The Right Sort of Religion.
We want a religion that goes into the family and keeps the husband from being spiteful when dinner is late—keeps the wife from fretting when the husband tracks the newly washed floor with his muddy boots, and makes the husband mindful of the scraper and the door mat; keeps the mother patient when the baby is cross, and keeps the baby pleasant; amuses the children as well as instructs them; wins as well as governs; projects the honeymoon into the harvest moon; and makes the happy hours like the eastern fig-tree, bearing in its bosom at once the beauty of the tender blossom and the glory of the ripening fruit. We want a religion that bears heavily, not merely on the “exceeding sinfulness of sin,” but on the exceeding rascality of lying and stealing; a religion that banishes small measures from the counters, small baskets from stalls, pebbles from the cotton-bags, clay from paper, sand from sugar, chicory from coffee, annatto from butter, beet juice from vinegar, alum from bread, strychnine from wine, water from milk cans, and buttons from the contribution box. The religion that is to save the world will not put all the big strawberries at the top and all the bad ones at the bottom. It will not offer more baskets of foreign wine than the vineyards ever produced bottles, and more barrels of Genesee flour than all the wheat fields of New York grow, and all her mills grind. It will not make one-half a pair of shoes of good leather and the other of poor leather, so that the first shall redound to the maker’s credit, and the second, to his cash. It will not put Jouvin’s stamp on Jenkins’ kid gloves, nor make Paris bonnets in the back room of a Boston milliner’s shop, nor let a piece of velvet that professes to measure twelve yards come to an untimely end in the tenth, or a spool of sewing silk that vouches for twenty yards be nipped in the bud at fourteen and a half, nor the cotton thread spool break to the yard-stick fifty of the two hundred yards of promise that was given to the eye, nor yard wide cloth measure less than thirty-six inches from selvage to selvage, nor all wool delaines and all linen handkerchiefs be amalgamized with clandestine cotton, nor coats made of woolen rags pressed together be sold to the unsuspecting public for legal broadcloth. It does not put bricks at five dollars a thousand into chimneys it contracted to build of seven dollar materials, nor smuggle white pine floors that have paid for hard pine, nor leave yawning cracks in closets where boards ought to join, nor daub ceilings that ought to be smoothly plastered, nor make window blinds of slats that cannot stand the wind, and paint that cannot stand the sun, and fastenings that may be looked at, but are on no account to be touched. The religion that is to sanctify the world, pays its debts. It does not consider that forty cents returned for one hundred cents given is according to the gospel, though it may be according to law. It looks upon a man who has failed in trade and who continues to live in luxury, as a thief. It looks upon a man who promises to pay fifty dollars on demand with interest, and who neglects to pay it on demand with or without interest, as a liar.