The home world; friendly counsels for home-keeping hearts

Contents

CHAPTER FACI

I Cherishing the Home 9

II Old Familiar Things 17

Chapter I Cherishing The Home

IN one day we live in many different worlds. There is the home-world of the morning hours before we bundle off to work. There is the street-world and the trolley-world that we mingle with on our way to work. And during the day, there is the long hard world of work, work, work. Then there is the returning round of these worlds but in an opposite direction, thank God, and ending in the world of home and comfort, happiness and rest. This repetition of home, work, home, varied by a little good amusement, a week or two of vacation in the summer months, periodical holidays, like Christmas and Easter, forms our life. This is true no matter what our work may be, and it is good once in a while to look into the various worlds that form our daily life and see what we are doing in them.

This multitude of worlds in the short space of one day is an impressive thing. It astounds you when you think about it. For we enter and remain a short time in each world, mingle with its respective inhabitants, exert a conscious or unconscious influence on each dweller there, and go out of it leaving it better or worse for the moment we lived in it. The silent influence of good or bad example has been the powerful weapon wherewith we assaulted our neighbor. After all, it is about our influence in the little worlds that make up our daily round that we shall be questioned on the last day. Hence it is wise to sit here and review our conduct and see what we can do to bring more love and light and holy cheerfulness into the big world which is nothing more than all our little worlds put together.

For instance, look at the home-world. Your companions are the familiar ones of home, father, mother, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. If you have not all these relatives, you know well those you have, and feel perfectly free in their company. There is an intimacy here which you will not experience in any other small world of the day, for no world is like this world of home. Its companions, atmosphere, resources and happiness surpass by far those of any world except that of Heaven. "Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite obsorption of home, the delicious retirement of dependent love." 1

"A home is four walls inclosing one family with identity of interest, and a privacy from outside inspection so complete that it is a world in itself, no one entering except by permission, bolted and barred and chained against all outside inquisitiveness. The phrase so often used in law-books and legal circles is mightily suggestive — every man's house is his castle, as much so as though it had drawbridge, portcullis, redoubt, bastion, and armed turret. Even the officer of the law may not enter to serve a writ except the door be voluntarily opened unto him; burglary, or the invasion of it, is a crime so offensive that the law

CHERISHING THE HOME n

clashes its iron jaws on any one who attempts it." 8 You are so used to your home that you do not, perhaps, appreciate it as you should. Its continued stability has become an accepted thing. Your home is like the eternal mountains and it would be a fearful shock to you if anything occured to shake its foundations and bring it crashing down. Oh, what a ruin is the crushed home ! The walls have closed in relentlessly, and for you, maybe, the home does not exist any more. When the home is broken up, when some volcano of human emotions has erupted and belched its poison over your home-world, you will begin to realize what you enjoyed and what you miss. The broken home is a sad sight. The study of those violent emotions that wreck homes is the saddest of studies. Only a priest can fully realize what a sad study this is, for in his experience he has seen homes come tumbling down despite every effort to keep them firm.

The home is a ruin, like the deserted house Irving describes : "The house was now silent and deserted. I saw the windows of the study which looked out upon the soft scenery I have mentioned. The windows were closed — the library was gone. Two or three ill-favored beings were loitering about the place, whom my fancy pictured into retainers of the law. It was like visiting some classic fountain that had once welled its pure waters in a sacred shade, but finding it dry and dusty, with the lizard and the toad brooding over the shattered marbles."

If in your present home-world, you can in any way, even by great sacrifices, prevent the spread of the poisonous emotions, never hesitate to do

*Talmage, The Marriage Ring.

it. The future will repay you by happiness. God will repay you by His graces. Have you ever seen a home wrecked by jealousy? Or stubbornness on the part of the wife or husband? It is something of this kind that grows up like the Genii in the Arabian Nights, and devours the little home-world which you fondly thought nothing could touch. In the beginning the thing was foul, but you did not notice it, just as you do not notice the minute specks of dust until the bright ray of sunlight catches them up and reveals them. And in their effects these infinitesimal beginnings are like the mighty Vesuvius, that roars its thunderous streams of molten rock down on the hapless cities and buries them in fire.

