the uttermost for the primitive quality and intention of his nature; take note, above all things, of these tender and sensitive beings God has given into our hands, not to fit our theories, but to answer to his spirit. We must be childlike with them, which does not mean at all we shall be childish. They need guidance and correction, education and inspiration; but men and women of the simplest and kindliest turn, who withal are wise and strong, always do this best. What they do not need is to be made old in their youth, to grow to settled patterns, to be not children, but machines. "Woe unto that man who shall so offend one of these little ones! it were better that a millstone were hung about his neck, and he were cast into the depths of the sea," than that he should hang such a millstone about the necks of these free souls fresh from the heart of God.

If, again, we are faithful to the children in this simple, kindly way, this is what we may expect: that a good home now will create others like it in the time to come. Good homes are like good apple-trees, they propagate after their kind. What you see in New England in one era, you see in Minnesota in another; and what you see in Cork and Connaught to-day, you see to-morrow on Goose Island, or on the patch skirting your town. When I make a home my children will love to think of in forty years, I make what they will have made

then out of their loving memory. If you could search out all the colonies which have swarmed from a place like Nantucket, you would be sure to find the same clean home-life you find there; with wider margins and more opulent tendencies, to be sure, but still the same organic life. And so it is everywhere and with us all. When we wonder, then, how the homes will look in which our chiidren will live when we are dead, or think we would like to come back and look at them, if we are true to these simple lessons and laws, here is the glass: we just glance round our own home, and there we are. It will be about the same home we are looking at: they will be talking about us as we talk about those who have gone to their rest; they will have to fight the same battles, and to meet the same trials, for one thing happeneth to all, and the same old light will shine, and the same old joy · pulse, through the place; the grand factor will be this we have now in our hand, and home will answer to home like the cups in a honeycomb; or, if things go harder with some of the children than they go with us, and they never realize such a home, still what we give them will bless them all their days: the vision will abide when the reality is lost, and the vision will be the diviner reality, because the things which are not seen are eternal. Howard Payne was living in a garret in Paris, on the edge of starvation; and there came to him a

vision of the old home; and he sang it out of his heart, and wist not what he was doing, never dreaming for an instant that what he learnt in suffering he should teach in song, and become immortal; but so it was. This burden came to him then, “There is no place like home;" and then, I suppose, he did not feel the hunger, or see the garret; and the tears would fall on the paper, and the hand would tremble, as he drew the picture after the pattern he had seen in the mount. The rivers ran flashing in the sun, the uplands were green again, the streets were peopled afresh, the old chimes of Trinity smote his heart, and within the vision there was one fireside, and voices and presences: he was in the old home again, and God made his cup run over.

Then, as the homes grow sacred, the land will grow sacred; for these are not one thing, and this another. You shall belt a land with fortresses, and she will still be as weak as Taunton Water if the homes are not fastnesses of a strong manhood; and build churches that will make the land glorious by their beauty, and "get up" revivals that shall fill them with devotees; yet if in your home there is not some such life as I have tried to open, if you raise your children to be slaves to an ism, the day will come when your religion will be little better than a fight of kites and crows. Ichabod will be written on the key-stone of the temples, and the Christ will weep again, and cry, "If thou hadst

known, even thou, in this thy day, the things which belong to thy peace."

But let us be sure of this, and then this land we live in will grow all sacred by reason of these true homes. One shall be salt with the spray of the Atlantic, and another of the Pacific; but they shall open into each other, and be one. Or one shall be falling back into ruins as you see them here and there in the New Hampshire wilderness, - the old folks dead and gone, the children moved away where a new home shall be growing to a larger and finer fitness,—but the long and touching tradition shall make the old home beautiful; the children's children will go back to hunt up the old cellar and the spring, to bring a blossom from the door-yard which has managed to fight the wilderness and hold its own until the right man comes to look for it in the light of the old days, and say to the strangers, "This was our place once: here was our hearth-stone, and yonder are our graves."