“I have already given you a peep at the life in a heathen kraal. Now repair to a Christian home. Here we find everything simpler and more quiet. Here polygamy, with all its attendant sensualities and riot, has given place to restraint of passions and a purer union. Here is but one house and one wife. The Christian man’s love is now undivided, and all his efforts are centred in one objective. The single house is no longer a stack of grass enclosing a dungeon of darkness, but a square-walled building, humble indeed, but airy and bright. In place of being obliged to crawl like animals on our knees into the heathen hut, we may enter erect as becomes the dignity of man, through swinging doors. We come not into a smoky darkness, but into a dwelling flooded with the light of glazed windows. In the kraal we found the whole family, old and young, male and female, huddled together night and day in the one small room; here we have a dwelling with separate rooms, so that parents and children and strangers may each enjoy some privacy. The air is not only light with sunshine; it is also pure and clean, for no cooking operations are performed herein, but in a special kitchen outside. In the heathen hut, whether for sitting or sleeping, we were accommodated on the floor; now we may sit more respectably on chairs, eat our meals from a table, and rest our weary bones on a raised bed. “At four or five o’clock in the morning, according to season,--for the Zulu is an early riser,--all are up. We hear a gentle murmur from within. Ah! it is the familiar sound, so sweet to us, but never heard in the heathen kraal. It is the hour of morning prayer, when husband and wife and little ones join their hearts and voices together in a fervent hymn of praise or hopeful supplication for protection and aid.” [Sidenote: The home, the centre of a nation’s life.] The home is the centre of a nation’s life. More and more emphasis is being laid in enlightened communities on the need of proper home environment and on the grave risks and great dangers that accompany the lack of such environment. If one studies the labors and writings of the great social and religious workers of today, this note of emphasis on home life and training will be heard to ring out loud and clear, above all other sounds of harmony or discord,--a call to meet a definite need. Dr. Devine has voiced this thought and enlarged upon it in its various phases in his recent book, “The Family and Social Work,” in which he claims that “To maintain normal family life, to restore it when it has been interfered with, to create conditions more and more favorable to it, is thus the underlying object of all our social work. Efforts to relieve distress and to improve general conditions are shaped by our conception of what constitutes normal family life.” [Sidenote: Christianity’s gift to non-Christian homes.]