His apostles, or wait for their strong and repeated enunciation of the everlasting stringency of the fifth commandment of the Decalogue, "Honour thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise."

We can scarcely forget how Divine Inspiration has made the condition of our Home Relations the test of a standing or falling national virtue. The Old Testament closes, the New Testament opens, with that definition of the Elijah mission as the reprover and restorer of all things, "He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." "He shall go before Him, in the strength and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." The very substitution of the clause," the disobedient to the wisdom of the just," for the original of Malachi, " and the hearts of the children to their fathers," seems suggestive at least of the connection between filial estrangement and general ungodliness-between a heart undutiful and a heart irreverent -a son alienated from his father and a man alienated from his God. Most certain it is, that the state of the homes is the state of the population. If you would know what society is, you must examine the family. The terrible thing is when you find in the lower classes of the national life an early abandonment of the home, or a stay within it on the footing of an absolute and avowed independence. In many of our great towns, the daughter, as well as the son, is a lodger; the contribution, which is her bounden duty, to the family resources takes the form of a rent for board and lodging, which, on the first word of rebuke or restraint, she can, with or without notice, simply carry elsewhere. The religion of the family, such as it is, is not a family religion: each member of the family goes his or her own way on the day of rest-to church or chapel, to this or that church, to this or that chapel, in absolute disregard of the wish of the parent, or of the companionship of brother or sister. The family life is a rope of sand, without recognition and without cohesion. Is not that a true word, a Divine insight, which traces the faults, sins, and crimes of a nation to its root and source here? Is it not the estrangement of children from parents which makes our world the wilderness it is? Is it not at this point that the " Elijah" must begin his restoring, that the "Elisha" must throw in his healing salt, if the restoration is to be thorough and the cure vital?

These gross and vulgar forms of home disunion are, of course, not those of our social standing. If the same evil exists among us, it will manifest itself in a different way-under the mask, probably, of many lingering civilities and kindlinesses. Nevertheless, the principle of the same disorganisation may be at work even here. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that there are not thousands of homes, gentle and simple, in our own country to-day where the relationships of parents and sons are exercised in beautiful harmony, with all the reverence on the one side, with all the tenderness on the other side, and with all the love on both, of which this most gracious, most Divine institution is capable. And yet is the Restorer's office absolutely superfluous to-day? Is there no such want amongst us as the turning of hearts to each other, in the relation of sons and fathers? You will not say it. It is quite possible to have great estrangements of heart and feeling decently and decorously glossed over. There is a selfish neglect of the home, in presence or absence, quite easy without one disrespectful word spoken. There is even a contemptuous treatment possible-as though the young knew better than the old, had a revelation, all their own, of the thing that is manly and proper. And there is a slight, silly, trifling treatment possible-a general levity of tone and manner, making all serious counsel, all grave conversation, all true sympathy, out of the question-all that is deep or high, all that is really great or heavenward, in the intercourse between a youth and his father, or his mother, or his brothers and sisters, and leaving behind it, after each sojourn or visit, a sense of void and of vanity, bitterly disappointing to the home-heart that was yearning for confidence and for help, to be received and given, in the anxious, critical journey from birth to death, from earth to heaven.

The result of these things is, in various forms, that evil thing which the "Elijah" mission comes to repair. Often it is a careless estrangement. There is no motive in it, no reason for it, no avowal -perhaps no consciousness of it. It is what might easily have been avoided-what might possibly be removed, were there but just the thing which, alas! is the thing wanting-an earnest purpose, a conscientious resolve. Meanwhile, all is playing, fighting, jesting; nothing is called by its own name; the very relationship itself has a nickname, for which it is pleaded that it means nothing, when, unhappily, that is the very worst of pleas, making into an excuse the

very purposelessness which is the crime. Now and then, not quite rarely, it is a religious estrangement. The son has taken up opinions, which are not those of the home, on subjects of sacred import. He may be right in so doing-may have given much time, large reading, deep thought, earnest prayer, to the discovery; he cannot help the result. Then arises the practical question. This new doctrine is not the doctrine of the home; the home dislikes it, protests against it, will have none of it; unwise arguments, injudicious entreaties, overbearing commands, are heaped upon him; much, and sorely against his will, alienation follows; it is not his doing; he tried all gentle methods, and they were in vain. But how often But how often is it otherwise! There was no modesty in the manner, no humility in the language, no reluctance to differ, no moderation in the carrying out of the new, no show of regret in the abandonment of the old. The alienation might have been avoided without cowardice or compromise.-Far, far more often the estrangement is the consequence of sin. By some one of the thousand wiles or assaults of evil, the son has been led astray from the God of his father. He has that in his bosom which cannot dwell in the home; if it does, it must first disguise itself. A guilty secret is there, such as innocent sisters could not hear of and live. A deep sense of hollowness, a burning wound of shame, makes it torture to be as he is, where he is. A distance wide as the poles asunder severs him from the days when home could be home to him. The habit of dissimulation grows. At last he is a stranger amongst next friends. The heart of the son is alienated from the father. Where is the "Elijah that shall turn it back again?