Small jealousies breed great disasters. Little hates are like accursed acorns from which grows nothing so beautiful as the majestic oak. Foul swamp weeds spring up from such seeds sown in the home-world and if the home does not become either suddenly or in the near future, a bleak, stagnant, loathsome swamp of human emotions, then the sacrifice of some hero or heroine saved it and transformed the hate and jealousy by love and forbearance.

Whatever world you enter or leave, whatever world you influence, there can be no question but that your widest influence is here in the home-world. The difficulty seems to be oftentimes that because this is the most familiar of our worlds, we neglect it more or less, and prove ourselves unconscious or thoughtless of its demands on our influence. Here we should be at our best. The finest gentleman and the finest lady are to be found at home. Outside of home we show our-

CHERISHING THE HOME 13

Selves for a little while, but home is our abiding place, the center of our happiness, and it is here alone the truest and best that is in us should be discovered.

The finger of God points to home and He bids us find our earthly joy there, and the sad experience of many, is a fruitless search for happiness outside the sacred walls. And what does the world give in exchange for the gloomy harvest? Is it fame? Burke said that he would not give a peck of refuse wheat for fame. The poet Byron drained the cup of earthly joy to the dregs and then sighed for death. He had everything but a home. Glory and fame were his, but the warmth of home would never fill his veins with happiness. Fame! Why, this is air, a mere fantasy, something a fevered man sees in troubled dreams. Yet the world of home is beset by this phantom and the threshold is crossed many and many a time because fame beckons and, lacking the right judgment of what we leave and what we strive for, off we go into the gay arms of the world, only to return with our peck of refuse wheat and the tears of disappointed regret.

The touch of the outside world on flesh warmed by home-fires is like a demon's heated breath of passion. The ruin is terrific, because innocence has been blasted.

Our homes are sacred places. They afford us escape from sickening failure when we return breathless and conquered in the strife for money, place and glory; home is as refreshing as the cup of cool water after the heats of the day; it is our solace when the world has opened its huge maw and swallowed our peace. Faith in Christ is the rock we cling to when the world grows stormy, and this faith is calm, serene and strong in the home. How many Prodigals have returned to the beloved walls with a sense of amazement and wonder that they could ever have left them so easily, so eagerly ! The doors of home open outwards with slow creaking and noisy protest, but with gladness do they swing inward, like embracing arms.

A rich soil will grow as thick a crop of weeds as of wheat, and the difference is in sowing and cultivating, the time and labor and amount of self-sacrifice in keeping out the weed and helping the wheat to grow its golden grains. Now the rich soil of the home is this soil of self-sacrifice and the harvest is more golden than wheat.

How often have you seen some good self-sacrificing girl save the home from ruin after the mother had died? She slaved for the younger children, sacrificed her youth to hard work, her beauty to nights with the needle and hours over the cooking range, and perhaps in the end became an old maid for her charity. She never had time for wooing. Her life was the worker's life, the burden was on her slim shoulders, and if the children today know what the influence of home means, she is responsible and hers is the reward. There must be a special place set apart in heaven for those faithful, self-sacrificing women, who raise the children of other mothers at the hard price of never having children of their own. What would become of many families if all the old maid aunts had not sacrificed themselves on the stone of selfless devotion?

How often have you seen some young boy just

CHERISHING THE HOME 15

growing into manhood take on his shoulders the support of the family when the father was snatched away suddenly and when the distracted mother hardly cared where the next meal was to come from! The other children were too young to realize the seriousness of their loss. They drew their chairs up to the dining-table as usual. There had to be bread and the young boy earned it. Perhaps he gave up an education to hold that home together. If, then, he does not know how to spell correctly; if he does not use the choicest language in his conversation, do not consider him a boor, an uncouth fellow not worth knowing. In God's sight he is a hero, and your opinion, while it may hurt his feelings, will not change the eternal decrees one whit. It is you who are foolish to condemn a fellowman or woman without knowledge of the circumstances that went to mould his life.

