NUGGETS FROM A WELSH MINECopyrighted by Olive E. Weston, 1902. THE HOME (Page 14). Love is the only safe and justifiable basis for a home. All Bibles, as well as all stories, all philosophy and all experience assert this. Go to housekeeping, and, if possible, to house-building. Do not be outdone by the beaver. Do not sink lower than the bird, who builds its own nest, making it strong without and beautiful within. That home alone is home where love generates generous impulses, noble purposes. True love will breed There is no home where there is no common toil. The world is the larger home. The child must early learn to feel its dependence on and its obligation to this larger home circle if it is to grow noble. There are no furnishings to a house that really convert it into a home, which have not won their places, one by one, in the heart and brain of the housewife. Civilization rests, not primarily on the court-house, or the college, or the public school building, or the post-office, or the railway station, or yet in the club, but in the home. The trouble with our young people is not that they are too poor in material things to make for themselves a home, but that they are too poor in spiritual things to confess the poverty which might enable them to lay the foundations of a home, humble but altogether holy.... The beautiful heron, mad with a maternal love, blind to all dangers from without, bent only on protecting her brood, giving her life to her little ones, was killed by the woman who wears the graceful aigrette—that marvel of Nature's embroidery woven for a nuptial robe to the gracious bird. She, and none other, is responsible for that life, for it was for her sake that the bloody deed was done. THE SCHOOL (Page 29). The highest task that life holds for men and women is the choosing of an ideal to grow toward. It should be It has taken a hundred years of agony and study to prove even in advanced America a man's right to his own body; a woman's right to her old soul; and the child's right to the development of his mind as of his muscle. I plead for the true perspective in the training of your children. I believe, of course, in good bodies, comfortable and beautiful clothing, generous houses, and all the learning of the schools; I believe in intellectual joy and all the powers of thought, but only when they are subordinated to high affections and strong wills. There is a power at work in the world that estimates gifts, not by the amount, but by the purpose that dictated them. The kindergarten contains the seed of the gospel for children in its terminology when it seeks to develop the child by its "occupations."... WORK (Page 111). There can be no development, mental, spiritual, or physical, except by exercise. Through labor we became creators, co-workers with God. Labor can be transfigured into a habit. In the scales of the universe, a day's work will always weigh more than the dollar that pays for that day's work. The tradesman who strives to know all about his own Blessed word is that,—"occupation." The new education is bound up in it. The health of the child is contained in it. The safety of the saint is represented by it, and the progress of humanity is dependent upon it. When labor becomes the pride of the laborer, then he becomes fit object for the envy of kings. The most disordered explosions of pent-up passions and unreleased power follow in the wake of enforced idleness. There is no release from toil, and the only escape from the burdens of labor must come, not by its cessation, but by its glorification. There is an overwork that is killing, but the danger from work, any work, all work, is trifling compared to the greater dangers of indolence. There is always a large physical element in distances. It is always farther from the breakfast table to the field than it is from the field to the dinner table. When the wheels of life bear me down for the last time, I ask for no higher compliment, I seek no truer statement of the work I have tried to do, than that which the white-headed old negress gave the beardless boy on the hot Corinth cornfield in 1862. Then, if I deserve it, let some one who loves me say, "Here is a Linkum soldier who has done got run over," one who, like his leader, tried to "pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever a flower would grow." |