of your being a brother alter the nature of your conduct?  You are her brother, and therefore may act ungentlemanly and like a scoundrel!  Why, oh, shame, cowardly shame! because there is no one to resent your ill-treatment—­there is no one to defend a sister from the unkindness of a brother, or to defend the brother, I may add, from the sister’s unkindness; for though I speak to the brother, let each sister who reads this, ask her conscience whether her own sister’s heart condemn her not.

Time will not allow me to enter into any great detail, in illustrating the frequency of these violations of the law of family affection, nor indeed is it needed.  I can give you a general rule, which your own minds will approve, and which will meet all cases.  Let the sister treat no man with more courtesy and politeness than she treats her father and her brothers—­treat no woman more kindly and politely than she does her mother and her sisters.  Let her not confine all her graces and fascinations to strangers, and make her family to endure all her petulance and unamiability.  So let the brother treat his mother and sisters.  So let the father and mother treat each other and their children, and you will, my readers, obtain a noble reward in the increasing happiness and comfort of your family circles—­in the manliness which will belong to the sons—­in the mental and moral graces which will adorn the daughters.  The family will thus become the school of virtue and the bulwark of society—­the reciprocal influence of brothers and sisters thus trained will be of untold power on each other’s character.

One word further, and I close.  I have been describing the legitimate influence of religion in a family.  True religion will make just such fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers.  It is in this way that religion develops itself; that religion which is beautiful abroad and has no beauty at home, is of little worth.  If, then, you would make your families what I have described, you must yourself come under the power of religion, must give your heart to God, and then you will find the duties of the family becoming comparatively easy.  Unless you do so, you will find yourselves constantly failing in your most strenuous efforts, and will be far from reaching the point which I have sought to describe.  Natural affection may indeed be much cultivated by this course, and drawn forth in its native simplicity or regulated by the forms of refined education, it will throw an inestimable beauty and charm around the fireside.  But it will be, after all, but merely natural affection.  It cannot rise so high nor exert such heavenly influence over the family circle as will the power of religion.  It sanctifies and exalts natural affections.  It not only restrains but actually softens the natural asperities of the temper, harmonizes discordant feelings and interests, and secures that happy co-operation which makes a Christian circle an emblem of heaven.  In one word, religion will make you a happy family