p. 202 | Love of Home

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 27, 1882

Love of Home.

That woman is wise who chooses for her partner in life a man who desires to find his home a place of rest. It is the man with many interests, with engrossing occupations, with plenty of people to fight, with a struggle to maintain against the world, who is really the domestic man, in the wife's sense; who enjoys home, who is tempted to make a friend of his wife, who relishes prattle, who feels in the home circle, where nobody is above him and nobody unsympathetic with him, as if he were in a haven of ease and reparation.

The drawback of home-life, its contained possibilities of insipidity, sameness, and consequent weariness, is never present to such a man. He no more tires of his wife than of his own happier moods. He is no more plagued with his children than with his own lighter thoughts. All the monotony and weariness of life he encounters outside. It is the pleasure-loving man, the merry companion, who requires constant excitement, that finds home-life unendurable. He soon grows weary of it, and considers everything so very tame, and so like flat beer, that it is impossible for him, not only to be happy, but to feel that he is less unhappy there than elsewhere. We do not mean that the domestic man, in the wife's sense, will be always at home. The man always at home has not half the chance of the man whose duty is outside it, for he must sometimes be in the way. The point for the wife is, that he should like home when he is there; and that liking, we contend, belongs, first of all, to the active and strong, and deeply-engaged, and not to the lounger, or even easy-minded man.—Saturday Review.