Where Else but Home?

“Every home is perforce a good or bad educational center,” wrote Ida Tarbell. “It does its work in spite of every effort to shrink or supplement it. No teacher can entirely undo what it does, be that good or bad.”¹ “the personal responsibilities which parents assume in bringing children into the world are so great that . . . they should bear . . . these responsibilities willingly.” ² And any home where parents pull in two different directions, any home that fails to teach children the solid and the basic responsibilities of life, or fails to hold the family together is a kind of failure that cannot be calculated. “Ask yourselves whether your household is kept open by pure, refined, unselfish, elevated living,” said Phillips Brooks. “. . . In the home, hearts ought to lie nearest and openest to one another.” ³ In the home there should be an exchange of confidences, understanding, sympathy, patience with problems, Where else can we better be ourselves, or be better understood? Where else could we make mistakes and be so fully forgiven? Where else would we better go with an aching heart, or with the disappointments of any day? Where else is so much service so unselfishly given without rules of work, or demands for pay, or even, in a sense, the right to quit. Home⎯where “hearts are of each other sure.” ⁴ The answers that are being sought in so many places, in so many other ways, are found in homes where character, reverence and respect, faith and tolerance, love and loyalty are the basis of the lessons learned in life. “Happy will that house be,” said Emerson, “in which the relations are from character.” ⁵ There is no place so strong, so able to absorb, no place which gives so much an asks so little and is entitled to so much more. “To be happy at home,” said Samuel Johnson, “is the ultimate result of all ambition.” ⁶ “If I were asked to name the world’s greatest need,” said President McKay, “I should say unhesitatingly; wise mothers, and . . . exemplary fathers.” ⁷ When all else has failed, when all ambitions are drained away, when there is weariness and disappointment, he is most lonely who hasn’t a home he can count on. As Petronius said many centuries since: “He that flies from his own family has far to travel.” ⁸

“Out of the dreariness,

Into its cheeriness,

Come we in weariness

Home.”⁹