Chapter 2

The Basest of all Traits--A Wolf's Den--The Tailless Fox--Envy is Largely Ignorance--Greatness attained only after Arduous Labors--The Tenor and The Stone-Front--Thiers' Long Life--A Critical View of Gladstone's Public Sorrows--Truly Distracting Dilemmas in which Circumstances of Empire Involve Great Men--An appeal to Envy. Page 354.

Contentment.

Mrs. Lofty--First Surprise of the Newly-Rich--The Scotch Mist--The Angel Sent to Conduct an Empire and the One Sent to Sweep a Street--Our Principal Causes of Happiness Free to All--How Rich Men Secure Happiness--The Prisoner and His Three Pins--Happiness Inalienable in Health--A Pleasant View of Egotism as a necessary Ingredient in Our Make-up. Page 362.

Ambition.

The Need of a "Balance of Power" in the Mind--As a General Thing Ambition a Quality to be Curbed--Assassination of Merit by Envy--The Man Qualified to Deal with Ambition--A Picture of His Unhappy Lot, as Illustrated in Napoleon's Life--Poem. Page 368.

The Republic's Anchor.

A Favorite Chapter--The Telegraph Outriding the Storms--The Farmers the Grand Conservative Forces of the Republic--Difference between Business and Farming--How the Farmers Will Settle the Communists and the Magnates--The Farmer's Sons--A Plea for Them--A Picture of the Opportunities which We are Daily Missing. Page 375.

Temperance.

The Drunkard's Wife--A Drama of Horror--Why Society Looks So Calmly on Such Scenes--The Wisdom and Experience of Society--Effort of the Brother to Improve His Sister's Condition--The Result--What Society Is Doing--The Drift of Things--Views of the Future--A Better Time nearly at Hand. Page 386.

A Good Name.

The Highest Type of Reputation, a Silent but Powerful Influence--Two Instances of Good Reputation--Tall Masts Needed for Great Ships--The Difference between Greatness on the Inside of a Man, and Great Appearances on the Outside. Page 395

Worship.

Paramount Importance of Family Services--The Iron Duke's Remark--Sayings of the Wisest and Best--Scenes in Burned Chicago--Newton and La Place--Their Testimony--Victor Hugo: "I believe in the Sublimity of Prayer"--Wordsworth's Apostrophe--Young's Prayer--A Sweet Supplication. Page 400.

The Atheist.

The Owlet Atheism--Hammer and Tongs used to work in Fire--False Headings on News--On The Plains of Chaldæa--The Voice of Duty ever in the way of the Atheist--A Creator Demanded by Reason--The Atheist Like Falstaff, Leading a very Scrubby File of Soldiers. Page 410.

The Bible.

The Bible is Authentic, Old, Beautiful--It is the Only Hope We have--It Out-dates the Chinese Empire--Everything Good and Progressive is Founded on It--Practical Value of Studying It--Its Eloquence--Its Triumphs in an Infinitude of Tests. Page 421.

The Evening of Life.

Age the Outer Shore against which Dashes an Eternity--We are on a small Planet, but We Belong to a Larger Celestial Empire--The Undevout Astronomer Insane--Does the Beast Peer into the Stars?--Eternity is not a conceit of Man--Apostrophe to a Patriarch. Page 433.

The Future Life.

Cato's Soliloquy--Promises of God's Word clothed in Syllables of Unsurpassable Sweetness--He that holdeth the Pleiades in His Right Hand--Blissful Forecasts--Shall God weigh out Arcturus to Stop the Unreasoning Clamor of the Fool who Hath Said in His Heart there Is No God? Conclusion. Page 441.

THE GOLDEN CENSER.

Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer, Swung by seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. --Edgar Poe.

HOME.

'Tis sweet to hear the honest watchdog's bark Bay deep-mouthed welcome as we draw near home; 'Tis sweet to know that there is an eye will mark Our coming, and look brighter when we come.--Byron.

