Republican Herald

Home and Women.

If ever there has been a more touching and eloquent eulogium upon the charms of home and its dearest treasure, woman, than is contained in the following extract from the Christian Inquirer, it has not been our good fortune to meet it.

Our homes—what is their cornerstone but the virtue of women? And on what does social well being rest but on our homes? Must we not trace all other blessings of civilized life to the door of our private dwellings?—Are not our hearth stones, guarded by the holy forms of conjugal, filial, and parental love, the corner stones of Church and State—more sacred than either—more necessary than both? Let our temples crumble and our academies decay—let every public edifice, our halls of justice, and our capitols of State be levelled with the dust—but spare our homes. Man did not invent and he cannot improve nor abrogate them.—A private shelter to cover in two hearts dearer to each other than all the world; high walls to seclude the profane gaze of every human being—seclusion enough for children to feel that mother is a peculiar name—this is home and here is the birth place of every virtuous impulse—of every sacred thought. Here the Church and the State must come for their origin and support. Oh, spare our homes! The love we experience there gives us our faith in an Infinite goodness—the purity and disinterestedness of home are our foretaste and our earnest of a better world. In the relations there established and fostered do we find through life the chief solace and joy of existence. What friends deserve the name compared with those whom a birth right gives us? One mother is worth a thousand friends—one sister dearer and truer than 20 intimate companions. We who have played on the same hearth together under the light of smiles, who date back to the same season of innocence and hope, in whose veins runs the same blood; do we not find that years only make more sacred and important the tie that binds us? Coldness may spring up, distance may separate, different spheres may divide—but those who can love anything, who continue to love at all, must find that the friends whom God himself gave are wholly unlike any we can choose for ourselves, and that the yearning for these is the strongest spark in our expiring affections.