTIAL WOMEN

of this day, ninety-nine out of a hundred of them, came from such an illustrious ancestry of hard knuckles and homespun.

And who are these people in society, light as froth, blown every whither of temptation and fashion—the peddlers of filthy stories, the dancing-jacks of political parties, the scum of society, the tavern-lounging, the store-infesting, the men of low wink, and filthy chuckle, and brass breast-pins, and rotten associations? For the most part, they came from mothers idle and disgusting—the scandal-mongers of society, going from house to house, attending to everybody's business but their own, believing in witches, and ghosts, and horseshoes to keep the devil out of the churn, and by a godless life setting their children on the very verge of hell. The mothers of Samuel Johnson, and of Alfred the Great, and Isaac Newton, and of St. Augustine, and of Richard Cecil, and of President Edwards, for the most part were industrious, hard-working mothers.

Now, while I congratulate all Christian mothers upon the wealth and the modern science which may afford them all kinds of help, let me say that every mother ought to be observant of her children's walk, her children's behavior, her children's food, her children's looks, her children's companionships. However much help Hannah may have, I think she ought every year, at least, make one garment for Samuel. The Lord have mercy on the man who is so unfortunate as to have had a lazy mother!

II. Again, Hannah stands before you as

AN INTELLIGENT MOTHER.

From the way in which she talked in this chapter, and from the way she managed this boy, you know she was intelligent. There are no persons in the community who need to be so wise and well-informed as mothers.

Oh, this work of culture in children for this world and the next! This child is timid, and it must be roused up and pushed out into activity. This child is forward, and he must be held back and tamed down into modesty and politeness. Rewards for one, punishments for another. That which will make George will ruin John. The rod is necessary in one case, while a frown of displeasure is more than enough in another. Whipping and a dark closet do not exhaust all the rounds of domestic discipline. There have been children who have grown up and gone to glory without ever having had their ears boxed.

Oh, how much care and intelligence are necessary in the rearing of children! But in this day, when there are so many books on the subject, no parent is excusable in being ignorant of the best mode of

BRINGING UP A CHILD.

If parents knew more of dietetics there would not be so many dyspeptic stomachs and weak nerves and inactive livers among children. If parents knew more of physiology there would not be so many curved spines and cramped chests and inflamed throats and diseased lungs as there are among children. If parents knew more of art, and were in sympathy with all that is beautiful, there would not be so many children coming out in the world with boorish proclivities. If parents knew more of Christ, and practised more of His religion, there would not be so many little feet already starting on the wrong road, and all around us voices of riot and blasphemy would not come up with such ecstasy of infernal triumph.

The eaglets in the eyrie have no advantages over the eaglets of a thousand years ago; the kids have no superior way of climbing up the rocks than the old goats taught hundreds of years ago; the whelps know no more now than did the whelps of ages ago—they are taught no more by the lions of the desert; but it is a shame that in this day, when there are so many opportunities of improving ourselves in the best manner of cultivating children, that so often there is no more advancement in this respect than there has been among the kids and the eaglets and the whelps.

III. Again, Hannah stands before you as

A CHRISTIAN MOTHER.

From her prayers and from the way she consecrated her boy to God, I know that she was good. A mother may have the finest culture, the most brilliant surroundings; but she is not fit for her duties unless she be a Christian mother. There may be well-read libraries in the house, and exquisite music in the parlor, and the canvases of the best artists adorning the walls, and the wardrobe be crowded with tasteful apparel, and the children be wonderful for their attainments, and make the house ring with laughter and innocent mirth, but there is something woeful-looking in that house if it be not also the residence of a Christian mother.

I bless God that there are not many prayerless mothers—not many of them. The weight of the responsibility is so great that they feel the need of a divine hand to help, and a divine voice to comfort and a divine heart to sympathize. Thousands of mothers have been led into the kingdom of God by the hands of their little children. There were hundreds of mothers who would not have been Christians had it not been for the prattle of their little ones. Standing some day in the nursery, they bethought themselves: "This child God has given me to raise for eternity. What is my influence upon it? Not being a Christian myself, how can I ever expect him to become a Christian? Lord, help me!" Are there

ANXIOUS MOTHERS

who know nothing of the infinite help of religion? Then I commend to them Hannah, the pious mother of Samuel. Do not think it is absolutely impossible that your children may come up iniquitous. Out of just such fair brows and bright eyes, and soft hands, and innocent hearts, crime gets its victims—extirpating purity from the heart, and rubbing out the smoothness from the brow, and quenching the lustre of the eye, and shriveling up and poisoning and putrefying and scathing and scalding and blasting and burning with shame and woe.

