The Dissolution of the Home
Few things are sadder than the gradual dissolution of a family circle. When, moreover, it once begins, it goes forward with a rapidity that is almost startling. The eldest son, it may be, dissatisfied with his narrow surroundings, takes his journey into some far country to seek a better fortune; or the eldest daughter, obeying the deepest instincts of a woman’s nature, listens to the voice of a stranger, and forsakes with a light and hopeful heart the roof that sheltered her girlhood, to become the mistress of a new home. Then the younger children follow in quick succession. Some of them, most likely, are wrapped in white robes, and borne forth amid blinding tears to their last resting place. Sooner or later, and in one way or another, they are all gone. The long table in the dining hall is shortened, the chairs are taken out of the family room because there is no one to occupy them, and the old folks are left to each other as absolutely as they were in those far-distant days when under bright skies and with buoyant spirits they began life together. Well indeed is it for them if the young love that once animated their hearts has deepened and ripened into that rational affection which is the most sacred bond of union between two human beings. We have known aged couples whom not even the experiences of fifty years had disenchanted of the glowing ideals that floated before their vision when they first set their feet in the long road which begins at the marriage altar and ends in an open grave. Would that there were more such! At the risk of being sneered at by that large class of people to whom a bushel of corn or an ounce of silver is worth more than a ton of sentiment, we wish to protest against the criminal carelessness and indifference that allows all the glory to fade out of the wedded life, and suffers it to become a dull, monotonous, and commonplace thing. It is a matter of vast importance that husbands and wives, instead of losing their tender interest in each other, should cultivate this holy feeling with constant assiduity; for the time is coming when it may be the only human resource upon which they can draw for comfort. It is a pathetic picture, this of the old man and his old wife trying still to keep a cheerful spirit in the empty house that once rang with the laughter of happy children. But it is not without features that relieve it of its sadness. No true home was ever created in vain. In the order of God’s providence it serves a useful purpose, though it may afterward perish from the earth, and even the memory of it utterly decay. One of the most inestimable blessings that a boy or girl can carry with him into the busy world is the recollection of the dear, familiar hearthstone, on which perhaps no fire now glows, and around which no cheerful faces gather. This recollection is strength against temptation, courage in the teeth of hard conflict, fortitude under the pressure of grievous disappointment, and illuminating hope when sun, moon, and stars are obscured by cloud and tempest. Whatever is of high spiritual quality in the family life abides, and passes on as a quickening force into the thought and aspiration of later generations. The purity, the love, the gentleness, the self-denial, that find in that divine sphere the fittest theater for their display and exercise, do not evaporate into empty air, but become incorporate in the character of the children, and are transmitted in increasing volume to bless the souls of men and women still unborn.