relation a habit from the cradle. He builds in the same way his spiritual kingdom, spiritual knowledge and faith becoming hereditary through the ministry of the Christian home. For these issues he clothes the head of the family with dignity and authority, confirms his sceptre by strong and positive decrees, and makes his name and person venerable and sacred by the offices he fulfils, and the corresponding instincts of dependence and natural affection. If we lose the family as a school of virtue and piety, we lose the heritage of all covenanted blessings, we displace a unit from the series of God's steppingstones along our line, breaking off the succession, sink a chasm between the deep-freighted divine hand and the future it would have endowed with riches.

we

The family and the Sabbath-God's first institutions. for man were put in significant proximity when he ordained them both. If God's six days' work includes, as some think, the creation of woman, and we repeat concerning the day that followed the formula that announced the other completed days, "the evening and the morning were the seventh day," then the first bridal eve was the Sabbath eve, the first day of family life in Eden was the Sabbath-day. If this be so, the Sabbath brings to each wedded pair the fragrant memorial of those first nuptials, on which

"All heaven

And happy constellations

Shed their selectest influence,"

and pleads that the union thus formed between itself and the family remain perpetual. Over those bands we may

hear the great officiating Priest saying, "What God hath joined together let not man put asunder!"

The implements of

Our home itself suggests the Sabbath. All days of the week it is our rest. Wandering amid strangers, rasped by the sharp and hard contacts of life's jealousies and competitions, lonely in solitude, we turn how gladly to the one threshold on which unfeigned welcomes, companionable voices, the gentle ministries of love, will greet us and fill our spirits with tranquillity and repose. The weary laborer in the field looks up to the declining sun, marks his shadow lengthening toward the east, and bends with fresh vigor to his task, as his thought glides away a swift herald to his own cottage-door. Outside that door, life to him is labor; within it is rest. toil he lays down before he enters. He goes in to be refreshed and cheered; to sit, not stand; to have a place of ease at the bright hearth and pleasant board; to lay his length upon his couch, and let the soft tide of sleep. rise over him, and drown his consciousness. Home is his peaceful evening port after the day's rough voyaging for his body and spirit, a perpetual Sabbath. One to whom God has given such a daily Sabbath, so pleasant and beneficent a reminder of the weekly rest, ought to hear with most welcoming thankfulness, as though it spoke with a voice of music, the command, "Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates."

The first thing, then, for the parent who asks the question which we have here to answer, "How is the Sabbath to be kept in the family?" is to feel that his own spirit and example will settle the reverence paid to the day and the manner of its keeping in that little community of which he is the head. He must look to himself first. Before he consider methods and measures, and tax his invention, and put his contrivances in operation, let him question his own soul. What is the Sabbath to him? Does he call it "a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable"? Is it the festival of the week to his heart? For his whole nature, body and mind and spirit, does he esteem it a most gracious boon of God? Is he looking upon it as a severe intermeddling ordinance, breaking off his most fascinating pursuits, taking so much from what he calls, with all the eager relishes of his soul, in one intense word, "LIFE," dooming him to a dull, pulseless pause of existence? Or is this the culmination, the crown, the zest of desire and hope, the welcome release from worldly care, the banquet-day for a soul hungry and thirsty and denied, amid earthly planning and toiling, fit and full refreshment? There's a compensative beneficence in the Sabbath for the body's need. The weary frame sits at high noon to gather breath and strength before it renews the chase, but the pause is ever too brief. The call afield sounds again before the brow is dry and the swell of the bosom gone down into quiet. The night comes with its anointing dews of sleep, and imparts fresh increments of vigor. But the night is too short. It doesn't impart as much as was expended. The balance

is against us still when the morning blows its clarion. The stock on hand, through all the fluctuations, diminishes till the week be spent. Speedy bankruptcy were inevitable, did not the Sabbath come in with compensative relief to supplement the pause at noon and the ministration of the night with one solid day, insisting, kindly, from sun to sun, "in it thou shalt not do any work," and joining two reposeful nights by this pleasant isthmus of restful light. Is there in like manner a compensative element in the Sabbath for the soul's need? How do we think of it? We run to the fountains of spiritual refreshing morning and evening of our toiling days; we moisten our lips as we kneel down at the springs of comfort in our closet and at the family altar; we fill a cup from the precepts and promises of the word; we gather a little manna thus daily as the dew rises and before the sun is hot, a taste of the bread of heaven; but the soul is kept on short allowance. It expends amid worldly cares and draughts more than it thus receives. It will become lean and famished if a special and more bountiful table be not spread for its need. What is it that supplements for the soul's spiritual compensation the closet, the household worship, the daily Scripture reading? Is the Sabbath welcomed as such a feast-day to our hungry spirits,

a day in which we can lie at the fountains of refreshment through all the bright hours, hear the governing provider urge his large hospitality, -"Eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved"?

No strictness of ruling, no stern administration of Sabbath law, will commend the Sabbath to the fit hallowing

of the domestic circle, if the day is not, with the family headship, a loved and choice gift of God's goodness. This little society mirrors the character set over it for guidance and control. Looking into the clear depths of some Alpine lake, you see all the snowy peaks around leaning against that nether sky as in the upper. There below, as above, the torrents foam and the avalanches leap. There float the clouds as overhead, and the lonely and lordly vulture poises in slow flight his broad wings.

Scarce more accurate is this mirrored repetition of the surroundings and overhangings of the lake than the reproduction in the home of the pattern life and character of the family head. Line after line the pattern is worked into their own life by young copyists until the same lines and figures faithfully reappear. With the most youthful members of the circle, long before they can respond to our voices in articulate speech, our words and signals are intelligible, and answering signals give back perfect counterpart of the correspondence. Then it is that what they see and hear in the home, the tones that are uttered, the scenes that are acted, voices of passion and mirth, the hushed and solemn accents of prayer, the quietness around them on the Sabbath-day, or the rude clamor that fills its hours, the postures of kneeling or of revelling households, occupy their mind with images thenceforward vivid, influential, and imperishable. I have thought this ought to be said here, for if the sense of this be not on our hearts as parents, if the question of our personal spirit and example be not our first point of solicitude, and the necessity of honestly being and doing for our