This is the real influence to be exerted in home-worlds. This is real charity. Self-sacrifice like this can hold back the tide of many destroying floods and keep the home safe. This is one of the finest things in the world and you can see the fineness and beauty of it very often in the clear, brave eye of the girl and boy making the sacrifice. Without such heroism many a home would be a barn, and without it the mansion of marble may as well be the swamp lands where crows caw their mournful cries.

The whole human race is but one large family, and Eden was the cradle, the world is its home, the Father in heaven is at once the guardian, the law-maker and the reward, but self-sacrifice has been demanded of lonely women and brave men ever since the race was born. Woman must always be up and doing and agonizing over the children of men, and if her smile is music and her voice a song, the theme of the harmony is sacrifice. Think how wonderful must have been the first long ray of pure white light as it went leaping in its splendor across the gloomy dark of primal chaos! Yet this beauty was only material, and the beauty of self-sacrifice is greater. This beam of light pierces the worldly chaos of today and illumines souls. Its reach is limitless and its beams are cheering comfort. Where self-sacrifice is, there the home is truly cherished. This is the first ruddy home-fire and it should never grow dull or chill for want of fuel.

Chapter II

IN the home-world everything is familiar, so much so that you do not notice those details of life and living that surround you. The paper on the wall, for example, has become so much a part of your eyesight that you cannot tell off-hand what color it is. Thus the things we are most familiar with are the things we know least. This statement may sound strange, but truly here the old saying is verified that familiarity breeds contempt. You have but to test this argument on your friends. When you are at work today, ask your best friend :

"What is the color of the paper on the dining-room wall?"

You will get an answer like this :

"The paper on the dining-room wall? Why, eh, it's a kind of blue, I think, one of these flower effects, you know. But wait! Maybe it's red. Now I come to think of it, it is red. But I may be mistaken. Really, I forget."

The same may be said of the curtains on the windows. Unless you took a certain overweening pride in hanging them yourself, or in making them, it is safe to say that you will not notice them particularly until they have been taken down. Then their absence calls your attention to the fact that they were once there. It is like an alarm clock in your bedroom. If it stops you know something is wrong, but while it ticked away the moments of your life, you never noticed it. You were familiar with the sound and forgot it.

"Blessed is that home," says a modern writer, "in which for a whole lifetime associations have been gathering, until every figure in the carpet, and every panel of the door, and every casement of the window has a chirography of its own, spelling out something about father, or mother, or son, or daughter, or friend that was with us awhile. What a sacred place it becomes when one can say: In that room such a one was born; in that bed such a one died; in that chair I sat on the night I heard such a one had received a great public honor; by that stool my child knelt for her last evening prayer; here I stood to greet my son as he came back from a sea-voyage; that was my father's cane; that was mother's rocking chair 1 What a joyful and pathetic congress of reminiscences!" 1

There is a good story told by a young Jesuit priest who served in the French army during the war. His name is Lieutenant Marcel Jousse, and as he had been trained in the military school before he became a priest, he was called to the colors as an artilleryman. He hated the work, for he was a priest, but did his duty well. He wears the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. In describing the effect the noise of the big shells had on him, he said:

"No one can realize it unless from actual experience. The explosion at first, in the early days of the war, seemed to shake the earth and break the ears. It was a tremendous uproar of sound, a

^The Marriage Ring.

s hellish upheaval of noise. Gradually, when one heard this sound day after day, one got used to it. After three years and a half I was so habituated that when I was sent to Washington on the French Military Mission, I could not sleep at night. I grew very nervous. I did not know what was the matter. I sought the cause of the trouble and finally came to the conclusion that I could not sleep because there was not noise enough. I missed my big shells."

Certainly this was a strange sound to lull a man to sleep and yet when the noise was absent, Father Jousse missed it. He was not suffering from the ordinary shell shock but from the loss of his shell music. He had become used to the hissing lullaby of death.

The American soldiers, in the same way, found difficulty in sleeping in a mere four-walled room when they returned from overseas or camp. They had been used to the large room of outdoors, with the sky for roof and the wind blowing fresh on their faces. When they came home and got into bed and tried to sleep, they choked. There was not enough air. Such is man! A creature of custom, a piece of putty that can be moulded quite rapidly into various forms which he hates to lose once they are fixed on him.

