Part 15

It is not well to conclude these thoughts upon the influence of scenes upon character without urging home the truth, that our ruling principle is the main index and source of character; and he is sadly deluded who trusts to any position to secure his virtue or to excuse his vices. Apt enough we are to be discontented with our lot, and to burden fate or Providence with the blame that is our own. We imagine some more favored condition to be the sure warranty of success and worth. He who lives among the crowd ascribes to their example his vices, and he who lives among the fields refers his rudeness to want of better opportunity. Older than the Satire of Horace on human discontent is the wish of man for change of fortune, even as old as man himself. Better for him to make the best of what he has, and find his content thus keeping pace with his progress.

He that dwells in the country, while he should use every opportunity for enlarging his circle of experience by travel, must take heed lest he slight the privileges of his own position. He may fall into the vices of the town among the simpler habits of his neighbors, and be eaten at heart by the worst passion while breathing the purest airs of heaven. He must learn simple truth of a power above man, or nature will not save him from corruption.

He who lives in the city need not ascribe the evil that he suffers solely to circumstances, nor expect mental enlargement as the consequence of a cosmopolitan home. He must keep true simplicity in the midst of artificial conventions, and may narrow himself into an earthworm in the midst of the men and the culture of all climes and nations. He may be in bondage to a metropolitan mannerism which is quite as slavish as any provincial prejudice, and full as far short of a wise humanity as of a genuine faith.

Better counsel do we need than crowds can teach or nature alone can unfold. Wherever we dwell, we are to look to a kingdom not of this world, and by communion with its sovereign Head, elect Messiah and sainted intellects, we are to confirm what is best on earth by what is most gracious on high.

Still, though only in thought, need we weave our green bowers to tell us of the ancient march through the wilderness to the promised land, for still are we on our pilgrimage. Wisely do we keep the feast of tabernacles when we erect them at once in our remembrance and hope, looking upon the emblems of God's love for us in the past as the assurance of his love when the soul shall reach the river whose waters never fail, and rest beneath the tree of life whose leaf never fades, whose fruit never withers.

_August._

Returning Home.

RETURNING HOME.

Two commands God gave in the beginning and is always giving to his creatures. He bids them go forth and return, and the lives of all beings are divided between the two. The history of every man is but another version of the words, "He went forth and he returned." All his enterprises and all his results may be thus simply described.

It is so common, especially in our restless time, to dwell upon the more adventurous change, that the milder is apt to be slighted, and, bent upon advancing, we make too little account of return as a primal law of life. How can we fail to see it written on all things that God has made? It may be read upon every dew-drop whose summons back to the heavens the morning sunshine brings, and upon every flower whose gorgeous petals signal its triumph, and herald the retreat of its vital forces to the earth whence they came. Every rising wave murmurs also of an ebbing tide, and every beat of the pulse sends back as well as forward the current of life. The heavens--they bear majestic witness of Him who rules their hosts. The stars are ever returning upon their courses, and marking the seasons that time the periods of man. Insect, bird, and beast, follow instinctively the same great law; by their transformations, migrations and quickened or diminished vitality, they turn in the recurrent cycles in which all things have their round. In all ages, thinking minds have been impressed with this great fact. We see the impression in the early memorials of sober thought. The wise preacher brooded over it, as he spoke of winds and waters returning on their path and of there being nothing new under the sun. It haunted the visions of the sages of the Nile, and stands out to the eye in that serpent symbol which teaches from tombs and temples the circle of eternity.

Feeling themselves sometimes swept away upon this great current of events, inclosed in this serpent-fold of destiny, men have lost their proper sense of responsibility and sunk down into a passive fatalism. From this torpor God would ever arouse us, and have us see in the return, as in the going forth, the same providential plan--the same sphere of duty and privilege.

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How full of privilege is this recurrent aspect of things! Led by the hosts of heaven, the seasons walk their benign round, and in their course they are ever renewing most delightful relations of life. In the calendar of nature there are far more festivals than fasts, and, to a well-taught mind, the recurrence of the sadder times and scenes of the year brings thoughts more blessed than the world's reckless feasting. Spring and summer are always new and always cheering, whilst autumn and winter teach lessons and may nurture affections more precious than their gayer treasures. The text of nature has ever a marginal commentary taken from the book of the heart; and as the text is read and re-read, the commentary grows in size and interest, for each year's repeated interviews reveal nature and the heart more fully to each other, and give variety ever fresh to a friendship constant as the law of God. The great universe was made, we must believe, more for the home of rational souls than for the playground of giant masses and powers of matter. What aspect of its vastness is more tender than that which exhibits its majestic changes as waiting upon the discipline and affections of God's children; the great sun lighting the laborer to his work, and then withdrawing its light to send him to the welcome of his home and the peace of his pillow; the whole starry host joining together to make and mark the days and months whose returning recalls some pleasant face of life and Providence, makes childhood glad, or age peaceful.

