46 TRANSACTIONS. 



will react with thousand-fold benefactions on your hus- 

 bandry and your heart. Let your devotions take sincerity 

 from your earnest life. Let your creed take largeness 

 from the catholicity of your out-door and heaven-arched 

 employments. The school-house, the farm-house, the town- 

 house, may well bend in homage to the meeting-house. 

 For learning without faith is but ambitious discontent; 

 and government without Christianity is power without 

 principle ; and home without the beatitudes is only an 

 animal's stall and bed, with no sacred joy and no spiritual 

 peace. Besides, are there not acres among all your fields, 

 where the only growths are gravestones and mounds, and 

 the flowers planted by mourning love ; where the only 

 seed-time is that ordained by the sad necessity, " That 

 which thou sowest is not quickened except it die ; " and 

 whose only " harvest is at the end of the world 1 " At that 

 gate of the valley you will want a warmer and surer faith 

 than Nature and her unpitying skies reveal; another 

 promise of immortality than the poor prophesying of the 

 worm and the chrysalis. You will want a Gospel, a Naza- 

 reth, a Calvary. And so you will go forth from your home, 

 and pass the school-house and the town-house by, and 

 enter in with grateful hope at the church door, on the 

 village green, and bend towards the altar. 



IV. If now, finally, we go back with him from all these 

 exterior liabilities to his own premises again, we shall 

 hardly need, by this time, to memorialize the farmer of 

 what is required of him in his house. If the school has 

 disciplined his thinking faculty and refined his taste, if the 

 town-meeting has waked in him the exalting sense of citi- 

 zenship, if the church has lifted his heart into communion 

 with the Father of all families, and inspired his conscience 

 by the prophecy of life eternal, he will scarcely be content 

 to live a drivelling dullard at home, to play the selfish 

 tyrant in the little political economy of kitchen and ])arlor, 

 or to be worse than an infidel by providing not for his 

 own. By derivation, the significance of your common 

 title, husband-ni^.n, holds you to something. Husband- 

 men, I suppose, are not bachelor-men. Our agricultural 



