The Secret of a Christian Home
By Franklin Carter
To be the mother of a Phillips Brooks, a James Hannington, or a Reginald Heber; to be the father of an Adoniram Judson, a David Scudder, or a John Paton,—is there any comfort or joy or splendor that can rest on any Christian home comparable to the knowledge that a son had entered into such a fellowship with the Master? It is in such lives that college and church reach the zenith of their glory; but it is in the Christian home that such lives must take their impulse; in the Christian home that the heart must be so filled with, and the eye so fixed upon, Christ, the true goal, that love for men and women shall at last know no bounds. A truly Christian home can send a boy into college to be an attractive and momentous force for good for all who know him,—to be cheerful, but not flippant; gentle, but not compromising; loving, but not yielding; pure, but not austere; reverent among the careless, serious among the frivolous, and studious among the distracted, self-denying among the self-indulgent. In this age, when so many outside allurements make it so easy for boys and girls to neglect the home, what need of steady patience, of gentle confidence, of wise, tender thought, of delight in sacrifice, of supreme love for the Master, that the unconscious influence through God’s grace may soften the effect of mistakes in judgment and action, and make the home an attractive center of piety and love. This is, after all, the true secret, the full, studious companionship with the mind of Christ; not any series of carefully directed injunctions or entreaties; not formal prohibitions or requirements; no elaborate system of rewards and punishments; no cunning psychology of child life; no complicated method, but a heart that throbs with warm love for the Master’s wisdom, sinlessness, and sacrifice, and invests loving self-denial with manly beauty, that throbs, as his did, with tenderest sympathy for the helplessness and wonder of the child, and diffuses the radiance of a cheerful, hopeful, happy, wise spirit, but never abates one jot of loyalty to the highest standard, and never clouds with harsh and stormy utterance “the heaven that lies about us in our infancy.”—President Franklin Carter, in The Independent.