It was Sunday evening, and our little circle were convened by my study
fireside, where a crackling hickory fire proclaimed the fall of the
year to be coming on, and cold weather impending. Sunday evenings, my
married boys and girls are fond of coming home and gathering round the
old hearthstone, and "making believe" that they are children again. We
get out the old-fashioned music-books, and sing old hymns to very old
tunes, and my wife and her matron daughters talk about the babies in
the intervals; and we discourse of the sermon, and of the choir, and
all the general outworks of good pious things which Sunday suggests.
"Papa," said Marianne, "you are closing up your 'House and Home
Papers,' are you not?"
"Yes,--I am come to the last one, for this year at least."
"My dear," said my wife, "there is one subject you haven't touched on
yet; you ought not to close the year without it; no house and home can
be complete without Religion: you should write a paper on Home
Religion."
My wife, as you may have seen in these papers, is an old-fashioned
woman, something of a conservative. I am, I confess, rather given
to progress and speculation; but I feel always as if I were going on
in these ways with a string round my waist, and my wife's hand
steadily pulling me back into the old paths. My wife is a steady,
Bible-reading, Sabbath-keeping woman, cherishing the memory of her
fathers, and loving to do as they did,--believing, for the most part,
that the paths well beaten by righteous feet are safest, even
though much walking therein has worn away the grass and flowers.
Nevertheless, she has an indulgent ear for all that gives promise
of bettering anybody or anything, and therefore is not severe on any
new methods that may arise in our progressive days of accomplishing
old good objects.
"There must be a home religion," said my wife.
"I believe in home religion," said Bob Stephens,--"but not in the
outward show of it. The best sort of religion is that which one keeps
at the bottom of his heart, and which goes up thence quietly through
all his actions, and not the kind that comes through a certain routine
of forms and ceremonies. Do you suppose family prayers, now, and a
blessing at meals, make people any better?"
"Depend upon it, Robert," said my wife,--she always calls him Robert
on Sunday evenings,--"depend upon it, we are not so very much wiser
than our fathers were, that we need depart from their good old ways.
Of course I would have religion in the heart, and spreading quietly
through the life; but does this interfere with those outward, daily
acts of respect and duty which we owe to our Creator? It is too much
the slang of our day to decry forms, and to exalt the excellency of
the spirit in opposition to them; but tell me, are you satisfied with
friendship that has none of the outward forms of friendship, or love
that has none of the outward forms of love? Are you satisfied of the
existence of a sentiment that has no outward mode of expression? Even
the old heathen had their pieties; they would not begin a feast
without a libation to their divinities, and there was a shrine in
every well-regulated house for household gods."
"The trouble with all these things," said Bob, "is that they get to be
mere forms. I never could see that family worship amounted to much
more in most families."
"The outward expression of all good things is apt to degenerate into
mere form," said I. "The outward expression of social good feeling
becomes a mere form; but for that reason must we meet each other like
oxen? not say, 'Good morning,' or 'Good evening,' or 'I am happy to
see you'? Must we never use any of the forms of mutual good will,
except in those moments when we are excited by a real, present
emotion? What would become of society? Forms are, so to speak, a
daguerreotype of a past good feeling, meant to take and keep the
impression of it when it is gone. Our best and most inspired moments
are crystallized in them; and even when the spirit that created them
is gone, they help to bring it back. Every one must be conscious that
the use of the forms of social benevolence, even towards those who are
personally unpleasant to us, tends to ameliorate prejudices. We see a
man entering our door who is a weary bore, but we use with him those
forms of civility which society prescribes, and feel far kinder to him
than if we had shut the door in his face and said, 'Go along, you
tiresome fellow!' Now why does not this very obvious philosophy apply
to better and higher feelings? The forms of religion are as much more
necessary than the forms of politeness and social good will as
religion is more important than all other things."
"Besides," said my wife, "a form of worship kept up from year to year
in a family--the assembling of parents and children for a few sacred
moments each day, though it may be a form many times, especially in
the gay and thoughtless hours of life--often becomes invested with
deep sacredness in times of trouble, or in those crises that rouse our
deeper feelings. In sickness, in bereavement, in separation, the daily
prayer at home has a sacred and healing power. Then we remember the
scattered and wandering ones; and the scattered and wandering think
tenderly of that hour when they know they are remembered. I know, when
I was a young girl, I was often thoughtless and careless about family
prayers; but now that my father and mother are gone forever, there is
nothing I recall more often. I remember the great old Family Bible,
the hymn-book, the chair where father used to sit. I see him as he
looked bending over that Bible more than in any other way; and
expressions and sentences in his prayers which fell unheeded on my
ears in those days have often come back to me like comforting angels.
