| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 8 |
Page 4 |
But there are many who are many who are amiable and polite away from home who are not so in the sacredness of their own household. There are men who in society are courteous, thoughtful and gracious who when they enter their own doors become gruff, moody, and even rude. There are ladies who are the brightest charm of the social circle, sunny, sparkling, thoughtful, who as they cross their own thresholds are suddenly transformed, becoming disagreeable, petulant, impatient, irritable and unlovely. Some of the most brilliant lights of society are the most unendurable at home. They keep their courtly manners for company, and relapse into barbarism when in the shelter of their own roof tree. They have “careful thought for the stranger,” but for their “own the bitter tone.”
Now, it need not be said that the most unbroken continuity in family devotions will not make such home life religious. A true Christian home is one in whose holy circle all live the religion of Christ. We should be just as sunny inside our own doors as on the street. Courtesy that changes to rudeness when we cross our own threshold is not courtesy at all. Love that beareth all things, endureth all things and seeketh not its own must not turn to petulance and selfishness at home. We should appear always at our best among those we love the best. We ought to bring the sweetest things of our hearts into our homes.
Yet there are tendencies to careless living at home against which we need to guard ourselves very carefully. Sacred as are the home relationships, our very familiarity with them is apt to render us forgetful. Incessant repetitions of impressions of any kind are in danger of producing callousness of sensibility. In the constant contact of the home loves lies the danger that we become heedless of them. It takes special care and watchfulness and continual quickening of the affections to keep our hearts’ sensibilities always alive to the unbroken touch of the tender relationships of home. Then outside we have to be ever on our guard. The world has no patience with our ill temper and bad manners. A moment’s petulance, a single gruff reply or uncivil word, or the want of courtesy in the smallest thing, may cost us a friend or lose us a customer or mar our reputation. Hence we have the constant pressure of these selfish motives to compel us to appear always at our best in society.
But at home this pressure is removed. We are sure of the hearts there. They have patience with us. Their love is not of the fickle and uncertain kind that requires continuous propitiation. We have no fear of losing their esteem or regard. In our heedless selfishness we are in constant danger, when we enter the home shelter after the stress of the day, of removing the restraint and permitting our least amiable self to come to the outside.
There is still another reason why peculiar watchfulness over the home behavior is necessary. In the outside world the contact of life with life is usually at a reasonable distance. We do not get very close to men. We see only their best points. We meet them only in favorable circumstances, and are not compelled to endure the friction of actual contact with their meaner qualities. But that which makes home intercourse the sorest test of piety and of character is its closeness. Lives touch there at every point. The very unrestraint, laying all lives bare to each other, adds immeasurably to the danger of friction. Nothing but the religion of Christ, the love that endureth all things, is equal to the strain of such experiences.
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