SAVED BY FAMILIES by S. M. L. H.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 2, 1900

SAVED BY FAMILIES.

By S. M. L. H.

Now as to the instrument that must be made available for this work of enlightening the world. Many have the idea that it is the church; and there is a sense in which this is true. Others have the notion that it must be the individual Christian; and this is also true in an important sense: but between the individual and the church there is one important institution, which was long ago dragged by the enemy of all truth into the background, and which has been kept there until now; has been covered by his dark wing, and so misrepresented in everything which pertains to it that it has never yet been understood for what it is,—God’s choicest, most complete, and most adjustable instrument,—the one thing without which the church can never be anything but a cripple, and without which the individual can not come to any adequate knowledge of even himself or God. I refer to the family.

This is the instrument which God first fashioned for his own delight. It was to be a musical instrument, from which such harmonies as heaven had never heard should float out, and fill the heart of Infinite Love with raptures new even to him in whose bosom was the secret spring of all harmonies and of every joy.

Satan knew enough about the Eternal Father to understand how his heart was set on the perfect development of the seed-thought that constituted the germ of family life; and so, in his hatred of God, he set himself the task of breaking up the divine order out of which harmony should flow in one steady, sweet current of holy, happy life, and by a diabolical readjustment of its parts make of the family an instrument of torture instead of delight. He would make it send forth wails and discords instead of trills and jubilates. He would cause men to curse God for its necessities instead of praise him for its inspirations. He would make of it a witness against God instead of for him. By its testimony it should send men to eternal death instead of lift them to eternal life.

If the enemy of God could spoil the instrument, he could hinder the work; if he could impeach the witness, he could break down the testimony, and stand an opportunity for winning his case; and to this end he has put forth his utmost cunning, and has seemed almost to succeed. He has so marred, defaced, and broken the family that to the superficial observer he has seemed to destroy its testimony to the love of God. He has made it so fill the earth with discords that many a man has been so tortured by its tantalizing failures to meet his needs that he has even cursed God, and leaped into the arms of death; while others, who were possessed with more endurance and inventive qualities, have sought to mend the broken instrument, until a whole army of family “tinkers” have arisen, who would take it in hand as a watchsmith would a watch, clean it, and, if need be, “fix it up as good as new.”

A watch may be cleaned; but if a part is broken, you must send it to its own factory for the missing part. You can not obtain a Waltham wheel at a Geneva factory.

The family has been marred; and not all the divorces, remarriages, and multimarriages that Satan has devised will mend it. Only He who planned and made it for his own holy purpose can repair it; but he can do it, supplying out of the infinite “all things” whatever is needed to make it whole. And more than that, he can take a family that was first made up of disjointed material, such as should never have been put together for any purpose,—a mismated man and woman, to whom have been born a family all as disjointed as the father and mother,—and by a work, which he knows how to do, so smooth down here, refit there, and supply whatever is lacking in genuine manly and womanly elements, so readjust and return, as to get out of it such a testimony to the power and truth of his love as could never have been given by one which had been made and kept perfect from the beginning.

When the harmony of heaven begins to steal sweetly out from an instrument that has been breathing only jangling discords, every ear will be arrested, and every heart will thrill with surprise as well as delight, and begin to ask, “Who did it?”

S. M. L. H.