Home Reading | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 15, 1872

Home Reading.

ONE of the noblest and most pleasant duties of the head of the family is to furnish its members with good reading. In times which are past, it was considered enough to clothe and feed and shelter a family. This was the sum of parental duty. But lately it has been discovered that wives and children have minds, so that it becomes necessary to educate the children and furnish reading for the whole household. It has been found out that the mind wants food as well as the body, and that it wants to be sheltered from the pitiless storms of error and vice by the guarding and friendly roof of intelligence and virtue.

An ignorant family in our day is an antiquated institution. It smells of the musty past. It is a dark spot which the light of the modern sun of intelligence has not reached.

Let good reading go into a home, and the very atmosphere of that home gradually, but surely, changes. The boys begin to grow ambitious, to talk about men, places, books, the past and the future. The girls begin to feel a new life opening before them in knowledge, duty, and love. They see new fields of usefulness and pleasure. And so the family changes, and out from its number will grow intelligent men and women, to fill honorable places, and be useful members of society. Let the torch of intelligence be lit in every household. Let the old and young vie with each other in introducing new and useful topics of investigation, and in cherishing a love of reading, study, and improvement.