Every child is a bundle of tremendous possibilities; and whether that child shall come forth to life, its heart attuned to the eternal harmonies, and, after a life of usefulness on earth, go to a life of joy in heaven; or whether across it shall jar eternal discords, and, after a life of wrong-doing on earth, it shall go to a home of impenetrable darkness and an abyss of immeasurable plunge, is being decided by nursery song and Sabbath lesson and evening prayer and walk and ride and look and frown and smile. Oh, how many children in glory, crowding all the battlements, and lifting a million-voiced hosanna, brought to God through Christian parentage!

One hundred and twenty clergymen were together, and they were telling their experience and their ancestry; and of the one hundred and twenty clergymen, how many of them, do you suppose, assigned as the means of their conversion the influence of a Christian mother? One hundred out of the one hundred and twenty! Philip Doddridge was brought to God by the Scripture lesson on the Dutch tiles of a chimney fireplace. The mother thinks she is only rocking a child, but at the same time she may be rocking the fate of nations, rocking the glories of heaven. The same maternal power that may lift the child up may press a child down.

A daughter came to

A WORLDLY MOTHER

and said she was anxious about her sins, and she had been praying all night. The mother said: "Oh, stop praying! I don't believe in praying. Get over all these religious notions and I'll give you a dress that will cost $500, and you may wear it next week to that party." The daughter took the dress, and she moved in the gay circle the gayest of all the gay, that night; and sure enough all the religious impressions were gone and she stopped praying. A few months after she came to die, and in her closing moments said: "Mother, I wish you would bring me that dress that cost $500." The mother thought it a very strange request, but she brought it to please the dying child. "Now," said the daughter, "mother, hang that dress on the foot of my bed," and the dress was hung there, on the foot of the bed. Then the dying girl got up on one elbow and looked at her mother, and then pointed to the dress, and said: "Mother, that dress is the price of my soul." Oh, what a momentous thing it is to be a mother!

IV. Again, and lastly, Hannah stands before you

THE REWARDED MOTHER.

For all the coats she made for Samuel, for all the prayers she offered for him, for the discipline exerted over him she got abundant compensation in the piety and the usefulness and the popularity of her son Samuel; and that is true in all ages. Every mother gets full pay for all the prayers and tears in behalf of her children. That man useful in commercial life; that man prominent in a profession; that master mechanic—why, every step he takes in life has an echo of gladness in the old heart that long ago taught him to be a Christian, and heroic and earnest.

The story of what you have done, or what you have written, of the influence you exerted, has gone back to the old homestead—for there is some one always ready to carry good tidings—and that story makes the needle in the old mother's tremulous hand fly quicker, and the flail in the father's hand come down on the barn floor with a vigorous thump. Parents love to hear good news from their children. Do you send them good news always?

Look out for the young man who speaks of his father as "the governor," the "squire," or the "old chap." Look out for the young woman who calls her mother her "maternal ancestor," or the "old woman." "The eye that mocketh at his father, and refuseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it."

God grant that all these parents may have the great satisfaction of seeing their children grow up Christians. But, oh! the pang of that mother, who, after a life of street gadding and gossip retailing, hanging on the children the fripperies and follies of this world, sees those children tossed out on the sea of life like foam on the wave, or nonentities in a world where only bravery and stalwart character can stand the shock! But blessed be the mother who looks upon her children as sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty.

Oh! the satisfaction of Hannah in seeing Samuel serving at the altar; of Mother Eunice in seeing her Timothy learned in the Scriptures. That is the mother's recompense, to see children coming up useful in the world, reclaiming the lost, healing the sick, pitying the ignorant, earnest and useful in every sphere. That throws a new light back on the old family Bible whenever she reads it, and that will be ointment to soothe the aching limbs of decrepitude, and light up the closing hours of life's day with the glories of an autumnal sunset!

