The Passing of the Home

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 10, 1907

The Passing of the Home

The family and the home were established in Eden. They are divine institutions—a part of the eternal plan for the happiness of the human race. It was evidently the original purpose of the Creator that each family should possess a piece of land, greater or smaller, and that each home should be a little community in itself. But from the earliest days of history there has been a counterworking influence to break down the divine plan, and to induce men to crowd together under conditions which encourage corruption and crime. A marked change for the worse is noticeable within the present generation. All over the world the people seem to be flocking to the cities, and discarding the natural and simple methods of living for those which are artificial and injurious. This change has been discussed in an editorial in Harper’s Weekly under the heading, “The Passing of the Home.” From this article we quote one paragraph:—

The passing of the home began when from false economy, or necessity, or whatever cause, people ceased to have a little land around their homes, a little ground where they could have the ineffable joy of sticking something into the ground and seeing it grow. The passing of the home continued when married people began to live in second-rate hotels and boarding-houses, and to create a leisure class of the wives of poor men. The passing of the home went on as people built smaller and smaller and less solid houses, with fewer sitting-rooms, doing away with the day nursery, the library, the business man’s den, the sewing room, the big, roomy linen closets,

where the housewife could sit down and count her embroidered napkins, and shake out the lavender bags in her hemstitched linen sheets. The passing of the home was announced when people began to build in blocks, leaving half the rooms in the house damp and dark, and when apartment houses went up all over our cities and towns. It meant that people were going to have sleeping dormitories, and possibly a place to eat together, but it meant that the home, the old-fashioned family life, the privacy, the dignity, the close and sacred relations, were loosening, and that people were more and more living in the world and less in the family.

This is a change for the worse. Remember Sodom.