The Christian Home: As it is in the Sphere of Nature and the Church; Showing the Mission, Duties, Influences, Habits, and Responsibilities of Home, its Education, Government, and Discipline; with Hints on "Match Making," and the Relation of Parents to the Marriage Choice of their Children; together with a consideration of the Tests in the Selection of a Companion, Etc.Philips, Samuel
Religion
The Christian Home: As it is in the Sphere of Nature and the Church; Showing the Mission, Duties, Influences, Habits, and Responsibilities of Home, its Education, Government, and Discipline; with Hints on "Match Making," and the Relation of Parents to the Marriage Choice of their Children; together with a consideration of the Tests in the Selection of a Companion, Etc.
Philips, Samuel
Family; Home; Marriage; Parent and child
If we would, therefore, escape the shackles and contamination of corrupt
society, we must hold the parlor sacred and give to it the air and bearing
of at least a moral aristocracy. Home is the first form of society. The law
of love rules and reigns there. It is enthroned in the heart, and casts
light around our existence. In that society we live above the trammels of
artificial life. In its parlor the members merge with society beyond its
sacred precincts. Hence it is the most beautiful room; the best furniture
is there; smiles adorn it; friends meet there; fashion meets there in her
silks and jewels, with her circumstance and custom, her sympathies,
antipathies and divers kinds of conversation; form and profession reign
there; flatteries and hypocrisies intrude themselves there; pledges are
given there; attachments and vows are made there; the mind and heart are
impressed and moulded there; the cobweb lines of etiquette are drawn there;
a panorama of social fascinations pass before the youthful eye
there,--these make the parlor the most dangerous department of home. There
the young receive their first introduction to society; there they see the
world in all the brilliancy of outward life, in the pomp and pageantry of a
vanity fair. All seems to them as a fairy dream, as a brilliant romance;
their hearts are allured by these outward attractions; their imaginations
are fed upon the unreal, and they learn to judge character by the external
habiliments in which its reality is concealed. They estimate worth by the
beauty of the face and form, by the cost of dress and the genuflections of
the body. They form their notions of happiness from fashion, fortune and
position. They become enslaved to love-sick novels and fashionable
amusements. There, too, they make choice of companions; there they form
matrimonial alliances; there their hearts are developed, their minds
trained for social life, their affections directed, and influence brought
to bear upon them, which will determine their weal or their woe.
If such be the influence of the home-parlor, should it not be held sacred,
and made to correspond, in all the uses for which it is set apart, with the
spirit and character of a Christian family; and should not its doors be
effectually guarded against the intrusion of spurious and demoralizing
elements of society?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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