n we are disposed for
something higher, the mind is elevated to gracious thoughts, the brain
gives reasonable counsel, the heart generous responses. And I speak
with all reverence when I say that many of our darkest hours in
spiritual things are not to be attributed to an angry God or a hidden
Saviour, but to physical repletion or inanition. But if these
wonderfully fashioned bodies be the "temple of the Holy Ghost," how
shall we expect the comforts of God in a disordered or ill-kept
shrine?

Thus it is in the power of the housewife to turn the work of the
kitchen into a sacrifice of gladness, and to make the offices of the
table a means of grace. Certain it is that she will decide whether her
husband is to be commercially successful or not; for if a man will be
rich, he must ask his wife's permission to be so. And if he will be
physically healthy, mentally clear, morally sweet, she must take care
that his home furnish the proper food and stimulus on which these
conditions depend. Nor will she go far wrong if she take as a general
rule, lying at the foundation, or in close connection with them all,
Sydney Smith's pleasant hyperbolic maxim, "Soup and fish explain half
the emotions of life."

We will suppose that the housewife is also the house-mother, and
that she is not content with apathetically remarking that "her
children are beyond her control," and so sending them away to
nurses and boarding schools; but that she really strives to
encourage every virtue, draw out every latent power, and make both
boys and girls worthy of the grand future to which they are heirs. Who
shall say now that woman's domestic sphere is narrow, or unworthy of
her highest powers? For if she accepts honestly and solemnly all her
responsibilities, she takes a position that only good women or
angels could fill.

Nor need house duties shut her out from all service except to those of
her own household. In these very duties she may find a way to help her
poorer sisters far more efficient than many of more pretentious
promise. When she has become a scientific, artistic cook, let her
permit some ignorant but bright and ambitious girl to spend a few
hours daily by her side, and learn by precept and example the highest
rules and methods of the culinary art. Girls so instructed would be
real blessings to those who hired them, and would themselves start
life with a real, solid gain, able at once to command respectable
service and high wages.

I a