p. 509 | READING ALOUD

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 18, 1880

READING ALOUD.

It is strange that in a country whose language is stored full of 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, where 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. Father has his paper; mother her tract; Mary has a novel; Johnny his stories of wild adventure. Reading there is, enough of it; but each one reads for himself. There is no reading for the whole, and no grouping of the family into an audience for an evening's enjoyment, such as comes to people who hear a good bit of writing well read.

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 enough in its way, but its range of expression is far narrower than that of reading, and for that matter, far less practical in its adaption to the family wants. Then, too, singing requires an instrumental accompaniment, and an instrument costs money and requires too much practice on the part of the performer to be available for the many. The expressions of literature are abundant, and the art of reading well is easily acquired and cheaply taught; it brings the point out, and "sets the table in a roar." History, 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 quickening for the imagination, appeal to judgment, elevation of feeling, opportunity for criticism, which shall 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.