The physical conditions of a home, and the moral and spiritual characters developed in the home act and re-act on each other with clock-like precision. Would you expect a neat and orderly housemaid if you engaged a girl from a home in China which Mrs. S. C. Perkins thus describes?-- The great mass of the people live in what can only be called hovels, the family occupying one room, shared with pigs and chickens; damp, dark, unventilated, and unclean. Even in the houses of the rich there is a certain cheerlessness owing to the lack of carpets, the absence of sunlight, and the stiff arrangement of the furniture. The odor of incense in all houses renders the atmosphere close and unpleasant. The people will not use whitewash, because white is an unlucky color; indeed, their many superstitions interfere with the comfort of the poorer classes quite as much as does their poverty. In Northern China every house has its kang, a platform of stone about two feet high, underneath which a fire is kindled for warmth and for cooking, the heat being carried through it by a flue into the chimney. Here the family sleep at night, sit by day, and on it they cook their food.[17] How much ambition would one be able to arouse in a school girl coming from this home in Burma? The home of one of the mission school girls is described in this way: “It is a large teakwood house, and we walk right in, for there is no door bell. The large hall is half filled with piles of wood, for the family lives on the second floor. A servant tells us to go up, and we climb the long stairs. At the top we find the lady of the house sitting on a mat smoking. She motions us to be seated. In the large room are two mats, two chairs, and two tables.”[18] [Sidenote: Absence of innocence.] Innocent childhood, modesty, purity can hardly be counted on in the unnumbered homes of Africa, India, Persia, Korea, and other lands where the whole family lives in one room, where sons bring their brides to swell the number of those whose every act and word is seen or heard by the whole patriarchal family. If further evidence is needed of the inter-relation of the physical home surroundings and the formation of character, study the history of those savage communities that have come under the power of the Gospel, as for instance the New Hebrides Islands, and it will be very evident that “godliness is profitable for all things,” even for introducing a comfortable, tidy home in which one can stand upright and enjoy some degree of privacy! [Sidenote: Moral influences.]