There she sits,

THE OLD CHRISTIAN MOTHER,

ripe for heaven. Her eyesight is almost gone, but the splendors of the celestial city kindle up her vision. The gray light of heaven's morn has struck through the gray locks which are folded back over the wrinkled temples. She stoops very much now under the burden of care she used to carry for her children. She sits at home, too old to find her way to the house of God; but while she sits there, all the past comes back, and the children that forty years ago tripped around her armchair with their griefs and joys and sorrows—those children are gone now. Some caught up into a better realm, where they shall never die, and others out in the broad world, testing the excellency of a Christian mother's discipline. Her last days are full of peace; and calmer and sweeter will her spirit become, until the gates of life shall lift and let in the worn-out pilgrim into eternal springtide and youth, where the limbs never ache, and the eyes never grow dim, and the staff of the exhausted and decrepit pilgrim shall become the palm of the immortal athlete!



THE CHILDREN'S PATRIMONY.

"Whose son art thou, thou young man?"—SAMUEL 17:58.

Never was there a more unequal fight than that between David and Goliath. David five feet high; Goliath ten. David a shepherd boy, brought up amid rural scenes; Goliath a warrior by profession. Goliath a mountain of braggadocia; David a marvel of humility. Goliath armed with an iron spear; David armed with a sling with smooth stones from the brook. But you are not to despise these latter weapons. There was a regiment of slingers in the Assyrian army and a regiment of slingers in the Egyptian army, and they made terrible execution, and they could cast a stone with as much precision and force as now can be hurled shot or shell. The Greeks in their army had slingers who would throw leaden plummets inscribed with the irritating words: "Take this!" So it was a mighty weapon David employed in that famous combat.

A Jewish rabbi says that the probability is that Goliath was in such contempt for David, that in a paroxysm of laughter he threw his head back, and his helmet fell off, and David saw the uncovered forehead, and his opportunity had come, and taking his sling and swinging it around his head two or three times, and aiming at that uncovered forehead, he crushed it in like an egg-shell. The battle over,

BEHOLD A TABLEAU:

King Saul sitting, little David standing, his fingers clutched into the hair of decapitated Goliath. As Saul sees David standing there holding in his hand the ghastly, reeking, staring trophy, evidence of the complete victory over God's enemies, the king wonders what parentage was honored by such heroism, and in my text he asks David his pedigree: "Whose son art thou, thou young man?"

The king saw what you and I see, that this question of heredity is a mighty question. The longer I live the more

I BELIEVE IN BLOOD

—good blood, bad blood, proud blood, humble blood, honest blood, thieving blood, heroic blood, cowardly blood. The tendency may skip a generation or two, but it is sure to come out, as in a little child you sometimes see a similarity to a great-grandfather whose picture hangs on the wall. That the physical and mental and moral qualities are inheritable is patent to any one who keeps his eyes open. The similarity is so striking sometimes as to be amusing. Great families, regal or literary, are apt to have the characteristics all down through the generations, and what is more perceptible in such families may be seen on a smaller scale in all families. A thousand years have no power to obliterate the difference.

ROYAL RASCALS.

The large lip of the House of Austria is seen in all the generations, and is called the Hapsburg lip. The House of Stuart always means in all generations cruelty and bigotry and sensuality. Witness Queen of Scotts. Witness Charles I. and Charles II. Witness James I. and James II. and all the other scoundrels of that imperial line.

Scottish blood means persistence, English blood means reverence for the ancient, Welsh blood means religiosity, Danish blood means fondness for the sea, Indian blood means roaming disposition, Celtic blood means fervidity, Roman blood means conquest.

The Jewish facility for accumulation you may trace clear back to Abraham, of whom the Bible says "he was rich in silver and gold and cattle," and to Isaac and Jacob, who had the same

FAMILY CHARACTERISTICS.

Some families are characterized by longevity, and they have a tenacity of life positively Methuselahish. Others are characterized by Goliathian stature, and you can see it for one generation, two generations, five generations, in all the generations. Vigorous theology runs on in the line of the Alexanders. Tragedy runs on in the family of the Kembles. Literature runs on in the line of the Trollopes. Philanthropy runs on in the line of the Wilberforces. Statesmanship runs on in the line of the Adamses. Henry and Catharine of Navarre religious, all their families religious. The celebrated family of the Casini, all mathematicians. The celebrated family of the Medici—grandfather, son and Catharine—all remarkable for keen intellect. The celebrated family of Gustavus Adolphus, all warriors.