We are not aware of the influence things are having on us till we have
left them far behind in years. When we have summered and wintered
them, and look back on them from changed times and other days, we find
that they were making their mark upon us, though we knew it not."
"I have often admired," said I, "the stateliness and regularity of
family worship in good old families in England,--the servants, guests,
and children all assembled,--the reading of the Scriptures and the
daily prayers by the master or mistress of the family, ending with the
united repetition of the Lord's Prayer by all."
"No such assemblage is possible in our country," said Bob. "Our
servants are for the most part Roman Catholics, and forbidden by their
religion to join with us in acts of worship."
"The greater the pity," said I. "It is a pity that all Christians who
can conscientiously repeat the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer
together should for any reason be forbidden to do so. It would do more
to harmonize our families, and promote good feeling between masters
and servants, to meet once a day on the religious ground common to
both, than many sermons on reciprocal duties."
"But, while the case is so," said Marianne, "we can't help it. Our
servants cannot unite with us; our daily prayers are something
forbidden to them."
"We cannot in this country," said I, "give to family prayer that
solemn stateliness which it has in a country where religion is a civil
institution, and masters and servants, as a matter of course, belong
to one church. Our prayers must resemble more a private interview with
a father than a solemn act of homage to a king. They must be more
intimate and domestic. The hour of family devotion should be the
children's hour,--held dear as the interval when the busy father drops
his business and cares, and, like Jesus of old, takes the little ones
in his arms and blesses them. The child should remember it as the time
when the father always seemed most accessible and loving. The old
family worship of New England lacked this character of domesticity and
intimacy,--it was stately and formal, distant and cold; but, whatever
were its defects, I cannot think it an improvement to leave it out
altogether, as too many good sort of people in our day are doing.
There may be practical religion where its outward daily forms are
omitted, but there is assuredly no more of it for the omission. No man
loves God and his neighbor _less_, is a _less_ honest and good man,
for daily prayers in his household,--the chances are quite the other
way; and if the spirit of love rules the family hour, it may prove the
source and spring of all that is good through the day. It seems to be
a solemn duty in the parents thus to make the Invisible Fatherhood
real to their children, who can receive this idea at first only
through outward forms and observances. The little one thus learns that
his father has a Father in heaven, and that the earthly life he is
living is only a sacrament and emblem,--a type of the eternal life
which infolds it, and of more lasting relations there. Whether,
therefore, it be the silent grace and silent prayer of the Friends, or
the form of prayer of ritual churches, or the extemporaneous
outpouring of those whose habits and taste lead them to extempore
prayer, in one of these ways there should be daily outward and visible
acts of worship in every family."
"Well, now," said Bob, "about this old question of Sunday-keeping,
Marianne and I are much divided. I am always for doing something that
she thinks isn't the thing."
"Well, you see," said Marianne, "Bob is always talking against our old
Puritan fathers, and saying all manner of hard things about them. He
seems to think that all their ways and doings must of course have been
absurd. For my part, I don't think we are in any danger of being too
strict about anything. It appears to me that in this country there is
a general tendency to let all sorts of old forms and observances float
down-stream, and yet nobody seems quite to have made up his mind what
shall come next."
"The fact is," said I, "that we realize very fully all the objections
and difficulties of the experiments in living that we have tried; but
the difficulties in others that we are intending to try have not yet
come to light. The Puritan Sabbath had great and very obvious evils.
Its wearisome restraints and over-strictness cast a gloom on religion,
and arrayed against the day itself the active prejudices that now are
undermining it and threatening its extinction. But it had great merits
and virtues, and produced effects on society that we cannot well
afford to dispense with. The clearing of a whole day from all
possibilities of labor and amusement necessarily produced a grave and
thoughtful people, and a democratic republic can be carried on by no
other. In lands which have Sabbaths of mere amusement, mere gala days,
republics rise and fall as quick as children's card-houses; and the
reason is, they are built by those whose political and religious
education has been childish. The common people of Europe have been
sedulously nursed on amusements by the reigning powers, to keep them
from meddling with serious matters; their religion has been sensuous
and sentimental, and their Sabbaths thoughtless holidays. The common
people of New England are educated to think, to reason, to examine all
questions of politics and religion for themselves; and one deeply
thoughtful day every week baptizes and strengthens their reflective
and reasoning faculties. The Sunday-schools of Paris are whirligigs
where Young France rides round and round on little hobby-horses till
his brain spins even faster than Nature made it to spin; and when he
grows up, his political experiments are as whirligig as his Sunday
education. If I were to choose between the Sabbath of France and the
old Puritan Sabbath, I should hold up both hands for the latter, with
all its objectionable features."
