The Kind of Religion We Want.
We want a religion that softens the step, and tunes the voice to melody, and fills the eye with sunshine, and checks the impatient exclamation and harsh rebuke: a religion that is polite, deferential to superiors, courteous to inferiors and considerate to friends; a religion that goes into the family, and keeps the husband from being cross when dinner is late, and 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 amuses the children as well as instructs them; cares for the servants besides paying them promptly, projects the honey-moon into the harvest-moon, and makes the happy home like the Eastern fig-tree, bearing in its bosom at once the beauty of the tender blossom and the glory of the ripened fruit. We want a religion that shall interpose between the ruts and the gullies and rocks of the highway of life and the sensitive souls that are traveling over them.