The Right Kind of Religion.
By Gail Hamilton
THE religion that the world is dying for, is not a treasure, valued and cherished, indeed, but cherished under a glass case in the best room, carefully dusted, and visible only on days of high festival. We want a religion that is an atmosphere, wrapping us about, above, and below; going down into the lungs in deep-drawn inspiration, to purify and energize; filtering into the blood, to tint and quicken; spreading out in the skin, to protect and adorn; piercing noisome cellars, to dispel the noxious, death-dealing vapors; mounting into the parlors, and bedrooms, and kitchens, to keep them sweet and healthful; permeating and interpenetrating all things: a savor of life unto life. We want a religion that softens the step, and tones the voice to melody, and fills the eye with sunshine, and checks the impatient exclamation and the 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 spiteful when the dinner is late, and keeps the dinner from being 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—cares for the servants, besides paying them promptly—projects the honeymoon 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; a religion that looks after the apprentice in the shop, and the clerk behind the counter, and the student in the office, with a fatherly care and a motherly love—setting the solitary in families, introducing them to pleasant and wholesome society, that their lonely feet may not be led into temptation, forgiving occasional lapses while striving to prevent them, and to supply, so far as may be, the place of the natural guardians by a vigilance11that attracts without annoying. We want a religion that shall interpose continually between the ruts, and gullies, and rocks of the highway of life, and the sensitive souls that are traveling over them. We want a religion that bears heavily, not only on the "exceeding sinfulness of sin," but on the exceeding rascality of lying and stealing—a religion that banishes short measures from the counters, small baskets from the stalls, pebbles from the cotton bags, clay from paper, sand from sugar, chicory from coffee, otter from butter, flour from cream of tartar, 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 sell raisins on stems, instead of stems without raisins. It will not offer more baskets of foreign wines 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 of 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; nor, if the shoes have been promised on Thursday morning, will it let Thursday morning spin out till Saturday night. It will not put Jovin's stamp on Jenkin's 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 amalgamated with clandestine cotton; nor water-proof cloaks be soaked through in an hour; nor coats made of old woolen rags pressed together be sold to an unsuspecting public for legal broadcloth. It does not put bricks at five dollars per thousand into chimneys which it contracted to build of seven-dollar materials; nor smuggle white pine into 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 with 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. It does not send the little boy, who has come for the daily quart of milk, into the barnyard to see the calf, and seize the opportunity to skim off the cream; nor does it surround stale butter with fresh, and sell the whole for good; nor pass off the slack-baked bread upon the stable-boy; nor dust the pepper; nor "deacon" the apples. It does not put cotton gathering threads into the skirt, to succumb on the slightest provocation; nor content itself with fastening seams at the beginning and the end, trusting to Providence for the security of the intermediate stages.—Gail Hamilton.