This law of heredity asserts itself without reference to social or political condition, for you sometimes find the ignoble in high place and the honorable in obscure place. A descendant of Edward I. a toll gatherer. A descendant of Edward III. a door-keeper. A descendant of the Duke of Northumberland a trunk-maker. Some of the mightiest families of England are extinct, while some of those most honored in the peerage go back to an ancestry of hard knuckles and rough exterior. This law of heredity entirely independent of social or political condition.

Then you find avarice and jealousy and sensuality and fraud having full swing in some families. The violent temper of Frederick William is the inheritance of Frederick the Great. It is not a theory to be set forth by worldly philosophy only, but by divine authority. Do you not remember how the Bible speaks of "a chosen generation," of "the generation of the righteous," of "the generation of vipers," of an "untoward generation," of "a stubborn generation," of "the iniquity of the past visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation?" So that the text comes to-day with the force of a projectile hurled from mightiest catapult: "Whose son art thou, thou young man?"

"Well," says some one, "that theory discharges me from all responsibility. Born of sanctified parents we are bound to be good and we cannot help ourselves. Born of unrighteous parentage we are bound to be evil and we cannot help ourselves."

TWO INACCURACIES.

As much as if you should say, "The centripetal force in nature has a tendency to bring everything to the centre, and therefore all things come to the centre. The centrifugal force in nature has a tendency to throw out everything to the periphery, and therefore everything will go out to the periphery." You know as well as I know that you can make the centripetal overcome the centrifugal, and you can make the centrifugal overcome the centripetal. As when there is a mighty tide of good in a family that may be overcome by determination to evil, as in the case of Aaron Burr, the libertine, who had for father President Burr, the consecrated; as in the case of Pierrepont Edwards, the scourge of New York society seventy years ago, who had a Christian ancestry; while on the other hand some of the best men and women of this day are those who have come of an ancestry of which it would not be courteous to speak in their presence.

YOUR DUTY.

The practical and useful object of this sermon is to show to you that if you have come of a Christian ancestry, then you are solemnly bound to preserve and develop the glorious inheritance; or if you have come of a depraved ancestry, then it is your duty to brace yourself against the evil tendency by all prayer and Christian determination, and you are to find out what are the family frailties, and in arming the castle put the strongest guard at the weakest gate. With these smooth stones from the brook I hope to strike you, not where David struck Goliath, in the head, but where Nathan struck David, in the heart. "Whose son art thou, thou young man?"

There is something in the periodical holidays to bring up

THE OLD FOLKS.

Sometime in the winter holiday, when we are accustomed to gather our families together, old times have come back again, and our thoughts have been set to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne." The old folks were so busy at such times in making us happy, and perhaps on less resource made their sons and daughters happier than you on larger resource are able to make your sons and daughters happy. The snow lay two feet above their graves, but they shook off the white blankets and mingled in the holiday festivities—the same wrinkles, the same stoop of shoulder under the weight of age, the same old style of dress or coat, the same smile, the same tones of voice. I hope you remember them before they went away. If not, I hope there are those who have recited to you what they were, and that there may be in your house some article of dress or furniture with which you associate their memories. I want to arouse the most sacred memories of your heart while I make the impassioned interrogatory in regard to your pedigree: "Whose son art thou, thou young man?"

I. First, I accost all those who are descended of a

CHRISTIAN ANCESTRY.

I do not ask if your parents were perfect. There are no perfect people now, and I do not suppose there were any perfect people then. Perhaps there was sometimes too much blood in their eye when they chastised you. But from what I know of you, you got no more than you deserved, and perhaps a little more chastisement would have been salutary. But you are willing to acknowledge, I think, that they wanted to do right. From what you overheard in conversations, and from what you saw at the family altar and at neighborhood obsequies, you know that they had invited God into their heart and life. There was something that sustained those old people supernaturally. You have no doubt about their destiny. You expect if you ever get to heaven to meet them as certainly as you expect to meet the Lord Jesus Christ.

