This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it is ominous, infectious,
and fecund of other fault and misfortune. When men do not love their
hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have
dishonoured both, and that they have never acknowledged the true
universality of that Christian worship which was indeed to supersede
the idolatry, but not the piety, of the pagan. Our God is a household
God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's
dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly and pour out its
ashes. It is not a question of mere ocular delight, it is no question
of intellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how, and
with what aspect of durability and of completeness, the domestic
buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties,
not with more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them
depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientiousness, to build our
dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent
completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a
period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions, might be
supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of
local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, in every
possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate
rather with their condition at the commencement, than their attainments
at the termination, of their worldly career; and built them to stand as
long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to
their children what they had been, and from what, if so it had been
permitted them, they had risen.
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