On habits and manners

You know better than I can tell you what those obstacles are, and I believe you are rapidly learning what I have again and again told you in these pages, that they can only be surmounted or removed by patient, hard, intelligent work. For such work you have now the opportunity ; in it you have the warm sympathy and wise assistance of teachers and friends, to it you have every stimulus that human life can offer. More than all this, and I believe that there are many of you who have a deep and honest sense of the truth of what I am going to say, you have the humble faith that you are the children of an all-wise Father whose will it is honor and gladness to fulfil, in whose justice you can most absolutely trust. If you can put love for Him at the foundation of your lives, all the details of which I have tried to teach you, something, will seem neither trivial nor impossible, you will know the meaning of that beautiful old verse, — "A servant, with this clause, Makes drudgery divine ; Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, Makes that and the action fine." And you can so order your ways that wherever you may be, or whatever may be your work, you can feel and show that you are about your Father's business. It is to this end that all decency, all courtesy, all honor, all study tend, and this is the conclusion of the whole matter : "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." CHAPTER XVI. HOUSE AND HOME. The corner stone of all civilization is the Family ; the existence of families includes the existence of homes, and a home pre-supposes a house, so that we are swiftly and easily led to comprehend the importance to the human race, or at least to all civilized members of it, of the houses which shelter them, and which, furthermore, supply so large a share of the comforts, the charms, the sweet and powerful influences of Home. The effect of well built, convenient, attractive houses, is hardly to be overrated ; they are so supremely civilizing that men and women can hardly fail to be made, in one way or another, the better for living in them ; they seem to offer a premium upon neatness and taste, and are a constant stimulant to the desire for comfort and beauty, which is common to all people above the level of barbarians. No young man at the outset of his life can have a safer or wiser ambition than that which he gains from his desire to become a householder ; no young woman can go far wrong who believes that to become a housekeeper, in the true meaning of the term, is a good and beautiful thing, and neither of these positions are, as a general thing, to be lightly won or easily kept. A man who has only his own labor to depend upon must make up his mind to much hard work and some self sacrifice before he attains to the undivided ownership of a suitable and comfortable house ; and a woman, who in her childhood and youth has known little or nothing of the details of properly organized housework, needs to lay up a stock of courage and perseverance when she promises herself to become a true housekeeper.