So it is the same way with the curtains on the windows of your home. You could not describe them, especially if you are a man, and more, you could not realize how much they add to your warm home comfort. But when they are taken down and the cold glass of the window stares harshly at you, you know at once that something has gone wrong. A familiar thing is absent.

Even the china cups and saucers, the plates and knives and forks, are things of importance in the home-world. They make up those details that are called local coloring, and yet they exist as such only in your inner consciousness. Put a new cup on the saucer for breakfast and you notice it at once. How many times have you passed over the old one unnoticed?

"Why look!" you will say, " here's a new cup I It's got a green border!"

The chairs and tables are old familiar things. The table-cloths you have admired in your youth, wondered at in your middle age, and laughed at when you came back from your own very modern home to see the old folks.

Consider the clock on the dining-room mantelpiece. There is a brave Indian rider on a prancing horse. The savage holds a long sharp spear, and the horse has one foreleg gracefully curved. The set of his head is magnificent. The flowing mane is majestic. You can smell the fresh breeze that is blowing. Now when you were young, you used to stand in front of the mantelpiece and marvel at that clock. First, it spoke to you for a long time in little rusty-like whisperings, tick-i-ti-tock, tick-i-ti-tock; and the red Indian looked ferociously at you and the horse seemed very wild. The Indian's menacing spear sent a thrill through your young blood and you could never get over the marvel of so much splendid action frozen in one small piece of bronze.

But the best of all times in your youth was the striking of that clock. When you remember it now, close your eyes and, if it is striking nine o'clock in the evening, you can see your whitehaired grandmother knitting at the dining-room table ; and the old grandfather quietly sleeping in the wide-armed rocker. Notice how his head has fallen to one side? Perhaps your brother John, who is going to college, is frowning over the Greek or Latin or maybe a problem in geometry. You can see the lamp with the soft red shade. Your young sister is studying very hard and you rejoice your eyes in the calm beauty of her face. You? What are you doing? Can you remember as you watch the old clock now? Well, you were in the corner talking with your mother. And Dad was there near the lamp, poring over the political sheet and shaking his head at the downfall of the world.

Suddenly the clock groans, chimes a warning, and then strikes nine silver strokes of home-music. Your grandfather wakes up with a stiff neck and rubs it hard to restore the circulation. John's brow clears. He had set a time limit to his work and the problem was solved. He works by the clock and is just as systematic now. Your pretty sister looks up, gasps at the time, and turns back to her work. Your grandmother looks around the room, smiles one of those wrinkly old smiles that are filled with such deep knowledge of human life. Then perhaps you kissed your mother and went to bed, yawning hard as you tramped wearily up the stairs.

Anyhow, stand in front of the clock, shut your eyes, and submit yourself willingly to its magic spell and you will easily see all those dear things of the past that can come back to you now only in vision. True, the clock and the prancing horse and the Indian remain. The clock speaks as sweetly as ever of the flowing tide we call time, but, well — the old grand-parents are not there any more, and in many, many homes, the mother's voice is not heard, and the boys and girls are away far and wide working in other little worlds of their own.

If growth to manhood and womanhood has brought you many favors and blessings, it has also taken many away and these you recall once in a while when you come back into the world of the old home and see all its familiar surroundings and settings. Think of the influence the old home had on you and then ask yourself very honestly about your influence on the world of your own home nowadays.

"Our hearts," says Oliver Wendell Holmes, are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial as I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. . . . But the plants that come up year after year in the same place . . . give me the liveliest home-feeling. Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus. I remember the sweet honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars. That clump of peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in just the same circle, and by and by unpacking their hard balls of buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has come up in just that place, Neighbor

Walrus tells me, for more years than I have passed on this planet. It is a rare privilege in our nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its immediate neighborhood thus unchanged. Many born poets I am afraid, flower poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often transplanted." 2

The old-fashioned mantelpieces with their quaint statuettes and embroidered hangings formed a bright bit of color in your home-world. Perhaps they do yet but in apartment-house life these ancient ornaments are out of date. They take up too much room and the loss is really never made up.

