There is yet another consideration which must be noted ere we receive the full message of Jesus about the home. The teaching of Jesus concerning God was almost wholly based on a figure of speech derived from the home. In the Old Testament God is mentioned under the title of fatherhood but seven times. Five times he is spoken of as the father of the Jewish people; twice he is spoken of as the father of individual men. Only once in the sweep of the ancient Scriptures is there found a prayer addressed to God as Father. God was the King of kings, and the Lord of hosts; he was Creator and Lawgiver. But in the knowledge of the people he was not yet Father. The world waited long ere men found an Elder Brother who could break the spell of their orphanhood and reveal to them a Father. When Jesus desired to tell men what God was like he went to their homes and found therein the form of his teaching. He sprinkled the New Testament with the domestic name of God. Two hundred and sixty-five times God is spoken of under the title of Fatherhood. The sacredness of the home relation could not receive holier emphasis.
Thus the homes which are founded by the Lord become revelations of the Lord. Domestic relations are teachers of theology. Well may we speak of a Family Bible! There is such a Bible. The illustration of theology is the family illustration. Some day we shall recover that theology, and we shall place the theologies that have superseded it in their secondary place. Jesus was the final Teacher of theology, and we must give him the primacy. Under his teaching every true home is a symbol of the divine household; every true parent is a limited representative of God; every true son is an example of the filial spirit that is religion. The path of prayer starts with the word Father. The doctrine of providential care is explained by the word Father. The call to obedience refers to the will of the Father. The deeper tragedy of sin comes from the fact that the offense is against the Father. Conversion is a return to the Father.
Taking, then, the direct teaching of Jesus with reference to marriage as the founding of the home, taking his life in its merciful relation to the home, and taking his teaching about God as based on the home, we are justified in saying that Jesus was the Prophet and Saviour of the Family. The vision that he gave of the other life took on that form again. He declared that he was preparing a place for his own, and he called that place the “Father’s house.” He was likewise preparing a home this side of the many mansions. A Carpenter he was. He has builded many sanctuaries, some for worship, and some for the mercy that we show to the sick, and aged, and destitute. But the Carpenter of Nazareth is the builder of the true home. His word lays its foundations, raises its walls, places its capstone, and furnishes its atmosphere of peace and love. The home that is placed on any other word cannot stand the shock of the tempest. It is based on sand; and when the winds and rains and storms of passion come, the home will fall, and great will be the fall thereof. The world needs to-day the lesson of Jesus about the home; and it needs, also, the spirit of Jesus in the home. When men and women yield to that spirit, extravagance will be checked, forbearance will be increased, love will be promoted, peace will be established. Husband and wife will not then plead that Jesus’s strict decree concerning marriage may be annulled. Earthly homes will be like vestibules of the Father’s House.
There remains for brief discussion the relation of the Epistles of the New Testament to the home life of the people. The tendency here has been to give undue emphasis to certain phases of Paul’s teaching. Some reformers, especially some radical feminists, have spoken of the great apostle’s teaching with scant respect. The command to wives to obey their husbands has been kept apart from the command to husbands to love their wives even as Christ loved the church. Christ loved the church so that he gave his life for it; and when husbands love their wives to that sublime extent, obedience is no longer demanded for tyranny. All technical matters aside, it will be seen that the apostolic treatment of the domestic relations, touching the relative duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and servants, shows a marked balance. When each party keeps his portion of the precepts, and is strictly minded to fulfill precisely his part of the apostolic contract, debates about primacy and authority find their gracious solution in mutual love. Unless we should wish to make undue account of Saint Paul’s doctrine of the husband’s primacy, we cannot say that his attitude toward womankind was marked by anything other than utmost respect. Just what his own domestic experiences were is a question of age-long doubt. If we study his actual references to women we shall find a series of compliments too deep to serve as the expression of a superficial gallantry and too genuine to allow the author to be classed as a hater of the mothers and sisters and wives of the race. Near the end of his life Paul caught the vision of his Master. Beyond his wanderings he saw a destination; above his imprisonments he saw a freedom; after his shipwrecks he saw a haven; and the destination and freedom and haven were all expressed in the words “at home.” “At home,” “at home with the Lord,” this was Paul’s conception of the waiting heaven. He, too, exalted the home by making it the forefigure of heaven.
We have now presented enough to justify the statement that the Bible is the stanch friend of the home. As long as men and women read and obey the Book, and love and follow the Lord of the Book, their feet will turn reverently homeward as to the place of God’s appointing, as to the school of God’s own discipline, as to the place of God’s own joy, and as to the anteroom of God’s own heaven.
CHAPTER IV
The Bible and Education
The man whose program of daily life suggests the outline of these chapters awakes in the morning to the consciousness of himself. He is soon aware of the presence of his family and catches the sense of home. Directly the children are made ready for school and join that romping procession that moves each day at the joint command of parents and teachers. In the normal Christian community this fact of school-going is all but universal. In such a community the illiterate person is so exceptional as to be a curiosity; he is marked by separateness if not by distinction. All of us have marched to school; all of us have had teachers.