The Perfect Home

The benediction that falls upon the homes of a country is like the g-entle rain that descends among” the hills. A thousand springs are fuller afterward, and along the banks of a thousand streamlets, flowingthrough the valleys, the grass is greener and the flowers pour out richer fragrance.

Homes are the springs among the hills, whose many streamlets, uniting, form — like great rivers — society, the community, the nation, the Church. If the springs run low, the rivers waste; if they pour out bounteous currents, the rivers are full. If the springs are pure, the rivers are clear like crystal; if they are foul, the rivers are defiled.

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A curse upon homes sends a poisoning blight everywhere; a blessing sends healing and new life into every channel.

Homes are the divinely ordained fountains of life. It is not by accident that men live in families rather than in solitude. The human race began in a family, and Eden was a home. The divine blessing has ever rested upon nations and communities 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, dishonouring marriage and tearing down the sacred walls of home.

At the root 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 mediaeval English life a maiden goes before the bridal party on

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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 universally, wedding ceremonies and festivities have some feature of similar significance, implying that the occasion is one of gladness. In some countries 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 — joyous music, implying that the ceremony is one of peculiar gladness. In some places, too, wedding-bells are rung, and their peals are 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 perfect “Dome

always are these happy prophecies fulfilled. Sometimes the flowers wither and the music grows discordant, and the wedding- peals die away into only a memory of gladness. It ought not to be so. It is not so when the marriage has been true, and when the wedded life is ruled by love. Then the bridal wreath remains fresh and fragrant till it is laid upon the bier by the loving hands of the one who survives to close the eyes of the other; and the wedding music and the peals of the bells continue to echo in tones of gladness and peace until hushed in the sobbings of sorrow, when the singers sing in dirges, and the bells toll out the number 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

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what was lacking1. The divine intention, therefore, is that marriage shall yield happiness, and that it shall add to the fulness of the life 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 fulfil its conditions.

The causes of failure may lie at the back of the marriage altar, for many are united 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 understood and thoughtfully considered by all who would enter upon perfect tpome

it. Marriage is a divine ordinance: it is not a mere human arrangement, something that sprang up in the race as a convenience during the course of the history of 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 close. Children are taught in all the Scriptures to honour 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, to 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 are to her husband. The two are to live for and in each other. Life is to be lost for life.

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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 uniting of two halves into one complete whole. It is the knitting together of two lives in a union so close 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 union impossible; the husband may be cruel and abusive, or the wife ill-tempered, thriftless, or a burden; yet the Scriptures are very explicit in their teachings, that the tie once formed is

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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, beside this, the teaching- of Christ recognises 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 other, only death can part them. Each takes into sacred keeping the happiness and the highest good of the other to the end of life.

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