University of Virginia Library

12. XII.
HOME RELIGION.

IT was Sunday evening, and our little circle were
convened by my study-fireside, where a crackling
hickory fire proclaimed the fall of the year to be
coming on, and cold weather impending. Sunday
evenings, my married boys and girls are fond of coming
home and gathering round the old hearthstone,
and “making believe” that they are children again.
We get out the old-fashioned music-books, and sing
old hymns to very old tunes, and my wife and her
matron daughters talk about the babies in the intervals;
and we discourse of the sermon, and of the
choir, and all the general outworks of good pious
things which Sunday suggests.

“Papa,” said Marianne, “you are closing up your
House and Home Papers, are you not?”

“Yes, — I am come to the last one, for this year
at least.”

“My dear,” said my wife, “there is one subject
you have n't touched on yet; you ought not to close
the year without it; no house and home can be complete
without Religion: you should write a paper on
Home Religion.”

My wife, as you may have seen in these papers,
is an old-fashioned woman, something of a conservative.
I am, I confess, rather given to progress and
speculation; but I feel always as if I were going on
in these ways with a string round my waist, and my
wife's hand steadily pulling me back into the old
paths. My wife is a steady, Bible-reading, Sabbath-keeping
woman, cherishing the memory of her fathers,
and loving to do as they did, — believing, for the most
part, that the paths well beaten by righteous feet are
safest, even though much walking therein has worn
away the grass and flowers. Nevertheless, she has an
indulgent ear for all that gives promise of bettering
anybody or anything, and therefore is not severe on
any new methods that may arise in our progressive
days of accomplishing old good objects.

“There must be a home religion,” said my wife.

“I believe in home religion,” said Bob Stephens, —
“but not in the outward show of it. The best sort
of religion is that which one keeps at the bottom of
his heart, and which goes up thence quietly through
all his actions, and not the kind that comes through
a certain routine of forms and ceremonies. Do you
suppose family prayers, now, and a blessing at meals,
make people any better?”

“Depend upon it, Robert,” said my wife, — she
always calls him Robert on Sunday evenings, — “depend

upon it, we are not so very much wiser than our
fathers were, that we need depart from their good old
ways. Of course I would have religion in the heart,
and spreading quietly through the life; but does this
interfere with those outward, daily acts of respect and
duty which we owe to our Creator? It is too much
the slang of our day to decry forms, and to exalt
the excellency of the spirit in opposition to them; but
tell me, are you satisfied with friendship that has none
of the outward forms of friendship, or love that has
none of the outward forms of love? Are you satisfied
of the existence of a sentiment that has no outward
mode of expression? Even the old heathen had their
pieties; they would not begin a feast without a libation
to their divinities, and there was a shrine in every
well-regulated house for household gods.”

“The trouble with all these things,” said Bob, “is
that they get to be mere forms. I never could see
that family worship amounted to much more in most
families.”

“The outward expression of all good things is apt
to degenerate into mere form,” said I. “The outward
expression of social good feeling becomes a mere
form; but for that reason must we meet each other like
oxen? not say, `Good morning,' or `Good evening,'
or `I am happy to see you'? Must we never use
any of the forms of mutual good-will, except in those

moments when we are excited by a real, present emotion?
What would become of society? Forms are,
so to speak, a daguerrotype of a past good feeling,
meant to take and keep the impression of it when it
is gone. Our best and most inspired moments are
crystallized in them; and even when the spirit that
created them is gone, they help to bring it back.
Every one must be conscious that the use of the
forms of social benevolence, even towards those who
are personally unpleasant to us, tends to ameliorate
prejudices. We see a man entering our door who is a
weary bore, but we use with him those forms of civility
which society prescribes, and feel far kinder to
him than if we had shut the door in his face, and said,
`Go along, you tiresome fellow!' Now why does
not this very obvious philosophy apply to better and
higher feelings? The forms of religion are as much
more necessary than the forms of politeness and social
good-will as religion is more important than all other
things.”

