er economy which we need to learn,--that
which makes all things subservient to the spiritual and immortal, and
that not merely to the good of our own souls and those of our family,
but of all who are knit with us in the great bonds of human
brotherhood.

"There have been from time to time, among well-meaning Christian
people, retrenchment societies on high moral grounds, which have
failed for want of knowledge how to manage the complicated question of
necessaries and luxuries. These words have a signification in the case
of different people as varied as the varieties of human habit and
constitution. It is a department impossible to be bound by external
rules, but none the less should every high-minded Christian soul in
this matter have a law unto itself. It may safely be laid down as a
general rule, that no income, however large or however small, should
be unblessed by the divine touch of self-sacrifice. Something for the
poor, the sorrowing, the hungry, the tempted, and the weak should be
taken from _what is our own_ at the expense of some personal
sacrifice, or we suffer more morally than the brother from whom we
withdraw it. Even the Lord of all, when dwelling among men, out of
that slender private purse which he accepted for his little family of
chosen ones, had ever something reserved to give to the poor. It is
easy to say, 'It is but a drop in the bucket. I cannot remove the
great mass of misery in the world. What little I could save or give
does nothing.' It does this, if no more,--it prevents one soul, and
that soul your own, from drying and hardening into utter selfishness
and insensibility; it enables you to say, I have done something; taken
one atom from the great heap of sins and miseries and placed it on the
side of good.

"The Sisters of Charity and the Friends, each with their different
costume of plainness and self-denial, and other noble-hearted women of
no particular outward order, but kindred in spirit, have shown to
womanhood, on the battlefield and in the hospital, a more excellent
way,--a beauty and nobility before which all the common graces and
ornaments of the sex fade, appear like dim candles by the pure,
eternal stars."

IX

SERVANTS

In the course of my papers various domestic revolutions have occurred.
Our Marianne has gone from us with a new name to a new life, and a
modest little establishment not many squares off claims about as much
of my wife's and Jenny's busy thoughts