An elegant sufficiency, content, Retirement, rural, quiet, friendship, books, Ease and alternate labor, useful life, Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven.--Thomson.

'Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. --J.H. Payne, in the Opera of "Clari."

No word in the English language approaches in sweetness the sound of this group of letters. Out of this grand syllable rush memories and emotions always chaste, and always noble. The murderer in his cell, his heart black with crime, hears this word, and his crimes have not yet been committed; his heart is yet pure and free; in his mind he kneels at his mother's side and lisps his prayers to God that he, by a life of dignity and honor, may gladden that mother's heart; and then he weeps, and for a while is not a murderer. The Judge upon his bench deals out the dreaded justice to the scourged, and has no look of gentleness. But breathe this word into his ear, his thoughts fly to his fireside; his heart relents; he is no longer Justice, but weak and tender Mercy.

What makes that small, unopened missive so precious to that great rough man? Why, 'tis from Home--from Home, that spot to which his heart is tied with unseen cords and tendrils tighter than the muscles which hold it in his swelling chest. Perhaps he left his Home caring little for it at the time. Perhaps harsh necessity drove him from its tender roof to lie beneath

THE THATCH OF AVARICE.

It does not matter. As the great river broadens in the Spring, so do his feelings swell and overflow his nature now. Why does he tremble,--that rough, weather-beaten man? Because there is but one place on the great earth where "an eye will mark his coming and grow brighter." If that beacon still burns for him, he can continue his voyage. If it has gone out, if anything has happened to it, his way is dark; nothing but the abiding hand of the Great Father can steady his helm and hold him to his desolate course.

The man who wandered "mid pleasures and palaces," had no Home, and when he died he died on the bleak shores of Northern Africa, and was buried where he died, at the city of Tunis, where he held the office of United States Consul. "To Adam," says Bishop Hare, "Paradise was Home. To the good among his descendants,

HOME IS PARADISE."

"Are you not surprised," writes Dr. James Hamilton, "to find how independent of money peace of conscience is, and how much happiness can be condensed in the humblest home? A cottage will not hold the bulky furniture and sumptuous accommodations of a mansion; but if love be there, a cottage will hold as much happiness as might stock a palace." "To be happy at home," writes Dr. Johnson in the _Rambler_, "is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution." In the mind of the good there gather about the old Home

HALO UPON HALO OF FOND THOUGHT,

of nearly idolatrous memory. Upon this very green, the joyous march of youth went on. Here the glad days whirled round like wheels. At morn the laugh was loud; at eve the laughter rang. To-day, perhaps the most joyous of the flock lies in the earth. Perhaps the chief spirit of the wildest gambols is bent with sharp affliction; the one that loved his mother best is in a foreign land; the one that doubled her small cares with dolls goes every week to gaze at little gravestones, and the one that would not stay in bed upon the sun's bright rise now sits in awful blindness. You cannot rob these hearts of their sweet memories. The mystic keyword unlocks the gates. The peaceful waters flow; the thirsty soul is satisfied.

THE LONG AGO.

A lady opens a short epistle from her brother. He is rich, successful, busy, in short driven, cannot visit her at a certain date, regrets, with love, etc., all in ten short lines. What does this dry notice tell? It tells of a buffalo-robe which, by much strategy, can be secured from father's study; it tells of a daring, rollicking boy who has got the strategy and will soon get the buffalo-robe. It tells of two boys and three girls, all gathered in the robe, with the rollicking one as fireman and engineer, making the famous trip down the stairs which shall tumble them all into the presence of a parent who will make a weak demonstration of severity, clearly official, and merely masking a very evident inclination to try a trip on the same train.

WHERE WAS THIS?

Why at the dear old Home, in the Long Ago. Who was the fireman and engineer? Why, this great, pompous man of business, whose short note his sister has just laid down--of course, he was the fireman and the engineer!

