Domestic Courtesy by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 28, 1871

Domestic Courtesy.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

BRO. MOODY, here is something good for you and the whole family. Call sister Moody and all the children together and read it aloud to them. Be sure to take your due share of it. When it hits you, stop and confess it, and resolve to reform.

“That genial and wholesome social critic, Mr. George William Curtis, the essayist of the Editor’s Easy Chair of Harper’s Magazine, takes for his texts in the new February number, the want of cheerful courtesy which is unhappily so common in our households. He thus draws the picture of what we fear must be admitted to be the average American home to-day:—”

“The family go about silent, or nodding, scolding, and snarling, and apparently without the least thought that they are to restrain any emotion, or the indulgence of any whim. Old clothes, shabby dressing-gowns, slippers, petulance, and selfishness, are quite good enough for the home. But if the same persons are to go out to call, or to dine, or to a ball, nothing is too pretty to wear, nothing too sweet to say, no politeness too fine to display.”

“Now, you young fellow at the table reading the evening paper, and nodding in a surly way to your mother and sister, take a test. If your clothes breathe a delicious fragrance—say of heliotrope or roses—but would do so only when you were at home, or only when you went abroad, which would you choose? Would you smell sweet at home, or when you went away from home? Would you have a perpetual climate of rare odors in your own house, or elsewhere? Of course you would have it at home, for your own comfort and enjoyment, you curmudgeon, if for nothing else. But what is domestic courtesy but the breath of heliotropes and roses at home? It is as much for your own pleasure that you should be pleasant as it is for that of others. The happiest household in the world is that in which the wishes of the thoughtful mother are made the laws of conduct, and where courtesy is new every morning and fresh every evening, like the celestial benediction.”

“How many of us, brethren and sisters, make home the rag-bag of ill-humors and caprices, and wretched moods of every kind, while we carefully hide them from the stranger? When the guest arrives, we slide a chair over the rent in the carpet, and slip a tidy over the worn edge of the sofa-cushion, and lay a prettily bound book over the ink stain on the parlor table-cloth; and so at his coming the flying hair is smoothed, and the sullen look is gilded with a smile, and the sour tone is suddenly wonderfully sweet. Shriveled old autumn blooms in a moment into rosy spring. And how, as this mother writes—how is a youth to know that this house, where everything seems to smile, is not always as warm and sunny as he finds it? Yet this young woman so neatly dressed, so quietly mannered, so fascinating to the young man, may be the most ‘inefficient’ of human beings.”

This is a fair description of many a family, even in the church. How will such families appear in Heaven? D. M. CANRIGHT.