“Besides,” said my wife, “a form of worship, kept
up from year to year in a family, — the assembling
of parents and children for a few sacred moments
each day, though it may be a form many times,
especially in the gay and thoughtless hours of life, —
often becomes invested with deep sacredness in times
of trouble, or in those crises that rouse our deeper

feelings. In sickness, in bereavement, in separation,
the daily prayer at home has a sacred and healing
power. Then we remember the scattered and wandering
ones; and the scattered and wandering think
tenderly of that hour when they know they are remembered.
I know, when I was a young girl, I was often
thoughtless and careless about family-prayers; but
now that my father and mother are gone forever,
there is nothing I recall more often. I remember the
great old Family Bible, the hymn-book, the chair where
father used to sit. I see him as he looked bending
over that Bible more than in any other way; and
expressions and sentences in his prayers which fell
unheeded on my ears in those days have often come
back to me like comforting angels. We are not aware
of the influence things are having on us till we have
left them far behind in years. When we have summered
and wintered them, and look back on them from
changed times and other days, we find that they were
making their mark upon us, though we knew it not.”

“I have often admired,” said I, “the stateliness
and regularity of family-worship in good old families
in England, — the servants, guests, and children all
assembled, — the reading of the Scriptures and the
daily prayers by the master or mistress of the family,
ending with the united repetition of the Lord's Prayer
by all.”

“No such assemblage is possible in our country,”
said Bob. “Our servants are for the most part Roman
Catholics, and forbidden by their religion to join
with us in acts of worship.”

“The greater the pity,” said I. “It is a pity that
all Christians who can conscientiously repeat the
Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer together should
for any reason be forbidden to do so. It would do
more to harmonize our families, and promote good
feeling between masters and servants, to meet once a
day on the religious ground common to both, than
many sermons on reciprocal duties.”

“But while the case is so,” said Marianne, “we
can't help it. Our servants cannot unite with us; our
daily prayers are something forbidden to them.”

“We cannot in this country,” said I, “give to family
prayer that solemn stateliness which it has in a
country where religion is a civil institution, and masters
and servants, as a matter of course, belong to
one church. Our prayers must resemble more a private
interview with a father than a solemn act of
homage to a king. They must be more intimate
and domestic. The hour of family devotion should
be the children's hour, — held dear as the interval
when the busy father drops his business and cares,
and, like Jesus of old, takes the little ones in his
arms and blesses them. The child should remember

it as the time when the father always seemed most
accessible and loving. The old family worship of
New England lacked this character of domesticity and
intimacy, — it was stately and formal, distant and
cold; but whatever were its defects, I cannot think
it an improvement to leave it out altogether, as too
many good sort of people in our day are doing. There
may be practical religion where its outward daily
forms are omitted, but there is assuredly no more of it
for the omission. No man loves God and his neighbor
less, is a less honest and good man, for daily prayers
in his household, — the chances are quite the other
way; and if the spirit of love rules the family hour,
it may prove the source and spring of all that is
good through the day. It seems to be a solemn duty
in the parents thus to make the Invisible Fatherhood
real to their children, who can receive this idea
at first only through outward forms and observances.
The little one thus learns that his father has a Father
in heaven, and that the earthly life he is living is only
a sacrament and emblem, — a type of the eternal
life which infolds it, and of more lasting relations there.
Whether, therefore, it be the silent grace and silent
prayer of the Friends, or the form of prayer of ritual
churches, or the extemporaneous outpouring of those
whose habits and taste lead them to extempore prayer,
— in one of these ways there should be daily outward
and visible acts of worship in every family.”

“Well, now,” said Bob, “about this old question
of Sunday-keeping, Marianne and I are much divided.
I am always for doing something that she thinks is n't
the thing.”

