comes the
intimation of awful change staring upon us with the face of death.
There falls the shadow of the funeral train, passing across the
threshold. There breaks in upon us the sense of bereavement, in the
vacant chambers; where the familiar foot-step patters, where the
familiar voice is heard no more. From the very nature of things, the
profoundest happiness and misery of human life must be experienced among
the conditions of Home.

Having thus in some respects considered what Home _must_ be, I have
virtually anticipated whatever may be said in the second division of
this discourse respecting what Home _ought_ to be.

Thus, as it is the earliest and most influential school, it behoves
every one who is bound by its responsibilities to make it an agent of
the _best culture_. The great subject of Home Education, is of itself
enough for a series of discourses; and I have not room to lay down even
the general propositions which belong to it, much less for
specifications. But I would remind you--and I think the suggestion is
especially needed amidst the whirl of city life--that there _is_ such a
thing as Home Education, and it presses its claims upon everybody who
inhabits a Home. There is such a thing as Home Education, differing from
school education, whether of the week day or the Sabbath, and therefore
it is a matter we ought to attend to, and not suppose we have done
enough when we patronize an academy, or help fill a class on Sunday. To
every parent--to every influential member of a household--there is
committed a charge which can be shifted to no one else; there is an
opportunity which no outside teacher possesses. There are some duties in
life that we have to look for and to go after; there are others which
are passed right into our hands, whether we will or not. And this duty
of Home Education is of the latter kind. Now, I have just said that I
cannot specify here, and even if there were room I am not sure that it
would be advisable. For I doubt whether we can give any manual of
methods and instruments in this respect, any more than there can be a
manual of religious exercises suited to every spiritual peculiarity.
Dispositions, capacities, circumstances, must create their own methods.
And perhaps the poorest method of all would be some system of domestic
education, which the experimenter thinks will do the work exactly. I am
somewhat suspicious of systems. I am more than suspicious of any
constrained formal me