still placed by law and custom on the footstool, while the man is on the throne. It is all wrong; and the time is coming when they shall "sit side by side, full summed in all their powers." Until that day dawns on the world, we must keep its morning star shining through our own windows. That wife is the rare exception who does not bear a full half of the burden, and as good Mrs. Payser says in the story, "Earn one quarter of the income and save another." It is the simplest justice, when she does this, to give her, not one third, but one half of all that is left when we are through. The truest thing to do, if the husband dies first, is to leave everything to the wife, exactly as the wife, if she dies first, leaves everything to the husband. Every will should be drawn in that way, as the last expression of our mutual love and trust. I have read wills made in this city, by men who died in the odor of sanctity, over which I should think the devil would chuckle, so true they were to the constitution of his infernal kingdom. A pure life, from the day we become respon sible to the moment we are revealed to each other; a frank and open communion from that day to the wedding; loyalty, purity, and patience mingling with our love from that day onward, and this true expression of our perfect trust from beyond the grave, these are the things that go to a true wedding, a true home, and a blessed home life. -- XI. CHILDREN AND CHILDHOOD. LUKE ix. 47, 48: "Jesus took a child and set him by him, and said unto them, Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me; and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me." It is very good to me, in reading the Bible, to notice how much of the interest and hope of the world is made to depend on the children that are unborn when the hope springs up, resting far away in the future, but sure to come when God will, and to bring with them some great blessing and help. The world moves on through the ages, and the generations come and go, each bearing its own burden, and fulfilling its own destiny; and to every one there is allotted a certain share of disappointment and sorrow, and the failure of hopes and expectations. But like a strain of clear, quiet music running through a tumult of clashing discords, the promise of the children to be born, who shall do what the fathers failed to do, runs through the generations, from Adam to the advent of the Holy Child. And when at last this child is born, and has passed through his wonderful career, and dies on the cross, so strong is the conviction that it is in the birth of the babe, not the death of the martyr, that the deepest meaning is hidden, that the new era, the year of our Lord, as we call it, dates from the manger, and not from the cross; and then, though the preponderant weight of the church seems constantly to have been cast into the balance for Easter, and though twenty books have been written and twenty sermons preached about Calvary to one about Bethlehem, they have never as yet disturbed this steady human instinct that has left Easter to the church, and taken Christmas into the home; has replied with a carol to every sermon, and insisted that the greatest day of the two was that on whose morning the stars shone right on a stable, and the angels sang about "Peace on earth, and good will to men" because a babe was born, and was sleeping, as they sang, in that rude, dark place. This, I say, is a remarkable quality in our Bible. It is no less so as a fact in this common life to which the Bible is a perpetual index and inspira tion. What was true in that old world, is still true in the new. The hope of humanity, the prom. ise of the world to come on this planet, rests in the children. When the Spartans replied to the king, who demanded fifty of their children as hostages, "We would prefer to give you a hundred of our most distinguished men," it was only an expression of the everlasting value of the child to any commonwealth and to every age. They had been defeated, but their hope was that the children would conquer. They had done their best, but their children, they hoped, would do better. Sparta would rise again from the cradle and the nursery. The new hands would do the new work, and the fresh hearts receive the fresh inspiration; and so, in the hope that still shone for Sparta, fifty children were of more value than a hundred fathers. It was a truth which every age has, in some way, to learn. The great hope is always in the new birth. It is in the next new life that God hides the next new thing the world needs for its use. The time comes when great dis coveries stop short of their consummation for want of a new man, and no more new discov |