| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 27 |
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The moral effect of interior home decoration is still greater. We should make the rooms in which our children sleep and play and live just as bright and lovely as our means, directed by wisest skill and purest taste, can make them; and not only should the adornments and decorations be pleasing to the eye, but it is of importance that we give the most careful heed to their moral character. There are many pictures found in even Christian homes whose influence is toward impurity. There are other pictures whose influence is toward gloom, and there are those again whose chaste beauty, bright cheerfulness and rich suggestiveness make them continual inspirations toward refinement and moral excellence. They frame themselves into young hearts and become a joy and comfort for ever.
A young artist once asked a great painter for some word of advice which might help him in all his after life. Having noticed on the walls of the young man’s rooms some rough and coarse sketches, he advise him, as a young man desirous of rising in his profession, to remove these, and never to allow his eye to become familiar with any but the highest forms of art. If he could not afford to buy good oil paintings of the first class, he should either get good engravings of great pictures or have nothing at all upon his walls. If he permitted himself to become familiar with anything in art that was vulgar in conception, however perfect in execution, his taste would insensibly become depraved; whereas, if he would habituate his eye to look only on that which was pure and grand or refined and lovely, his taste would insensibly become elevated.
This advice is of perfectly pertinent application to the use of pictures and statuary in home decoration. Children from their earliest years are naturally fond of pictures. Their eyes rest much upon them, and insensibly they have much to do not only with the formation of their taste, but also in giving moral tone and color to their minds. Familiarity with vulgarity and coarseness will inevitably deprave, and looking upon pure and beautiful things will imperceptibly, yet surely, refine, elevate and inspire.
Lovely pictures in a home have a wondrous and subtle power in the education and refining of child life. They may be but wood cuts or chromos or steel engravings, but let them be chaste and pure. Let us hang nothing in our parlors or play rooms or bedchambers or dining rooms that would bring a blush to the sweetest modesty or start a suggestion of anything indelicate in any beholder’s mind. Every picture, engraving or print will touch itself into the soul of each child reared in the home. That which is impure or gross will leave a stain, and that which is refined and lovely will become a sweetening memory for ever.
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