THE a.s.sAULT OF THE SORDID.
Attempt has been made to take the marriage inst.i.tution, which was intended for the happiness and elevation of the race, and make it a mere commercial enterprise; an exchange of houses and lands and equipage; a business partnership of two, stuffed up with the stories of romance and knight-errantry, and unfaithfulness and feminine angelhood. The two after a while have roused up to find that, instead of the paradise they dreamed of, they have got nothing but a Van Amburgh"s menagerie, filled with tigers and wild-cats. Twenty thousand divorces in Paris in one year preceded the worst revolution that France ever saw. It was only the first course in that banquet of h.e.l.l; and I tell you what you know as well as I do, that wrong notions on the subject of Christian marriage are the cause at this day of more moral outrage before G.o.d and man than any other cause.
There are some things that I want to bring before you. I know there are those of you who have had homes set up for a great many years; and then there are those here who have just established their home. They have only been in it a few months or a few years. Then there are those who will, after awhile, set up for themselves a home, and it is right that I should speak out upon these themes.
THE BENEFICENT GUEST.
My first counsel to you is, have Jesus in your new home, if it be a new home, and let Him who was a guest at Bethany be in your household; let the divine blessing drop upon your every hope and plan and expectation. Those young people who begin with G.o.d end with heaven. Have on your right hand the engagement ring of the divine affection. If one of you be a Christian, let that one take a Bible and read a few verses in the evening-time, and then kneel down and commend yourselves to Him who setteth the solitary in families. I want to tell you that the destroying angel pa.s.ses by without touching or entering the door-post sprinkled with the blood of the everlasting covenant.
Why is it that in some families they never get along, and in others they always get along well? I have watched such cases, and have come to a conclusion. In the first instance, nothing seemed to go pleasantly, and after awhile came devastation, domestic disaster or estrangement. Why? They started wrong! In the other case, although there were hardships and trials, and some things that had to be explained, still things went on pleasantly until the very last. Why?
They started right!
FORBEARANCE NEEDED.
My advice to you in your home is to exercise to the very last possibility of your nature the law of forbearance. Prayers in the household will not make up for everything. Some of the best people in the world are the hardest to get along with. There are people who stand up in prayer-meetings and pray like angels, who at home are uncompromising and cranky. You may not have everything just as you want it. Sometimes it will be the duty of the husband, and sometimes of the wife, to yield; but both stand punctiliously on your rights, and you will have a Waterloo with no Blucher coming up at nightfall to decide the conflict.
A GRANDFATHER"S APOLOGY.
Never be ashamed to apologize when you have done wrong in domestic affairs. Let that be a law of your household. The best thing I ever heard of my grandfather, whom I never saw, was this: that once, having unrighteously rebuked one of his children, he himself having lost his patience, and, perhaps, having been misinformed of the child"s doings, found out his mistake, and in the evening of the same day gathered all his family together, and said: "Now I have one explanation to make, and one thing to say. Thomas, this morning, I rebuked you very unfairly. I am very sorry for it. I rebuked you in the presence of the whole family, and now I ask your forgiveness in their presence." It must have taken some courage to do that. It was right, was it not?
Never be ashamed to apologize for domestic inaccuracy. Find out the points; what are the weak points, if I may call them so, of your companion, and then stand aloof from them.
Do not carry the fire of your temper too near the gunpowder. If the wife be easily fretted by disorder in the household, let the husband be careful where he throws his slippers. If the husband come home from the store with his patience all exhausted, do not let the wife unnecessarily cross his temper; but both stand up for your rights, and I will promise the everlasting sound of the war-whoop. Your life will be spent in making up, and marriage will be to you an unmitigated curse. Cowper said:
"The kindest and the happiest pair Will find occasion to forbear; And something every day they live, To pity, and perhaps forgive."
I advise, also, that you make your chief pleasure circle around about that home. It is unfortunate when it is otherwise. If the husband spend the most of his nights away from home, of choice, and not of necessity, he is not the head of the household; he is only the cashier. If the wife throw the cares of the household in the servant"s lap, and then spend five nights of the week at the opera or theatre, she may clothe her children with satins and laces and ribbons that would confound a French milliner, but they are orphans. Oh, it is sad when a child has to say its prayers alone because mother has gone off to the evening entertainment! In India they bring children and throw them to the crocodiles, and it seems very cruel; but the jaws of New York and Brooklyn dissipation are swallowing down more little children to-day than all the monsters that ever crawled upon the banks of the Ganges!
A G.o.dLESS MOTHER"S GRIEF.
I have seen the sorrow of a G.o.dless mother on the death of a child she had neglected. It was not so much grief that she felt from the fact that the child was dead as the fact that she had neglected it. She said: "If I had only watched over and cared for the child, I know G.o.d would not have taken it." The tears came not; it was a dry, blistering tempest--a scorching simoon of the desert. When she wrung her hands it seemed as if she would twist her fingers from their sockets; when she seized her hair it seemed as if she had, in wild terror, grasped a coiling serpent with her right hand.
