This is all right, noble, and faithful to the natural elements of home.  Natural affection prompts it, and it is well.  But if this is all; if Christian parents and their children are governed only by the promptings of nature; if they are bound together by no spiritual ties and interests and hopes; if they are not prompted by faith to make provision for the soul, and for eternity; then we think they have not as yet realized the deepest and holiest significance of their home.

The Christian home demands the Christian consciousness,—­the sense of a spirit-world with all its obligations and interests and responsibilities.  Oh, is it not too often the case that even the Christian mother, while she teaches her babe the accents of her own name, never thinks of teaching it to lisp the name of Jesus,—­never seeks to unfold its infant spirit,—­never supplies it with spiritual food, nor directs its soul to the eternal world!  In the same way the pious wife neglects her impenitent husband; and the pious husband, his reckless wife.  There is too much such dereliction of duty in the homes of church members.

Our homes give us an interest in, and bind us by peculiar bonds to, the eternal world; those loved ones who have gone before us, look down from heaven upon those they have left behind; though absent from us in body, their spirits are still with us; and they come thronging upon glowing pinions, as ministering spirits, to our hearts.  Mother! that little babe that perished in your arms, hovers over thee now, and is the guardian angel of your heart and home.  It meets thee still!  And oh, how joyful will your home-meeting be in heaven!  Children! the spirit of your sainted mother lingers around your home to minister in holy things to thee.  She has left you in body; she lies mouldering now in the humid earth; but she is with thee in spirit.  Your home, dwelling in the sphere of the church on earth, has a spiritual communion with the sainted ones of the church in heaven.  Thus, as the home-feeling can never he eradicated, so the home-meetings can never be broken up.  Even the dead are with us there; their seats may be empty, and their forms may no longer move before us; but their spirits meet with us, and imprint their ministrations upon our hearts.  The dead and the living meet in home!

    “We are all here! 
    Father, mother,
    Sister, brother,
  All who hold each other dear,
  Each chair is filled, we’re all at home! 
  Let gentle peace assert her power,
  And kind affection rule the hour—­
    We’re all—­all here! 
  Even they—­the dead—­though dead so dear,
  Fond memory to her duty true,
  Brings back their faded forms to view. 
  How life-like through the mist of years,
  Each well-remembered face appears;
  We hear their words, their smiles behold,
  They’re round us as they were of old—­
    We are all here!”

CHAPTER II.