"Well," said my wife, "cannot we contrive to retain all that is really
valuable of the Sabbath, and to ameliorate and smooth away what is
forbidding?"
"That is the problem of our day," said I. "We do not want the Sabbath
of Continental Europe: it does not suit democratic institutions; it
cannot be made even a quiet or a safe day, except by means of that
ever-present armed police that exists there. If the Sabbath of America
is simply to be a universal loafing, picnicking, dining-out day, as it
is now with all our foreign population, we shall need what they have
in Europe, the gendarmes at every turn, to protect the fruit on our
trees and the melons in our fields. People who live a little out from
great cities see enough, and more than enough, of this sort of
Sabbath-keeping, with our loose American police.
"The fact is, our system of government was organized to go by moral
influences as much as mills by water, and Sunday was the great day for
concentrating these influences and bringing them to bear; and we might
just as well break down all the dams and let out all the water of the
Lowell mills, and expect still to work the looms, as to expect to work
our laws and constitution with European notions of religion.
"It is true the Puritan Sabbath had its disagreeable points. So have
the laws of Nature. They are of a most uncomfortable sternness and
rigidity; yet for all that, we would hardly join in a petition to have
them repealed, or made wavering and uncertain for human convenience.
We can bend to them in a thousand ways, and live very comfortably
under them."
"But," said Bob, "Sabbath-keeping is the iron rod of bigots; they
don't allow a man any liberty of his own. One says it's wicked to
write a letter Sunday; another holds that you must read no book but
the Bible; and a third is scandalized if you take a walk, ever so
quietly, in the fields. There are all sorts of quips and turns. We may
fasten things with pins of a Sunday, but it's wicked to fasten with
needle and thread, and so on, and so on; and each one, planting
himself on his own individual mode of keeping Sunday, points his guns
and frowns severely over the battlements on his neighbors whose
opinions and practice are different from his."
"Yet," said I, "Sabbath days are expressly mentioned by Saint Paul as
among those things concerning which no man should judge another. It
seems to me that the error as regards the Puritan Sabbath was in
representing it, not as a gift from God to man, but as a tribute of
man to God. Hence all these hagglings and nice questions and exactions
to the uttermost farthing. The holy time must be weighed and measured.
It must begin at twelve o'clock of one night, and end at twelve
o'clock of another; and from beginning to end, the mind must be kept
in a state of tension by the effort not to think any of its usual
thoughts or do any of its usual works. The fact is, that the
metaphysical, defining, hair-splitting mind of New England, turning
its whole powers on this one bit of ritual, this one only day of
divine service, which was left of all the feasts and fasts of the old
churches, made of it a thing straiter and stricter than ever the old
Jews dreamed of.
"The old Jewish Sabbath entered only into the physical region, merely
enjoining cessation from physical toil. 'Thou shalt not _labor_ nor do
any _work_,' covered the whole ground. In other respects than this it
was a joyful festival, resembling, in the mode of keeping it, the
Christmas of the modern church. It was a day of social hilarity,--the
Jewish law strictly forbidding mourning and gloom during festivals.
The people were commanded on feast days to rejoice before the Lord
their God with all their might. We fancy there were no houses where
children were afraid to laugh, where the voice of social cheerfulness
quavered away in terror lest it should awake a wrathful God. The
Jewish Sabbath was instituted, in the absence of printing, of books,
and of all the advantages of literature, to be the great means of
preserving sacred history,--a day cleared from all possibility of
other employment than social and family communion, when the heads of
families and the elders of tribes might instruct the young in those
religious traditions which have thus come down to us.
"The Christian Sabbath is meant to supply the same moral need in that
improved and higher state of society which Christianity introduced.
Thus it was changed from the day representing the creation of the
world to the resurrection day of Him who came to make all things new.
The Jewish Sabbath was buried with Christ in the sepulchre, and arose
with Him, not a Jewish, but a Christian festival, still holding in
itself that provision for man's needs which the old institution
possessed, but with a wider and more generous freedom of application.
