temptations, with fiery furnace and thundering wheel-bucket; and there was no lifeboat. Pray for your rulers.

In the next place, be faithful at the ballot-box. Do not stand on your dignity and refuse to vote because the rabble go. Put on your old clothes and elbow your way through the unwashed, and the wretched, and the abandoned, and go to the polls. Cast your own vote. Make up your mind in a Christian way as to who are the best men for office; then vote for the man who loves God and hates rum, and believes in having the Bible read every day as long as the world stands, in all our common schools. Refuse to vote, or vote the wrong way, and you sin against the graves of the men who died for the government, and you sin against your children, who may live to feel the curse of your negligence or your political dishonesty.

But I have a better prescription than all. It is the fourth thing that I have to say in the way of counsel, and that is evangelize the people. Gospelize this country, and you will have pure representatives and pure men everywhere. I have no faith in the conversion of an old politician. I never knew one to be converted. I suppose the grace of God can do it, but seldom tries it. I should be no more surprised to see the Pope of Rome and the cardinals come in and sit down on the "anxious seat" in a Methodist meeting house than I would be to see long row of politicians converted. What work we have to do we are to do with the great masses of the people who cast the votes, and with our children who are coming up to be the sovereigns. That woman who, this afternoon, in the Sabbath-school class, teaches six boys how to be Christians does more for our political future than all the fine essays that were ever written about the Constitution, or the arrangement of the American Senate for holding stock of the Credit Mobilier. I want you to understand there is work for you and me to do. Change men's hearts, and their lives will be right. There were good men this last week in Cooper Institute, New York, trying to have the Christian religion recognized in the constitution of the United States. But, my friends, you get the people converted by the grace of God, and I do not care about the mere technicality of a constitutional recognition. What we want in this country is just four revivalsrevivals that come like those in the days of Nettleton, and Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield. We want four revivals at once: one starting from the north, rolling south; one starting from the south, rolling north; one starting from the east, rolling

west; one starting from the west, rolling east. And then I want to stand on the spot where the four seas meet, that I may shout: "Hallelujah! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth." "Hallelujah! for the kingdoms of this world are becoming the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ." But remember, that if there be forty millions of people in this country, upon you personally rests a forty-millionth of the responsibility. The least thing you can do for the country is to contribute toward it a heart changed by the grace of God, and a life all pure. Remember, that it is not as nations we are at last to be judged, but as individuals, each man answering for himself in that day when monarchies and republics alike shall perish, and the earth itself shall become a heap of ashes, scattered in the blast of the nostrils of the Lord God Almighty.

LIFE AT HOME.

"Let them learn first to show piety at home."-1 Tim. v. 4.

A CHURCH within a church, a republic within a republic, a

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

As individuals, we are fragments. God makes the races in parts, and then he gradually puts us together. What I lack, you make up; what you lack, I make up; our deficits and surpluses of character being the wheels in the great social mechanism. One person has the patience, another has the courage, another has the placidity, another has the enthusiasm; that which is lacking in one is made up by another or made up by all. Buffaloes in herds; grouse in broods; quails in flocks; the human race in circles. God has most beautifully arranged this. It is in this way that He balances society--this conservative and that radical keeping things even. Every ship must have its mast, cutwater, taffrail, ballast. Thank God, then, for Princetown and Andover for the opposites. I have no more right to blame a man for being different from me than a drivingwheel has a right to blame the iron-shaft that holds it to the centre. John Wesley balances Calvin's Institute, Dr. M'Cosh gives to Scotland the strong bones of theology, Dr. Guthrie clothes them with a throbbing heart and warm flesh. The diffi

culty is that we are not satisfied with just the work that God has given us to do. The water-wheel wants to come inside the mill and grind the grist, and the hopper wants to go out and dabble in the water. Our usefulness and the welfare of society depends upon our staying in just the place that God has put us, or intended we should occupy. For more compactness, and that we may be more useful, we are gathered in still smaller circles in

the home group. And there you have the same varieties again;

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

This institution of marriage has been defamed in our day. Socialism, and polygamy, and Mormonism, and the most damnable of all things, Freeloveism, have been trying to turn this earth into a Turkish harem or a great Salt Lake City. While the pulpits have been comparatively silent, novels-their cheapness only equalled by their nastiness-are trying to educate; have taken upon themselves to educate this nation in regard to holy marriage, which makes or breaks for time and eternity. Oh, this is not a mere question of residence or wardrobe. It is a question charged with gigantic joy or sorrow-with heaven or hell. Alas, for this new dispensation of George Sand. Alas, for this mingling of the night-shade with the marriage garlands. Alas, for the venom of adder's spit into the tankards. Alas for the white frosts of eternal death that kill the orange blossoms. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is to assert what is right and to assert what is wrong. Attempt has been made to take this in

stitution which was intended for the happiness and elevation of the race, and make it a mere commercial enterprize-an exchange of houses, and lands, and equipage-a business partnership of two. Stuffed up with the stories of romance and knight-errantry, and unfaithfulness, and feminine angelhood, the two after a while have roused up to find that, instead of the Paradise they dreamed of, they have got nothing but a Van Amburgh's menagerie, filled with tigers and wild cats. Eighty thousand divorces in Paris in one year preceded the worst revolution that France ever saw. It was only the first course in that banquet of hell; and I tell you what know you well as as I do, that wrong notions on the subject of Christian marriage are the cause at this day of more moral outrage before God and man than any other cause. There are some things that I want to bring before you. I know there are those of you who have had homes set up for a great many years, and notwithstanding the hardships and trials that come to them you would not surrender them; and then there are those here who have just established their home. They have only been in it a few months or a few years. Then there are those who will, after a while, set up for themselves a home, and it is right that I should speak out upon these themes.

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

In