with idle fancies and vain imaginations.
Sentimentalism takes the place of religion; filthy literature and
fashionable cards shove the Family Bible in some obscure nook of their
parlor and their hearts. The hours devoted to family prayer are now spent
in a giddy whirl of amusement and intoxicating pleasure, in the study of
the latest fashions and of the newly-published love adventures of some
nabob in the world of refined scoundrelism. The parental solicitude, once
directed to the eternal welfare of the child, is now expended in
match-making and setting out in the world.

Thus does the Christian home often become adulterated with the world by its
indiscriminate association with unfit social elements. That portion of
society whose master-spirits are love-stricken poets, languishing girls,
amorous grandmothers, and sap-headed fiction writers, is certainly unfit
for a place in the parlor of the Christian family. We should not permit the
principles of common-sense decorum to give place to the lawless vagaries of
fancy and the hollow-hearted forms of artificial life. Under the gaudy
drapery of smiles and flounces, of rustling silks and blandishments, there
are hearts as brutish and stultified, and heads as brainless and incapable
of gentle and moral emotion, and characters as selfish and ungenerous, as
were ever concealed beneath the rags of poverty, or the uncouth manners and
rough garb of the incarcerated villain!

It is, therefore, beneath the dignity of the Christian to permit his home
to become in any way a prey to immoral and irreligious associations and
influences. Like the personal character of the Christian, it should be kept
unspotted from the world; and no spirit, no customs, no companions, opposed
to religion, should be permitted to enter its sacred limits. Heedless of
this important requisition, parents may soon see their children depart from
the ways in which they were trained in the nursery, and at last become a
curse to them, and bring down their gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.

Here is indeed the great fault of many Christian parents in the present
day. They do not exert that guardian care they should over the social
relations and interests of their children. They are too unscrupulous in
their introduction to the world, and leave them in ignorance of its snares
and deceptions. What results can they look for if they permit their parlor
tables to become burdened with French novels, and their children to