Man himself has in his own being a periodicity corresponding with the cycles of nature. His active energies, his sensibilities, social and devout, his intellectual powers, have their recurrent periods. He is strangely ignorant of his own nature, who has not learned that there are times and tides within his own soul as well as with seas and stars. The plan of the benign Deity for him seems to be such as to secure at once constancy, and variety, and progress.

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Note well the constancy which God, the Ever Faithful and True, ordains for man by the recurrent order of his lot. He will not have life a chaos of scattered fragments, nor a stray meteor that follows no orbit. It must have its periods of outgoing and return. Whatever be our home, the object of our love or care, to that we must ever recur; and however capricious the humors, or eventful the career, every man's life falls into a certain circuit, and every heart revolves in some orbit by a law as sure as that which guides Arcturus and Orion. Man, indeed, may be so perverse as to abuse the law, but he cannot repeal it. He may give his heart to evil, and make his home with wickedness; but wherever he makes it, there this law finds him, and, in a round of habit good or bad, returns him after every wandering to his own place. Securing thus the constancy of his Providence, God teaches us to see the moral significance of the law of return. What a lesson is here upon the force of habit! Its power comes from God's own constancy, and woe to the man who inverts his nature so sadly, that evil instead of good walks in the appointed circuit. Every vice into which he falls constantly returns upon him, like the circling waters of the whirlpool, which run round and round until lost in the dark deep. Every good which he loves, every truth he accepts, every charity he cherishes, follows the same law; circling in the ascending order, like the vine that twines round and round its trellis, to lift its leaves and fruit into the upper air and light. The law of habit we cannot repeal, but our use of it depends upon ourselves. It is like the tides, which wait not our bidding to rise or fall, but which leave us free to launch wisdom and industry, or folly and rapine, upon their waters. The law says that man must return in his course. He must go home. Let a true life interpret the benignity of this Divine constancy.

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Consider, also, the variety which comes from the action of this law. The interest of existence depends in great measure upon a due proportion of constancy and variety. Were there no uniformity, the world would be chaos, society Babel, and thought madness; there could be no external stability, no intellectual consistency; the senses would recognize no familiar things, and memory could make no reliable record. Such a condition is hardly conceivable; although feuds and wars sometimes so disturb the stability of life as to give some idea of the fatal effect of such disorder. Without variety, moreover, the Divine plan would also be broken, and a dreary monotony would brood over paradise itself. Benign Heaven has blended the two elements in our lot, so that perhaps our highest pleasure consists in the return of familiar blessings with varied circumstances;--not in absolute novelty or absolute permanence, but in scenes, friends, and pursuits ever constant and ever new. Who does not know this kindly mingling of joys? What traveller is there in distant lands--lands which his boyish fancy has so long yearned to see--who does not feel more delight in the return than in the going away? No matter what beauties or sublimities of nature and art may have feasted sense and soul, the fairest sight is his own familiar home and friends,--the sublimest thought is of the God who guarded his childhood, and whose presence he feels more deeply as the guardian of his dwelling, than as the dread Being who piled up the Alps and poured out the oceans. In any aspect of the case, it is recurrence with variety that gives our being much of its finest zest. To talk with cherished friends after absence, to revisit familiar scenes and meditate on times past and present; to perform, under new influences and encouragements, the accustomed round of duty; how much of freshest satisfaction is thus found! It is the best novelty and the truest constancy. Old things are made new by the fresh spirit infused into them, and that which the apostle states as the feeling of a first convert to the Gospel, becomes a permanent aspect of life,--"Old things are passed away, and all things are become new."

Happy the man who understands self-discipline, so as to secure this charm, and mingle constancy and variety in his pursuits. He will divide days and years in such a way that life shall be ever more constant and more fresh. No servile drudge to worldly care, no capricious pleasure-seeker who is always uneasy, because always sated, he will be a faithful worker and a cheerful friend, stronger for work by recreation, the wiser for enjoyment by his work,--filling his time with such varied uses, that recurrent duties shall be welcome to him each in its time, and every day's life illustrate in some way the varied uniformity of God's plan for nature and humanity. Great obstacles, we know, lie in the way of such order; for care is often too imperious and protracted, and pleasure too engrossing, to make true method easy; but the obstacles yield before a just purpose, and, in the end, every man is the artificer of his habits. He can make his life constant to its appointed round, and varied in its constancy.

