Failure in the Home

We turn at this time to a simple basic subject, “Love at home,” which includes both sentiment and service and something else besides⎯the love of mothers, parents, children, in this most close and precious relationship of life. We turn also to a simple, challenging sentence: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” While we are worrying about dropouts and moral breakdown and disrespect for law, and creating agencies and institutions that conscientiously are trying to correct these ills and evils, we may well make up our minds to go back to the beginning, to the institution God gave us⎯the family, the home, which is basic to all that matters most, in time and in eternity. At home attitudes are first formed; at home example is most intimately in evidence. And as parents we had better be what we would wish our children to become, and as children we had better be what we would wish our children to become, and as children we better give respect to the parents God has given us. “The greatest use of a life,” said William James, “is to spend it on something that outlasts it.” Surely we can use our lives no better than to love and cherish and teach our children, and to know what others teach them⎯a responsibility from which we cannot rightly separate ourselves. Youth need guidance, and parents must not abdicate; for as we sow, indeed we reap. The future of the world, and of their everlasting lives, is bound up in what we give them basically from the first. We cannot in good conscience leave the teaching of children to chance. We must teach them causes and consequences, the commandments, the moral law, the purpose of life, and that preparation is important. And memories of home, wherever they are, should make them strong against temptation. And we would plead with parents to take the time to love, to teach, to care, to counsel, to keep close, to turn their hearts to their children, to turn the hearts of fathers, mothers, families in love and happiness at home. Basically there isn’t any other answer for strength and survival of character and country and the timeless values of life. “There is beauty all around, When there’s love at home . . .”