“Well, you see,” said Marianne, “Bob is always
talking against our old Puritan fathers, and saying all
manner of hard things about them. He seems to
think that all their ways and doings must of course
have been absurd. For my part, I don't think we are
in any danger of being too strict about anything. It
appears to me that in this country there is a general
tendency to let all sorts of old forms and observances
float down-stream, and yet nobody seems quite to have
made up his mind what shall come next.”

“The fact is,” said I, “that we realize very fully
all the objections and difficulties of the experiments
in living that we have tried; but the difficulties in
others that we are intending to try have not yet
come to light. The Puritan Sabbath had great and
very obvious evils. Its wearisome restraints and overstrictness
cast a gloom on religion, and arrayed against
the day itself the active prejudices that now are undermining
it and threatening its extinction. But it had
great merits and virtues, and produced effects on
society that we cannot well afford to dispense with.
The clearing of a whole day from all possibilities of
labor and amusement necessarily produced a grave

and thoughtful people; and a democratic republic
can be carried on by no other. In lands which have
Sabbaths of mere amusement, mere gala-days, republics
rise and fall as fast as children's card-houses;
and the reason is, they are built by those whose political
and religious education has been childish. The
common people of Europe have been sedulously nursed
on amusements by the reigning powers, to keep them
from meddling with serious matters; their religion has
been sensuous and sentimental, and their Sabbaths
thoughtless holidays. The common people of New
England are educated to think, to reason, to examine
all questions of politics and religion for themselves;
and one deeply thoughtful day every week baptizes
and strengthens their reflective and reasoning faculties.
The Sunday schools of Paris are whirligigs
where Young France rides round and round on little
hobby-horses till his brain spins even faster than Nature
made it to spin; and when he grows up, his political
experiments are as whirligig as his Sunday education.
If I were to choose between the Sabbath of
France and the old Puritan Sabbath, I should hold
up both hands for the latter, with all its objectionable
features.”

“Well,” said my wife, “cannot we contrive to retain
all that is really valuable of the Sabbath, and to
ameliorate and smooth away what is forbidding?”

“That is the problem of our day,” said I. “We do
not want the Sabbath of Continental Europe: it does
not suit democratic institutions; it cannot be made
even a quiet or a safe day, except by means of that ever-present
armed police that exists there. If the Sabbath
of America is simply to be a universal loafing, picnicking,
dining-out day, as it is now with all our foreign
population, we shall need what they have in Europe,
the gendarmes at every turn, to protect the fruit on our
trees and the melons in our fields. People who live
a little out from great cities see enough, and more than
enough, of this sort of Sabbath-keeping, with our loose
American police.

“The fact is, our system of government was organized
to go by moral influences as much as mills by
water, and Sunday was the great day for concentrating
these influences and bringing them to bear; and
we might just as well break down all the dams and let
out all the water of the Lowell mills, and expect still
to work the looms, as to expect to work our laws and
constitution with European notions of religion.

“It is true the Puritan Sabbath had its disagreeable
points. So have the laws of Nature. They are of a
most uncomfortable sternness and rigidity; yet for all
that, we would hardly join in a petition to have them
repealed, or made wavering and uncertain for human
convenience. We can bend to them in a thousand
ways, and live very comfortably under them.”

“But,” said Bob, “Sabbath-keeping is the iron rod
of bigots; they don't allow a man any liberty of his
own. One says it 's wicked to write a letter Sunday;
another holds that you must read no book but
the Bible; and a third is scandalized, if you take a
walk, ever so quietly, in the fields. There are all sorts
of quips and turns. We may fasten things with pins
of a Sunday, but it 's wicked to fasten with needle and
thread, and so on, and so on; and each one, planting
himself on his own individual mode of keeping Sunday,
points his guns and frowns severely over the battlements
on his neighbors whose opinions and practice
are different from his.”

