Oh, if you do not inculcate Christian principle in the hearts of your
children, and you do not warn them against evil, and you do not invite
them to holiness and to God, and they wander on into dissipation and
into infidelity, and at last make shipwreck of their immortal soul, on
their deathbed and in their Day of Judgment they will curse you!
Seated by the register or the stove, what if on the wall should come
out the history of your children? What a history--the mortal and
immortal life of your loved ones! Every parent is writing the history
of his child. He is writing it, composing it into a song, or turning
it into a groan.
My mind runs back to one of the best of early homes. Prayer, like a
roof, over it. Peace, like an atmosphere, in it. Parents,
personifications of faith in trial and comfort in darkness. The two
pillars of that earthly home long ago crumbled to dust. But shall I
ever forget that early home? Yes, when the flower forgets the sun that
warms it. Yes, when the mariner forgets the star that guided him. Yes,
when love has gone out on the heart's altar and memory has emptied its
urn into forgetfulness. Then, the home of my childhood, I will forget
thee! The family altar of a father's importunity and a mother's
tenderness, the voices of affection, the funerals of our dead father
and mother with interlocked arms like intertwining branches of trees
making a perpetual arbor of love, and peace, and kindness--then I will
forget them--then and only then. You know, my brother, that a hundred
times you have been kept out of sin by the memory of such a scene as I
have been describing. You have often had raging temptations, but you
know what has held you with supernatural grasp. I tell you a man who
has had such a good home as that never gets over it, and a man who has
had a bad early home never gets over it.
Again, I remark, that home is a type of heaven. To bring us to that
home Christ left His home. Far up and far back in the history of
heaven there came a period when its most illustrious citizen was about
to absent Himself. He was not going to sail from beach to beach; we
have often done that. He was not going to put out from one hemisphere
to another hemisphere; many of us have done that. But he was to sail
from world to world, the spaces unexplored and the immensities
untraveled. No world had ever hailed heaven, and so far as we know
heaven had never hailed any other world. I think that the windows and
the balconies were thronged, and that the pearline beach was crowded
with those who had come to see Him sail out the harbor of light into
the oceans beyond.