Four Walls Do Not Make a Home
by J. R. Miller Four walls do not make
a home, though it is a palace filled with all the elegances
which wealth can buy. The home life itself is more
important than the house and its adornments. by the home life
is meant the happy art of living together in tender love. We enter
some homes and they are full of sweetness, as fields of summer
flowers are full of fragrance. All is order, beauty, gentleness,
and peace. We enter other homes where we
find jarring, selfishness, harshness, and disorder. This difference
is not accidental. They are influences at work in
each home, which yield just the result we see in each. No home
life can ever be better than the life of those who make it.
Homes are the real schools in which men and women are trained,
and fathers and mothers are the real teachers and builders of
life. Sadly, the goal which most parents
have for their home is to have as good and showy a house as
they can afford, furnished in as rich a style as their means
will warrant, and then to live in it as comfortably as they
are able, without too much exertion or self-denial. But the true
idea of a Christian home is that it is a place for spiritual growth. It is a place for the parents
themselves to grow, to grow into beauty of character, to grow
in spiritual refinement, in knowledge, in strength, in wisdom, in patience,
gentleness, kindliness, and all the Christian graces and virtues. It is a place for children to
grow. to grow into physical vigor and
health, and to be trained in all that shall make them true
and noble men and women. A true home is set up and all
its life ordered for the definite purpose of training, building
up, and sending our human lives fashioned into Christ-like symmetry,
filled with lofty impulses and aspirations, governed by principles
of rectitude and honor. and fitted to enter upon the
duties and struggles of life with spiritual wisdom and strength. This Puritan devotional has been
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