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HOME AND MOTHER

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 29, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 13.

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HOME AND MOTHER.

O, it is the real mothers and the real homes that are keeping this old world from utter shipwreck; and yet there is a class of people who tell us that the home is a decaying institution, that our mothers are a great mistake, that the co-operative home, the co-operative kitchen, and co-operative mother are the coming institutions; that the children will be bunched together, and a trained nurse, or "little mother," will care for the whole in a scientific way; and the old-fashioned home and old-fashioned mother will be relegated to the past.
It is true that many of the homes of this country are not what they ought to be. In many of them strife and marital infidelity, conjugal infidelity, greed, intemperance, heartlessness, have eaten as cankers into the home life. The homes of many Christians are as prayerless and cheerless as a Greenland iceberg; and the youth who go out from such homes are left to drift on life’s sea, having no home chart or compass or haven to guide or shelter the weary wanderers.
As to the plans of these new reformers to do away with the home, on the basis of reason, "Annie Laurie" has the following forceful words to say in the Sunday Examiner of not long ago:
All of which shows what an absolutely false and foolish guide the pure human reason is, without the pure human heart. Rule your life by the light of reason alone, and you will live and die an absolutely miserable, and, because miserable, an absolutely useless, human being.
What in the world do you hang over the cradle of that puny, wailing infant for? Let it die. The world will be better off without it. Why should you be fool enough to care more for one wisp of its soft hair than you do for all the friendship of all the wise ones of the earth?
Why do you keep up the old superstition of the comfort of a grate fire? The furnace is much warmer, more economical, and less mussy. Gather your friends around the register, and be sensible.
What makes you keep on calling your sweetheart the foolish names that have been handed down to sweethearts since the cave men learned to talk? Call her Mary Jane, and be done with it.
It is all absurd nonsense, that fad of yours that the little Sunday night supper that the woman you love prepares with her own hands, is the coziest meal in the week.
Bring some health food home with you in a paper bag, and don’t bother about setting the table. That’s a waste of energy. As soon as you can afford to do it, move to a big hotel, and eat mutton that tastes like beef, and beef that you can’t tell from lamb. That’s progressive.
Why send the mother who held you on her breast when the world was young, a pretty knit shawl, just because it looks like the one you remember she wore when you were getting up from the scarlet fever, when she used to sit in the twilight and tell you foolish, tender little stories?
What folly! Buy her a good, warm coat, and let her button that about her, and be sensible for once.
She was a poor, ignorant thing anyway. She didn’t know a thing about hygienic food. She took the white out of her soft hands making things that boys like, so that you might always find some doughnuts in the crock, or some cookies in the big yellow bowl, when you came in, red-cheeked and hungry, from the sharp December air.
She ought to have fed you health food at stated times, in stated quantities. You would probably have been like most of the hygienic devotees I have had the agony of knowing—a poor, dyspeptic-looking mortal—but what of that? You would have been "advanced," and that’s the main thing.
When the new-fashioned mother gets into working order—ah, but that’s the hope of the whole foolish business—the new-fashioned mother will never really come in at all. The grace of simple human nature will save us from her at the last moment, in spite of a dozen Mrs. Gilmans, and a million followers.