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HOME DEPARTMENT

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 17, 1900

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 77, No. 16.

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HOME DEPARTMENT.

By H. E. S. Hopkins

H. E. S. HOPKINS.
(Fulton, Mich.)
ALTHOUGH there are many hundreds of Seventh-day Adventist women, is it possible that we fail to do our part in keeping the columns of the Home department well filled with interesting items, and thus compel our editors to remind us occasionally of neglected duty? Take up any secular paper where this privilege is given the women, and you always find the department brimful of their own productions.
What is the trouble that the editors are obliged to tell us that they will have to go outside and hunt up matter that is inferior, because we fail to supply the department with good material? It certainly is not for lack of talent among us. It must be owing to indifference and carelessness, or else our time is so absorbed in the duties of life that we think we have no time to devote to this duty. Perhaps if there were less of self and more of Christ in our hearts, we should be found as sentinels, faithful at our post in this respect.
Perhaps we mean to attend to it when we finish a piece of work for ourselves, then comes another, and another, thus we defer the matter, and finally forget. If this department has been given to us, is it not as much our duty to keep it filled as it is the editors' duty to fill their part of the paper? If we stand on the verge of an eternal world, why defer for the morrow what we should do to-day? Have we not followed long enough in this haphazard way of working for the Master?
He calls for greater activity and earnestness that we may, by our experience, words of good cheer, and knowledge, help one another to make the pathway of life brighter, and that we may be more successful in the salvation of those around our fireside, as well as elsewhere.
If we choose to follow the bent of our own mind, and neglect to do all the good we can in as many ways as we can, the Home department for 1900 may fail to come up to the credit it received in 1899. We can not afford this: no, it must be better than ever. Shall we not seek God for wisdom, and do our best to have its columns filled with good material of our own production?