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So God teaches us the moral significance of the law of return, by showing its bearing on the stability and freshness that give charm to our days. Yet more, he teaches us to find in it the true law of progress. He bids us return, but not the same, nor to the same,--he bids us return better or worse, and to a state of things better or worse. This is a necessity, and we are called to make it a happy necessity. Not in a circle of absolute uniformity, but in a rounding path, in a spiral course, we wind our way upward or downward,--our way turning indeed ever upon itself, yet at a higher or lower mark. The very structure of language indicates that true progress is the returning of the mind towards its previous experience. What is the accumulation of knowledge but remembering the facts of previous observation? What is wisdom but the fruit of reflection, or turning thought backward upon its course? What is repentance but conscience revising past errors? What is reformation but the whole man returning to himself and to God? It is progress that gives its most cheering aspect to the recurrent order of life.

Return then to thine own home as each day, or week, or season repeats the decree. Return to do better than you have ever done,--to see more clearly than before the demands of your position, the errors of your way of living, your indifference, perhaps unkindness, towards those who daily look to you for a nurture, better than that of perishing bread. Return to thine own house, and consider whether among the guests there welcomed, the only abiding Comforter is entertained, and the good angels that go with him are not shut out. Return with thought more free to see things as they are from your temporary absence from the trammels of routine, with affections fresh from nearer companionship with nature, with powers renewed for the sober work of life. Let fortune smile or frown more than of old, make sure of your own soul, and do better than you have done.

Constant and varied in many respects our life must be. God bids us add progress to the constancy and variety that he has decreed. True to him, our days in their returning order, their various events, their steady progress, shall go forward, like the march of the faithful host to the promised land, their step responsive, their way opening new attractions, their course ever onward, and above them, swelling sweet and clear, that glorious psalm of jubilee, which in its rhythmic verse and progressive flow ever returns upon the same rapturous burden, and repeats the hallowed anthem, "His mercy endureth for ever."

Let this be our spirit, and we shall know how wonderfully God reconciles two things apparently contradictory; we shall know, that the greater our progress, the surer our return,--that more and more the blessed scenes and friends of early days shall come back to us. Memory shall mate with hope to cheer us, and the evening of life shall add to its own tranquil beauty the fairest charms from the morning of our days. The aged man turns ever fondly to his childhood, and may enter the kingdom of heaven like a little child, even before death unlocks its gates of eternity.

What a thought here opens--opens to us as we return to our homes, and think of some who return no more! Beyond these homes, the orbit of our being reaches, and one, nay, many call to us, "Come." Over the grave the decree is still more solemnly heard. The words, "Thou sayest, return, ye children of men," mean more, far, than "dust to dust." "Return, ye children of men." "Dust to the dust whence it was,--the spirit to God who gave it."

Christ repeats the call in more than the Hebrew's faith, in more, far more than the philosopher's hope. Futurity as revealed by him is the way homeward to Him from whom our being came,--to all the faithful and lovely, who have blessed man and glorified God. We will not scorn the philosopher's hope of earthly cycles recurring in progressive order, until our globe bears the perfected harvest of a truer civilization, and all nature comes to herself. This hope is well, but does not go far enough. As we and those dear to us leave the earth, we crave word of a return more blessed than any dream of earthly kingdoms and ages. We crave what God has given us. The soul about to go into a region by itself unexplored, yearns to know that the path is not to night and nothingness, but is a return and more than a return to God, the Eternal Father, and to the mansions that gather from all earthly homes their purest treasures, and transfigure them in the light of heaven.

_September._

The Church in the House.

THE CHURCH IN THE HOUSE.

