Copyrighted by Olive E. Weston, 1902.
THE HOME (Page 14).
Love is the only safe and justifiable basis for a home. All Bibles, as
well as all stories, all philosophy and all experience assert this.
Go to housekeeping, and, if possible, to house-building. Do not be
outdone by the beaver. Do not sink lower than the bird, who builds its
own nest, making it strong without and beautiful within.
That home alone is home where love generates generous impulses, noble
purposes. True love will breed heavenly plans, nurse world-redeeming
schemes, and enlist all the forces of earth in the interests of
heaven.
There is no home where there is no common toil.
The world is the larger home. The child must early learn to feel its
dependence on and its obligation to this larger home circle if it is
to grow noble.
There are no furnishings to a house that really convert it into a
home, which have not won their places, one by one, in the heart and
brain of the housewife.
Civilization rests, not primarily on the court-house, or the college,
or the public school building, or the post-office, or the railway
station, or yet in the club, but in the home.
The trouble with our young people is not that they are too poor in
material things to make for themselves a home, but that they are too
poor in spiritual things to confess the poverty which might enable
them to lay the foundations of a home, humble but altogether holy....
The beautiful heron, mad with a maternal love, blind to all dangers
from without, bent only on protecting her brood, giving her life to
her little ones, was killed by the woman who wears the graceful
aigrette--that marvel of Nature's embroidery woven for a nuptial robe
to the gracious bird. She, and none other, is responsible for that
life, for it was for her sake that the bloody deed was done.
THE SCHOOL (Page 29).
The highest task that life holds for men and women is the choosing of
an ideal to grow toward. It should be sufficiently far away to
require a whole lifetime to pursue it.
It has taken a hundred years of agony and study to prove even in
advanced America a man's right to his own body; a woman's right to her
old soul; and the child's right to the development of his mind as of
his muscle.
I plead for the true perspective in the training of your children. I
believe, of course, in good bodies, comfortable and beautiful
clothing, generous houses, and all the learning of the schools; I
believe in intellectual joy and all the powers of thought, but only
when they are subordinated to high affections and strong wills.
There is a power at work in the world that estimates gifts, not by the
amount, but by the purpose that dictated them.
The kindergarten contains the seed of the gospel for children in its
terminology when it seeks to develop the child by its "occupations."...
WORK (Page 111).
There can be no development, mental, spiritual, or physical, except by
exercise.
Through labor we became creators, co-workers with God. Labor can be
transfigured into a habit.
In the scales of the universe, a day's work will always weigh more
than the dollar that pays for that day's work.
The tradesman who strives to know all about his own business and
cares but little about any other, will not have much business of his
own to absorb his attention after a while.
Blessed word is that,--"occupation." The new education is bound up in
it. The health of the child is contained in it. The safety of the
saint is represented by it, and the progress of humanity is dependent
upon it.
When labor becomes the pride of the laborer, then he becomes fit
object for the envy of kings.
The most disordered explosions of pent-up passions and unreleased
power follow in the wake of enforced idleness.
There is no release from toil, and the only escape from the burdens of
labor must come, not by its cessation, but by its glorification.
There is an overwork that is killing, but the danger from work, any
work, all work, is trifling compared to the greater dangers of
indolence.
There is always a large physical element in distances. It is always
farther from the breakfast table to the field than it is from the
field to the dinner table.
When the wheels of life bear me down for the last time, I ask for no
higher compliment, I seek no truer statement of the work I have tried
to do, than that which the white-headed old negress gave the beardless
boy on the hot Corinth cornfield in 1862. Then, if I deserve it, let
some one who loves me say, "Here is a Linkum soldier who has done got
run over," one who, like his leader, tried to "pluck a thistle and
plant a flower wherever a flower would grow."
EVERETT McNEIL.