SECTION II.

Home in the sphere of the church.

      “A holy home,
  Where those who sought the footprints of the Lord,
  Along the paths of pain, and care, and gloom,
  Shall find the rest of heaven a rich reward.”

What is the Christian home?  Only in the sphere of christianity does the true idea of home become fully developed.  Home with the savage is but a herding, a servitude.  Even among many of the Jews it was little better than a Mahommedan seraglio.  The most eminent of the heathen world degrade the family by making it the scene of lust, and introducing concubinage and polygamy.  Plato, one of the most enlightened of the heathen, had base conceptions of home, and abused its highest and holiest prerogatives by his ideas of polygamy.  We find too that in the ethics of Aristotle, the most lovely and sacred attributes of the family are totally discarded.  The home which he holds up to view is unadorned with chastity and virtue.  And Sophocles follows in the same path, stripping home of all that is sacred and essential to its true constitution.  And when we come down to the present age, and view this divine institute in the light of Mormonism and Socialism, who will say that here we have unfolded its true idea and sacred character?

How different is the true Christian home!  Here the marriage union is preserved “honorable,” held sacred, and woman is raised to her true position.  In the sphere of the Christian church, home is brought fairly and completely into view.  Here it rises above the measure of natural affection, and temporal interest.  It enters the sphere of supernatural faith, and becomes the adumbration of our home in heaven.

The Christian home is a true type of the church.  “The husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is of the church.”  The love of the family is self-denying and holy, like that between Christ and His church.  The children are “the heritage of the Lord;” the parents are His stewards.  Like the church, the Christian home has its ministry.  Yea, the church is in the home, as the mother is in her child.  We cannot separate them; they are correlatives.  The one demands the other.  The Christian home can have existence only in the sphere of the church.  It is the vestibule of the church, bound to her by the bonds of Christian marriage, of holy baptism, and of the communion of saints, leading to her in the course of moral development, and completing her life only in the church-consciousness.

Home is, therefore, a partnership of spiritual as well as of natural life.  The members thereof dwell “as being heirs together of the grace of life.”  “Heavenly mindedness,” “the hidden man of the heart,” and a “hope full of immortality,” are the ornaments of the Christian home.  Hers is “the incorruptibility of a meek and quiet spirit;” her members are “joint heirs of salvation;” they are “one,” not only in nature, but “in Christ.”  They enjoy a “communion in spirit,” that their “joy might be full.”  “What God, therefore, hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”