Home Influence | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 7, 1865

Home Influence.

Wouldst thou listen to its gentle teaching, All thy restless yearning it would still, Leaf, and flower, and laden bee are preaching Thine own sphere, though humble, first to fill.

TRULY it has been said, that "our duties are like the circles of a whirlpool, and the innermost includes home." A modern writer has designated home "heaven's fallen sister;" and a melancholy truth lies shrouded in those few words. Our home influence is not a passing, but an abiding one; and all-powerful for good or evil, for peace or strife, for happiness or misery. Each separate Christian home has been likened to a central sun, around which revolves a happy and united band of warm, loving hearts, acting, thinking, rejoicing, and sorrowing together. Which member of the family group can say, I have no influence? What sorrow, or what happiness, lies in the power of each!

"A lighted lamp," writes M'Cheyne "is a very small thing, and it burns calmly and without noise, yet it giveth light to all that are within the house." And so there is a quiet influence, which, like the flame of a scented lamp, fills many a home with light and fragrance. Such an influence has been beautifully compared to a "carpet, soft and deep, which, while it diffuses a look of ample comfort, deadens many a creaking sound. It is the curtain which, from many a beloved form, wards off at once the summer's glow and the winter's wind. It is the pillow on which sickness lays its head, and forgets half its misery." This influence falls as the refreshing dew, the invigorating sunbeams, the fertilizing shower, shining on all with the mild lustre of moonlight, and harmonizing in one soft tint, many of the discordant hues of a family picture.