The home is the centre of a nation’s life. More and more emphasis is being laid in enlightened communities on the need of proper home environment and on the grave risks and great dangers that accompany the lack of such environment. If one studies the labors and writings of the great social and religious workers of today, this note of emphasis on home life and training will be heard to ring out loud and clear, above all other sounds of harmony or discord,—a call to meet a definite need.
Dr. Devine has voiced this thought and enlarged upon it in its various phases in his recent book, “The Family and Social Work,” in which he claims that “To maintain normal family life, to restore it when it has been interfered with, to create conditions more and more favorable to it, is thus the underlying object of all our social work. Efforts to relieve distress and to improve general conditions are shaped by our conception of what constitutes normal family life.”
Christianity’s gift to non-Christian homes.
Any candid woman who has studied the “home-scenes” at the beginning of this chapter and has then proceeded (as it is hoped and expected that she will) to study home conditions and surroundings in other lands, will surely be ready to admit that the greatest gift Christianity has to offer to a non-Christian land is the introduction of the power of the Christ life into the homes of that land. Dr. Dennis lays great emphasis on the necessity and opportunity for missionary endeavor along this line.
The reconstruction of the family, next to the regeneration of individual character, is the most precious contribution of missions to heathen society, and we may add that it is one of the most helpful human influences which can be consecrated to the service of social elevation. In the effort to hallow and purify family life we stir the secret yearning of fatherhood and motherhood; we enter the precincts of the home, and take childhood by the hand; we restore to its place of power and winsomeness in the domestic circle the ministry of womanhood; and at the same time we strike at some of the most despicable evils and desolating wrongs of our fallen world. Nothing in the history of human society, except the teaching and example of Jesus Christ, has wrought with such energy and wisdom in introducing saving power into social development as a sanctified home life. If parental training can be made loving, faithful, conscientious, and helpful, if womanhood can be redeemed and crowned, if childhood can be guided in tenderness and wisdom, if the home can be made a place where virtue dwells, and moral goodness is nourished and becomes strong and brave for the conflicts of life, we can conceive of no more effective combination of invigorating influences for the rehabilitation of fallen society than will therein be given.[16]
Greatness of the task.
The task fairly staggers us with its greatness and its limitless scope; but let us be big enough to look even beyond all this, and, with the glorious capacity for motherhood that lies in every good woman’s breast, let us see not only the millions of homes that are in darkness and sorrow and degradation today, but also realize that the children of today are to be the fathers and mothers of tomorrow. Our work as a “great, beautiful, organized motherhood for the world” must include the preparation of these children to assume the duties of parenthood in the future, and to raise from generation to generation the standards of individual and home and national life “till we all attain unto a full grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”
Disorderly homes.
The physical conditions of a home, and the moral and spiritual characters developed in the home act and re-act on each other with clock-like precision. Would you expect a neat and orderly housemaid if you engaged a girl from a home in China which Mrs. S. C. Perkins thus describes?—
The great mass of the people live in what can only be called hovels, the family occupying one room, shared with pigs and chickens; damp, dark, unventilated, and unclean. Even in the houses of the rich there is a certain cheerlessness owing to the lack of carpets, the absence of sunlight, and the stiff arrangement of the furniture. The odor of incense in all houses renders the atmosphere close and unpleasant. The people will not use whitewash, because white is an unlucky color; indeed, their many superstitions interfere with the comfort of the poorer classes quite as much as does their poverty. In Northern China every house has its kang, a platform of stone about two feet high, underneath which a fire is kindled for warmth and for cooking, the heat being carried through it by a flue into the chimney. Here the family sleep at night, sit by day, and on it they cook their food.[17]