The Rights of Home by Sid

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 15, 1875

The Rights of Home.

By Sid

OUR homes have certain rights, of which, by a strange inconsistency in this age of fierce clamor for rights, individual and universal, they are often defrauded. In the first place, they have a right to us. Not only to our presence in the household room or at the dinner table, but to our presence as an influence within them. Everybody is aware of that dual quality of the mind which gives it a sort of double aspect, and makes it quite possible for a person to be in two places at a time, apparently; for example, Mr. Jones has returned from business, it being five in the afternoon. His coat and hat are hanging in the hall; he has put on the dressing-gown and slippers carefully laid out for him by his wife, and he is sitting in his easy chair listlessly holding the evening paper. “Hush, children, pa is tired,” whispers Mrs. Jones as the little ones make a noise in their play, and she casts a compassionate glance at the tired face. It would not be so tired, if Mr. Jones himself were there. The fact is, that for the time he is really absent, within calling distance it is true, but so far as his true self is concerned, he is in the Stock Exchange. The things that occupied him at noon, occupy him now; he hears a babel of voices, and sees anxious, hurried faces, and rouses with a start and coming-back feeling to the fact that he is in his own parlor, only when the bell rings for tea.

Hundreds of men do this every day. They have no time to get acquainted with their children. They see, in a general way, that they are clean and wholesome-looking; they pay quarterly school bills, and they grudge no expense in the matter of shoes and overcoats. They dimly remember that they once courted their wives, and said tender things in pleasant parlors, where the cheerful gas-light shed its glow, or on moonlight evenings under rustling leaves. The time for that has quite gone by, and they would feel as bashful as a school boy reciting a piece were they to essay a compliment now to the lady at the other end of the table. They have forgotten that home has its inalienable rights, and among them first and chiefest, the right to their personal presence. Nothing rests a man or woman who has been busy about one set of things, better than a total change of employment or feeling. A nap on the lounge is all very well; but, after a half-hour of it, if the most tired man will shake off dull sleep, and have a romp with the children, or a game of bo-peep with the baby, he will be rested much more thoroughly than if he drowse away the whole evening, as too many business men do.

Our homes have a right to cheerfulness. There is no skeleton in the closet worse than a gloomy temper. We have known households which were always under an eclipse, because some one member chose to consider herself a continual martyr. It was not a slip of the pen that made use of the feminine pronoun here; for, we say it with all deference to the gentle sex, women are given to the sulks far more generally than men. A man flames up, and is done with it, if he happen to have an irascible temper; but a woman nurses her wrath to keep it warm, and smoulders away like a fire that means to be a long time going out. Now, neither men nor women belonging to a family have a right, however they enjoy it themselves, to wear long faces, and injured looks, and funeral aspects, in the privacy of their domestic circle. Be cross, if you please, anywhere else, but at home be cheerful, patient, and considerate.

OUR homes have another right, too, which is sometimes lost sight of. They are our castles, of course; but, unlike the castles of the Middle Ages, they are not surrounded by moats, and approached by drawbridge and portcullis. They have only a thin door between themselves and the outer world, and it is well that the magnetic tide of communication between the world and them should not be interrupted. To this end, let them be flooded with good reading. There is no extravagance in taking several newspapers, in having new books, and in buying pictures and chromos. When these shall be thought necessities, and some of our present necessities in the way of dress and food shall be called luxuries, our homes will be perceptibly elevated.—Sid.