We see the sister of Rembrandt, the painter, traveling weary miles to the house of the brother whom in youth she shielded from the wrath of a drunken father, whose rude pictures she concealed from eyes that would have looked upon them in anger. Now he is the most celebrated painter of his time. He is rich beyond the imagination of his humble contemporaries. He never receives people into his stronghold.

TWO GREAT DOGS GUARD THE ENTRANCE.

Into a gloomy portal the aged sister enters, and soon the miser and the good angel of his past are together. There they sit in the dusk, and recall, after sixty years of separation, the scenes of the Home which existed eighty years before! We marvel at a word that comes along a cable under the ocean. Why should we not also wonder at a little word that can sound across the awful stretch of eighty years, through

AN OCEAN OF LIFE,

stormy with fearful disappointments, boisterous with seasons of success, and desolate with the drift, the slime, and the fungus of miserly greed!

Says Dickens: "If ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and proud to Home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal, and bear the stamp of heaven."

"If men knew what felicity dwells in the cottage of a godly man," writes Jeremy Taylor, "how sound he sleeps, how quiet his rest, how composed his mind, how free from care, how easy his position, how moist his mouth, how joyful his heart, they would never admire the noises, the diseases, the throngs of passions, and the violence of unnatural appetites that fill the house of the luxurious and the heart of the ambitious."

It has happened within a hundred years that men of private station have become Kings. One of the severest trials of their exalted lot has been the disaster which came upon their homes.

KINGS HAVE NO HOMES.

I am told that the Presidents of the United States have complained very naturally that they are denied that privacy which is accorded to the lowliest citizen in the land. It should content the possessor of a Home that he has that which Kings cannot have, and which if it be bright and free from wrong, is more valuable than palaces and marble halls. Of this golden right of asylum in the Home, Abraham Cowley has written: "Democritus relates, as if he gloried in the good fortune of it, that when he came to Athens, nobody there did so much as take notice of him; and Epicurus lived there very well, that is, lay hid many years in his gardens, so famous since that time, with his friend Metrodorus; after whose death, making, in one of his letters, a kind commemoration of the happiness which they two had enjoyed together, he adds at last that he thought it no disparagement to those great felicities of their life, that, in the midst of that most talked of and talking country in the world, they had lived so long, not only without fame, but almost without being heard of; and yet, within a very few years afterward, there were

NO TWO NAMES OF MEN MORE KNOWN

or more generally celebrated. If we engage into a large acquaintance and various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of our time; we expose our life to an ague of frigid impertinences which would make a wise man tremble to think of."

What makes the remembrance of the old Home so happy? Was it not because there the storms of life were turned away from us by those who bore the blasts to keep us in our innocence? And now that future which then was on our horizon has neared us and is our zenith, the centre of our heavens. About us are

PRATTLING LITTLE ONES

who in the far-off years will clothe this house about with that holy mantle which will give it the right to that same grand title, Home. Can we not, in thinking of the good old Home, stand a little nearer to the blast and warm some tiny heart a little more? Does the merry laugh sing out as it did in our own youth? Then this is indeed a Home, growing each day more sacred in the mind of those fledglings who will so soon fly from the nest to beat a fluttering and a weary way through the tempests that will encompass them. A Christmas-tree, a picnic, a May-day festival, make trouble for limbs already weary with labor, but

IT IS THE WEARINESS AND THE SELF-SACRIFICE

as well as the mirth and the innocence which have girt this great word round about with its bright girdle of true glory. "Suffer little children to come unto me," says the Lord Jesus, "and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." We may say likewise, following the beauteous expression of our Savior, "Suffer little children to come into our homes, and forbid them not their mirth and their joy, for their contentment is now the one lesson that will take deep hold on their lives, and their souls will grow rapidly in such surroundings." Says the poet Southey: "A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising six weeks."

"He is the happiest," says Goethe, "be he King or peasant, who finds peace in his Home." Especially should

THE YOUNG MAN