American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science;: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian HomesStowe, Harriet Beecher
Religion
American Woman's Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science;: Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Home economics
One other consideration is very important. There is no duty more binding
on Christians than that of patience and meekness under provocations
and disappointment. Now, the tendency of every sensitive mind, when
thwarted in its wishes, is to complain and find fault, and that often
in tones of fretfulness or anger. But there are few servants who have
not heard enough of the Bible to know that angry or fretful
fault-finding from the mistress of a family, when her work is not done
to suit her, is not in agreement with the precepts of Christ. They
notice and feel the inconsistency; and every woman, when she gives way
to feelings of anger and impatience at the faults of those around her,
lowers herself in their respect, while her own conscience, unless very
much blinded, can not but suffer a wound.
In speaking of the office of the American mistress as being a missionary
one, we are far from, recommending any controversial interference with
the religious faith of our servants. It is far better to incite them
to be good Christians in their own way than to run the risk of shaking
their faith in all religion by pointing out to them what seem to us
the errors of that in which they have been educated. The general purity
of life and propriety of demeanor of so many thousands of undefended
young girls cast yearly upon our shores, with no home but their church,
and no shield but their religion, are a sufficient proof that this
religion exerts an influence over them not to be lightly trifled with.
But there is a real unity even in opposite Christian forms; and the
Roman Catholic servant and the Protestant mistress, if alike possessed
by the spirit of Christ, and striving to conform to the Golden Rule,
can not help being one in heart, though one go to mass and the other
to meeting.
Finally, the bitter baptism through which we have passed, the life-blood
dearer than our own which has drenched distant fields, should remind
us of the preciousness of distinctive American ideas. They who would
seek in their foolish pride to establish the pomp of liveried servants
in America are doing that which is simply absurd. A servant can never
in our country be the mere appendage to another man, to be marked like
a sheep with the color of his owner; he must be a fellow-citizen, with
an established position of his own, free to make contracts, free to
come and go, and having in his sphere titles to consideration and
respect just as definite as those of any trade or profession whatever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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