A TRUE HOME PLEASURE

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 30, 1879

A TRUE HOME PLEASURE.

It is strange that in a country whose language is stored with the choicest works of the human mind, and whose population is, as a whole, so well educated, reading aloud as a source of amusement and means of enjoyment is so little resorted to. There are many families, even in book-loving New England, in which a book or a chapter of a book, is never read to the family circle from one end of the year to another. The individual members of the family read, but all reading done in the family is silent reading.

Only those who have visited in families where the gift of reading was cultivated as a source of family enjoyment, and the custom of reading aloud to the family practiced, can imagine what a help and blessing to the family life such a habit is. Music is well in its way, but its range of expression is far narrower than that of reading, and for that matter is far less practical in its adaptation to the family wants. Then, too, singing requires an instrumental accompaniment, and a piano costs money and requires too much practice on the part of the performer to be available for the many. The art of reading well is easily acquired and cheaply taught, and the expressions of literature are abundant and varied. If sorrow has fallen on the family, the needed antidote can be found both in prose and poetry. If fun is called for, then fun can be had at the asking; for the language is so full of humor, so quaint and subtle, that the bare recital of the author's words brings the point out and “sets the table in a roar.” History, tragedy, comedy, wit, pathos, sublimity, every spring at which the human mind loves to drink, can be opened, and the sweet waters be given freely to every one.

How cosy those home readings may be made! Warmth, light, companionship, culture, happiness, are all included in them. How much you are missing, good people, if reading is not cultivated as one of the means of happiness and pleasure in your family circle; for in such an exercise there is a quickening of the imagination, an appeal to the judgment, which will teach the children more of literature in three hours than they can learn at school in three weeks. Next to the impulse of love as a means of drawing families together, is the influence of intellectual companionship. Cultivate this, good friends, and see how satisfactory will be the result.—Golden Rule.