Home Influence by G. B. THOMPSON

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 21, 1910

Home Influence

By G. B. THOMPSON

G. B. THOMPSON

“BE it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” How true this is! The memories of home cling to us; neither distance nor circumstances can efface them from the mind. The sailor thinks of home as his ship rocks in the tempest. The merchant thinks of home as he bars his doors and windows at the close of the day. The mother hurries home to the baby in the cradle. The schoolboy, weary with lessons, trudges home to father and mother. The weary plowman wends his way from the field at sunset, thankful for the blessings and comforts of home.

Who can forget the home of his youth,—the long winter evenings, with the blazing fire on the hearth; the genial smiles of father and mother, with the streaks of gray creeping into their hair? The furniture may not have been costly, and the house but a cabin in the woods; yet it was home, and to life’s latest moment it will linger in the memory.

Home is destined by its Author to be a cheerful, happy place, where the altar of prayer is reared, and the name of the Lord reverenced. Yet all homes do not reach this ideal. One writer has well said that he is to be pitied whose home is in some valley of grief between the hills instead of on the hilltop of cheerfulness.

How to save our young people is a great problem. There is none greater or more important. The church, our schools, the Educational, Missionary Volunteer, and Sabbath-school departments, are doing all they know how to do to direct the footsteps of the youth and children among us into the right path. And they are doing much in this direction. But without the help and right influence of the home their best efforts will be greatly neutralized. Think of a young person who returns home from one of our schools, where, under the Christian influence with which he was surrounded, he gave his heart to God and enlisted in his service. His heart is warm and tender; yet when he reaches home,—a home where, perchance, father and mother keep the Sabbath, at least in form,—he finds no family altar. Business takes precedence; and the God of heaven, from whom all blessings flow, is forgotten morning and evening. What a chilling influence such a home must have!

And to the absence of prayer there is sometimes added the evil influence of cross and angry words. Husband and wife scold each other and the children. A faultfinding, nagging spirit pervades the home. If family prayer is maintained, impatience, fretfulness, and irritability over the most trivial matters are manifested before and after asking Deity for strength for the day. No young people’s society, church-school, or college can successfully battle against the influence of such a home. Many an earnest-hearted young person has grown cold, and started on the downward path to perdition, in just such a home.

A young man came to me on a camp-ground, and said, in substance: “What am I to do? I love the truth, and try to be a Christian. I would like to enter the work. But while father and mother profess to keep the Sabbath, they are impatient with each other and with me. They lose their tempers, and speak hasty, angry words. I can’t please them, no matter how hard I try. They find fault with everything, and commend nothing. I am so tried that often I am tempted to run away from home, and plunge into the pleasures of sin. I know it is all right, as you say, to pray and hold fast my integrity to God, but it is hard for a boy to do.”

I hope this is an isolated case. To see the children whom we love numbered among the lost at last because the home was a hotbed of impatience will be unspeakably sad!

There is an old fable which relates that it was a source of trouble to some fishes to see a number of lobsters swimming backward instead of forward. They therefore determined to open a class for their instruction. This was done, and a number of young lobsters came. The fishes gravely argued that if they began with the young ones, they would learn to swim aright. At first,

the young lobsters did very well; but afterward, when they returned home, and saw their fathers and mothers swimming in the old way, they soon forgot their lessons. It is thus that many a child, well taught at school, drifts away from the Lord through wrong home influence.

“She always made home happy,” is the epitaph in a churchyard inscribed by a husband after many years of wedded life. No higher tribute than this could be paid to the memory of the dead. “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” But “he that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.”

What the world needs is more Christian homes, where “abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” 1 Cor. 13:13.

Takoma Park, D. C.