And shows its perfect law?
If there thy faith shall fail thee,
If there no shrine be found,
What can thy prayers avail thee
With kneeling crowds around?
Go! leave thy gift unoffered
Beneath religion's dome,
And be thy first fruits proffered
At home! dear home!




FIRESIDE INFLUENCE.


Is it not true that parents are the lawgivers of their children? Does
not a mother's counsel--does not a father's example--cling to the
memory, and haunt us through life? Do we not often find ourselves
subject to habitual trains of thought? and, if we seek to discover the
origin of these, are we not insensibly led back, by some beaten and
familiar track, to the paternal threshold? Do we not often discover some
home-chiseled grooves in our minds, into which the intellectual
machinery seems to slide, as by a sort of necessity? Is it not, in
short, a proverbial truth, that the controlling lessons of life are
given beneath the parental roof? We know, indeed, that wayward passions
spring up in early life, and, urging us to set authority at defiance,
seek to obtain the mastery of the heart. But, though struggling for
liberty and license, the child is shaped and molded by the parent. The
stream that bursts from the fountain, and seems to rush forward headlong