The force and influence of home-habits will teach us the importance of establishing such only as receive the sanction of God.  Habits, as we have seen, are much more easily formed than broken.  When once established they enslave us to them, and subject our character to their iron despotism.  They become the channel through which our life flows.  The stream of our existence first forms the channel, and then the channel rules, guides and controls the current of the stream.  The deeper the channel is wrought, the greater is its moulding and controlling influence over the stream.  Thus our habits become our masters, and are the irrevocable rulers of our life.  This is true of good, as well as of bad habits.  We come into voluntary subjection to them, until we shrink from the first proposal to depart from them.

“Habit,” says the Rev. C.C.  Colton, “will reconcile us to everything but change, and even to change, if it recur not too quickly.  Milton, therefore, makes his hell an ice-house, as well as an oven, and freezes his devils at one period, but bakes them at another.  The late Sir George Staunton informed, me, that he had visited a man in India, who had committed a murder, and in order not only to save his life, but what was of much more consequence, his caste, he submitted to the penalty imposed; this was, that he should sleep for seven years on a bedstead, without any mattress, the whole surface of which was studded with points of iron resembling nails, but not so sharp as to penetrate the flesh.  Sir George saw him in the fifth year of his probation, and his skin then was like the hide of a rhinoceros, but more callous.  At that time, however, he could sleep comfortably on his bed of thorns, and remarked that at the expiration of the term of his sentence, he should most probably continue that system from choice, which he had been obliged to adopt from necessity.”

This illustrates the force of established habit, and the pliability of our nature in yielding a voluntary subjection to it.  What is at first involuntary, painful, and a self-denial to us, wall when it passes into a habit, become agreeable, because the habit bends our nature to it, chains us down to it, infatuates the will, and thus becomes, as it were, a second nature.  If so, it is very plain that our habits are either a blessing or a curse.  When good they are a safeguard against evil, give stability to our character, and are the law of perseverance in well-doing.  Such habits in the Christian home form, an irresistible bulwark against the intrusions of temptation and iniquity.  But when they are bad, they chain us to evil, and impel us onward and downward to ruin.  Hence from his habits we can easily estimate the merit or demerit of a person, know all his weak points and idiosyncrasies, and what will be the probable termination of his existence.