Home by WILLIAM COVERT

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 29, 1913

Home

By WILLIAM COVERT

WILLIAM COVERT

“Home is the sacred refuge of our life.” — Dryden.

It is the place in which one resides. It is the spot, or place, dedicated to us and our family circle, where others may not come without permission. It is our place, set apart and enclosed for ourselves. To the eye on the outside there is seen only the measured place or material wall of our dwelling, but on the inside is that which is really home to us.

Spurgeon says: “The word home always sounds like poetry to me. It rings like a peal of bells at a wedding, only more soft and sweet, and it chimes deeper into my heart. It does not matter whether thatched cottage or manor house, home is home be it ever so homely, and there is no place on earth like it.”

To all God’s children the word home should mean that place which is brightest and best, where there is purest love and truest confidence. Home can be just what home should be only where Christ rules and domestic love presides. Indeed, it is difficult for people to get away from the shade or the sunshine of their own domicile. They may travel far, but the memory cable seldom cuts loose from home. Home is on the mind when they lie down, when they dream, and when they wake up. No matter where the body may be, the thought most generally stays at home. The physical man may ride over the ocean, and yet the mental man for the most part abides at home.

His heart and his treasures are in his home. That little place where his family resides, where his own garden grows, and where even his neighbors knock when they wish to be admitted, is bigger and dearer to him than all the world besides.

Home is the place where he goes when he wants to rest or when he wishes to pour out the secrets of his soul and divide counsel with that part of himself who keeps the home. Home is the place to which a man returns when his work is done. In that dear old place where we have studied and worked, have eaten and slept, have received our friends and loved our own with all our souls, not only every face but every thing there has become to us sacred and sublime.

The old armchair, the consecrated place in the corner, and those who sit in them, are so indelibly written on the home tablet that neither time nor distance can remove them. And that tablet abides in the mind and becomes more and more deeply embedded while passing decades carry us onward in their cycles of time. But neither we in mortal life nor the place we call home on this sin-cursed earth can long abide the wear and ravage of time; yet our home here may be made a place so completely connected with heaven that the abiding presence of God is actually in it. Indeed, our home on earth can in truth become the vestibule of our great eternal home, and so we shall step from it into our mansion in the New Jerusalem.

Truly, we are divided by only a little space from our glorified and everlasting home. And so we are to live in our transitory home in such a way as to bind our relatives and household members to heaven with cords too strong for sin to sever.

Home should be a happy and holy place, a little church on earth under the control of Him who rules in heaven. There is no period of one’s lifetime when home influences are not needed. When the days of infancy have passed by and the months of childhood have flown, then the years of youthfulness come, during which time the guiding hand of home is needed to direct the vigorous steps leading into the fulness of maturity. Then in the full tide of life, while the responsible years of home-making show their spring-time, their summer, their autumn, and their winter, how careful we should be in our sowing, our culture, and our harvest! For in the strength of these years we show our character, make our history, and seal our destiny.

The home of the aged should in a special sense manifest a richness of Christian experience, and the living in it should be enacted vespers for the entering into heaven. In this home the veterans should show the courage of the soldiers that they have been, and proclaim their ripened loyalty to the cause for which they have stood.

But in every stage of home life let there be exemplified the true spirit of

kindness which is breathed in the pronunciation of the word itself. It was in exhortation for the people who compose the home and for their betterment that Margaret Sangster wrote,—

“If I had known in the morning How wearily all the day The words unkind Would trouble my mind I said when you went away, I had been more careful, darling, Nor given you needless pain; But we vex our own With look and tone I We might never take back again.

“For though in the quiet evening You may give me the kiss of peace, Yet it might be That never for me The pain of heart should cease. How many go forth in the morning That never come back at night! And hearts have been broken For harsh words spoken That sorrow can never set right.

“We have careful thoughts for the stranger, And smiles for the sometime guest, But oft for ‘our own’ The bitter tone, Though we love ‘our own’ the best. Ah, lips with the curve impatient! Ah, brow with that look of scorn! ’Twere a cruel fate Were the night too late To undo the work of morn.”