The Home Beautiful

Several months before the death of Dr. J. R. Miller, he made plans for “The Home Beautiful.” The suggestion had been made to him that it would be helpful if he would take the heart of the books “Week Day Religion,” “Practical Religion,” “Home Making,” and “In His Steps,” and make a new voliune on Christian home life. It was his purpose to improve on the suggestion made to him by preparing a nimiber of new chapters. The plan was not to be carried out. God called him from earth before he was able to do more than begin the preparation of the volume.

However, he talked so fully of his plans to his associates, that it has been possible to arrange ‘’The Home Beautiful” in a manner that is felt to be in accordance with the wishes of one whose life was devoted to inspiring men, women and children to the life that alone can make the home really beautiful.

JOHN T. FARIS
Philadeiphia, October, 19x2

Homes are the divinely ordained fountains of life. It is not by accident that men live in families rather than solitarily. The hmnan race began in a family, and Eden was a home. The divine blessing has ever rested upon nations and commimities just in the measure in which they have adhered to these original institutions and have kept marriage and the home pure and holy; and blight and curse have come just in the measure in which they have departed from these divine models, dishonoring marriage and tearing down the sacred walls of home.

Back of the home lies marriage. The wedding day throws its shadow far down the future; it may be, ought to be, a shadow of healing and benediction. In a tale of medieval English life a maiden goes before the bridal party on their way to the church, strewing flowers in their path. This was meant to signify that their wedded life should be one of joy and prosperity. Almost imiversally wedding ceremonies and festivities have some feature of similar significance, implying that the occasion is one of gladness. In some coimtries flowers are worn as bridal wreaths. In some they are woven into garlands for the waist, the tying of the ends being a part of the ritual. In others they are carried in the hand or worn in the hair or on the bosom. Music comes in, also, always joyous music, implying that the ceremony is one of peculiar gladness. In some places, too, wedding bells are rung, their peals being merry and gladsome.

All these and similar bridal customs indicate that the world regards the wedding as the crowning day of life, and marriage as an event of the highest felicity, an occasion for the most enthusiastic congratulations. Yet not always are these happy prophecies fulfilled. Sometimes the flowers wither and the music grows discordant and the wedding peals die away into a memory only of gladness. It ought not to be so. It is not so when the marriage has been true, and when the wedded Ufe is ruled by love. Then the bridal wreath remains fresh and fragrant till it is laid upon the coffin by the loving hands of the one who survives to dose the eyes of the other; and the wedding music and the peals of the bells continue to echo in tones of gladness and peace imtil hushed in sobbings of sorrow when the singers sing in dirges and the bells toll out the niunber of the finished years.

Marriage is intended to bring joy. The married life is meant to be the happiest, fullest, purest, richest life. It is God’s own ideal of completeness. It was when he saw that it was not good for man to be alone that woman was made and brought to him to supply what was lacking. The divine intention, therefore, is that marriage shall yield happiness, and that it shall add to the fulness of the h*fe of both husband and wife; that neither shall lose, but that both shall gain. If in any case it fails to be a blessing and to yield joy, and a richer, fuller life, the fault cannot be with the institution itself, but with those who under its shadow fail to fulfill its conditions.

The causes of failure may lie back of the marriage altar, for many are imited in matrimony who never should have entered upon such a union; or they may lie in the life after marriage, for many who might attain to the very highest happiness in wedded life, fail to do so because they have not learned the secret of living happily together.

To guard against the former mistake the sacred character and the solemn responsibilities of marriage should be well imderstood and thoughtfully considered by all who would enter upon it. Marriage is a divine ordinance. It was part of God’s original intention when he made man. It is not a mere himian arrangement, something that sprang up in the race as a convenience along the history of the ages. It was not devised by any earthly lawgiver. It is not a habit into which men fell in the early days. The stamp of divine intention and ordination is upon it.

As a relationship it is the closest and most sacred on earth. The relation of parent and child is very dose. Children are taught in all the Scriptures to honor their parents, to revere them, to cleave to them, to brighten and bless their lives in every possible way. Yet the marriage relation is put above the filial, for a man is to leave his father and his mother, give up his old home with all its sacred ties and memories, and cleave to his wife. After marriage a husband’s first and highest duties are to his wife, and a wife’s to her husband. The two are to live for each other. Life is to be lost for life. Every other interest is thenceforward secondary to the home interest.

Then the marriage relation is indissoluble. The two become in the fullest, truest sense one. Each is incomplete before; marriage is the imiting of two halves in one complete whole. It is the knitting together of two lives in a union so dose and real that they are no more twain, but one; so close that nothing save death or the one crime of infidelity to the marriage bond itself can disunite them. Marriage, therefore, is not a contract which can be annulled at the will of one or both of the parties. It may be discovered after the marriage has been formed that the parties are ill mated; one may find in the other traits or habits unsuspected before, which seem to render happiness in imion impossible; the husband may be cruel and abusive or the wife ill-tempered, thriftless or a biurden; yet the Scriptures are very explicit in their teachings, that the tie once formed is indissoluble. There is one crime, said the pure and holy Jesus, which, committed by either, leaves the guilty one as dead, the other free. But besides this the teaching of Christ recognizes no other lawful sundering of the marriage tie. When two persons stand at the marriage altar and with clasped hands promise before God and in the presence of human witnesses to take each other as wife and as husband, to keep and to cherish each the other, only death can unclasp their hands. Each takes into sacred keeping the happiness and the highest good of the other to the end of life.

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