It was given to the Christian world as a day of rest, of refreshment,
of hope and joy, and of worship. The manner of making it such a day
was left open and free to the needs and convenience of the varying
circumstances and characters of those for whose benefit it was
instituted."
"Well," said Bob, "don't you think there is a deal of nonsense about
Sabbath-keeping?"
"There is a deal of nonsense about everything human beings have to
deal with," I said.
"And," said Marianne, "how to find out what is nonsense?"--
"By clear conceptions," said I, "of what the day is for. I should
define the Sabbath as a divine and fatherly gift to man,--a day
expressly set apart for the cultivation of his moral nature. Its
object is not merely physical rest and recreation, but moral
improvement. The former are proper to the day only so far as they
are subservient to the latter. The whole human race have the
conscious need of being made better, purer, and more spiritual; the
whole human race have one common danger of sinking to a mere animal
life under the pressure of labor or in the dissipations of pleasure;
and of the whole human race the proverb holds good, that what may be
done any time is done at no time. Hence the Heavenly Father
appoints one day as a special season for the culture of man's
highest faculties. Accordingly, whatever ways and practices
interfere with the purpose of the Sabbath as a day of worship and
moral culture should be avoided, and all family arrangements for the
day should be made with reference thereto."
"Cold dinners on Sunday, for example," said Bob. "Marianne holds these
as prime articles of faith."
"Yes,--they doubtless are most worthy and merciful, in giving to the
poor cook one day she may call her own, and rest from the heat of
range and cooking-stove. For the same reason, I would suspend as far
as possible all traveling, and all public labor, on Sunday. The
hundreds of hands that these things require to carry them on are the
hands of human beings, whose right to this merciful pause of rest is
as clear as their humanity. Let them have their day to look upward."
"But the little ones," said my oldest matron daughter, who had not as
yet spoken,--"they are the problem. Oh, this weary labor of making
children keep Sunday! If I try it, I have no rest at all myself. If I
must talk to them or read to them to keep them from play, my Sabbath
becomes my hardest working day."
"And, pray, what commandment of the Bible ever said children should
not play on Sunday?" said I. "We are forbidden to work, and we see the
reason why; but lambs frisk and robins sing on Sunday; and little
children, who are as yet more than half animals, must not be made to
keep the day in the manner proper to our more developed faculties. As
much cheerful, attractive religious instruction as they can bear
without weariness may be given, and then they may simply be restrained
from disturbing others. Say to the little one, 'This day we have noble
and beautiful things to think of that interest us deeply: you are a
child; you cannot read and think and enjoy such things as much as we
can; you may play softly and quietly, and remember not to make a
disturbance.' I would take a child to public worship at least once of
a Sunday; it forms a good habit in him. If the sermon be long and
unintelligible, there are the little Sabbath-school books in every
child's hands; and while the grown people are getting what they
understand, who shall forbid a child's getting what is suited to him
in a way that interests him and disturbs nobody? The Sabbath-school is
the child's church and happily it is yearly becoming a more and more
attractive institution. I approve the custom of those who beautify the
Sabbath school-room with plants, flowers, and pictures, thus making it
an attractive place to the childish eye. The more this custom
prevails, the more charming in after years will be the memories of
Sunday.
"It is most especially to be desired that the whole air and aspect of
the day should be one of cheerfulness. Even the new dresses, new
bonnets, and new shoes, in which children delight of a Sunday, should
not be despised. They have their value in marking the day as a
festival; and it is better for the child to long for Sunday, for the
sake of his little new shoes, than that he should hate and dread it
as a period of wearisome restraint. All the latitude should be given
to children that can be, consistently with fixing in their minds the
idea of a sacred season. I would rather that the atmosphere of the day
should resemble that of a weekly Thanksgiving than that it should make
its mark on the tender mind only by the memory of deprivations and
restrictions."
"Well," said Bob, "here's Marianne always breaking her heart about my
reading on Sunday. Now I hold that what is bad on Sunday is bad on
Monday,--and what is good on Monday is good on Sunday."
"We cannot abridge other people's liberty," said I. "The generous,
confiding spirit of Christianity has imposed not a single restriction
upon us in reference to Sunday. The day is put at our disposal as a
good Father hands a piece of money to his child,--'There it is; take
it and spend it well.' The child knows from his father's character
what he means by spending it well, but he is left free to use his own
judgment as to the mode.
"If a man conscientiously feels that reading of this or that
description is the best for him as regards his moral training and
improvement, let him pursue it, and let no man judge him. It is
difficult, with the varying temperaments of men, to decide what are or
are not religious books. One man is more religiously impressed by the
reading of history or astronomy than he would be by reading a sermon.
