Ministry of Home | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 6, 1879

Ministry of Home.

The institution of the family relation may be regarded as one of the wisest of divine provisions for the moral culture and happiness of our race. Few persons, we are sure, have ever justly estimated the influence of home upon the present happiness and future career of its inmates. A home rightly constituted becomes not only the sweetest and most sacred spot on earth, but must exert a more powerful influence upon the heart and intellect than any other. To say nothing of the influence of paternal example and authority exerted in favor of virtue, honor, and religion, home should prevent all tendency to outside and evil associations.

Here it is that many parents, who wish well to their children, mistake. Home is suffered to be the dullest spot on earth, when it should be the happiest. How many by a harsh and censorious manner banish every particle of sunshine from the home temple. Moral lectures, corporeal punishments inflicted under the influence of passion, and compulsory attendance upon religious rites, are not likely to win the heart to religion or the Cross. Few children can be compelled to become religious, but all may be persuaded and won by the influence of love and the attractions which religion properly exemplified must present. Music, good books, and in short everything that will contribute to make home attractive and afford amusement and exercise for the mental powers, should be employed in order to prevent children from falling into the habit of spending their evenings in the streets, or in places of questionable resort. Nine-tenths of the young men who become ungodly and licentious might trace their career to the irksomeness of home, and their consequent love of street companions, the debasing influence of the theatre and other worldly amusements.

To keep children at home we must induce them to love it. We should never deem money lost which is applied to the adornment and furnishing of home with an eye to this end. Those little items which make up the comfort of home serve to endear it to the heart and make it a means of moral culture.

But to make home what it should be, we must have religion. There are homes where religion is ignored—where no family worship is held—where no Christian songs are sung—where no family Bible dispenses its hallowed ministrations. We do not say such homes are positively wretched. Education, morality, and refinement may in some instances save them from this. All do not partake of the character of the positively vicious—the licentious and profligate. But can any home be truly happy which ignores God, the giver of all blessings? If we would have ours truly a place of rest and peace we must place it under the guardianship of the great Father of all. His grace, like morning dew, should descend each day upon the hearts of all its inmates. Our children should learn at the family altar how to reverence God and religion. Then, instead of pining to abandon home, to plunge into the excesses of vice and prodigality, they would cling to it as the dearest spot on earth. And even when the necessities of maturer years called them to distant fields of activity, the memory of home and its sacred associations would follow them and preserve them in the paths of virtue and honor. —Christian Advocate.