“Yet,” said I, “Sabbath-days are expressly mentioned
by Saint Paul as among those things concerning
which no man should judge another. It seems
to me that the error as regards the Puritan Sabbath
was in representing it, not as a gift from God to man,
but as a tribute of man to God. Hence all these hagglings
and nice questions and exactions to the uttermost
farthing. The holy time must be weighed and
measured. It must begin at twelve o'clock of one
night, and end at twelve o'clock of another; and
from beginning to end, the mind must be kept in a
state of tension by the effort not to think any of its
usual thoughts or do any of its usual works. The fact
is, that the metaphysical, defining, hair-splitting mind

of New England, turning its whole powers on this
one bit of ritual, this one only day of divine service,
which was left of all the feasts and fasts of the old
churches, made of it a thing straiter and stricter than
ever the old Jews dreamed of.

“The old Jewish Sabbath entered only into the
physical region, merely enjoining cessation from physical
toil. `Thou shalt not labor nor do any work,' covered
the whole ground. In other respects than this it
was a joyful festival, resembling, in the mode of keeping
it, the Christmas of the modern Church. It was
a day of social hilarity, — the Jewish law strictly forbidding
mourning and gloom during festivals. The
people were commanded on feast-days to rejoice
before the Lord their God with all their might. We
fancy there were no houses where children were afraid
to laugh, where the voice of social cheerfulness quavered
away in terror lest it should awake a wrathful
God. The Jewish Sabbath was instituted, in the absence
of printing, of books, and of all the advantages
of literature, to be the great means of preserving
sacred history, — a day cleared from all possibility
of other employment than social and family
communion, when the heads of families and the elders
of tribes might instruct the young in those religious
traditions which have thus come down to us.

“The Christian Sabbath is meant to supply the

same moral need in that improved and higher state of
society which Christianity introduced. Thus it was
changed from the day representing the creation of
the world to the resurrection-day of Him who came
to make all things new. The Jewish Sabbath was
buried with Christ in the sepulchre, and arose with
Him, not a Jewish, but a Christian festival, still holding
in itself that provision for man's needs which the
old institution possessed, but with a wider and more
generous freedom of application. It was given to the
Christian world as a day of rest, of refreshment, of
hope and joy, — and of worship. The manner of
making it such a day was left open and free to the
needs and convenience of the varying circumstances
and characters of those for whose benefit it was instituted.”

“Well,” said Bob, “don't you think there is a deal
of nonsense about Sabbath-keeping?”

“There is a deal of nonsense about everything
human beings have to deal with,” said I.

“And,” said Marianne, “how to find out what is
nonsense?”

“By clear conceptions,” said I, “of what the day
is for. I should define the Sabbath as a divine and
fatherly gift to man, — a day expressly set apart for
the cultivation of his moral nature. Its object is not
merely physical rest and recreation, but moral improvement.

The former are proper to the day only
so far as they are subservient to the latter. The
whole human race have the conscious need of being
made better, purer, and more spiritual; the whole
human race have one common danger of sinking to a
mere animal life under the pressure of labor or in the
dissipations of pleasure; and of the whole human race
the proverb holds good, that what may be done any
time is done at no time. Hence the Heavenly Father
appoints one day as a special season for the culture of
man's highest faculties. Accordingly, whatever ways
and practices interfere with the purpose of the Sabbath
as a day of worship and moral culture should
be avoided; and all family arrangements for the day
should be made with reference thereto.”

“Cold dinners on Sunday, for example,” said Bob.
“Marianne holds these as prime articles of faith.”

“Yes, — they doubtless are most worthy and merciful,
in giving to the poor cook one day she may call
her own, and rest from the heat of range and cooking-stove.
For the same reason, I would suspend as far as
possible all travelling, and all public labor, on Sunday.
The hundreds of hands that these things require to
carry them on are the hands of human beings, whose
right to this merciful pause of rest is as clear as their
humanity. Let them have their day to look upward.”

“But the little ones,” said my oldest matron daughter,

who had not as yet spoken, — “they are the problem.
Oh, this weary labor of making children keep
Sunday! If I try it, I have no rest at all myself. If
I must talk to them or read to them to keep them
from play, my Sabbath becomes my hardest working-day.”