There may be overwrought and wearied states of the brain and nerves
which require and make proper the diversions of light literature; and
if so, let it be used. The mind must have its recreations as well as
the body."
"But for children and young people," said my daughter,--"would you let
them read novels on Sunday?"
"That is exactly like asking, Would you let them talk with people
on Sunday? Now people are different; it depends, therefore, on who
they are. Some are trifling and flighty, some are positively
bad-principled, some are altogether good in their influence. So of the
class of books called novels. Some are merely frivolous, some are
absolutely noxious and dangerous, others again are written with a
strong moral and religious purpose, and, being vivid and interesting,
produce far more religious effect on the mind than dull treatises
and sermons. The parables of Christ sufficiently establish the point
that there is no inherent objection to the use of fiction in
teaching religious truth. Good religious fiction, thoughtfully
read, may be quite as profitable as any other reading."
"But don't you think," said Marianne, "that there is danger in too
much fiction?"
"Yes," said I. "But the chief danger of all that class of reading is
its _easiness_, and the indolent, careless mental habits it induces. A
great deal of the reading of young people on all days is really
reading to no purpose, its object being merely present amusement. It
is a listless yielding of the mind to be washed over by a stream which
leaves no fertilizing properties, and carries away by constant wear
the good soil of thought. I should try to establish a barrier against
this kind of reading, not only on Sunday, but on Monday, on Tuesday,
and on all days. Instead, therefore, of objecting to any particular
class of books for Sunday reading, I should say in general that
reading merely for pastime, without any moral aim, is the thing to be
guarded against. That which inspires no thought, no purpose, which
steals away all our strength and energy, and makes the Sabbath a day
of dreams, is the reading I would object to.
"So of music. I do not see the propriety of confining one's self to
technical sacred music. Any grave, solemn, thoughtful, or pathetic
music has a proper relation to our higher spiritual nature, whether it
be printed in a church service-book or on secular sheets. On me, for
example, Beethoven's Sonatas have a far more deeply religious
influence than much that has religious names and words. Music is to be
judged of by its effects."
"Well," said Bob, "if Sunday is given for our own individual
improvement, I for one should not go to church. I think I get a great
deal more good in staying at home and reading."
"There are two considerations to be taken into account in reference to
this matter of church-going," I replied. "One relates to our duty as
members of society in keeping up the influence of the Sabbath, and
causing it to be respected in the community; the other, to the proper
disposition of our time for our own moral improvement. As members of
the community, we should go to church, and do all in our power to
support the outward ordinances of religion. If a conscientious man
makes up his mind that Sunday is a day for outward acts of worship and
reverence, he should do his own part as an individual towards
sustaining these observances. Even though he may have such mental and
moral resources that as an individual he could gain much more in
solitude than in a congregation, still he owes to the congregation the
influence of his presence and sympathy. But I have never yet seen the
man, however finely gifted morally and intellectually, whom I thought
in the long run a gainer in either of these respects by the neglect of
public worship. I have seen many who in their pride kept aloof from
the sympathies and communion of their brethren, who lost strength
morally, and deteriorated in ways that made themselves painfully felt.
Sunday is apt in such cases to degenerate into a day of mere mental
idleness and reverie, or to become a sort of waste-paper box for
scraps, odds and ends of secular affairs.
"As to those very good people--and many such there are--who go
straight on with the work of life on Sunday, on the plea that 'to
labor is to pray,' I simply think they are mistaken. In the first
place, to labor is _not_ the same thing as to pray. It may sometimes
be as good a thing to do, and in some cases even a better thing; but
it is not the same thing. A man might as well never write a letter to
his wife, on the plea that making money for her is writing to her.
It may possibly be quite as great a proof of love to work for a wife
as to write to her, but few wives would not say that both were not
better than either alone. Furthermore, there is no doubt that the
intervention of one day of spiritual rest and aspiration so refreshes
a man's whole nature, and oils the many wheels of existence, that
he who allows himself a weekly Sabbath does more work in the course
of his life for the omission of work on that day.
"A young student in a French college, where the examinations are
rigidly severe, found by experience that he succeeded best in his
examination by allowing one day of entire rest just before it. His
brain and nervous system refreshed in this way carried him through the
work better than if taxed to the last moment. There are men
transacting a large and complicated business who can testify to the
same influence from the repose of the Sabbath.
