FAMILIAR TALK
IS IMPROMPTU HOSPITALITY A LOST ART
Without staying to prove my premises I take it for granted nobody will dispute that what it pleases me to call impromptu hospitality is an out-of-date virtue.
In the very olden time there were those who were backward in the practice of it. Else the fisherman Apostle would not have enjoined upon the “strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia,” to “use hospitality, one to another, without grudging.”
An ancient writer says: “The primitive Christians made one principal part of their duty to consist in the exercise of hospitality; and they were so exact in the practice of it that the very heathens admired them for it.”
From which we gather that the Apostolic admonition had fallen into good soil and brought forth much fruit.
It would be interesting to know when the quid pro quo element entered into and defiled the noble virtue. The primitive Christians aforesaid had no knowledge of this alloy, while the recollection of the Master’s teaching was fresh in their minds:
“For if ye lend to them of whom you hope to receive, what thank have ye?”
The principle that moves me to invite those to sit at my table and sleep under my roof who can return the favor in kind, or be useful in turn to me in some way, is barter, not hospitality. When I give a feast—be it afternoon tea, or the gravest of social functions, a dinner party—to five hundred, or to five people who have invited me at some time to their houses—and because of the obligation under which their invitations have laid me—I may be honest. I am not generous. I pay a debt. I do not exercise a grace.
The former times were not better in all respects than these. But for divers reasons they were more hospitable times. It was inevitable that private houses should keep open doors when taverns, and even houses of entertainment, were few and far apart upon main-traveled roads, and utterly wanting to the traveler who pushed his way into the back country unknown except to the pioneer. If the stranger were not welcomed to the home of him whose house stood nearest to the wayside, he was shelterless in night or storm. There is the less need for the exercise of undiscriminating hospitality when inn and hotel “blaze” the track into the wilderness.
There is none the less occasion for asking our friends to enter our homes and to partake of the food which is a symbol of the good-will we have for them, our disposition to share with them the best blessings granted to man in this world—home loves and home joys. True hospitality but widens the circle and makes the guest “at home.” Artificial hospitality seeks or accepts a convenient season for making the everyday life of the home seem what it is not to the stranger within our gates.