That early association has been a charm for you. There was a time when you got right up from a house of iniquity and walked out into the fresh air because you thought your mother was looking at you. You have never been very happy in sin because of a sweet old face that would present itself. Tremulous voices from the past accosted you until they were seemingly audible, and you looked around to see who spoke. There was an estate not mentioned in the last will and testament, a vast estate of prayer and holy example and Christian entreaty and glorious memory. The survivors of the family gathered to hear the will read, and this was to be kept, and that was to be sold, and it was share and share alike. But there was

AN UNWRITTEN WILL

that read something like this: "In the name of God, Amen. I, being of sound mind, bequeath to my children all my prayers for their salvation; I bequeath to them all the results of a lifetime's toil; I bequeath to them the Christian religion which has been so much comfort to me, and I hope may be solace for them; I bequeath to them a hope of reunion when the partings of life are over; share and share alike may they have in eternal riches. I bequeath to them the wish that they may avoid my errors and copy anything that may have been worthy. In the name of the God who made me, and the Christ who redeemed me, and the Holy Ghost who sanctifies me, I make this my last will and testament. Witness, all ye hosts of heaven. Witness, time, witness, eternity. Signed, sealed, and delivered in this our dying hour. Father and Mother."

You did not get that will proved at the surrogate's office; but I take it out to-day and I read it to you; I take it out of the alcoves of your heart; I shake the dust off it, I ask you will you accept that inheritance, or will you break the will? O ye of Christian ancestry, you have a responsibility vast beyond all measurement! God will not let you off with just being as good as ordinary people when you had such extraordinary advantage. Ought not a flower planted in a hot-house be more thrifty than a flower planted outside in the storm? Ought not a factory turned by the Housatonic do more work than a factory turned by a thin and shallow mountain stream? Ought not you of great early opportunity be better than those who had a cradle unblessed?

THE CAPITAL ACCOUNT.

A father sets his son up in business. He keeps an account of all the expenditures. So much for store fixtures, so much for rent, so much for this, so much for that, and all the items aggregated, and the father expects the son to give an account. Your heavenly Father charges against you all the advantages of a pious ancestry—so many prayers, so much Christian example, so many kind entreaties—all these gracious influences one tremendous aggregate, and He asks you for an account of it.

Ought not you to be better than those who had no such advantages? Better have been a foundling picked up off the city commons than with such magnificent inheritance of consecration to turn out indifferently.

Ought not you, my brother, to be better, having had Christian nurture, than that man who can truly say this morning: "The first word I remember my father speaking to me was an oath; the first time I remember my father taking hold of me was in wrath; I never saw a Bible till I was ten years of age, and then I was told it was a pack of lies. The first twenty years of my life I was associated with the vicious. I seemed to be walled in by sin and death." Now, my brother, ought you not—I leave it as a matter of fairness with you—ought you not to be far better than those who had no early Christian influence?

Standing as you do between the generation that is past and the generation that is to come, are you going to pass the blessing on, or are you going to have your life the gulf in which that tide of blessing shall drop out of sight forever? You are

THE TRUSTEE OF PIETY

in that ancestral line, and are you going to augment or squander that solemn trust fund? are you going to disinherit your sons and daughters of the heirloom which your parents left you? Ah! that cannot be possible, that cannot be possible that you are going to take such a position as that. You are very careful about the life insurances, and careful about the deeds, and careful about the mortgages, and careful about the title of your property, because when you step off the stage you want your children to get it all. Are you making no provision that they shall get grandfather and grandmother's religion? Oh, what a last will and testament you are making, my brother! "In the name of God, Amen. I, being of sound mind, make this my last will and testament. I bequeath to my children all the money I ever made and all the houses I own; but I disinherit them, I rob them of the ancestral grace and the Christian influence that I inherited. I have squandered that on my own worldliness. Share and share alike must they in the misfortune and the everlasting outrage. Signed, sealed and delivered in the presence of God and men and angels and devils and all the generations of earth and heaven and hell, March, 1886."

O ye of highly favored ancestry, wake up this morning to a sense of your opportunity and your responsibility. I think there must be

AN OLD CRADLE,

or a fragment of a cradle somewhere that could tell a story of midnight supplication in your behalf. Where is the old rocking-chair in which you were sung to sleep with the holy nursery rhyme? Where is the old clock that ticked away the moments of that sickness on that awful night when there were but three of you awake—you and God and mother? Is there not an old staff in some closet? is there not an old family Bible on some shelf that seems to address you, saying: "My son, my daughter, how can you reject that God who so kindly dealt with us all our lives and to whom we commended you in our prayers living and dying? By the memory of the old homestead, by the family altar, by our dying pillow, by the graves in which our bodies sleep while our spirits hover, we beg you to turn over a new leaf for the new year." Oh, the power of ancestral piety, well illustrated by a young man of New York who attended a prayer-meeting one night and asked for prayer, and then went home and wrote down these words:

AN ENTRY IN A DIARY.

