The Bible and Home

The significance of the home is seen in the fact that every human being is a son or a daughter. This ordinary statement at once insists on becoming extraordinary. It is difficult to think what life would have been, or even how it could have been, if children had been pushed upon the earth from some mysterious void and had been nurtured without the providential agency of fathers and mothers. So much do we realize the importance of the home that where it is impossible to maintain one, owing to the death, or inability, or worthlessness of parents, we still make provision for an institution that shall provide as many domestic features as can be won for the orphaned. This we call an Orphans’ Home. It is significant that the sociological tendency of the period drifts away from even this institution. The effort now is to bring the childless and the parentless together. Goldsmith said that the nakedness of the indigent world might be clothed with the trimmings of the vain. There are those who affirm that, if the parentless and the childless could be brought into the company of homes, the Orphan Asylum would be no longer needed.

Our imaginations may make an easy test. Let an authoritative edict go forth that after the approaching midnight the home would be banished, and that each community must adjust itself to some other form of social life. What would such an edict mean? The homes from which students have come are no more responsible for them. They constitute no longer the bases of supplies on which they can draw, nor the alluring hearthstones to which they can return. The workman turns no more his eager feet toward the lights of his cottage. The prince finds his palace removed and all its splendor ceases to invite him. Little children are herded into impersonal surroundings and become public rather than domestic charges. The scene of disaster could be described without merciful stint. These suggestions are enough to show that society could scarcely escape chaos if the home were to be destroyed. How much do the words father, mother, brother, sister, wife, husband, son, daughter mean? Empty out their closer significance, and you vacate much of life’s meaning.

Nor is this the narrow word of an ecclesiastic or theologian. Drummond in The Ascent of Man claims that the evolution of a father and mother was the final effort of nature. John Fiske, as scientist and historian, points out the helplessness of infant life as binding parents into unity that grows out of responsibility. Soon after its birth the wee animal runs and leaps, while the wee bird does not wait long ere it flies from limb to limb; but the human babe in the ancient forest lies helpless in its log cradle for many months. Both Drummond and Fiske agree that by this program the God of nature was introducing patience, devotion, and sacrifice into the world and was making ready for the kingdom of heaven. It is plain that Drummond does not state it too strongly when he says that “the goal of the whole plant and animal life seems to have been the creation of a family which the very naturalist had to call Mammals,” or Mothers.

This represents somewhat the divine history of the home. The prophecy of the home likewise does some convincing work. The truth is that the home as an institution plants itself squarely in the path of some modern social theories. Some of those theories have begun by boldly demanding that the home be abolished because it has been made a buttress of private life and property. Not only has this suggestion been met with a horror that in itself expresses the instinctive conviction of the sacredness of the home, but it has been met with the insistence that the prophets should name their substitute for the hearthstone. This insistence has received nothing more than hazy and vague replies. The prophet stammers out some dark saying about “something better” or about the home as having fulfilled its mission in “the evolution of society”; and by the very helplessness of his speech he really becomes an advocate of closer domestic relations! It is interesting to note how these reformers seek to find a good path back from their social desert! They soon declare that the new regime must keep the home intact, and that only sporadic and irresponsible voices from their camp are lifted against the home’s sanctity! The antihome prophet always has a hard task. He collides with one of the granite convictions of humanity. If he would save the rest of his theory he must save the home from the proposed destruction. God has set the solitary in families. Men look in vain for a better setting for the jewel of life. From all their seeking they come back in due season to the truth that, imperfect as the home may often be, it is still rooted and grounded in outer life and in inner instinct, and that it is futile to try to make better what God has made best.All this will serve for emphasizing the importance of the home, though much more might be added. When the man awakes in the morning, becomes aware of himself, and then hears the voices of his wife and children, he is immediately related to one of the fundamental institutions of society. If the Bible be, as we have claimed, preeminently the Book of Life, it must relate itself vitally to the home. Our inquiry, therefore, is, What bearing does the Book have upon the home? The answer must necessarily be sketchy and incomplete; but we can soon gather an answer that will establish the biblical drift of teaching.

The Bible begins with an impressive lesson of monogamy. In the Eden life one man and one woman join hands as partners in joy and work. Let the account be poetry, allegory, parable, the lesson is the same. In that intimate communion with God that found him in the garden in the cool of the day, bigamy and polygamy are not represented as being at home. Even the Fall is not described as quickly dropping man low enough to reach the dreadful level of promiscuity or of any of the approaches to so-called free love. It required time ere that downward journey could be made. Humanity in its innocence is not described as starting from the dens of polygamy.But in season the Bible gives us some disconcerting facts. Bigamy and polygamy confront us in the lives of some worthies. Let it be allowed that sometimes the motive is the perpetuation of the home itself. Provision is sought against the curse of barrenness. Let it be allowed, also, that the Bible does not represent bigamy as working well. It brought discord into Abraham’s tent. The peevish wife drives her own wretched substitute from the door, until the desolate Hagar stands in her loneliness and repeats the comforting ritual of the seeing God. The son of bigamy goes off into his wild life, with his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. The admirable thing about the second patriarch is his devotion to one woman. Neutral and characterless as Isaac seems to be, he still won a mention in the marriage service of the ages by his faithfulness to Rebecca alone. Upon the third patriarch bigamy was forced by a cruel deception. In truth a review of the Old Testament will show that any departure from the unity of the home made for trouble. It filled the moving tabernacles of the patriarchs with quarrels. It led David on to murder. It drenched Solomon in debauchery. It degraded the successive kings until it destroyed their power and ruined the nation. Its inevitable end was the loss of the land and the sadness of captivity.

