lessons remain.


ESSENTIALS TO A HAPPY HOME.

Although home means love, yet love alone may not insure happiness.
In addition to love, without which a true home can not exist, we select
four essential requisites to make home life useful and happy. These
are intelligence, unselfishness, attractiveness, and religion.

First, Intelligence. Much of the misery of the world in individual and
family life is due to gross ignorance. Once the father of a family said
to me, "We did not get our mail to-day, I miss my reading." Knowing
the man we were surprised at such a remark, and ventured to ask him
what papers he took. A list of ten or a dozen papers was named. All
of them were newspapers. One was a general daily, two were local
dailies, and the rest were local weekly papers. No intelligent person
would have carried over three of those papers from the post-office.
This man spent hours upon a class of reading that should be finished
with a few minutes each day. In this same family the mother told me
that she had never rode on a railway train, and that she had never been
outside of her own county. This is an exceptional case, but it illustrates
how that ignorance makes thrift and happiness impossible in a home,
neither of which belong to this family. Here every law of health is
violated, foresight in providing for the physical comforts of the home
is wanting; little attention is given to the education of the children; no
sacrifices to-day enrich to-morrow; life is a humdrum, a routine, a
dread, with no exuberance, joy, or hope. In time, such a life leads to
failure and gloom, to secret, then to open vice, and to a final shipwreck
of the home and of the individual. In a similar yet in a less marked way,