“And, pray, what commandment of the Bible ever
said children should not play on Sunday?” said I.
“We are forbidden to work, and we see the reason
why; but lambs frisk and robins sing on Sunday;
and little children, who are as yet more than half
animals, must not be made to keep the day in the
manner proper to our more developed faculties. As
much cheerful, attractive religious instruction as they
can bear without weariness may be given, and then
they may simply be restrained from disturbing others.
Say to the little one, — `This day we have noble and
beautiful things to think of that interest us deeply;
you are a child; you cannot read and think and enjoy
such things as much as we can; you may play softly
and quietly, and remember not to make a disturbance.'
I would take a child to public worship at least once of
a Sunday; it forms a good habit in him. If the sermon
be long and unintelligible, there are the little
Sabbath-school books in every child's hands; and while
the grown people are getting what they understand,
who shall forbid a child's getting what is suited to

him in a way that interests him and disturbs nobody?
The Sabbath school is the child's church; and happily
it is yearly becoming a more and more attractive institution.
I approve the custom of those who beautify
the Sabbath school-room with plants, flowers, and
pictures, thus making it an attractive place to the
childish eye. The more this custom prevails, the
more charming in after years will be the memories
of Sunday.

“It is most especially to be desired that the whole
air and aspect of the day should be one of cheerfulness.
Even the new dresses, new bonnets, and
new shoes, in which children delight of a Sunday,
should not be despised. They have their value in
marking the day as a festival; and it is better for
the child to long for Sunday for the sake of his little
new shoes than that he should hate and dread it as
a period of wearisome restraint. All the latitude
should be given to children that can be, consistently
with fixing in their minds the idea of a sacred season.
I would rather that the atmosphere of the day
should resemble that of a weekly Thanksgiving than
that it should make its mark on the tender mind
only by the memory of deprivations and restrictions.”

“Well,” said Bob, “here 's Marianne always breaking
her heart about my reading on Sunday. Now I

hold that what is bad on Sunday is bad on Monday,
— and what is good on Monday is good on Sunday.”

“We cannot abridge other people's liberty,” said I.
“The generous, confiding spirit of Christianity has
imposed not a single restriction upon us in reference
to Sunday. The day is put at our disposal as a good
Father hands a piece of money to his child: — `There
it is; take it and spend it well.' The child knows
from his father's character what he means by spending
it well; but he is left free to use his own judgment
as to the mode.

“If a man conscientiously feels that reading of this
or that description is the best for him as regards his
moral training and improvement, let him pursue it,
and let no man judge him. It is difficult, with the
varying temperaments of men, to decide what are or
are not religious books. One man is more religiously
impressed by the reading of history or astronomy than
he would be by reading a sermon. There may be
overwrought and wearied states of the brain and
nerves which require and make proper the diversions
of light literature; and if so, let it be used. The
mind must have its recreations as well as the body.”

“But for children and young people,” said my
daughter, — “would you let them read novels on
Sunday?”

“That is exactly like asking, Would you let them

talk with people on Sunday? Now people are different;
it depends, therefore, on who they are. Some
are trifling and flighty, some are positively bad-principled,
some are altogether good in their influence.
So of the class of books called novels. Some are
merely frivolous, some are absolutely noxious and
dangerous, others again are written with a strong
moral and religious purpose, and, being vivid and
interesting, produce far more religious effect on the
mind than dull treatises and sermons. The parables
of Christ sufficiently establish the point that there is
no inherent objection to the use of fiction in teaching
religious truth. Good religious fiction, thoughtfully
read, may be quite as profitable as any other reading.”

“But don't you think,” said Marianne, “that there
is danger in too much fiction?”

