Domestic Life | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 5, 1872

Domestic Life.

SPEAKING of domestic life, how rarely one takes into consideration the whole complex nature of it, judging that it is an affair of pots and kettles, of eating and drinking, of lying down and rising, sweeping and dusting; and though, to be sure, these are the frame-work upon which it hangs, so to speak, they are not its essence. A domestic life is not necessarily one of drudgery, a perpetual devotion to the fire-god, a continual opening of oven doors and watching of boiling pots. It is, rather, a life of unity, in which each part is subservient to the whole, of which no part is mean and insignificant, since the whole being the science of living, and life a gift from God, it follows that no fraction of it is beneath our attention. It is the old story of the convertibility of things.

There are some homes which seem pervaded with an atmosphere of repose; where domestic life is like a melody, worn old, perhaps, but associated with sweetest reminiscences.. It may not be a wealthy home, it may merely afford “a sufficiency,” or even a shabby gentility; but the tune never loses tone or descends to discords. And there are other homes where it is one hurry and skurry from morning to night; where the china drops into fragments at a touch; where the bread is sour, the cake heavy, and everything at loose ends; where plenty masquerades in the garb of poverty; where there is waste instead of economy; because their domestic life is a thing of low aims and petty ambitions, does not move equably toward order and happiness, and is unrelated to the suggestion that this life is but the phase of the heavenly condition, where we shall form one harmonious family, moved by one aspiration, informed with never-failing love.—Harper’s.