"Twenty-five years ago to-night my mother went to heaven, my beautiful, blessed mother, and I have been alone, tossed up and down upon the billows of life's tempestuous ocean. Shall I ever go to heaven? She told me I must meet her in heaven. When she took her boy's hand in hers and turned her gentle, loving eyes on me, and gazed earnestly and long into my face, and then lifted them to heaven in that last prayer, she prayed that I might meet her in heaven. I wonder if I ever shall.

"My mother's prayers! Oh, my sweet, blessed mother's prayers! Did ever boy have such a mother as I had? For twenty-five years I have not heard her pray until to-night. I have heard all her prayers over again. They have had, in fact, a terrible resurrection. Oh, how she was wont to pray! She prayed as they prayed to-night, so earnest, so importunate, so believing. Shall I ever be a Christian? She was a Christian. Oh, how bright and pure and happy was her life! She was a cheerful and happy Christian. There is

"MY MOTHER'S BIBLE.

"I have not opened it for years. Did she believe I could ever neglect her precious Bible? She surely thought I would read it much and often. How often has she read it to me. Blessed mother, did you pray in vain for your boy? It shall not be in vain. Ah! no, no, it shall not be in vain. I will pray for myself. Who has sinned against so much instruction as I have? against so many precious prayers put up to heaven for me by one of the most lovely, tender, pious, confiding, trusting of mothers in her heavenly Father's care and grace? She never doubted. She believed. She always prayed as if she did. My Bible, my mother's Bible and my conscience teach what I am and what I have made myself. Oh, the bitter pangs of an accusing conscience! I need a Saviour mighty to save. I must seek Him. I will. I am on the sea of existence, and I can never get off from it. I am afloat. No anchor, no rudder, no compass, no book of instructions, for I have put them all away from me. Saviour of the perishing, save or I perish."

Do you wonder that the next day he arose in a prayer-meeting and said: "My brethren, I stand before you a monument of God's amazing mercy and goodness, forever blessed be His holy name; all I have and all I am I consecrate to Jesus, my Saviour and my God?" Oh, the power of ancestral prayer. Hear it! Hear it!

II. But I turn for a moment to those who had

EVIL PARENTAGE,

and I want to tell you that the highest thrones in heaven and the mightiest triumphs and the brightest crowns will be for those who had evil parentage, but who by the grace of God conquered. As useful, as splendid a gentleman as I know of to-day had for father a man who died blaspheming God until the neighbors had to put their fingers in their ears to shut out the horror. One of the most consecrated and useful Christian ministers of to-day was born of a drunken horse-jockey. Tide of evil tremendous in some families. It is like Niagara Rapids, and yet men have clung to a rock and been rescued.

There is a family in New York whose wealth has rolled up into many millions that was founded by a man who, after he had vast estate sent back a paper of tacks because they were two cents more than he expected. Grip and grind and gouge in the fourth generation—I suppose it will be grip and grind and gouge in the twentieth generation. The thirst for intoxicants has burned down through the arteries of a hundred and fifty years. Pugnacity or combativeness characterize other families. Sometimes one form of evil, sometimes another form of evil. But

IT MAY BE RESISTED,

it has been resisted. If the family frailty be avarice, cultivate unselfishness and charity, and teach your children never to eat an apple without offering somebody else half of it. Is the family frailty combativeness, keep out of the company of quick-tempered people, and never answer an impertinent question until you have counted a hundred both ways, and after you have written an angry letter keep it a week before you send it, and then burn it up! Is the family frailty timidity and cowardice, cultivate backbone, read the biography of brave men like Joshua or Paul, and see if you cannot get a little iron in your blood. Find out what the family frailty is, and set body, mind and soul in battle array.

CONQUER YOUR WILL.

