CHAPTER IV.

The relation of home to the church.

The Christian home sustains a direct relation to the church.  This relation is similar to that which it sustains to the state.  The nature and mission of home demand the church.  The former is the adumbration of the latter.  The one is in the other.  “Greet the church that is in thine house.”  The church was in the house of Aquila and Priscilla, in the tent of Abraham, and in the palace of David.  It must be in every Christian home, and every Christian home must be in the church.  In a word, our families must be churchly.

This relation is vital and necessary,—­a relation of mutual dependence.  The family is a preparation for the church, subordinate to it, and must, therefore, throw its influence in its favor, be moulded by it, and labor With direct reference to the church in the way of training up for membership in it.  As the civil and political relations of home involve the duty of parents to train up their children for efficient citizenship in the state, so its moral and religious relations involve the duty of education for the church.  Hence the Christian home is churchly in its spirit, religion, education, influence, and mission.

Family religion is an element of home, not only as a mere fact or principle in its subjective form, but in the form and force of the church.  In its unchurchly form it is powerless.  It must be experienced and administered in a churchly spirit and way, not as something detached from the organic embodiment of Christianity.  The relation of the church to the family forbids this.  The church pervades all the forms of society.  It includes the home and the state.  It gives to each proper vitality, legitimate principles, proper direction, and a true destiny.

But home is not only a preparation for the church, but completes itself in the church,—­never out of the church.  By the “mystery” of marriage and the sacrament of holy baptism, home and the church are bound up into each other by indissoluble bonds.  The one receives the mark and superscription of the other; the one is the type or emblem of the other.

The church, through her ordinances, ministry and means of grace, is brought directly “into the house,” and operates there constantly as a spiritual leaven.  It is the purpose of God that our homes be entrenched within the sacred enclosures of His church.  The former, in its relation to the latter, is like “a wheel within a wheel,”—­one of the parts which make up the great machinery of the kingdom of grace, operating harmoniously and in its place with all the rest, and for the same end.  The former is built upon the latter,—­receives her dedication and sanctity from it.  They are correlatives.  The one demands the other.  Hence they cannot be divorced.  The individual passes over to the church through the Christian home.  The one is the step