Sympathy is excited and measured by the power of natural affection.  In proportion to the strength of the latter will be the attractive power of the former.  That soothing voice which calms the wailing-infant; that fond bosom from which the child draws its subsistence, and on which it pillows its weary head; that smile which throws a sunshine around its existence, and all those acts of kindness administered by the hand of love, draw the child instinctively to the parent’s heart, and blend in sweetest union its very being with theirs.

The principle of home-sympathy reigns in some degree in every household whose members have not sunk below the level of the brute.  Its nature demands that it be mutual.  It should glow with peculiar warmth in the wife, the mother, and the sister; because it is a more prominent instinct of woman.  It is an intuition of the mother’s heart.

  “When pain and anguish wring the brow,
  A ministering angel thou!”

Who but she can smooth the pillow and soothe the anguish of the child of affliction?  There is a tenderness in her nature, a softness in her touch, a lightness in her step, a soothing expression in her face, a tender beam in her eye, which man can never have, and which eminently fits her for the lead in home-sympathy.  The want of it is a libel upon her sex.  It is her prerogative,—­the magic power she wields in the formation and reformation of character.

But her sympathy should find response in the bosom of her husband, the father, the brother; for, if true, it must he mutual.  Their joys and their sorrows must be common.  Thus heart must answer to heart, and face.  “The cruelty of that man,” says J.A.  James, “wants a name, and I know of none sufficiently emphatic, who denies his sympathy to a suffering woman, whose only sin is a broken constitution, and whose calamity is the result of her marriage.”  Without such mutual sympathy, the members of the family would be cold and repulsive, and society would be deprived of its most lovely attributes; its members would lose the connecting link which brings them together, and its entire fabric would fall to pieces and degenerate into barbaric individualism.

  “Had earth no sympathy, no tears would flow,
  In heart-felt sorrow, for another’s woe;
  The joyous spirit then would weary roam,
  A stranger to the dear delights of home.”

We shall now consider briefly the religious elements of home-sympathy.  These involve harmony of the spiritual affections, and a transfer to all the members, of the religious experience and enjoyment of each.  As natural sympathy arises out of and is measured by natural affection, so spiritual sympathy is the product of faith and love.  Hence the latter is purer, more refined and efficient than the former.  If the members of the family are the children of God, they will live together in the unity of the Spirit as well as of natural affection.  The sympathy