ily rights and
privileges, the ward of family interests, the palladium of family hopes and
happiness. Your household piety will be the crowning attribute of your
peaceful home,--the "crown of living stars" that shall adorn the night of
its tribulation, and the pillar of cloud and of fire in its pilgrimage to a
"better country." It shall strew the family threshold with the flowers of
promise, and enshrine the memory of loved ones gone before, in all the
fragrance of that "blessed hope" of reunion in heaven which looms up from a
dying hour. It shall give to the infant soul its "perfect flowering," and
expand it in all the fullness of a generous love and conscious blessedness,
making it "lustrous in the livery of divine knowledge." And then in the
dark hour of home separation and bereavement, when the question is put to
thee, mourning parents, "Is it well with the child? is it well with thee?"
you can answer with joy, "It is well!"

CHAPTER IV.

THE RELATION OF HOME TO THE CHURCH.

The Christian home sustains a direct relation to the church. This relation
is similar to that which it sustains to the state. The nature and mission
of home demand the church. The former is the adumbration of the latter. The
one is in the other. "Greet the church that is in thine house." The church
was in the house of Aquila and Priscilla, in the tent of Abraham, and in
the palace of David. It must be in every Christian home, and every
Christian home must be in the church. In a word, our families must be
churchly.

This relation is vital and necessary,--a relation of mutual dependence. The
family is a preparation for the church, subordinate to it, and must,
therefore, throw its influence in its favor, be moulded by it, and labor
With direct reference to the church in the way of training up for
membership in it. As the civil and political relations of home involve the
duty of parents to train up their children for efficient citizenship in the
state, so its moral and religious relations involve the duty of education
for the church. Hence the Christian home is churchly in its spirit,
religion, education, influence, and mission.

Family religion is an element of home, not only as a mere fact or principle
in its subjective form, but in the form and force of the church. In its
unchurchly form it is powerless. It must be experienced and administered in
a churchly spirit and way, not as something detached from the organic
embodiment of Chri