| Home Making |
Chapter 7 |
Page 6 |
The good we could do in our homes with our tongues if we would use them to the utmost limit of their capacity it is simply impossible to compute. Why should so much power for blessing be wasted? Especially why should we ever pervert these gifts and use our tongues to do evil, to give pain, to scatter seeds of bitterness? It is a sad thing when a child is born dumb, but it were better far to be dumb and never to have the gift of speech at all, than, having it, to employ it in speaking only sharp, unloving or angry words.
“Only a word!
But sharp, oh sharper than a two edged sword,
To pierce and sting and scar
The heart whose peace a breath of flame could mar.”
The home conversation should be loving. Home is the place for warmth and tenderness. Yet there is in many families a great dearth of kind words. In some cases there is no conversation at all worthy of the name. There are no affectionate greetings in the morning or good nights at parting when the day closes. The meals are eaten in silence. There are no fireside chats over the events and incidents of the day. A stranger might mistake the home for a deaf and dumb institution. In other cases it was better if silence reigned, for only words of miserable strife and shameful quarreling are heard from day to day. Husband and wife, who vowed at the marriage altar to cherish the one the other till death, keep up an incessant petty strife of words. Parents, who are commanded in the holy word not to provoke their children to anger lest they be discouraged, but to bring them up in the nurture of the Lord, scarcely ever speak gently to them. They seem to imagine that they are not “governing” their children unless they are perpetually scolding at them. They fly into passions against them at the smallest irritation. They issue their commands to them in words and tones which would better suit the despot of some petty savage tribe than the head of a Christian household. It is not strange that under such “nurture” the children, instead of dwelling together in unity, with loving speech, should only wrangle and quarrel, speaking only bitter words in their intercourse with one another. That there are many homes of just this type it is idle to deny. That prayer is offered morning and evening in these families only makes the matter worse, as it is mockery for a household to rise from their knees only to begin another day of strife and bitterness.
Page 6
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