No tears! Comrades of the little one came in and wept over the coffin; neighbors came in, and the moment they saw the still face of the child the shower broke. No tears for her. G.o.d gives tears as the summer rain to the parched soul; but in all the universe the driest and hottest, the most scorching and consuming thing is a mother"s heart if she has neglected her child, when once it is dead. G.o.d may forgive her, but she will never forgive herself. The memory will sink the eyes deeper into the sockets, and pinch the face, and whiten the hair, and eat up the heart with vultures that will not be satisfied, forever plunging deeper their iron beaks. Oh, you wanderers from your home, go back to your duty! The brightest flowers in all the earth are those which grow in the garden of a Christian household, clambering over the porch of a Christian home.
MATRIMONIAL CONGENIALITY.
I advise you also to cultivate sympathy of occupation. Sir James Mackintosh, one of the most eminent and elegant men that ever lived, while standing at the very height of his eminence, said to a great company of scholars: "My wife made me." The wife ought to be the advising partner in every firm. She ought to be interested in all the losses and gains of shop and store. She ought to have a right--she has a right--to know everything. If a man goes into a business transaction that he dare not tell his wife of, you may depend that he is on the way either to bankruptcy or moral ruin. There may be some things which he does not wish to trouble his wife with; but if he dare not tell her, he is on the road to discomfiture.
On the other hand, the husband ought to be sympathetic with the wife"s occupation. It is no easy thing to keep house. Many a woman that could have endured martyrdom as well as Margaret, the Scotch girl, has actually been worn out by house management. There are a thousand martyrs of the kitchen. It is very annoying, after the vexations of the day, around the stove or the table, or in the nursery or parlor, to have your husband say: "You know nothing about trouble; you ought to be in the store half an hour." Sympathy of occupation!
If the husband"s work cover him with the soot of the furnace or the odors of leather or soap factories, let not the wife be easily disgusted at the begrimed hands or unsavory aroma. Your gains are one, your interests are one, your losses are one; lay hold of the work of life with both hands. Four hands to fight the battles; four eyes to watch for the danger; four shoulders on which to carry the trials. It is a very sad thing when the painter has a wife who does not like pictures. It is a very sad thing for a pianist when she has a husband who does not like music.
GENTEEL BUSINESS.
It is a very sad thing when a wife is not suited unless her husband has what is called a "genteel business." So far as I understand a "genteel business," it is something to which a man goes at ten o"clock in the morning, and from which he comes home at two or three o"clock in the afternoon, and gets a large amount of money for doing nothing.
That is, I believe, a "genteel business;" and there has been many a wife who has made the mistake of not being satisfied until the husband has given up the tanning of the hides, or the turning of the banisters, or the building of the walls, and put himself in circles where he has nothing to do but smoke cigars and drink wine, and get himself into habits that upset him, going down in the maelstrom, taking his wife and children with him.
There are a good many trains running from earth to destruction. They start all the hours of the day, and all the hours of the night. There are the freight trains; they go very slowly and very heavily; and there are the accommodation trains going on toward destruction, and they stop very often and let a man get out when he wants to. But genteel idleness is an express train; Satan is the stoker, and Death is the engineer; and though one may come out in front of it and swing the red flag of "danger," or the lantern of G.o.d"s Word, it makes just one shot into perdition, coming down the embankment with a shout and a wail and a shriek--crash, crash! There are two cla.s.ses of people sure of destruction: First, those who have nothing to do; secondly, those who have something to do, but are too lazy or too proud to do it.
LOVE TO PRESIDE.
I have one more word of advice to give to those who would have a happy home, and that is, let love preside in it. When your behavior in the domestic circle becomes a mere matter of calculation; when the caress you give is merely the result of deliberate study of the position you occupy, happiness lies stark dead on the hearthstone. When the husband"s position as head of the household is maintained by loudness of voice, by strength of arm, by fire of temper, the republic of domestic bliss has become a despotism that neither G.o.d nor man will abide. Oh, ye who promised to love each other at the altar, how dare you commit perjury? Let no shadow of suspicion come on your affection.
It is easier to kill that flower than it is to make it live again. The blast from h.e.l.l that puts out that light leaves you in the blackness of darkness forever.
A HOUSE NOT A HOME.
Here are a man and wife; they agree in nothing else, but they agree they will have a home. They will have a splendid house, and they think that if they have a house they will have a home. Architects make the plan, and the mechanics execute it; the house to cost one hundred thousand dollars. It is done. The carpets are spread, lights are hoisted, curtains are hung, cards of invitation sent out. The horses in gold-plated harness prance at the gate; guests come in and take their places; the flute sounds; the dancers go up and down; and with one grand whirl the wealth and the fashion and the mirth of the great town wheel amidst the pictured walls.
Ha! this is happiness. Float it on the smoking viands; sound it in the music; whirl it in the dance; cast it on the snow of sculpture; sound it up the brilliant stairway; flash it in chandeliers! Happiness, indeed! Let us build on the centre of the parlor floor a throne to Happiness; let all the guests, when they come in, bring their flowers and pearls and diamonds, and throw them on this pyramid, and let it be a throne; and then let Happiness, the Queen, mount the throne, and we will stand around and, all chalices lifted, we will say: "Drink, O Queen! live forever!"
