t disappearing. We have broken away from
the old homestead, have lost the restraining and purifying associations
that gathered round it, and live away from home in hotels and
boarding-houses. A large and influential class of women not only
neglect, but disdain, the retired and simple domestic virtues, and scorn
to be tied down to the modest but essential duties--the drudgery, they
call it--of wives and mothers. We are daily losing the faith, the
virtues, the habits, and the manners, without which the family cannot be
sustained. This, coupled with the separate pecuniary interests of
husband and wife secured, make the family, to a fearful extent, the mere
shadow of what it was and of what it should be. What remains of the
family is only held together by the graces and virtue of women. But even
this last hope is fast breaking down, by the great facility of obtaining
a divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_--a facility by which the laws of most
of the States of the Union grant to lust the widest margin of license,
and legalize concubinage and adultery. Now when the family goes, the
nation goes too, or ceases to be worth preserving. God made the family
the type and basis of society; "male and female made he them."

By its present system of education, the State makes war on God and His
Christ, and says, with Lucifer, "Non servio"; and this is the daring
rebel against God and His law, that would claim the innocent children
of the Christian family as its own; teach them its false maxims,
promising them, as Satan, its master, did the Saviour, riches, and
honors, and power, if they will but fall down and worship it. How
incomprehensibly strange it is, that good men and women who profess
Christianity, and acknowledge the obligations of its commandments,
should give ear to this tempter, instead of saying, "Get behind me,
Satan," and, "Thou art a liar and a cheat from the beginning." The
State, in this subject of education, represents the world; and religion,
as well as experience, teaches us its folly, its wickedness, its
treachery and its ambition. "The State promises bread and gives a
stone." It promises wealth, and honor, and gives taxes, slavery, and
degradation. It is blind, and it attempts to lead; it is ignorant, and
it offers to teach and direct the young. It will not receive the law,
and it claims the right to give it. It arrogates the "_higher law_," and
"_would be as God_." There is the danger; and it is against this the
fight m