Showing Piety at Home by Rev. A. L. Stone

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 24, 1863

Showing Piety at Home.

By Rev. A. L. Stone

You tell me a man is changed by the converting and renewing grace of God. Is he? Let me look at him. It is something that I may see him with a Bible in his hands. It goes as confirmation, that I behold him on his knees. It helps the evidence that I hear him speaking his public vows in covenant with God and his people. But I would rather visit him insensibly in his home; whether he is gentle and self-restrained, when he used to be petulant and irritable; whether he is monarch of all he surveys, or the servant and minister of all; lives to receive the incense of the family homage, to be saved trouble, and to guard his personal comfort and convenience from interference and restriction, or to lavish thought and toil and care upon the welfare of all the dependent circle. Let me know, are the angles rounded off in the home? Is he eager to lift off the household burdens from the frailer form at his side, and adjust them to his own broader shoulders. Especially has he become, in a scriptural meaning phrase, a nursing father to his little ones there. Are they only the playthings of his idle moments, with whom he frolics as so many kittens when he is good natured, and looks upon as so many stumbling blocks to be kicked out of the way when he is moody and hasty? or are the young plants to be watched and nurtured for the garden of God, youthful learners to be taught the way of life, early pilgrims whose feet he is to lead with his own in the path to heaven? Show me the evidence that he has discerned and accepted his most privileged and responsible calling of nurseryman for the great Husbandman in this little plantation of human beings. I wish to see him kneel with his right arm around his eldest born, and the left on the cradle of his babe; to hear him—with a tax which he shall feel, because it is pains-taking, study and effort, and yet for love's sake shall not feel, because it is freely and gladly borne—reading and expounding to young hearers the way of truth and salvation. If his heart is not turned to his children, it is not turned to Christ.—Rev. A. L. Stone.