First, last and all the time, have Christ in your home. Julius Caesar
calmed the fears of an affrighted boatman who was rowing him in a
stream by stating: "So long as Caesar is with you in the same boat no
harm can happen." And whatever storm of adversity or bereavement or
poverty may strike your home all is well as long as you have Christ
the King on board. Make your home so far-reaching in its influence
that down to the last moment of your children's life you may hold them
with a heavenly charm. At seventy-six years of age the Demosthenes of
the American Senate lay dying at Washington--I mean Henry Clay, of
Kentucky. His pastor sat at his bedside and the "old man eloquent,"
after a long and exciting public life, trans-Atlantic and
cis-Atlantic, was back again in the scenes of his boyhood, and he kept
saying in his dream over and over again: "My mother! mother! mother!"
May the parental influence we exert be not only potential but holy,
and so the home on earth be the vestibule of our home in heaven, in
which place may we all meet--father, mother, son, daughter, brother,
sister, grandfather and grandmother, and grandchild, and the entire
group of precious ones, of whom we must say in the words of
transporting Charles Wesley:
"One family we dwell in Him,
One church above, beneath;
Though now divided by the stream--
The narrow stream of death;
One army of the living God,
To His command we bow;
Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now."