Home Life by Hepworth

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 24, 1870

Home Life.

By Hepworth

The other day I chanced to enter a friend's house. He did not know I was in the parlor, and I overheard his conversation. He was very harsh in his dealings with his child. He was "out of sorts" that morning. "The wind was east," and the east wind blew into his lungs, and into his soul, and soured his mind, and soured his heart, and so, like a base miscreant, as he was, he vented his bad temper on his wife and children. It is a bad habit some men have.

This man was talking in a hard, unchristian manner—talking as no father should talk. He had lost his temper. He was saying what he would be sorry for in a few moments. And then the servant announced my presence. Mind you, the man would have said he could not help it: “The boy teased me! He did what I cannot endure, and on the impulse of the moment I spoke my anger. I could not control myself.”

There was a frown on his face; but when I was announced, being more or less of a stranger, demanding of him certain courtesies, he at once smoothed his face as though nothing had happened—as though the sun was shining brightly in the heavens, and the wind was south and not east. He came into the room where I was, and, in the most cordial and courteous way possible, gave me his hand, and smilingly bade me welcome.

He could not control himself, simply because he did not think enough of his boy—because he did not sufficiently appreciate his family; and because he thought that his home was a den in which he could roar with impunity, and not the great temple of God, where he should walk as priest and king.

And yet I, almost a stranger, was strong in my presence, to cause him at once to cool down into courtesy, into affability, into politeness.

I tell you that many and many a man, and many and many a woman, in this strange world of ours, in which many things seem to go wrong, will be gentle, and kind, and charitable, and full of smiles outside of their houses, with strangers, for whose opinion they do not care one jot or one tittle, and in the houses where the happiness of years depends upon their sweetness of soul, and where they are constantly shedding influences that will ripen into the good or bad life of a boy or girl, will yield to a pettishness and peevishness, unworthy of them as men and women, and wholly unworthy of them as Christians.—Hepworth.