FAMILY SAFEGUARDS

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 16, 1880

FAMILY SAFEGUARDS.

The Christian at Work truthfully submits that "too many households are practically carried on as though they were merely lodging-houses and restaurants." The same paper continues:—

"The individuals composing them have their separate interests, and go on their different ways as though there were no common tie to bind them closely, and as though kinship was a rope of sand, convenient for some purposes, but easily broken at will. Now this is all wrong. . . . When father and mother have their life and friends quite apart from those of their children, when the boys are in a hurry to scatter in every direction after tea, and the girls prefer any place to their home, the home is in a dangerous state. It should be more than four walls, more than a roof, a shelter from the storm, and a place to eat and sleep in, and if it be only these and nothing more, it has failed in its mission. Sometimes people have so hard a time to get on from day to day, that they think they are excusable if they sacrifice the amenities of life to its grim necessities. But poverty need be no bar to love. Sometimes people are so intent on laying up money for their children, that they neglect their children's souls, and worldly advancement becomes the golden prize to which their energies are bent. Sordid ambition is inevitably a foe to domestic affection. It is a gross form of selfishness, and love withers when selfishness scorches its tender roots. Sometimes father and mother are so absorbed in society, or politics, or fashion, that they neglect their little children, and think they have done their whole duty when they have provided nurses and preceptors for them in their juvenile years. And the swift hours pass, and the weeks and months and years roll on, and after a while the unnatural spectacle is presented of young men and women who are heartless, irresponsible, fast, lovers of pleasure and devotees of their own wills. The artificial excitements of our day and generation are many. Temptations environ the path of the young. The family should be a bulwark, a defense, a representative of the most sacred principles of human nature, and a place of retreat to the sorrowful, the merry, the tired and the ardent, alike. The very fact that so many ages, from the venerable grand-parents to the toddler of two or three summers, may be gathered about a single hearthstone, shows that the mingling of experiences, temperaments, and dispositions is meant to be beneficial all around."