"I believe those Christian people who from conscience and principle
turn their thoughts most entirely out of the current of worldly cares
on Sunday fulfill unconsciously a great law of health; and that,
whether their moral nature be thereby advanced or not, their brain
will work more healthfully and actively for it, even in physical and
worldly matters. It is because the Sabbath thus harmonizes the
physical and moral laws of our being that the injunction concerning it
is placed among the ten great commandments, each of which represents
some one of the immutable needs of humanity."
"There is yet another point of family religion that ought to be
thought of," said my wife: "I mean the customs of mourning. If there
is anything that ought to distinguish Christian families from Pagans,
it should be their way of looking at and meeting those inevitable
events that must from time to time break the family chain. It seems to
be the peculiarity of Christianity to shed hope on such events. And
yet it seems to me as if it were the very intention of many of the
customs of society to add tenfold to their gloom and horror,--such
swathings of black crape, such funereal mufflings of every pleasant
object, such darkening of rooms, and such seclusion from society and
giving up to bitter thoughts and lamentation. How can little children
that look on such things believe that there is a particle of truth in
all they hear about the joyous and comforting doctrines which the
Bible holds forth for such times?"
"That subject is a difficult one," I rejoined. "Nature seems to
indicate a propriety in some outward expressions of grief when we lose
our friends. All nations agree in these demonstrations. In a certain
degree they are soothing to sorrow; they are the language of external
life made to correspond to the internal. Wearing mourning has its
advantages. It is a protection to the feelings of the wearer, for whom
it procures sympathetic and tender consideration; it saves grief from
many a hard jostle in the ways of life; it prevents the necessity of
many a trying explanation, and is the ready apology for many an
omission of those tasks to which sorrow is unequal. For all these
reasons I never could join the crusade which some seem disposed to
wage against it. Mourning, however, ought not to be continued for
years. Its uses are more for the first few months of sorrow, when it
serves the mourner as a safeguard from intrusion, insuring quiet and
leisure in which to reunite the broken threads of life, and to gather
strength for a return to its duties. But to wear mourning garments and
forego society for two or three years after the loss of any friend,
however dear, I cannot but regard as a morbid, unhealthy nursing of
sorrow, unworthy of a Christian."
"And yet," said my wife, "to such an unhealthy degree does this custom
prevail, that I have actually known young girls who have never worn
any other dress than mourning, and consequently never been into
society, during the entire period of their girlhood. First, the death
of a father necessitated three years of funereal garments and
abandonment of social relations; then the death of a brother added two
years more; and before that mourning was well ended, another of a wide
circle of relatives being taken, the habitual seclusion was still
protracted. What must a child think of the Christian doctrine of life
and death who has never seen life except through black crape? We
profess to believe in a better life to which the departed good are
called,--to believe in the shortness of our separation, the certainty
of reunion, and that all these events are arranged in all their
relations by an infinite tenderness which cannot err. Surely,
Christian funerals too often seem to say that affliction 'cometh of
the dust,' and not from above."
"But," said Bob, "after all, death is a horror; you can make nothing
less of it. You can't smooth it over, nor dress it with flowers; it is
what Nature shudders at."
"It is precisely for this reason," said I, "that Christians should
avoid those customs which aggravate and intensify this natural dread.
Why overpower the senses with doleful and funereal images in the hour
of weakness and bereavement, when the soul needs all her force to rise
above the gloom of earth, and to realize the mysteries of faith? Why
shut the friendly sunshine from the mourner's room? Why muffle in a
white shroud every picture that speaks a cheerful household word to
the eye? Why make a house look stiff and ghastly and cold as a corpse?
In some of our cities, on the occurrence of a death in the family, all
the shutters on the street are closed and tied with black crape, and
so remain for months. What an oppressive gloom must this bring on a
house! how like the very shadow of death! It is enlisting the nerves
and the senses against our religion, and making more difficult the
great duty of returning to life and its interests. I would have
flowers and sunshine in the deserted rooms, and make them symbolical
of the cheerful mansions above, to which our beloved ones are gone.
Home ought to be so religiously cheerful, so penetrated by the life of
love and hope and Christian faith, that the other world may be made
real by it. Our home life should be a type of the higher life. Our
home should be so sanctified, its joys and its sorrows so baptized and
hallowed, that it shall not be sacrilegious to think of heaven as a
higher form of the same thing,--a Father's house in the better
country, whose mansions are many, whose love is perfect, whose joy is
eternal."