Home Happiness | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 27, 1874

Home Happiness.

It is the fashion among certain of the more restless and ambitious of our women, says the Queen, to despise the home-life as too tame, too narrow, and too uneventful for them. They long for a wider arena, set well in view of the world, whereon to display their gifts or their acquirements; and they think this claustral house, this unexciting family of which they form a part, unworthy of their efforts. And yet in reality the

ART OF LIVING WELL

at home, and of making the family life a success, is just as great in its way, if not so important in its apparent—but only apparent—results, as the finest shades of diplomacy and the largest transactions of business. All sorts of talents, both moral and intellectual, are wanted for the task; and it seems slightly irrational to despise as futile qualities which so few of us are strong enough to possess, or to rate them as beneath the regard of high-minded people, when not one in a hundred has wit enough to employ them to a satisfactory issue.

The poetry of belief makes the English home the very ideal of sweetness, peace, love, security. Sisters are angelic friends each to each, and parents and children are inclosed in a golden web of affection which keeps in all the good spirits and shuts out all the bad. Husbands and wives live in a daily atmosphere of contented affection which is superior to the tumultuous fever of the love-making time, in so far as it is surer and more serene; and if the world does not penetrate within those four walls, life is assumed to be all the better for the absence of disturbing elements—by no means the poorer for the want of additional interest, or the less carefully conducted for the want of critical eyes to overlook. This is the ideal of an English home; but, good as it is to keep a high ideal, it is also necessary to accept things as they are, and to make no illusions on matters of facts. The matter of fact connected with the family is too often just the reverse of the ideal; and instead of love, and confidence, and serenity, and all the rest of it, we have ill-tempers and selfishness,

BACKBITINGS AND QUARRELING,

and any one abroad preferred to every one at home. It is true enough that sisters ought to be friends, but are they? Are they not as often rivals and even enemies, as true and loving comrades, each desiring the other's good, and each as willing as the other to give the best and take the worst for friendship's sake? We know some homes, but we are bound to say they are few, wherein the governing law is the law of true friendship and faithful love. For the most part there is far more of tyranny, jealousy, and rebellion, than of those sweet sentiments generally assumed.

When we think for a moment of all the evil qualities included in this one small term—family quarrels—we need scarcely ask for deeper misery or more damaging sins of action. And no one can insist too warmly on the necessity of keeping the peace at home, whereby the social life abroad may be made beautiful and the souls of men rendered blessed.

Fathers, and mothers, and brothers, all have their part in this; but truly, no one so much as the “girls.” When the sisters are harmonious together, everything seems to go well; when they quarrel, and are jealous, and selfish, and exacting, peace is not to be found, and nothing is as it should be, which is some way toward admitting that supreme influence of the sex so much insisted on at the present day. Unfortunately, it is a mode of exercising influence not much regarded by the majority, who care more for the shadow than the substance—less for home than for the world without. Perhaps there may be some who read our words to whom they will come with the power of fit application; and to them we can only insist again and again on the infinite importance of keeping the peace at home, and the need of cultivating the nobler qualities of mind and heart, if this is to be done well. A small sphere is not necessarily an unimportant one, and home and family are the seed places of all that is most stirring and most public in the world. Without, however, mutual concession, there is no peace; without peace, there is no happiness; and without happiness, of what good is life? It is better to give up this and that little personal domain for the insuring of peace, than to fight for supremacy and maintain the war. A lowly temper has its own grace, and if by it we can insure happiness at home, who would be foolish enough to cherish its opposite, and so secure misery?—Sel.