eciation of
which is so necessary for constructive action and large results in life,
I particularly desire to make appear. And it is this relationship that
gives appropriateness to the handling of the three in a single address
tho each, from a different point of view, might well be made the center
of an entire evening's consideration.

The home, the church, and the school! What troops of memories arise
around each as we turn our gaze backward! How sweet and sacred appears
the home as we recall mother and father, sister and brother, in the old
home setting in the early days of our pilgrimage! How solemn and
hallowed seems the church as we go back in thought to our first
connections with it in Sunday school, in its communion service, and to
our own entrance as members! And how fascinating and joyful, even the
sometimes tinged with regret or apprehension, the school as we retrace
our pathway over the years of its associations! The home, the church,
and the school--but the first of these is the home.

THE HOME

Let me ask you, therefore, to think with me first of the home--of that
institution which in its very inception, more than any other, was
God-inspired; that institution which from its very beginning up to the
present hour has, more than any other, reflected the spirit and purpose
of God--that institution whose center is the child and whose function
that child's development--_the home_. It is the most ancient of all the
institutions of man. Organized and set apart at the very dawn of human
life, when the morning stars were singing together, the divine Voice
gave it sanction and stated its function: "Be fruitful and multiply, and
replenish the earth." And the institution, as the ages have passed, has
never once lapsed and never repudiated its origin or its work. Still it
has advanced so far and improved so much in outward appearance, at any
rate, and developed so greatly that, as we know it to-day, we may almost
call it a modern institution, so modern indeed and so different from all
others as to merit the name of American institution.

Students of history have so laid bare the conditions of living and of
home life in the past as to reveal to us the fact that the home, as we
know it and love it, did not exist prior to our own day. In all former
periods, even tho glorious to look back upon, some of them, golden days
as they were of the world's upward struggle, we search in vain for our
kind of a home. The home of t