Ephesians 3:15 Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, St. Paul tells us that it is a society which has God for its founder, and we have only to add to this that it is a society of which each individual father is the human centre. The parental presence is the home. Place is no part of it. We may speak of the home of our childhood, or the home of our youth, and mean by this the particular house in which days full of delightful memories were spent, and from which to have been uprooted by circumstances adverse or prosperous, was a trouble and a sorrow never to be compensated — but, after all, the home itself moves with the parents, and the essence of it is still, amidst all change, the parental presence. Now the home, thus defined, may be of various, even of opposite characters. There are good homes and bad homes — homes of beautiful example, tender affection, and entirely beneficent influence. There are homes of mere self-indulgence, teaching no better lesson than that of the utter unsatisfactoriness of a life lived to itself. There are homes of pitiable discord, where the best hope of the best of sons is that he may be the gentle and persuasive mediator, determined to veil what he cannot honour, and to do his difficult duty alike and equally towards two incongruous characters whose one chance of harmony lies in him. We have seen such instances — we have seen the painful task nobly accomplished, whatever the final issue in success or failure. These last words show us that home does not cease to be home because its characteristics are not home-like. Home is the parental presence, and neither unworthiness, nor ungodliness, nor open evil can either abrogate its rights or destroy its responsibilities. "Home" has its "relations" still, even where pain and grief are the sum of them. Most true and certain it is, that the state of the homes is the state of the population. If you would know what society is, you must examine the family. The terrible thing is, when you find in the lower classes of the national life an early abandonment of the home, or a stay within it on the footing of an absolute and avowed independence. In many of our great towns the daughter, as well as the son, is a lodger: the contribution, which is her bounden duty, to the family resources, takes the form of a rent for board and lodging, which, on the first word of rebuke or restraint, she can, with or without notice, simply carry elsewhere. The religion of the family, such as it is, is not a family religion: each member of the family goes his or her own way, on the day of rest, to the church or chapel, to this or that church, to this or that chapel, in absolute disregard of the wish of the parent or of the companionship of brother or sister. The family life is a rope of sand, without recognition and without cohesion. Is not that a true word, a divine insight, which traces all the faults, and all the sins, and all the crimes of that nation, to its root and source here? Is it not the estrangement of fathers from sons, and of children from parents, which makes the world, our world, the wilderness it is? Is it not at this point that the Elijah must begin his restoring, that the Elisha must throw in his healing salt, if the restoration is to be thorough, if the cure is to be vital? But now we must say a word or two as to what home is — in God's intention, and in the experience of His children. 1. Home is our haven. In early years it is a place of safe keeping. What should we have been without that safeguard? Have we ever stopped to commiserate and to feel for the homeless? Those poor children, baptized in tears, who never had a home — what must it be for them? No sweet memories — of gentle nurture, of kind smiles and loving words, of the presence of all good and the absence of all evil — can we wonder that they fell into bad ways and vile habits? What was there to warn them off from them? What was there to win them another way? What was there so much as to distinguish for them between good and evil? God's holy ordinance, above and before all services or sacraments, of a tender and loving home, this was wanting to them — and, with it, all that "preventing with the blessings of goodness" of which a Psalmist tells, and of which we, the worst of us, have all had experience! 2. Home is our confessional. Yes; before there was altar or shrine, ministry or priesthood, home was. The father of the household was its priest. God modelled upon that exemplar all priesthood that was ever His institution. Priesthood itself replaced not the home, still less that Christian ministry which leaves all Christians priests. How many soever be the presbyters of the Church of England, still the confessional, as God ordained it, is the home. Thither carry your secrets — there unbosom, and there leave them. 3. Yet one word more. Home is our friend. Very delightful is other friendship — ask not of me any depreciation of it. "There is a Friend that sticketh closer than a brother." The mere fact that I have chosen Him partly proves and partly ensures the congeniality and the sympathy. But yet, I say it — home is the friend. It is the dear ones of birth and nature who will go through life with us. Friends may he severed beyond the reach of voice or sign — friends may form their own new ties, or their own life tie, and be partially lost to us. The home and its belongings change not. We go back to them, as to our own, after the longest separations, after the widest wanderings. Hold fast by your home. Even its relics and fragments are precious. Even upon the "broken pieces of that ship" we can "escape safe to land"! Nothing is like it. Cling to it. It is your life. (Dean Vaughan.) Parallel Verses KJV: Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,WEB: from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, |
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