in domestic life.
There are homes at once affluent and joyless, groaning with needless waste
and barren of needed comfort, in which the idea of repose seems as
irrelevant as Solomon's figure of lying down on the top of a mast, and all
from a pervading spirit of disorder. In such dwellings there is no love of
home. The common house is a mere lodging and feeding place. Society is
sought elsewhere, pleasure elsewhere; and for the young and easily
impressible there is the strongest inducement to those modes of
dissipation in which vice conceals its grossness behind fair exteriors and
under attractive forms. On the other hand, the well-ordered house affords
to its inmates the repose, comfort, and enjoyment which they crave and
need, and for those whose characters are in the process of formation may
neutralize allurements to evil which might else be irresistible.

Section III.

Measure.

There are many objects, as to which *the question of duty is a question of
more or less*. To this class belong not only food and drink, but all forms
of luxury, indulgence, recreation, and amusement. In all these the choice
lies between excess, abstinence, and temperance. The tendency to excess is
intensely strong, when not restrained by prudence or principle. This
tendency is by no means confined to the appetite for intoxicating liquors,
though modern usage has restricted to excess in this particular the term
_intemperance_, which properly bears a much more extended signification.
There is reason to believe that there is fully as much intemperance in
food as in drink, and with at least equally ruinous consequences as to
capacity, character, health, and life,--with this difference only, that
gluttony stupefies and stultifies, while drunkenness maddens; and that the
glutton is merely a dead weight on the community, while the drunkard is an
active instrument of annoyance and peril. There are probably fewer who
sink into an absolutely beastly condition by intemperance in food than by
intemperance in drink; but of persons who do not expose themselves to open
scandal, those whose brains are muddled, whose sensibilities are
coarsened, and whose working power is impaired by over-eating, are more
numerous than those in whom similar effects are produced by over-free
indulgence in intoxicating drinks. Intemperance in amusements, also, is
not uncommon, and would undoubtedly be more prevalent than it is, were no