r
influence upon us than the house we dwell in,--especially that in which
our earlier and more impressible years are spent. The building and
arrangement of a house influence the health, the comfort, the morals,
the religion. There have been houses built so devoid of all
consideration for the occupants, so rambling and hap-hazard in the
disposal of rooms, so sunless and cheerless and wholly without snugness
or privacy, as to make it seem impossible to live a joyous, generous,
rational, religious family-life in them.

There are, we shame to say, in our cities _things_ called houses, built
and rented by people who walk erect and have the general air and manner
of civilized and Christianized men, which are so inhuman in their
building that they can only be called snares and traps for
souls,--places where children cannot well escape growing up filthy and
impure,--places where to form a home is impossible, and to live a
decent, Christian life would require miraculous strength.

A celebrated British philanthropist, who had devoted much study to the
dwellings of the poor, gave it as his opinion that temperance-societies
were a hopeless undertaking in London, unless these dwellings underwent
a transformation. They were so squalid, so dark, so comfortless, so
constantly pressing upon the senses foulness, pain, and inconvenience,
that it was only by being drugged with gin and opium that their
miserable inhabitants could find heart to drag on life from day to day.
He had himself tried the experiment of reforming a drunkard by taking
him from one of these loathsome dens and enabling him to rent a tenement
in a block of model lodging-houses which had been built under his
supervision. The young man had been a designer of figures for prints; he
was of a delicate frame, and a nervous, susceptible temperament. Shut in
one miserable room with his wife and little children, without the
possibility of pure air, with only filthy, fetid water to drink, with
the noise of other miserable families resounding through the thin
partitions, what possibility was there of doing anything except by the
help of stimulants, which for a brief hour lifted him above the
perception of these miseries? Changed at once to a neat flat, where, for
the same rent as his former den, he had three good rooms, with water for
drinking, house-service, and bathing freely supplied, and the blessed
sunshine and air coming in through windows well arranged for
ventilation, he