HOME-WORK

BY MRS. S. M. I. HENRY.

THERE is a vast difference between housework and home-work. The world has been accustomed to think of housework as the one legitimate occupation of woman, and to consider that in it she should find abundant scope for all her abilities, and that from it she should draw the keenest pleasures of her life.

Young women have been made to think that they were so much less than their men friends expected them to be, as they failed to accomplish all that is included in “good housekeeping.” To know how to cook, to wash and iron, to make and mend, and to do these things with her own hands, was — in the ordinary walks of life — to assume that a girl would make an exemplary wife and mother.

There have been men of culture and influence who have deliberately chosen women of a lower order of intelligence as wives, and mothers of their children, because they did not wish anything of them beyond such service as can be summed up in housekeeping and nursing. And “good housekeeping” is a most excellent accomplishment,—a beautiful gift,—to be cultivated as one cultivates art and music; but it has often been costly in both souls and bodies.  It is also a necessity; it must be done and done well. The growing family must be housed, and fed, and clothed; kept clean, and made comfortable. This part of our life-work is so exacting that it will be a diligent woman indeed who can keep the house, full of growing boys and girls out of whom men and other housekeepers are to be developed, in good comfort during the process.

But with the world as it is to-day, if this woman be the mother, she must become much more than a housekeeper,—she must be able to do much more and better than a housekeeper need do, or the whole is in peril, and the end of all her weary service may be failure and sorrow.  There is danger that the real claim of “good housekeeping” may be overridden by the pressure of greater interests, because it has been dragged out of its own place, into a prominence which does not belong to it, and at the sacrifice of vital interests to which it stands simply as an accessory.

The home is greater than the house, as the heart in its relation to the man, is greater than the hand. The man may live happy and useful without a hand, but without a heart he is nothing but dead clay. The strong action of a sound heart compensates for many physical losses; and with a true home-keeper in charge, all is assured that is really necessary to the house. The home must have a house, as the heart must have a body in which to operate; so while we are building and caring for the one, we cannot safely forget the other.

The home idea has, in the past, been ignored to such an extent in the efforts to secure the house and its furnishings, that it has become imperative that special attention be called to it, and that its claims be strenuously urged.

The conditions of commerce and society tend to break down all that remains of this fragment of Eden in the world; and the pressure of necessities which crowd the working man and woman into “tight places,” threatens to destroy it altogether. It seems almost certain that it is to become lost to the world; but God's people are never left to any such disaster as that would be. The angels have never looked on a more pitiful sight than the homes that lie dead and buried under great houses ; that, well-kept, rich, and beautiful in all that can satisfy the sensual nature, are still cold and empty of that light and life of love that makes the safety and delight of the home.

The people of God must come to an intelligent understanding of what the home is, and of its importance in the plan of salvation, or suffer from this ignorance as from no other; for this is a point where ignorance means death. The work of the home once done, well or ill, must remain forever. It cannot be pulled down like a wall, and rebuilt, or raveled like a seam, or painted over like a picture. It cannot be patched like a rent, or cemented like broken china, so that it will be as “good as new.” The work of the home is writing on wax which becomes adamant, and retains the every mark of touch forever. Housework is for today; home-work is for eternity ; and every father and mother must make the choice as to which shall receive the, most careful attention.

The home was God's first building on the earth. A great port of entry from the   nowhere into the here, it stands on the shores of time, its numberless gates wide open ; its lights, countless as the stars of heaven, shining out into the darkness; its voices, sweet with songs first breathed out of the heart of infinite Love, filling the world with harmonies. Of all the creations of God, it is the most marvelous. Its ministry, like the forces of nature, has all seasons and methods for its own; at its will it fashions the character and destiny of man, as well as the institutions of the earth. Under God, by the work of the homekeeper, nations rise and fall, kings reign, republics are built, laws are made and enforced, or left to lie dead in the musty books of old libraries.

By her needs, commerce has become the great fact of the world's processes; and retail traffic, the great occupation of the masses of her people. Because of her the school and the college flourish, and the church is compassing sea and land in sending forth the Heaven-sent message to the ends of the earth.  And because of the usurpation of this throne and kingdom of the home by the servile housekeeper, there sits to-day throughout the land of Bibles, in the “ lurking-places of the villages,” that “wicked” whose mouth is full of “cursing and deceit and fraud;” who  “in the secret places doth murder the innocent” (or innocence); who “lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den ... to catch the poor” (or unwary; maybe our own children); who “doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into his net.”

Nothing can save the children of the church, to say nothing of the others, from falling into this snare of that “wicked,” but the restoration of the home to its appointed office in the divine plan as it concerns man. The recovery of the two Edenic institutions, the Sabbath and the home, from the secondary places to which the lust of man has crowded them, must be the crowning work of the gospel in the world.

So far-reaching is the influence of the home, that any danger which threatens it threatens equally every human interest, and that much of the designs of eternal Love as concerns human well-being. It behooves us, therefore, to bring a candid mind and an honest heart to its consideration, and to the study of the responsibilities with which its keepers have been invested.  I say “keepers,” because it is evident that God never intended to place this, which is the center of all things in the earth, in the hands of a fractional part of the human unit for its keeping. “God said, It is not good that the man should be alone;” and the fact that man was created first, and held in waiting to receive the woman as she came from the hand that formed her, proves that other truth,—that she was not to be left solitary in her work. “They twain shall be one flesh,”—they shall jointly keep that which has been placed in their care, working together, a united head, for one grand purpose. God's idea of home-keeping degenerated into modern housekeeping because this unity of the two in one was broken, and man went his selfish way, leaving woman to an equally selfish “sphere.”

There can be no mother without a father, no child without both; and there can be no just division, but there should be a mutual sharing of all responsibilities which the conditions involve. No house can become a home if either the father or the mother element is lacking, in either office of provider or keeper.

A crying need of the home, as it has been bequeathed to this generation, is a nearer fatherhood and a larger motherhood, — both made so true, and pure, and one, by the Holy Spirit's abiding love, that God the Father shall find a real representation of himself therein,— a representation which the children shall recognize, reverence, love, and obey; and by which they shall be led to know his Christ. To know God, through that translation of himself which a true father and mother may be, is to love him. So to learn to love him is the most blessed experience that can come to any son of man, excepting that which results from personal trust in Christ. And that first leads surely to this last and best, by a short, safe way, which leaves small room for ruin. ~

ADVENT REVIEW & SABBATH HERALD  

 Jan. 12, 1897   Vol. 74 No. 2 

Written from the Sanitarium in Battle Creek, MI