Home Hinderers.
"I know a husband," says the letter to me, "who gives up his Sabbaths largely to teaching in the Sunday school and to other work with and for young people. He is trying to be useful for Christ. But his wife wants him to stay home on Sunday. She thinks he is selfish, thinks he is doing too much for the church, more than a Christian need do. This wife receives all of her husband's salary, and most of his evenings are spent at home, but still she is not happy."
My correspondent also tells of a mother who will not permit her daughter to join the church, because in that case she would have to give up worldly pleasures. The daughter, who is old enough for it, wishes to join. Now my correspondent wants me to write something that will meet these two cases.
Alas! in the day of final enlightenment I think we shall all be amazed to learn how many Christian lives have been thwarted or hindered by those at home that should have been the most eager and efficient helpers. When a wife does not sympathize with her husband's zeal for the Lord or a husband with his wife's; when a mother or father looks coldly upon the religious desires and activities of son or daughter, the wormwood of bitter estrangement is mingled with what should be one of earth's most delicious and satisfying drafts.
Of course—of course I would not have any member of the household neglect the duties owed to a home. They are as sacred as the duties owed to the church. Christ is in the home, and will miss us very quickly if our love and thoughts are not there.
But the home is only a means, not an end. It is one of the agencies for the building of Christ's kingdom on earth. The most lovely and loving of homes, if it is selfishly wrapped up in itself, if it has no loving outreach toward all the world, is no home for Christ. Wife is to help husband be a better worker for Christ; husband is to help wife, and mother and father are to help their children. This law is the highest and ultimate reason for marriage and parenthood. Everything else is a duty or a pleasure along the way to this supreme duty and pleasure.
For, as false love is the most selfish thing in the world, true love, Christian love, is the most superbly and happily unselfish.
Where Would Your Home Fall?
I am greatly pleased with an interesting advertisement with which the publishers of a certain widely circulated magazine are trying to persuade advertisers that it furnishes precisely the best medium for their use.
This advertisement is mainly a picture, a big picture occupying a large part of a newspaper page. It represents a great revolving cylinder. In this cylinder are many openings, smaller at the left and progressively larger toward the right. Through these openings houses are falling, and below the cylinder they are shown lying in three great piles. At the left is a pile of poor little houses, hardly more than huts. In the middle is a pile of houses slightly better, but still mainly tenements. On the right is a big pile of nice, comfortable houses, with many that are evidently inhabited by people of wealth and refinement. It is a distinguished-looking heap of homes. It is homes of the last class, the publisher declares, that take his magazine, and that, of course, the advertisers of the country want to reach through his magazine.
I have been thinking about that graphic appeal to the pocketbook, and I have been wishing that I could make an appeal to the soul.
If that cylinder should separate homes not by their wealth but by their Christian character, into which pile would your home fall?
The three heaps would be motley to the eye. Big houses would jostle little houses and tenements would, in many cases, tumble into the same pile as Newport cottages and Fifth Avenue palaces. But on the left would be the homes that do not know Christ or practice His loving precepts, in the middle would be the careless half-way homes, and on the right would be such homes as Mary and Martha and John and Joseph of Arimathæa lived in—homes to which Christ loved to go, homes where He still to this day blessedly abides.
Ah, that is the real classification. That separation determines the homes that are really worth reaching. And if your home falls into the right pile it is the home of happiness and power, whether it is assessed for $500 or $500,000.
Home-Wellness.
We all know what homesickness is. I well remember my first long absence from home. It came when I was thirty years old, and it was to be a permanent business. I bore it pretty well. Indeed, I did not admit to myself for a moment that I was homesick, and in the ordinary sense of the word I was not; but I was not able to think of my home at all. When thoughts would lead up to it, I had to spring to the switch and throw them off on another track. To this day I dare not let my memory play around that dear old home, take me into this familiar room and that, down into the basement, up into the attic, into my own little apartment where the books were, and the table at which I wrote, and the window that let in the starlight— ah, stop that! I am getting homesick this very minute!
Some folks make a virtue of homesickness. I will have none of it. If it is not your duty to be away from home, you ought not to be away from it; and if it is your duty to be away, you ought to rejoice even in that separation and not get sick over it. No; homesickness may not be avoidable, though I think it generally is. Whenever it comes, anyway, it is not a thing to be proud of; it is at best a misfortune.
But the thing I do believe in is "home-wellness." "Home-wellness" is making the most of home while you have it.
How often we hear it said, "It is worthwhile to travel to have the joy of getting home again. One never realizes how good home is till one has been away from it for some time." How seldom we comprehend the disgrace involved in that remark!
For it is our business to understand the joys of home. It is our business to appreciate it while we are at home, and while our appreciation can do our dear ones and the precious home life some good, and not wait till we go away or till some confused return, whose transient emotions are so speedily forgotten.
Home-wellness thinks every morning as we rise: "How good it is to be a member of this household! How blithely the sun shines in at my window! How I bless God for this good home!" Home-wellness looks around at the breakfast table upon all the dear ones there, and shines out its gratitude from beaming eyes, and carols it out with cheery laugh and loving praises. Home-wellness goes through the entire day with a song in the heart. It irradiates the whole family with its satisfaction, for home-wellness is very contagious. It makes everyone work better and play better. And when the evening comes, and the sacred night takes the home in its keeping, it is a home of thanksgiving and peace that it broods under its ebon wings.
Homesickness is said to produce, very often, physical results as serious as a genuine disease; indeed, it deserves to be ranked with the diseases of the body as well as the maladies of the soul. But home-wellness is the opposite of disease; it is the household health.
Naming Our Homes.
A Missouri paper urges farmers to name their farms, and to register the names with the county clerk. "A bright name for a farm," says the State board of agriculture, "promotes pride, appeals to sentiment, lends dignity, fosters individuality, is valuable as a means of identification, and is a real business asset."
The same arguments apply to names for homes. In England the smallest suburban house is likely to possess a distinctive name, neatly displayed to the passersby. The custom is a very pleasant one, and must add much to the value of the home in the mind of every inmate. How much of our personality hinges upon our names! What would remain of it if, like prisoners, we were to our friends only No. 231 or No. 544? Yet that is the way we treat our homes.