The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

pious consumption, which saw luxury goods as a primary means to spiritualize the self and to animate both economic and moral progress” (4-5). While this is true, one can also see how Crowfield warns against consumer excess as well. Of course, his wife and daughters resist his warnings and create a parlor that no one can use so that the furniture and the carpets will not be ruined. Crowfield’s warnings remap the parlor by suggesting that families can come together in rooms that are inviting and not formal, yet at the same time he lives in a house that maintains an exclusively-furnished parlor. Even though the women in Crowfield’s family create an uninhabitable parlor, Crowfield continues to emphasize the idea that families and guests will gather in comfortable spaces and that one purpose for this gathering is for families to participate in “home religion.” According to Clifford Clark, Jr. in “Domestic Architecture as an Index to Social History: The Romantic Revival and the Cult of Domesticity in America, 1840-1870,” Horace Bushnell, a minister from Hartford, Connecticut was the first to locate Christianity, not in the church, but in people’s private homes in his 1847 book Christian Nurture (540). In The American Home , David Handlin adds that in antebellum America “home religion had become an accepted part of American Christianity” (4). The reason “home religion” was so important to antebellum ministers was that they thought that homes could more easily influence children to remember “moral examples” and “guide [them] as [they] made [their] way in a world full of ruinous temptations” (Handlin 14). House and Home Papers and Christopher Crowfield advocate a thrifty consumerism that will create home-spaces the family will not want to leave. As a result, these home-spaces can become a place of informal, private, conversational instruction much like the setting and tone House and Home Papers represents for its readers. At the beginning of the book’s final chapter, “Home Religion,” Stowe brings home and religion together when she places her reader into 30