“Yes,” said I. “But the chief danger of all that
class of reading is its easiness, and the indolent, careless
mental habits it induces. A great deal of the reading
of young people on all days is really reading to no
purpose, its object being merely present amusement.
It is a listless yielding of the mind to be washed over
by a stream which leaves no fertilizing properties, and
carries away by constant wear the good soil of thought.
I should try to establish a barrier against this kind of
reading, not only on Sunday, but on Monday, on Tuesday,
and on all days. Instead, therefore, of objecting

to any particular class of books for Sunday reading,
I should say in general, that reading merely for
pastime, without any moral aim, is the thing to be
guarded against. That which inspires no thought,
no purpose, which steals away all our strength and
energy, and makes the Sabbath a day of dreams, is
the reading I would object to.

“So of music. I do not see the propriety of
confining one's self to technical sacred music. Any
grave, solemn, thoughtful, or pathetic music has a
proper relation to our higher spiritual nature, whether
it be printed in a church service-book or on secular
sheets. On me, for example, Beethoven's Sonatas
have a far more deeply religious influence than much
that has religious names and words. Music is to be
judged of by its effects.”

“Well,” said Bob, “if Sunday is given for our own
individual improvement, I for one should not go to
church. I think I get a great deal more good in staying
at home and reading.”

“There are two considerations to be taken into
account in reference to this matter of church-going,”
I replied. “One relates to our duty as members of
society in keeping up the influence of the Sabbath,
and causing it to be respected in the community; the
other, to the proper disposition of our time for our
own moral improvement. As members of the community,

we should go to church, and do all in our
power to support the outward ordinances of religion.
If a conscientious man makes up his mind that Sunday
is a day for outward acts of worship and reverence,
he should do his own part as an individual
towards sustaining these observances. Even though
he may have such mental and moral resources that
as an individual he could gain much more in solitude
than in a congregation, still he owes to the congregation
the influence of his presence and sympathy.
But I have never yet seen the man, however finely
gifted morally and intellectually, whom I thought in
the long run a gainer in either of these respects by
the neglect of public worship. I have seen many
who in their pride kept aloof from the sympathies
and communion of their brethren, who lost strength
morally, and deteriorated in ways that made themselves
painfully felt. Sunday is apt in such cases to
degenerate into a day of mere mental idleness and
reverie, or to become a sort of waste-paper box for
scraps, odds and ends of secular affairs.

“As to those very good people — and many such
there are — who go straight on with the work of life on
Sunday, on the plea that “to labor is to pray,” I simply
think they are mistaken. In the first place, to
labor is not the same thing as to pray. It may sometimes
be as good a thing to do, and in some cases

even a better thing; but it is not the same thing. A
man might as well never write a letter to his wife on
the plea that making money for her is writing to her.
It may possibly be quite as great a proof of love to
work for a wife as to write to her, but few wives would
not say that both were not better than either alone.
Furthermore, there is no doubt that the intervention
of one day of spiritual rest and aspiration so refreshes
a man's whole nature, and oils the many wheels of
existence, that he who allows himself a weekly Sabbath
does more work in the course of his life for the
omission of work on that day.

“A young student in a French college, where the
examinations are rigidly severe, found by experience
that he succeeded best in his examination by
allowing one day of entire rest just before it. His
brain and nervous system refreshed in this way carried
him through the work better than if taxed to the
last moment. There are men transacting a large
and complicated business who can testify to the same
influence from the repose of the Sabbath.

“I believe those Christian people who from conscience
and principle turn their thoughts most entirely
out of the current of worldly cares on Sunday fulfil
unconsciously a great law of health; and that, whether
their moral nature be thereby advanced or not, their
brain will work more healthfully and actively for it

even in physical and worldly matters. It is because
the Sabbath thus harmonizes the physical and moral
laws of our being, that the injunction concerning it is
placed among the ten great commandments, each of
which represents some one of the immutable needs of
humanity.

