Add to this chastened festivity music. Most afflicted is that home where there is neither voice, nor art, nor heart for the strains of sacred song. The family harmony culminates in that pleasant concert. All that has kept any spirit there from any other melts away as the varied notes mingle and blend. They all aim at concord. They produce concord. They have come together in agreement and unison. They cannot, after singing in the same strains, soaring in company on wings of praise toward the divine presence, remember differences and cherish alienations. There is a charm in this hour of song for all the members of the household. Fretful childhood and querulous age are alike soothed and spellbound. "I am persuaded," writes Legh Richmond to his daughter, "that music is designed to prepare for heaven, to educate for the choral enjoyment of paradise, to form the mind to virtue and devotion, and to charm away evil, and sanctify the heart to God. A Christian musician is one who has a harp in his affections, which he daily tunes to the notes of the angelic host, and with which he makes melody in his heart to the Lord."

A Sabbath thus spent cannot fail to endear the members of the home to one another. were well to have distinctly in view. ward it, by pleasantness of mien and

This is an issue it Whatever can forof speech, by using

more freely the language of love, for which, perhaps, there are ears and hearts in our dwelling that are aching,

a language that flies our lips in the sternness of our interchanges with a selfish world, — by entering tenderly into the sharp passages of one another's daily experience,

rehearsed on this day, by making the rooms of the house bright with firelight and lamplight, or bringing in flowers to shed both beauty and fragrance around, and helping the festal aspect of the home, we ought to call into service. We should so keep the Sabbath within this domestic retreat as to secure by it the full realization of the highest ideal of Christian domestic life.

Finally, the Sabbath should be improved in the family as a day for special religious teaching. The great object of the day is to take off our thoughts from things material, earthly, and temporal, and bring them into communion with things invisible, heavenly, and eternal. This object must be pursued as steadily, and can be secured at least as successfully, with the children of the household as in wider and older circles. The responsibility for this home nurture comes upon the parent or guardian. If he act the part of a faithful and tender provider for these dependent ones in all but this, and carelessly or indolently or timidly omit this, he is yet chargeable with the most unkind neglect. To have denied them daily bread would have been less cruel.

He may think himself unequal to so grave a task. But why is he a parent? The relation is upon him. He cannot flee from the duty.

If he heartily and prayerfully undertake it, he will find himself wonderfully helped. He must, of course, be willing to summon his best energies to the work. The Sabbath will be to him, not a day of self-indulgent sloth, but of great intellectual activity. Nor will he leave all the burdens of the day for the day itself. He may make large preparation for it before it arrive.

It will be his duty to see that his family know the public ordinances of the day. If he teach otherwise by his own example, in whole or in part, if he prefer for himself an easy and undisturbed attendance upon preaching, with no restless elements in his pew, he can, in no way, redeem for those young hearts the proper influence of the day. He is teaching error, though he mean it not, by a fearfully-convincing demonstration.

He may do much by interesting himself in their attendance upon the Sabbath-school, aiding them in the preparation of their lessons, looking with them into the library-books which they bring in, inviting their teacher to meet them under their roof and to become acquainted with them in their domestic development, and lending his whole personal sanction to the influence of this beneficent institution in their religious training.

But this is not the whole, though it is where many parents stop. He may lay up through the week special questions and topics for Sabbath consideration,- questions that have arisen in the progress of family discipline, -topics suggested by peculiarities of disposition and faults or virtues of character which he has observed from day to day, but could not take thoroughly in hand. He may gather night after night a store of touching and impressive incidents from his nightly reading of the press; remember his little school, his small home parish, in all his reading and all his seeing and all his hearing, and have more instructive and suggestive matter accumulated in his Sabbath drawer than he can exhaust.

He must not forget that these young pupils receive

their most vivid and memorable lessons through the senses. It is worth his own while to make himself as carefully and fully acquainted as his circumstances will permit with the wonders of the earth and the air and the sea, and lead out the exploring and eager young thought to those exhibitions of the divine power and skill and goodness, with which the visible creation is filled. The pages of nature are all pictorially illustrated to his hand. Stars and dewdrops, rainbows and violets, clouds and their shadows, thunder-storms, the round and the products of the seasons, their own frame fearfully and wonderfully made, animal and insect life, light, heat, frost, — let him make these sensible things ministers and revealers of God and his character and his truth. He will find no lack of interest, or of stimulating questioning with his young audience.

Following the hint of teaching by the senses, let him be sure to furnish the nursery with a pictorial Bible. This emblazoned typology will draw curious eyes between the leaves, and let in the marvellous histories there upon the mind, and they will never be forgotten. Let him seek to make this book of books a charm and a fascination to the circle of little ones. My own father was a fine reader of Scripture narratives. He took pains to read well in his house to the youngest ears that could listen with any intelligence. It was as good as play to hear him give out some of the stirring scenes of the Scripture record. He used to indulge us often in that way on the Sabbath. He was magnificent upon the duel of David and Goliath. The first verse of that grand

chapter, as he began, always thrilled our hearts like the blast of a trumpet. The echoes come back yet, as I read it again, from that part of childhood's Sabbath hour, and all ringing with heroic tones, "Now the Philistines gathered together their armies to battle, and were gathered together at Shochoh, which belongeth to Judah, and pitched between Shochoh and Azekah, in Ephes-dammim."

On

By whatsoever volumes and helps, we must teach our households religiously on the Sabbath. Not in set forms, not in systematic lessons, not in dry and hard details. We must be men of parables. It is surprising how rich and fertile one may become in this style of teaching, even the humblest and least-favored mind, by making it an object of a little thought and study. Our children's minds and hearts are ours on the Sabbath. other days they are school-children, they are apprentices, they are clerks; they are studying, with other teachers and masters, the knowledge of this world. On this day they are with us. They are sons and daughters only, while the Sabbath sun lingers. They are heirs with us of immortality. We may join hands with them, draw their arms within ours, and walk on with them toward the gate of heaven.

I feel still that the practical difficulties remain as before. Childhood is restless, volatile, impatient of restraint, and naturally averse to religious truth. With us both brain and heart are often weary. All our devices fail at times to bring the peace of a Sabbath benediction upon the troubled waters of household unrest. We are