Some Consequences of Quarreling

There is an old hymn which could well be quoted often, and oftener remembered: “There is beauty all around, When there’s love at home; There is joy in ev’ry sound, When there’s love at home…”

In keeping with this thought and theme, one philosopher wrote: “A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” A home can be an earlier heaven. It often is. But the spirit of quarreling and contention sometimes enters in to detract from peace and happiness and love and loyalty. And not only does it adversely affect the actual participants, but it also adversely affects those who are present as nonparticipants.

Nagging and quarreling and picking at one another with pettiness and with critical and sarcastic comment adversely affect the lives of everyone around—at home, at work, at school in a community or country, or in any social situation.

In his account of the Crimean war, Lord George Padgett wrote of two eminent men who were supposed to be on the same side, but who were constantly quarreling and contending. “They were,” he wrote, ” like a pair of scissors who go snip and snip and snip, without doing each other any harm, but Heaven help the poor devil who gets between them.”

The illustration isn’t altogether apt because the two parties to a quarrel, more than the two sides of the scissors, do wear each other away. They do not go free from the effects of their feuding. But it is also true that those who live with it and witness it, also pay a price.

Children caught between quarreling parents pay a price. Parents between contending children pay a price. Everyone around quarrelsome and contentious people feels the adverse influence, and it is far-reaching in its effects.

Mothers and fathers should counsel with one another; parents should present a oneness before their children; and families should live in love and loyalty and avoid the rash things sometimes said that could leave scars and hurts forever after.

The subject suggests two immortal sentences: first, “…cease to find fault one with another…” The second is from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” Constant quarreling is contemptible.