way of comfort and convenience
can be done here; and the first neighborhood that shall set the
example of dividing the tasks and burdens of life by the judicious use
of the principle of association will initiate a most important step in
the way of national happiness and prosperity.

"My solution, then, of the domestic problem may be formulized as
follows:--

"1st. That women make self helpfulness and family helpfulness
fashionable, and every woman use her muscles daily in enough household
work to give her a good digestion.

"2d. That the situation of a domestic be made so respectable and
respected that well-educated American women shall be induced to take
it as a training-school for their future family life.

"3d. That families by association lighten the multifarious labors of
the domestic sphere.

"All of which I humbly submit to the good sense and enterprise of
American readers and workers."

VI

BODILY RELIGION: A SERMON ON GOOD HEALTH

One of our recent writers has said, that "good health is physical
religion;" and it is a saying worthy to be printed in golden letters.
But good health being physical religion, it fully shares that
indifference with which the human race regards things confessedly the
most important. The neglect of the soul is the trite theme of all
religious teachers; and, next to their souls, there is nothing that
people neglect so much as their bodies. Every person ought to be
perfectly healthy, just as everybody ought to be perfectly religious;
but, in point of fact, the greater part of mankind are so far from
perfect moral or physical religion that they cannot even form a
conception of the blessing beyond them.

The mass of good, well-meaning Christians are not yet advanced enough
to guess at the change which a perfect fidelity to Christ's spirit and
precepts would produce in them. And the majority of people who call
themselves well, because they are not, at present, upon any particular
doctor's list, are not within sight of what perfect health would be.
That fullness of life, that vigorous tone, and that elastic
cheerfulness, which make the mere fact of existence a luxury, that
suppleness which carries one like a well-built boat over every wave of
unfavorable chance,--these are attributes of the perfect health seldom
enjoyed. We see them in young children, in animals, and now and then,
but rarely, in some adult human being, who has preserved intact the
religion of the body t