A Cheerful Home | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Jan 28, 1886

A Cheerful Home.

A SINGLE bitter word may disquiet an entire family for a whole day; one glance cast a gloom over the household; while a smile, like a gleam of sunshine, may light up the darkest hours. Like unexpected flowers, which spring up along our path full of freshness, fragrance, and beauty, so do kind words and gentle acts and sweet dispositions make glad the home where peace and harmony dwell. No matter how humble the home; if it be thus garnished with grace and sweetened with kindness and smiles, the heart will turn lovingly toward it from all the tumults of the world. Toward the cheerful home the children gather "as clouds and as doves to the window."

And the influences of homes perpetuate themselves. The gentle grace of the mother lives in the daughter long after her head is pillowed in the dust of the earth; and fatherly kindness finds its echo in the nobility and courtesy of sons who come to wear his mantle and fill his place.

The class of men that disturb and disorder and distress the world are not those born and nurtured amid the hallowed influences of Christian homes, but rather those whose early life has been amid scenes of trouble and vexation; who started wrong in the pilgrimage, and whose course is one of disaster to themselves and trouble to those around them.—Sel.