The Christian Home / As it is in the Sphere of Nature and the Church; Showing the Mission, Duties, Influences, Habits, and Responsibilities of Home, its Education, Government, and Discipline; with Hints on "Match Making," and the Relation of Parents to the Marriage Choice of their Children; together with a consideration of the Tests in the Selection of a Companion, Etc.

by Samuel Philips

The memories of home are both pleasing and painful. When we leave the parental home for some distant land, how many pleasing recollections sweep over our spirits then. Even when tossed to and fro upon the angry wave, far from our native land.

"There comes a fond memory

Of home o’er the deep."

The memory of departed worth is a kind of compensation for the loss we sustain. The pious mother’s recollection of her sainted husband or child becomes the soother of her grief, and casts a pleasing light along her pathway, and awakens a new joy in her widowed heart. Pious memories, when they reflect the hope of reunion in heaven, are like the radiant sky studded with brilliant stars, each shining through the clouds which move along the verge of the horizon. They sweep as gently over the troubled heart as the summer zephyr over the blushing rose, touching all the chords of holy feeling, making them vibrate sadly sweet, in blended tones, too sweet to last.

"Here a deeper and serener charm

To all is given,

And blessed memories of the faithful dead

O’er wood and vale, and meadow-stream have shed

The holy hues of heaven."

How indelibly does memory paint the image of a departed child upon the mother’s heart! No flight of years; no distance from the grave in which he slumbers, can erase the image. It will be ever fresh, and, with awakening power, mingle with her tears and glow in her fondest hopes. Though time and distance and vicissitudes may calm her troubled heart, and cause her to settle down into tranquility of feeling; but these can never destroy the tenacity and vividness of her memory. Even then those objects to which it fondly clings, become the theme of her holiest and her happiest thoughts; and she retains them with a passionate ardor, exceeded only by that with which she clung to the living child. Her greatest pleasure is, to retire from the busy cares of the world, to some solitude where she may sit among flowers that remind her of the one that withered in her arms, and meditate upon him who slumbers beneath the clods of the valley. Oh, these are sweet and precious moments to her; and the tears which are then drawn from the deep well-springs of reminiscence, are sacred to him with whom she in spirit there communes. There with, rapture she remembers