Home is home with such fineness
of sentiment and such satisfaction for many reasons.
The first is its seclusion. Men do not expect their best
enjoyments to be in the public's gaze. They retire from publicity
when they want self-communion, or intimate enjoyment of friends.
The privacy of home gives it much of its sanctity, and deep and
abiding influence. It is a quiet retreat in which the domestic
virtues alone can flourish. And in its repose and peace it works
the miracles of its character-making results. Home must be private
in the main to be a real home, and to distill in men's minds the
best effects of their whole lives.
Another reason for the value of home is its dependence.
Man is only partially an independent being. He is dependent on
his Maker and fellow man for much of his best in life. In his
home he depends much on his family. Wife and children and friends
minister to him. They warm his social nature, animate, and cheer
him. Every member of the family is a helper of every other member.
Even the baby and the grandmother, and the poor sickly child and
the crippled boy, help keep down selfishness, and keep the heart
from loneliness. Man in his solitary home is like a barren tree
in the desert. He is like such a tree because he is barren of
fruit, it is barren around him and he is alone, glum, and cold,
and cheerless. No man is independent, but every one must depend
upon those nearest to him for the multiplied ministries he always
needs. If any man does not believe he is dependent upon others,
let him try living alone and wholly apart from society a little
while, and he will learn that our dependence is one of the things
that ministers to our well being.
Still another source of the value of home is its freedom.
Every one is most himself in his home, because there he is
freest from restraint, least repressed and most spontaneous and
natural. He knows his home friends and they know him. They are
used to each other and can bear with and help each other better
than can strangers. This sense of freedom and mutual understanding
gives the essence of the home feelings. The charm of feeling at
home with home friends and home things, is the delight of human
life.
The home love is natural and must be ministered to or life is
deprived of its best experiences. No one can think of home and
its power over the imagination, the home loves and their transcendent
treasures in the soul, the home pleasures and ministries, without
having his mind thronged with vivid pictures of home life which
becomes real to us all in our passage from the cradle to the grave.
May God Bless Our Home!