I think the genealogical table was put in the first chapter of the New Testament, not only to show our Lord's pedigree, but to show that a man may rise up in an ancestral line and beat back successfully all the influences of bad heredity. See in that genealogical table that good King Asa came of vile King Abia. See in that genealogical table that Joseph and Mary and the most illustrious Being that ever touched our world, or ever will touch it, had in their ancestral line scandalous Rehoboam and Tamar and Bathsheba. If this world is ever to be Edenized—and it will be—all the infected families of the earth are to be regenerated, and there will some one arise in each family line and open a new genealogical table. There will be some Joseph in the line to reverse the evil influence of Rehoboam, and there will be some Mary in the line to reverse the evil influence of Bathsheba. Perhaps the star of hope may point down to your manger. Perhaps you are to be the hero or the heroine that is to put down the brakes and stop that long train of genealogical tendencies and switch it off on another track from that on which it has been running for a century. You do that, and I will promise you as fine a palace as the architects of heaven can build, the archway inscribed with the words: "More than conqueror."

ADOPTED CHILDREN.

But whatever your heredity, let me say, you may be sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty. Estranged children from the homestead come back through the open gate of adoption. There is royal blood in our veins. There are crowns in our escutcheon. Our Father is King. Our Brother is King. We may be kings and queens unto God forever. Come and sit down on the ivory bench of the palace. Come and wash in the fountains that fall into the basins of crystal and alabaster. Come and look out of the upholstered window upon gardens of azalea and amaranth. Hear the full burst of the orchestra while you banquet with potentates and victors. Oh, when the text sweeps backward, let it not stop at the cradle that rocked your infancy, but at the cradle that rocked the first world, and when the text sweeps forward, let it not stop at your grave, but at the throne on which you may reign forever and ever! "Whose son art thou, thou young man?" Son of God! Heir of mortality! Take your inheritance!



THE MOTHER OF ALL.

"And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man."—GENESIS 2:21, 22.

It is the first Saturday afternoon in the world's existence. Ever since sunrise Adam has been watching the brilliant pageantry of wings and scales and clouds, and in his first lessons in zoology and ornithology and ichthyology he has noticed that the robins fly the air in twos, and that the fish swim the water in twos, and that the lions walk the fields in twos, and in the warm redolence of that Saturday afternoon he falls off into slumber; and as if by allegory to teach all ages that the greatest of earthly blessings is sound sleep, this paradisaical somnolence ends with the discovery on the part of Adam of

A CORRESPONDING INTELLIGENCE

just landed on the new planet. Of the mother of all the living I speak—Eve, the first, the fairest and the best.

I make me a garden. I inlay the paths with mountain moss, and I border them with pearls from Ceylon and diamonds from Golconda. Here and there are fountains tossing in the sunlight, and ponds that ripple under the paddling of the swans. I gather me lilies from the Amazon, and orange groves from the tropics, and tamarinds from Goyaz. There are woodbine and honey-suckle climbing over the wall, and starred spaniels sprawling themselves on the grass. I invite amid these trees the larks, and the brown thrushes, and the robins, and all the brightest birds of heaven, and they stir the air with infinite chirp and carol. And yet the place is a desert filled with darkness and death as compared with

THE RESIDENCE OF THE WOMAN

of the text, the subject of my morning story. Never since have such skies looked down through such leaves into such waters! Never has river wave had such curve and sheen and bank as adorned the Pison, the Havilah, the Gihon, and the Hiddakel, even the pebbles being bdellium and onyx stone! What fruits, with no curculio to sting the rind! What flowers, with no slug to gnaw the root! What atmosphere, with no frost to chill and with no heat to consume! Bright colors tangled in the grass. Perfume in the air. Music in the sky. Bird's warble and tree's hum, and waterfall's dash. Great scene of gladness and love and joy.

Right there under a bower of leaf and vine and shrub occurred

THE FIRST MARRIAGE.

Adam took the hand of this immaculate daughter of God and pronounced the ceremony when he said: "Bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh."

A FORBIDDEN TREE

stood in the midst of that exquisite park. Eve sauntering out one day alone looks up at the tree and sees the beautiful fruit, and wonders if it is sweet, and wonders if it is sour, and standing there, says: "I think I will just put my hand upon the fruit; it will do no damage to the tree; I will not take the fruit to eat, but I will just take it down to examine it." She examined the fruit. She said: "I do not think there can be any harm in my just breaking the rind of it." She put the fruit to her teeth, she tasted, she invited Adam also to taste of the fruit, the door of the world opened, and the monster Sin entered. Let the heavens gather blackness, and the winds sigh on the bosom of the hills, and cavern and desert and earth and sky join in one long, deep, hell-rending howl:

"THE WORLD IS LOST!"