The kitchen stove has disappeared with the years and a modern gas contrivance has taken its place. Can you remember the wonderful smell of baking bread soaring through the house like a blessing? Can you remember the huge slice of fresh bread your mother gave you when you returned home after school? You had to bring up the coal for the fire, that's true, and it was never an agreeable performance. Still, on a winter's night, with the wind trying to wreck the house and shrieking and yelling outside like a demon, that warm coal fire and the clean kitchen and the loaves of fresh bread on the table were things to be proud of and in your heart there was great contentment. That is, if you were a homey body and loved simplicity. Nowadays it seems as if all those fine old things were to be laughed at. The mistake is a sad one and the sooner we all return to the strength of that ancient home with its wonderful simplicity and peace, the sooner shall

we sophisticated, proud and foolish moderns be- ^olmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table.

come almost as good as the great people who bore us, who trained us and finally left us to rush headlong into the icebergs we are now.

So the poet sings of the changes time has brought

This is my home again! Once more I hail The dear old gables and the creaking vanes: It stands all flecked with shadows in the moon, Patient and white and woeful. 'Tis so still, It seems to brood upon its youthful years, When children sported on its ringing floors, And music trembled through its happy rooms. 3

An old man was moaning about modern improvements. His pet trouble was the loss of mantlepieces. With him there was a particular affection for a certain mantelpiece and in trying to find out his grudge against us moderns, we finally wormed the story out of him.

"Why," he said, "it was this way. My father was a big man, six feet and more. My mother was small, five feet, two inches. We boys used to pick her up and carry her around the house many times despite her protesting cries. When we were young boys just growing up, we never hoped to be as big as Pop but when we began to reach up to the mantelpiece in the dining-room, mother would sigh and say: 'Jim is as big as I am.'

"Regularly every birthday, Pop lined up the boys and girls and made Mom stand at the mantelpiece. Her dear head just reached the top. Then there was excitement and accurate measuring to see if the boy was as big as his mother. Soon she was the smallest of her family and then there was a

•Alexander Smith.

celebration. I can always see the old mantelpiece and one of these frilly hangings with a lot of raised work on the borders. I forget what they call them. Lambrequins, isn't it? And I can always see my mother standing there with Pop measuring the children by her head. My mother ! She has been dead for fifty years! May God grant me the grace to see her soon! I shall be as proud of her in Heaven as I was on earth."

The old man, after all is said, had a good reason to like mantelpieces. He evidently loved that particular one for its associations with his mother. Her influence over the children in her home-world must have been powerful as it was gentle and lasting.

The story is related of Henry Clay, the eloquent old man of the Senate, that when he lay dying, his fevered brain brought up images of his mother long since dead, and the old man cried out continually, "My Mother! Mother! Mother!" This is a sure index of the influence Clay's mother had upon him in early life and we can wish nothing more blessed in a home than this motherly influence which survives age and the passing of years and the glitter of glory. The home on earth is called the vestibule of heaven where all the precious mothers of the race are waiting to continue that love and influence which they began on earth and left off for a little time to go see God. Consider this picture sketched by a son thinking of his mother: "There she sits, the old Christian mother, ripe for heaven. Her eyesight is almost gone, but the splendors of the celestial city kindle up her vision. The gray light of heaven's morn has struck through the gray locks which are folded back over the wrinkled temples. She stoops very much now under the burden of care she used to carry for her children. She sits at home too old to find her way to the house of God; but while she sits there, all the past comes back, and the children that forty years ago tripped round her arm-chair with their griefs and joys and sorrows — those children are gone now, some caught up into a better realm, where they shall never die, and others out in the broad world, testing the excellency of a Christian mother's discipline. Her last days are full of peace, and calmer and sweeter will her spirit become, until the gates of life shall lift and let the worn-out pilgrim into eternal springtide and youth, where the limbs never ache, and the eyes never grow dim, and the staff of the exhausted and decrepit pilgrim shall become the palm of the immortal athlete!" 4

When we are dead fifty years, we may not have any one to remember us as nicely and heartily as the old gentleman remembered his mother, but this is an iron fact, unbreakable and lasting, that if we do exert a holy, strong influence in the home-world and in every other world we enter and leave during the day, some one will remember us, if not by name, certainly by our good deeds.