Part 10 (2/2)
The public residence of hotel and boarding-house abolishes the grace of hospitality. Your guest does not want to come to such a table. No one wants to run such a gauntlet of acute and merciless hyper-criticism. Unless you have a home of your own you will not be able to exercise the best rewarded of all the graces. For exercise of this grace what blessing came to the Shunamite in the restoration of her son to life because she entertained Elisha, and to the widow of Zarephath in the perpetual oil well of the miraculous cruise because she fed a hungry prophet, and to Rahab in the preservation of her life at the demolition of Jericho because she entertained the spies and to Laban in the formation of an interesting family relation because of his entertainment of Jacob, and to Lot in his rescue from the destroyed city because of his entertainment of the angels, and to Mary and Martha and Zaccheus in spiritual blessing because they entertained Christ, and to Publius in the island of Melita in the healing of his father because of the entertainment of Paul drenched from the s.h.i.+pwreck, and of innumerable houses throughout Christendom upon which have come blessings from generation to generation because their doors swung easily open in the enlarging, enn.o.bling, irradiating, and divine grace of hospitality. I do not know what your experience has been, but I have had men and women visiting at my house who left a benediction on every room--in the blessing they asked at the table, in the prayer they offered at the family altar, in the good advice they gave the children, in the gospelization that looked out from every lineament of their countenances; and their departure was the sword of bereavement.
The Queen of Norway, Sweden and Denmark had a royal
CUP OF TEN CURVES,
or lips, each one having on it the name of the distinguished person who had drank from it. And that cup which we offer to others in Christian hospitality, though it be of the plainest earthenware, is a royal cup, and G.o.d can read on all its sides the names of those who have taken from it refreshment. But all this is impossible unless you have a home of your own. It is the delusion as to what is necessary for a home that hinders so many from establis.h.i.+ng one. Thirty rooms are not necessary, nor twenty, nor fifteen, nor ten, nor five, nor three. In the right way plant a table, and couch, and knife and fork, and a cup, and a chair, and you can raise a young paradise. Just start a home, on however small a scale, and it will grow. When King Cyrus was invited to dine with an humble friend the king made the one condition of his coming that the only dish be one loaf of bread, and the most imperial satisfactions have sometimes banqueted on the plainest fare.
Do not be caught in the delusion of many thousands in postponing a home until they can have an expensive one. That idea is the devil's trap that catches men and women innumerable who will never have any home at all. Capitalists of America, build plain homes for the people.
Let this tenement-house system, in which hundreds of thousands of the people of our cities are wallowing in the mire, be broken up by small homes, where people can have their own firesides and their own altar.
In this great continent there is room enough for every man and woman to have a home. Morals and civilization and religion demand it.
SMALL HOMES NEEDED
We want done all over this land what George Peabody and Lady Burdett-Coutts did in England, and some of the large manufacturers of this country have done for the villages and cities, in building small houses at cheap rents, so that the middle cla.s.ses can have separate homes. They are the only cla.s.s not provided for. The rich have their palaces, and the poor have their poorhouses, and criminals have their jails; but what about the honest middle cla.s.ses, who are able and willing to work, and yet have small income? Let the capitalists, inspired of G.o.d and pure patriotism, rise and build whole streets of small residences. The laborer may have, at the close of the day, to walk or ride further than is desirable to reach it, but when he gets to his destination in the eventide he will find something worthy of being called by that glorious and impa.s.sioned and heaven-descended word, ”home.”
SOMETHING TO SAVE FOR.
Young married man, as soon as you can buy such a place, even if you have to put on it a mortgage reaching from base to cap-stone. The much abused mortgage, which is ruin to a reckless man, to one prudent and provident is the beginning of a competency and a fortune, for the reason he will not be satisfied until he has paid it off, and all the household are put on stringent economies until then. Deny yourself all superfluities and all luxuries until you can say: ”Everything in this house is mine, thank G.o.d!--every timber, every brick, every foot of plumbing, every door-sill.” Do not have your children born in a boarding-house, and do not yourself be buried from one. Have a place where your children can shout and sing and romp without being overhauled for the racket. Have a kitchen where you can do something toward the reformation of evil cookery and the lessening of this nation of dyspeptics. As Napoleon lost one of his great battles by an attack of indigestion, so many men have such
A DAILY WRESTLE
with the food swallowed that they have no strength left for the battle of life; and though your wife may know how to play on all musical instruments, and rival a prima donna, she is not well educated unless she can boil an Irish potato and broil a mutton-chop, since the diet sometimes decides the fate of families and nations.
Have a sitting-room with at least one easy chair, even though you have to take turns at sitting in it, and books out of the public library or of your own purchase for the making of your family intelligent, and checkerboards and guessing matches, with an occasional blind man's buff, which is of all games my favorite. Rouse up your home with all styles of innocent mirth, and gather up in your children's nature a reservoir of exuberance that will pour down refres.h.i.+ng streams when life gets parched, and the dark days come, and the lights go out, and the laughter is smothered into a sob.
CHRIST IN THE HOME.
First, last and all the time, have Christ in your home. Julius Caesar calmed the fears of an affrighted boatman who was rowing him in a stream by stating: ”So long as Caesar is with you in the same boat no harm can happen.” And whatever storm of adversity or bereavement or poverty may strike your home all is well as long as you have Christ the King on board. Make your home so far-reaching in its influence that down to the last moment of your children's life you may hold them with a heavenly charm. At seventy-six years of age the Demosthenes of the American Senate lay dying at Was.h.i.+ngton--I mean Henry Clay, of Kentucky. His pastor sat at his bedside and the ”old man eloquent,”
after a long and exciting public life, trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic, was back again in the scenes of his boyhood, and he kept saying in his dream over and over again: ”My mother! mother! mother!”
May the parental influence we exert be not only potential but holy, and so the home on earth be the vestibule of our home in heaven, in which place may we all meet--father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, grandfather and grandmother, and grandchild, and the entire group of precious ones, of whom we must say in the words of transporting Charles Wesley:
”One family we dwell in Him, One church above, beneath; Though now divided by the stream-- The narrow stream of death; One army of the living G.o.d, To His command we bow; Part of the host have crossed the flood, And part are crossing now.”
EASY DIVORCE.
”What therefore G.o.d hath joined together let not man put asunder.”--MATTHEW 19:6
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