LIGHTS OUT.
But the guests depart, the flutes are breathless, the last clash of the impatient hoofs is heard in the distance, and the twain of the household come back to see the Queen of Happiness on the throne amid the parlor floor. But, alas! as they come back the flowers have faded, the sweet odors have become the smell of a charnel-house, and instead of the Queen of Happiness there sits there the gaunt form of Anguish, with bitten lip and sunken eye, and ashes in her hair.
The romp and joyous step of the dancers who have left seems rumbling yet, like jarring thunders that quake the floor and rattle the gla.s.ses of the feast, rim to rim. The spilled wine on the floor turns into blood. The wreaths of plush have become wriggling reptiles. Terrors catch tangled in the canopy that overhangs the couch. A strong gust of wind comes through the hall and the drawing-room and the bed-chamber, in which all the lights go out. And from the lips of the wine-beakers come the words: "Happiness is not in us!" And the arches respond: "It is not in us!" And the silenced instruments of music, thrummed on by invisible fingers, answer: "Happiness is not in us!" And the frozen lips of Anguish break open, and, seated on the throne of wilted flowers, she strikes her bony hands together, and groans: "It is not in me!"
HAPPINESS IN POVERTY.
That very night a clerk with a salary of a thousand dollars a year--only one thousand--goes to his home, set up three months ago, just after the marriage-day. Love meets him at the door; love sits with him at the table; love talks over the work of the day; love takes down the Bible, and reads of Him who came our souls to save; and they kneel, and while they are kneeling--right in that plain room, on that plain carpet--the angels of G.o.d build a throne, not out of flowers that perish and fade away, but out of garlands of heaven, wreath on top of wreath, amaranth on amaranth, until the throne is done. Then the harps of G.o.d sounded, and suddenly there appeared one who mounted the throne, with eye so bright and brow so fair that the twain knew it was Christian Love. And they knelt at the throne, and, putting one hand on each head, she blessed them, and said: "Happiness is with me!"
And that throne of celestial bloom withered not with the pa.s.sing years; and the queen left not the throne till one day the married pair felt stricken in years--felt themselves called away, and knew not which way to go, and the queen bounded from the throne, and said: "Follow me, and I will show you the way up to the realm of everlasting love." And so they went up to sing songs of love, and walk on pavements of love, and to live together in mansions of love, and to rejoice forever in the truth that G.o.d is love.
HOTELS VERSUS HOMES.
"And brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee."--LUKE 10:34, 35.
This is the good Samaritan paying the hotel bill of a man who had been robbed and almost killed by bandits. The good Samaritan had found the unfortunate on a lonely, rocky road, where, to this very day, depredations are sometimes committed upon travelers, and had put the injured man into the saddle, while this merciful and well-to-do man had walked till they got to the hotel, and the wounded man was put to bed and cared for. It must have been a very superior hotel in its accommodations, for, though in the country, the landlord was paid at the rate of what in our country would be four or five dollars a day, a penny being then a day"s wages, and the two pennies paid in this case about two days" wages. Moreover, it was one of those kind-hearted landlords who are wrapped up in the happiness of their guests, because the good Samaritan leaves the poor wounded fellow to his entire care, promising that when he came that way again he would pay all the bills until the invalid got well.
THE VALUE OF HOTELS.
Hotels and boarding-houses are necessities. In very ancient times they were unknown, because the world had comparatively few inhabitants, who were not much given to travel, and private hospitality met all the wants of sojourners, as when Abraham rushed out at Mamre to invite the three men to sit down to a dinner of veal; as when the people were positively commanded to be given to hospitality; as in many of the places in the East these ancient customs are practiced to-day. But we have now hotels presided over by good landlords, and boarding-houses presided over by excellent host or hostess, in all neighborhoods, villages and cities, and it is our congratulation that those of our land surpa.s.s all other lands. They rightly become the permanent residences of many people, such as those who are without families, such as those whose business keeps them migratory, such as those who ought not, for various reasons of health or peculiarity of circ.u.mstances, take upon themselves the cares of housekeeping.
QUEENLY CATERERS.
Many a man falling sick in one of these boarding-houses or hotels has been kindly watched and nursed; and by the memory of her own sufferings and losses the lady at the head of such a house has done all that a mother could do for a sick child, and the slumberless eye of G.o.d sees and appreciates her sacrifices in behalf of the stranger.
Among the most marvelous cases of patience and Christian fidelity are many of those who keep boarding-houses, enduring without resentment the unreasonable demands of their guests for expensive food and attentions for which they are not willing to pay an equivalent--a lot of cranky men and women who are not worthy to tie the shoe of their queenly caterer. The outrageous way in which boarders sometimes act to their landlords and landladies show that these critical guests had bad early rearing, and that in the making-up of their natures all that const.i.tutes the gentleman and lady were left out. Some of the most princely men and some of the most elegant women that I know of to-day keep hotels and boarding-houses.