Killing Themselves with Work.
MANY a husband has said, "Don't ask my wife to do anything for the church, or missionary society, or temperance cause, she has enough to do at home—she is killing herself with work as it is;" and he tells the truth. But if the husband would look a little closer into matters, he would find that his wife was killing herself over work that was ruining his children, cursing the world and blighting the church; that she was sacrificing her all to fashion and show. Month after month and year after year the worldly women of the church toil on for the personal adornment of themselves and their children till heart and flesh fail, and an untimely grave covers them out of our sight. "Martyrs to fashion," would be the most truthful and fitting epitaph that could be put upon their tombstones. Many a professedly Christian mother has wrapped her enfeebled infant in embroidered muslin and flannels, into which her child's life-blood had been stitched. In many a professedly Christian home the first lesson a child learns is how to dress in the prevailing style. It leaves its cradle admiring its fine clothes, and suffers hours of torture with curling papers and crimping pins, before it has learned to say, "Now I lay me down to sleep." It is not surprising that the tender twig bent world-ward from the very first, should turn from the church to the opera, the theatre and the ball-room. When we look about we are grieved to find that so few of the young men and women reared in the church are loving, working Christians. But it is not surprising. If from infancy they are taught to feel that the world and its favors are better than the church and its privileges—more to be desired than spiritual riches, we ought not to expect anything else than a lack of interest and confidence on their part. If you want your child to be a Christian, make the beauty and power of your Christianity felt at home in the daily life. Those who are killing themselves in their scramble after the world and its follies, are indeed killing themselves for time and eternity.—Christian Women.