ar-reaching in its influence
that down to the last moment of your children's life you may hold them
with a heavenly charm. At seventy-six years of age the Demosthenes of
the American Senate lay dying at Washington--I mean Henry Clay, of
Kentucky. His pastor sat at his bedside and the "old man eloquent,"
after a long and exciting public life, trans-Atlantic and
cis-Atlantic, was back again in the scenes of his boyhood, and he kept
saying in his dream over and over again: "My mother! mother! mother!"
May the parental influence we exert be not only potential but holy,
and so the home on earth be the vestibule of our home in heaven, in
which place may we all meet--father, mother, son, daughter, brother,
sister, grandfather and grandmother, and grandchild, and the entire
group of precious ones, of whom we must say in the words of
transporting Charles Wesley:

"One family we dwell in Him,
One church above, beneath;
Though now divided by the stream--
The narrow stream of death;
One army of the living God,
To His command we bow;
Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now."

EASY DIVORCE.

"What therefore God hath joined together let not man put
asunder."--MATTHEW 19:6

That there are hundreds and thousands of infelicitous homes in America
no one will doubt. If there were only one skeleton in the closet, that
might be locked up and abandoned; but in many a home there is a
skeleton in the hallway and a skeleton in all the apartments.

"UNHAPPILY MARRIED"

are two words descriptive of many a homestead. It needs no orthodox
minister to prove to a badly mated pair that there is a hell; they are
there now. Sometimes a grand and gracious woman will be thus
incarcerated, and her life will be a crucifixion, as was the case with
Mrs. Sigourney, the great poetess and the great soul. Sometimes a
consecrated man will be united to a fury, as was John Wesley, or
united to a vixen, as was John Milton. Sometimes, and generally, both
parties are to blame, and Thomas Carlyle is an intolerable scold, and
his wife smokes and swears, and Froude, the historian, is mean enough,
because of the shekels he gets for the manuscript,[3] to pull aside
the curtain from the lifelong squabble at Craigenputtock and Five,
Cheyne Row. Some say that for

THE ALLEVIATION

of all these domestic disorders of which we hear, easy divorce is a
good prescription. God sometim