What a memorable epoch in the history of home is that, in which death finds his first entrance within its sacred enclosures, and with ruthless hand breaks the first link of a golden chain that creates its identity!  We can never forget that event.  It may he the first-born in the radiant beauty of youth, or the babe in the first bursting of life’s budding loveliness, or a father in the midst of his anxious cares, or the mother who gave light and happiness to all around her.  Whoever it is, the first death makes a breach there which no subsequent bereavement can equal; new feelings are then awakened; a new order of associations is then commenced; hopes and fears are then aroused that never subside; and the mysterious web of family life receives the hue of a new and darker thread.

What a sad bereavement is the death of the husband and father!  Children! there is the grave of your father!  You have recently heard the clods of the valley groan upon his coffin.  The parent stem from which, you grew and to which, you fondly clung, has been shattered by the lightning-stroke of death, and its terrible shock is now felt in every fiber of the wrenched and torn branches.  Yours is now a widowed and an orphaned home.  The disconsolate members are left helpless and hopeless in the world; the widowed mother sits by the dying embers of her lonely cottage, overwhelmed with grief, and poor in everything but her children and her God.  These orphans are turned out upon the cold charities of an unfriendly world, neglected and forlorn, having no one to care for them but a poor, broken-hearted mother, whose deathless faith points them to the bright spirit-world to which their sainted father has gone, where parting grief shall weep no more.

But a greater bereavement even than this, is, the death of a wife and mother.  Ah! here is a bereavement which the child alone can fully feel.  When the mother is laid upon the cold bier, and sleeps among the dead, the center of home-love and attraction is gone.  What children are more desolate and more to be pitied than the motherless ones?  She, who fed them from her gentle breast and sung sweet lullaby to soothe them into sleep,—­she, who taught them to kneel in prayer at her side, and ministered to all their little wants, and sympathized with them in all their little troubles,—­she has now been torn from them, leaving them a smitten flock indeed, and the light of her smile will never again be round their beds and paths.  As the shades of night close in upon that smitten home, and the chime of the bell tells the hour in which the mother used to gather them around her for prayer, and sing them to their rosy rest, with what a stricken heart does the bereaved husband seek to perform this office of love in her stead; and as he gathers them for the first time around him, how fully does he feel that none can take a mother’s place!