In his letter to Philemon St. Paul salutes "the church in thy house," and thus brings home to us a fact which is too often put a great way off. He brings the church into the house, and thus makes an every-day reality of an institution, which is thought to belong to the disputed territory where controversialists quarrel, or the close walls where priestcraft rules. The church, what is it? many are virtually ready to ask. Is it a certain style of edifice, or platform of opinion, or set of ceremonies or band of officials? In the apostle's mind, surely it was a very tangible fact, and he closes his letter so full of friendly remembrance and delicate courtesy with an affectionate message to the church in his correspondent's house. He meant, of course, by the church the Christian people under Philemon's roof, whether those who lived there constantly or those who came to worship occasionally. The same greeting is several times repeated in Paul's letters, and fitly guides us in some thoughts on practising Christianity at home, or the Church in the House. We would show that.--

There should be a church in every house, What makes it a true church in itself, And how it may be true to the church universal.

There should be a church in every house. Nay, we might indeed say, that there must be one there, unless the people are heathen or infidels. A church is a society of Christians for Christian purposes, and it is not easy to see how any worthy family can fail to answer to this large definition, if they will only think of it. Is not the compact which united the heads of the family to each other, and pledged them to their children, a Christian compact, expressly sanctioned by religion, as well as by civil law? Can the compact be kept in any tolerable sense without Christian influences, and is it not expected as a matter of course, that every house shall possess those standards of faith and practice, those Scriptures, which set forth Christ as Saviour and mark his people as his own? Is not all that is done in piety and charity within the household, as far as it goes, a ministration of Christianity? We certainly might justly take offence, if it were said of us, that the apostle's salutation could have no sort of application to our home, on the ground, that there is nothing distinctively Christian there. In all proper humility, consider how we have been educated, what books, what teachers we have enjoyed, what influences we have won from the great thoughts and great institutions of Christendom, what convictions we have tried to cherish amidst all our cares and changes;--consider these things, and would it be right to say that there is nothing Christian at home, nothing of the church there? Some families may indeed seem to be very worldly, almost godless; yet even they are likely to have among them, however unworthily; some traces of Christian institutions, and within their desecrated roof the Bible with its glad tidings, and memory with its treasured wisdom, and conscience with undying witness, still speak of God and Christ, and so far the place is holy ground.

If thus in some sense there must be something of the church in every household not utterly depraved, is it not well to give importance to the fact, that what must be in _some_ way should be in the right way? Many men have been Christians without knowing it, and many families have been churches without thinking of it. All simple, unconscious goodness is to be honored; but it is not so frequent as to make conscious effort dangerous, nor will the most beautiful and spontaneous piety lose any of its grace by opening its eyes fully to what is to be done. Let the spheres of our life be distinctly seen, and the affections will be all the freer and fresher for the clear vision. Let it be distinctly seen, that they who live in one household, by that fact stand in close relations to each other, and have a faith to cherish and a work to do. Let it be seen, that the family was the oldest church holding its worship before temples were built or priesthoods formed, and that the true temple and the true priesthood, instead of repealing, do but consecrate anew the patriarchal church, and Moses and Jesus both give new power and beauty to the covenant with Abraham and the individual family.

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Let there be a church then in every house. We now add, let it be a true one. What makes it such, do any ask? The apostle's benediction is a sufficient reply. To the church in thy house, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace and peace: these are the true consecration of the household. Grace, bringing into all souls the riches of God's favor, and winning them to him through a heavenly faith,--peace, drawing all hearts into unity, and harmonizing all labors by one ruling love. Grace--this comprises all that Jesus came to give to men, all the divine life that he would impart. Its source is God's own Spirit, his wisdom, his power, his mercy--and there is no way of defining it so good as the simple gospel way. Consider what was in Jesus, and what he gave to those that trusted in him, such a sense of God's being and goodness, such life of the soul, such assurance of a divine kingdom both present and future, such consecration of all faculties by one comprehensive faith,--consider this, and we best discern what grace is, and how it gives vigor and beauty to the household as to the individual. Its source is in God, but it is to be received by the soul's own will, and to open the soul to its influence has been the great effort of all worthy theologies, creeds, worship, ministers. We would not disparage any of them, while we do plead earnestly for the importance of the church in the house, with its own peculiar means of grace, its affections so demanding to be confirmed by a love that is divine, its pleasures so readily opening the soul to gratitude, its sacrifices so full of blessing when devoutly rendered, its labors so rich in the fruits of the Spirit when springing from a root of faith, its vicissitudes so eloquent in providential lessons, its memories so full of caution, its hopes so thirsting for immortality. God surely has opened in our homes precious means of grace, and blessed are they who by prayer uttered or unuttered--by devout trust spoken or unspoken, use these means sacredly as in the church of Christ! A transforming spirit will be at work there, and will transfigure all its experience by a divine light, and consecrate all its various gifts and faculties by a divine power.