The Art of Living

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

The Art of Living.

In American houses it needs a thorough revision. Extravagance is the rock on which society is going to pieces. Let us face the danger before it is too late to avert it. Single people shrink from marriage because they see married people are living in a perpetual whirl of bills and competition and social hypocrisy. An air of common deception hangs around all our houses. We are afraid to be poor. On one thousand a year, how shall we keep up the appearance of three thousand? That is the standing social problem. In such a case, luxury in the parlor necessitates meanness somewhere else. Our lace curtains tell dreadful lies. Let us have a reform, and come down to a specie basis. The well-to-do people ornament their houses with mortgages. The poor run bills. High pressure marks all life, from the cottage to the mansion, and in three directions it is ruinous.

It is financial ruin.

Any man who puts a dollar into appearances is on the way to sink a fortune in the same miry slough. Living costs about twice what it ought, fully twice in America what it does in Europe. There is no reason for it. This is a land of grain and fruits, and abundant work. The man who spends two thousand a year could live on one thousand, and be happier. Perhaps not indeed by himself. The social level needs to sink from extravagance to thrifty economy. If this is the way out of national trouble, it is doubly the way out of family worries. Be brave enough to decline appearances. Be honest straight through your domestic arrangements, though the two story must yield to the cottage, and the pudding to corn meal.

It is mental ruin.

The money that is spent on horses and dress and table unnecessaries would fill our homes with books. The expensive furniture would be well replaced by pictures, to be a constant refining and enlightening influence. The money it costs many a family of moderate means to keep up four weeks of appearances at the sea-shore, would fill their house with treasures of knowledge and art. Instead of that, the glorious month at Long Branch is followed by eleven months of scrimping in the kitchen, and general meanness all around.

It is moral ruin.

People cannot systematically deceive without moral penalty, even though the lies are velvet and silken. The penalty comes in the loss of self-respect. The man who mortgages his property to keep up the family style, thereby mortgages his name to the devil. Instead of studying moral philosophy to find the causes of general social disorder—loosening of home bonds and lowering of purity—let us come down to an honest way of living. Let us make our carpets, and our table, and our clothes tell the truth, and then perhaps our children will. A blight will surely fall on all our social life unless we recover ourselves from that great American vice—truckling—and live honestly before men. The seeds of hypocrisy are in the heart of every child that goes out from a household whose whole life is a sham. In vain we preach honesty and sincerity from the pulpit, so long as the life from the pulpit word to the home-management is all a pretense. Society, you must come down and dare to appear what you are.—Sel.