Beasts that before were harmless and full of play put forth claw, and sting, and tooth, and tusk. Birds whet their beak for prey. Clouds troop in the sky. Sharp thorns shoot up through the soft grass. Blastings on the leaves. All the chords of that great harmony are snapped. Upon the brightest home this world ever saw our first parents turned their back and led forth on a path of sorrow the broken-hearted myriads of a ruined race.

Do you not see, in the first place, the danger of a poorly regulated

INQUISITIVENESS?

She wanted to know how the fruit tasted. She found out, but six thousand years have deplored that unhealthful curiosity. Healthy curiosity has done a great deal for letters, for art, for science and for religion. It has gone down into the depths of the earth with the geologist and seen the first chapter of Genesis written in the book of nature illustrated with engraving on rock, and it stood with the antiquarian while he blew the trumpet of resurrection over buried Herculaneum and Pompeii, until from their sepulchre there came up shaft and terrace and amphitheatre. Healthful curiosity has enlarged the telescopic vision of the astronomer until worlds hidden in the distant heavens have trooped forth and have joined the choir praising the Lord. Planet weighed against planet and wildest comet lassoed with resplendent law.

HEALTHFUL CURIOSITY

has gone down and found the tracks of the eternal God in the polypi and the starfish under the sea and the majesty of the great Jehovah encamped under the gorgeous curtains of the dahlia. It has studied the spots on the sun, and the larvae in a beech leaf, and the light under fire-fly's wing, and the terrible eye glance of a condor pitching from Chimborazo. It has studied the myriads of animalculae that make up the phosphorescence in a ship's wake, and the mighty maze of suns, and spheres, and constellations, and galaxies that blaze on in the march of God. Healthful curiosity has stood by the inventor until forces that were hidden for ages came to wheels, and levers, and shafts, and shuttles—forces that fly the air, or swim the sea, or cleave the mountain until the earth jars, and roars, and rings, and crackles, and booms, with strange mechanism, and ships with nostrils of hot steam and yokes of fire draw the continents together.

I say nothing against healthful curiosity. May it have other Leyden jars, and other electric batteries, and other voltaic piles, and other magnifying glasses with which to storm the barred castles of the natural world until it shall surrender its last secret. We thank God for the geological curiosity of Professor Hitchcock, and the mechanical curiosity of Liebig, and the zooelogical curiosity of Cuvier, and the inventive curiosity of Edison; but we must admit that unhealthful and irregular inquisitiveness has rushed thousands and tens of thousands into ruin.

Eve just tasted the fruit. She was curious to find out how it tasted, and that

CURIOSITY BLASTED HER

and blasted all nations. So there are clergy in this day inspired by unhealthful inquisitiveness who have tried to look through the keyhole of God's mysteries, mysteries that were barred and bolted from all human inspection, and they have wrenched their whole moral nature out of joint by trying to pluck fruit from branches beyond their reach, or have come out on limbs of the tree from which they have tumbled into ruin without remedy. A thousand trees of religious knowledge from which we may eat and get advantage; but from certain

TREES OF MYSTERY

how many have plucked their ruin! Election, free agency, trinity, resurrection—in the discussion of these subjects hundreds and thousands of people ruin the soul. There are men who have actually been kept out of the kingdom of heaven because they could not understand who Melchisedec was not!

Oh, how many have been destroyed by an unhealthful inquisitiveness! It is seen in all directions. There are those who stand with the eye-stare and mouth-gape of curiosity. They are the first to hear a falsehood, build it another story high and two wings to it. About other people's apparel, about other people's business, about other people's financial condition, about other people's affairs, they are over anxious. Every nice piece of gossip stops at their door, and they fatten and luxuriate in the endless round of the great world of tittle-tattle. They invite and sumptuously entertain at their house Colonel Twaddle and Esquire Chitchat and Governor Smalltalk. Whoever hath an innuendo, whoever hath a scandal, whoever hath a valuable secret, let him come and sacrifice it to

THIS GODDESS OF SPLUTTER.

Thousands of Adams and Eves do nothing but eat fruit that does not belong to them. Men quite well known as mathematicians failing in this computation of moral algebra: good sense plus good breeding, minus curiosity, equals minding your own affairs!