The Home of Childhood

Samuel D. Burchard, D.D.
Submitted by: Mrs. Deborah Phelps

The most impressive series of pictures I have ever seen are by Thomas Cole, an American artist, and termed "The Voyage of Life."

The first represents a child seated in a boat amid varied and beautiful flowers, and his guardian angel standing by to guard and protect the little voyager.

The second represents the youth, still on his voyage, guiding his own bark down the stream, his finger pointing upward to a beautiful castle painted in the clouds.

The third represents the man, still in the boat, going down the rapids; the water rough, the sky threatening, and the guardian angel looking on from a distance, anxiously.

The fourth represents an old man, still in his boat, the sun going down amid floating clouds tinged with gold, purple, and vermilion, the castle or House Beautiful in full view, and the guardian angel with an escort of shining celestials waiting to attend him to his home in glory.

The pictures have suggested to me a series of articles on Life's Great Mission and work for the grander life beyond. And on this sublime voyage to the land of immortals, to the Palace Beautiful in the skies, let us start from the dear old home of childhood, that home which, though it may be desolate, is still imperishable in memory

Home of my childhood, thou shalt ever be dear
To the heart that so fondly revisits thee now;
Though thy beauty be gone, thy leaf in the sere,
The wreaths of the past still cling to thy brow.

Spirit of mine, why linger ye here;
Why cling to those hopes so futile and vain?
Go, seek ye a home in that radiant sphere,
Which through change and time thou shalt ever retain.

Let our destined port be the home of the blessed--the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker are God!

"And thou shalt bring thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and thy father's household home unto thee."--Joshua ii.18.

The Christian home, implying marriage, mutual affection, piety, gentleness, refinement, meekness, forbearance, is our ideal of earthly happiness--a beautiful and impressive type of heaven.

It is more than a residence, a place of abode, however attractive in its surroundings, however richly adorned with art and beauty.

It is where the heart is, where the loved ones are--husband, wife, father, mother, brothers, sisters, all united in sympathy, fellowship and worship. It may be humble, unpretentious, exhibiting no signs of material wealth; but there is the wealth of mutual affection, which fire cannot consume, and no commercial disaster alienate or destroy, and this is home--the home of the heart, the home of childhood, the elysium of riper years, the refuge of age.

That we may better appreciate the Christian homes that God has given us--the homes of comfort and refinement, that rocked the cradle of our infancy--let us consider, first, the vast multitudes of our fallen race that really have no home; none in the Christian sense, none that antedate heaven in peace, refinement and mutual love. How many children are born to the heritage of vice, poverty and crime, left to drift upon the tide of circumstances, to be buffeted in the wild and angry storm, to be chilled on the desolate moor of life--to wander amid the voids of human sympathy--the solitude and estrangement of human society--the children of dire misfortune--victims of vice and crime, polluted and polluting from the first.

How many fall, like blossoms prematurely blown, nipped by the lingering frosts of winter and sinking into the shadowed stream, or the sobbing soil of earth to be seen no more.

Think of the dwellings of hard-handed, wearied, ill-requited labor, where ignorance and discontent reign supreme,--where there is no recognition of God, who, in his all-wise Sovereignty, raiseth up one and casteth down another. Such homes, or rather places of abode, there are all over the land, all over the dark and wide realm of heathendom, the children of which must be devoted to sacrifice to the horrors of the Ganges or the Nile.

Look now to the other extreme of society, to the habitations of the millionaires, adorned with all the luxuries of wealth, the appliances of art, taste, beauty, whose children are trained up to worship at the shrine of Mammon, to exclude from their minds all thoughts of God and the hereafter, to live only for this world, to feel that there is no society worth cultivating except that of the rich, the elite, the would-be fashionable; that all enjoyments are material, sensuous, worldly; that the chief end of man is to eat, drink, and be merry. Such households do not furnish the best schools in which to educate children to wrestle with misfortune and to do the great work of life. They are liable to grow up effeminate, lacking executive strength, cold, proud, misanthropic, alienated in sympathy from the toiling masses.

There can be no well-regulated home without piety, without the fear and love of God. And such homes are usually found in the middle walks of life, not among the extreme poor, nor the proudly affluent, but among the mutually loving--the reverently worshipful. It is to such homes that the world owes its highest interests. The old patriarchs understood the secret, even under the former dispensation, long before the dawn of the Christian era. God testified of Abraham, of Moses, of Samuel, and Job how truly they comprehended the nature of that family institution, around which cluster all the associations of the first period of human life.

And it has only been in the line and in the light of the Christian revelation, that the highest type of the household has been produced and preserved. And it is upon the application of Christian principles alone, that the structure of the Christian family and the Christian home can stand.

The family in its origin is divine, and God has instituted laws for its regulation and perpetuity, and these laws must be scrupulously observed and obeyed or it ceases to be an ornament and a blessing--the great training-school for the Church and the State--the safeguard of society and a type of heaven.

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