“There is yet another point of family religion that
ought to be thought of,” said my wife: “I mean the
customs of mourning. If there is anything that ought
to distinguish Christian families from Pagans, it should
be their way of looking at and meeting those inevitable
events that must from time to time break the
family chain. It seems to be the peculiarity of Christianity
to shed hope on such events. And yet it
seems to me as if it were the very intention of many
of the customs of society to add tenfold to their gloom
and horror, — such swathings of black crape, such
funereal mufflings of every pleasant object, such darkening
of rooms, and such seclusion from society and
giving up to bitter thoughts and lamentation. How
can little children that look on such things believe
that there is a particle of truth in all they hear about
the joyous and comforting doctrines which the Bible
holds forth for such times?”

“That subject is a difficult one,” I rejoined. “Nature
seems to indicate a propriety in some outward
expressions of grief when we lose our friends. All

nations agree in these demonstrations. In a certain
degree they are soothing to sorrow; they are the
language of external life made to correspond to the
internal. Wearing mourning has its advantages. It
is a protection to the feelings of the wearer, for
whom it procures sympathetic and tender consideration;
it saves grief from many a hard jostle in the
ways of life; it prevents the necessity of many a trying
explanation, and is the ready apology for many
an omission of those tasks to which sorrow is unequal.
For all these reasons I never could join the crusade
which some seem disposed to wage against it.
Mourning, however, ought not to be continued for
years. Its uses are more for the first few months
of sorrow, when it serves the mourner as a safeguard
from intrusion, insuring quiet and leisure, in which
to reunite the broken threads of life, and to gather
strength for a return to its duties. But to wear
mourning garments and forego society for two or three
years after the loss of any friend, however dear, I
cannot but regard as a morbid, unhealthy nursing of
sorrow, unworthy of a Christian.”

“And yet,” said my wife, “to such an unhealthy
degree does this custom prevail, that I have actually
known young girls who have never worn any other
dress than mourning, and consequently never been
into society, during the entire period of their girlhood.

First, the death of a father necessitated three years
of funereal garments and abandonment of social relations;
then the death of a brother added two years
more; and before that mourning was well ended, another
of a wide circle of relatives being taken, the
habitual seclusion was still protracted. What must a
child think of the Christian doctrine of life and death,
who has never seen life except through black crape?
We profess to believe in a better life to which the
departed good are called, — to believe in the shortness
of our separation, the certainty of reunion, and that
all these events are arranged in all their relations by
an infinite tenderness which cannot err. Surely, Christian
funerals too often seem to say that affliction
“cometh of the dust,” and not from above.

“But,” said Bob, “after all, death is a horror; you
can make nothing less of it. You can't smooth it
over, nor dress it with flowers; it is what Nature shudders
at.”

“It is precisely for this reason,” said I, “that Christians
should avoid those customs which aggravate
and intensify this natural dread. Why overpower the
senses with doleful and funereal images in the hour of
weakness and bereavement, when the soul needs all
her force to rise above the gloom of earth, and
to realize the mysteries of faith? Why shut the
friendly sunshine from the mourner's room? Why

muffle in a white shroud every picture that speaks a
cheerful household word to the eye? Why make a
house look stiff and ghastly and cold as a corpse? In
some of our cities, on the occurrence of a death in
the family, all the shutters on the street are closed
and tied with black crape, and so remain for months.
What an oppressive gloom must this bring on a house!
how like the very shadow of death! It is enlisting the
nerves and the senses against our religion, and making
more difficult the great duty of returning to life and
its interests. I would have flowers and sunshine in
the deserted rooms, and make them symbolical of
the cheerful mansions above, to which our beloved
ones are gone. Home ought to be so religiously
cheerful, so penetrated by the life of love and hope
and Christian faith, that the other world may be
made real by it. Our home life should be a type
of the higher life. Our home should be so sanctified,
its joys and its sorrows so baptized and hallowed,
that it shall not be sacrilegious to think
of heaven as a higher form of the same thing, — a
Father's house in the better country, whose mansions
are many, whose love is perfect, whose joy is
eternal.”