c burdens and is willing to work for the political, educational,
and social advancement of the community must of necessity spend some
of his evenings away from home. There are associations and churches
that have a right to demand a share of a man's presence and means, and
that is a weak woman who always looks offended when her husband goes
out in the evening.
But club-houses become a pest when they demand all a man's evenings;
and that is a result we are called to deplore. Every head of a
household is called to be its educator, its companion, its religious
instructor and exemplar; not only to furnish the wardrobe and to make
the money to pay the bills when they come in, but to give his
highest intellectual energies and social faculties to the amusement,
instruction, and improvement of the household.
But I describe the history of thousands of households when I say that
the tea is rapidly taken, and while yet the family linger the father
shoves back his chair, has "an engagement," lights his cigar and
starts out, not returning until after midnight. That is the history of
three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, except when he is sick
and cannot get out.
How about home duties? Have you fulfilled all your vows? Would your
wife ever have married you with such a prospect? Wait until your sons
get to be sixteen or seventeen years of age, and they too will shove
back from the tea-table, have an "engagement," light their cigars, go
over to their club-houses, their night-key rattling in your door after
midnight--the effect of your example. And as your son's constitution
may not be as strong as yours, and the liquor he drinks more terribly
drugged, he will catch up with you on the road to death although you
got the start of him. And so you will both go to hell together! A
revolving Drummond-light on the front of a locomotive casts its gleam
through the darkness as it is turned around; so I catch up the lamp of
God's truth and turn it round until its tremendous glare flashes into
all the club-houses of our cities.
Flee the presence of the dissipating club-houses. "Paid your money?"
Sacrifice that rather than your soul. "Good fellows," are they? They
cannot stay what they are under such influences. Mollusca live two
hundred fathoms down in the Norwegian seas. The Siberian stag grows
fat on the stunted growth of Altaian peaks. The Hedysarium thrives
amid the desolation of Sahara. Tufts of osier and birch grow on the
ho
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