l up the vision of such. Think how many such abodes there
are this very night, which winter besieges with all his terrors, and
into which he sends his invading frost! Think what Home is to hundreds,
and, therefore, how life looks to them, seen through this atmosphere of
disease and want, with starvation by the hearth, and death at the door,
and misery everywhere! Think, when the cold pierces even through all
your wrappages of comfort, and scarcity almost pinches, what forms of
humanity, with lungs, and nerves, and hearts, and every capacity for
suffering, are scraping the moss of subsistence from the barest rocks of
life, and struggling every day through an avalanche! Think what this
Sabbath has been in the dwellings of the poor, you who have had time to
listen to the Gospel, and have heard it comfortably--so comfortably,
perhaps, that you have fallen asleep under it--think what this Sabbath
has been in the dwellings of the poor! And yet, when I consider what,
doubtless, the Sabbath has been in some of those places, I am thankful
that the highest ideal, the richest sanctities of Home, are not
dependent upon outward conditions; for even there, unfaltering duty and
true love have made the bare walls beautiful, and prayer has set the
desolate chamber on the steps of the Divine throne; and before the eye
of faith the cold arch of the winter night, that looks in through hole
and cranny, has burst into a revelation of heaven, and a path for those
ministering angels that come to help the sufferer and to comfort God's
poor.

With more unqualified sadness, therefore, our thoughts must rest upon
still another group of dwellings, where deprivation and ignorance are
mingled with vice and crime--where want and guilt strip away the masks
of civilization, and bring out the essential savage in man's nature.
These also we must call "_homes_!" These breathing-holes of abomination,
these moral tombs, where huddle the demons of violence, and cunning, and
debauchery, and from which they issue. That vast Hades of social evil
opening downward from our streets, where the best ideals have no type,
and the purest sentiments scarce a name; where God is but a dark cloud
of muttering thunder in the soul; where all that is fair in womanhood is
dishevelled and transformed; and where childhood is baptized in infamy,
trained to sin, canopied with curses, and rocked to sleep by the
convulsive hell of passions all around it.

The Homes of the Metropolis