p. 99 | Your Evenings, by Etta Booth

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 5, 1867

Your Evenings,

By Etta Booth

Fathers, husbands, brothers, where and how do you spend your evenings? At home with your families? Do you help to make home happy and cheerful after your day's toil is done, choosing for your society those whom you have sworn to love, cherish, and protect? Do you, by your presence—that which your wife above all earthly things prizes most highly— cheer her whose labors cease not, but who cheerfully toils on from early rising to the late hours of the night, to keep yourself, your little ones, and your homes tidy and comfortable? Do you appreciate home with all its comforts and enjoyments, realizing that it is what the world cannot give? Do you say by your acts that you love your family better than all else earthly besides? Do you strive to have your influence felt and known for good? Do you strive to make yourself a pattern to be loved, honored, and imitated? Or do you merely make home a stopping place, convenient to eat and sleep in? Are the sacred precincts of home a reservoir for all the bitterness of your heart and the outpourings of your uncontrolled disposition? Do you find home convenient only when sickness and calamity befall you?

Fathers! husbands! brothers! sons! is not your time spent somewhere where it ought not to be? Are you mingling with the gay, with the ungodly, with the “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God,” and not separating yourself from “the unclean?” Do your jests sound as high, your laugh ring as loudly as that of the inveterate bacchanal and the most irreligious, around the public fireside? You profess Christ and the teachings of the meek and lowly; but could the attentive ear detect it? Leaving unquestioned the circumstances that brought you among the men of sin, would the stranger know that you had ever tasted the pure waters of life—been bought with a price and born again?

Ah! you are parleying with the Evil One at the expense of your soul; you are compromising with the Devil, and may make one concession too many. The Evil One tries to make you believe you are not doing wrong; but your path is fearful, and God pities you. Will you not accept his love? O let its sanctifying influence shed its rays upon your wasting soul! You want to do right, you mean to do better, and have often felt condemned. Why then will you not begin just now? Grieve not the tender Spirit from you. Begin with a determination, and you will find home happy. It cannot be cheerful unless you help make it so. Put away selfishness; try your Bible and your religion, and you will succeed. ETTA BOOTH.