We ought to be able to answer that question. There is a balm in Gilead for all sorrows; may there but be the Divine Physician to apply it!

But now we must say a word or two as to what Home is-in God's intention, and in the experience of His children.

Home is our haven. In early years it is a place of safe keeping. What should we have been without that safeguard? Have we ever stopped to commiserate and to feel for the homeless? Those poor children who never had a home-no sweet memories of gentle nurture, of kind smiles and loving words of the presence of all good and the absence of all evil-can we wonder that they fall into bad ways and vile habits? What was there to warn them off, or to win them another way? What was there so much as to distinguish for

them between good and evil? God's holy ordinance of a loving and tender home-this was wanting to them, and, with it, all that "preventing with the blessings of goodness" of which a Psalmist tells, and of which we, the worst of us, have had experience. But that which home was to us in infancy and childhood, that it still is to us. in the occasional return. Where is the young man who does not owe much, who might not owe more, to his holidays from school, to his vacations from college? When we return home, we shake off the surroundings and encumbrances of a factitious existence, and go back into all the naturalness and reality of the rock from which we were hewn. "For a few short weeks," said a voice silent now for almost forty years, "this fatal spell will now be taken off from you, and you will live and breathe in freedom." O the reparative, restorative influence, as it might be, of those "few short weeks"! Repent of your neglect of them. Use them hereafter, if God spares you, to the full.

Home is our confessional. Yes, before there was altar or shrine, ministry or priesthood, home was; and the father of the household was its priest. God modelled upon that exemplar all priesthood that was ever His institution. His priesthood replaced not the home; still less is it replaced by that Christian ministry which leaves all Christians priests. The confessional, as God ordained it, is the home. Thither carry your secrets-there unbosom and there leave them. Absolution is of God only. "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" I speak of the human instrumentality, and I say that, for one man whose best confessor is the clergyman, for a hundred and a thousand men the best, the only safe, confessor is in his home. Yes, in home! Many a secret in which there is danger-moral, spiritual danger— in divulging in a vestry or a chancel may be confided with nothing but advantage to a brother, to a father-best of all, to a mother. Fear not that you will be misunderstood or abhorred. Fear not the being indelicate. The purest of Christian matrons knows something of the evil that is in the world; she can understand you. Fear not lest her love should spurn from her, for his sin, the son of her womby A word a half-word-will tell all that she need know-unspoken unspeakable will be the comfort, the relief, the emancipation for you! Of all the terrors of a mother, concealment is the most terrible. Confidence given will be joy more than grief, even if it should tell of the most heinous sin that man is capable of. Then, if there be

but the honest heart-without which there would not be the confession-infinite will be the help in regaining the right way from knowing that a mother sympathises, counsels, and prays!

Yet one word more. Home is our friend. Very delightful is other friendship; ask not of me any depreciation of it. "There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother." The mere fact that I have chosen him partly proves and partly ensures the congeniality and the sympathy. But yet I say it-home is the friend. It is the dear ones of birth and nature that will go through life with us. Friends may be severed beyond the reach of voice or sin-may form their own new ties, or their own new life-tie, and be partially lost to us. The home and its belongings change not. We go back to them, as to our own, after the longest separations, after the widest wanderings. Hold fast by your home. Even its relics and fragments are precious.

I must add yet three concluding words. First, remember the "home relations" of others besides yourself. Let the thought make you sympathetic-considerate towards those beneath you in station, servants and tradesmen. Take pleasure in entering into their home feelings. Those more especially who have left homes of their own to serve you-how desirous you should be to help them in remembering their homes, to rejoice in their home joys, and to weep in their home sorrows. Still more, let the thought make you doubly watchfu against drawing others into sin. Do not, in wantonness or in selfishness, involve another, beside or beneath you, in that miserable alienation from home which we have spoken of as the certain consequence of sinning. The poorest has a home, however homely. The woman who is a "sinner" had a home once. Be not you instrumental in adding one lock or one bar to that home if it be now shut behind her.

Secondly, beware of so treating your own home in the present as that it shall be the bitterest memory to you in a day that shall be. If you knew what it is to be what the Psalmist speaks of as "a man that mourneth for his mother," you would dread the having to feel in that season of heaviness that, by omission or commission of yours, you ever made that mother's heart to ache for you! While yet there is time, think of that last end, and treasure not up unto yourselves sorrow in the cloudy and dark day!

Thirdly, my last word is spoken to a few in this congregation