II
THE NURSERY OF SPIRITUAL LIFE
We are coming more and more to realize that religion attaches to the simple, elemental aspects of our human life. We shall not look for it in a few rare, exalted, and so-called “sacred” aspects of life, separated off from the rest of life and raised to a place apart. Religion to be real and vital must be rooted in life itself and it must express itself through the whole life. It should begin, where all effective education must begin, in the home, which should be the nursery of spiritual life.
The Christian home is the highest product of civilization; in fact there is nothing that can be called civilization where the home is absent. The savage is on his way out of savagery as soon as he can create a home and make family life at all sacred. The real horror of the “slums” in our great cities is that there are no homes there, but human beings crowded indiscriminately into one room. It is the real trouble with the “poor whites” whether in the South or in the North that they have failed to preserve the home as a sacred center of life.
One of the first services of the foreign missionary is to help to establish homes among the people whom he hopes to Christianize. In short, the home is the true unit of society. It determines what the individual shall be; it shapes the social life; it makes the Church possible; it is the basis of the state and nation. A society of mere individual units is inconceivable. Men and women, each for self, and with no holy center for family life, could never compose either a Church or a State.
Christianity has created the home as we know it, and that is its highest service to the world, for the kingdom of heaven would be realized if the Christian home were universal. The mother’s knee is still the holiest place in the world; and the home life determines more than all influences combined what the destiny of the boy or girl shall be. The formation of disposition and early habits of thought and manner as well as the fundamental emotions and sentiments do more to shape and fix the permanent character than do any other forces in the world.
We may well rejoice in the power of the Sunday school, the Christian ministry, the secular school, the college, the university; but all together they do not measure up to the power of the homes which are silently, gradually determining the future lives of those who will compose the Sunday school, the Church, the school, and the college.
The woman who is successful in making a true home, where peace and love dwell, in which the children whom God gives her feel the sacredness and holy meaning of life, where her husband renews his strength for the struggles and activities of his life, and in which all unite to promote the happiness and highest welfare of each other—that woman has won the best crown there is in this life, and she has served the world in a very high degree. The union of man and woman for the creation of a home breathing an atmosphere of love is Christ’s best parable of the highest possible spiritual union where the soul is the bride and he is the Eternal Bridegroom, and they are one.
It seems strange that these vital matters are so little emphasized or regarded. Few things in fact are more ominous than the signs of the disintegration of the home as a nursery of spiritual life. We can, perhaps, weather catastrophes which may break down many of our ancient customs and even obliterate some of the institutions which now seem essential to civilization; but the home is a fundamental necessity for true spiritual nurture and culture, and if it does not perform its function the world will drift on toward unspeakable moral disasters.