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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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