The Old Testament records polygamy, but it does not applaud polygamy. When once a polygamist stood in the halls of Congress and defended his right to a seat by quoting the examples of the patriarchs, his plea did not avail. Not only was the conviction of the nineteenth century against his contention, but the mood of the very Book from which he quoted was his enemy. So far as we can judge, monogamy was the general rule among the Jewish people. The exemplars of bigamy and polygamy were mainly those whose position enabled them to flaunt the public sentiment of their day. The history of Old Testament polygamy is so sorrowful that the Hebrew people have reacted from it into a stanch defense for the monogamic home. The seduction of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, the unfilial licentiousness of Absalom, the sordid road of impurity trod by the later monarchs of Israel, and the despair of the Babylonish captivity, make a piercing case against polygamy. On the other hand, the unwavering faithfulness of the maid in the Song of Solomon, the patience of Hosea with his prodigal wife, the idyllic story of Ruth, all these became persuasive pleas for a home wherein one man and one woman should live together in loyal love even until death. When Jesus came to give his message contemporaneous polygamy had all but ceased in Palestine. But easy divorce, sometimes called “consecutive polygamy,” had become prevalent. The world was waiting for the voice of authority, and it heard that voice when Christ began to teach.

The teaching of Jesus in reference to marriage is unmistakable. It may impress many as severe; it cannot impress any as doubtful. If we accept him as the Supreme Teacher we receive a decision given with no equivocal terms. It is often said that the method of the Lord was to offer general principles and to leave his followers to carry out these principles in the spirit of loving discipleship. Thus he declined to give detailed rules for the observance of the Sabbath, explicit instructions for the division of estates, definite laws for prayer and worship and almsgiving. Yet when he discussed marriage he gave both general principles and specific rules. If this was not the only case where he became sponsor for a rule it was surely the most emphatic case. He seemed to feel that concerning marriage and the home he must give a mass of distinct precepts. It was as if he deemed the home so sacred and its enemies so subtle and powerful as to make necessary some particular instruction.Perhaps we shall not err in saying that Jesus found in his time urgent reasons for specific and strong teaching about marriage. The Jews, who went to a mechanical extreme in their observance of the Sabbath law, had gone to an opposite extreme in their attitude toward the law of the home. In this regard the period was worse than our own, but it was not unlike our own. The domestic conscience of the Jews had been more or less weakened. Mere trifles were made excuses for the breaking up of home. Doubtless the influence of the Romans was making itself felt among the Hebrews. Professor Sheldon quotes Dorner as showing the reckless ease of divorce among leading Romans. One man divorced his wife because she went unveiled on the street; another because she spoke familiarly to a freedwoman; another because she went to a play without his knowledge. Even Cicero, proclaimed a very noble Roman, divorced his first wife that he might marry a wealthier woman, and his second wife because she did not seem to be sufficiently afflicted over the death of his daughter! “In fine,” says Professor Sheldon, “it was not altogether hyperbole when Seneca spoke of noble women as reckoning their years by their successive husbands rather than by the Consuls” (History of the Early Church, pages 29, 30).The records of this same period among the Romans will rout the claim that easy divorce tends to purity. Faithlessness to marriage vows was not seriously regarded, and there were instances of so-called noble women registering as public prostitutes in order that they might thus avoid the penalties of the laws! Easy divorce seemed to be accompanied by easy virtue, as if, indeed, both evils grew naturally out of the same soil. The Roman fashions were having their influence on the Jews. The sacred law was searched and was explained away with evil subtlety in order that men might be religiously released from the marriage bond.

Evidently, then, the times demanded that Jesus should save the marriage law from looseness. The ease of divorce was not unlike that in our own land to-day. If the teaching of Jesus was needed then it is needed now in order that marriage may recover its binding solemnity. On general principles we must all rejoice that Jesus did not give a dubious word on this sacred matter. It may be doubted whether any man who did not have the cause of his own pleasure to serve and who was not willing to subordinate a social law to the superficial joy of his own life, would be willing to modify the Saviour’s teaching. Certainly that teaching has long been the firm bulwark of the married life. Had Jesus spoken with doubt, or had he given sanction to easy divorce, what would the results have been? Our homes would have been builded upon the sands of freakish impulses and of hasty tempers. But Jesus’s word puts rock into the domestic foundation. When it was given it was met by all of the objections which it still evokes. Some said that the teaching was extreme in its severity, quite outdoing the law of Moses in its demands. Others said that rather than to submit to a bond so unbreakable, it would be better not to marry at all. Still Jesus did not lower his teaching. God was the author of marriage; man must not assume to be its destroyer. God takes two persons and makes them one flesh; man must not cut that vital bond.

Plainly, then, Jesus felt that marriage established a family relationship which was to resemble other family relationships in its indissolubleness. How can a man get rid of his brother, or his sister, or his father or mother, when God has decreed a relation in the flesh that cannot be severed? One may live apart from brother or sister, or father or mother, as a matter of convenience or peace; but how can one destroy the relationship? In spite of angry decrees, is not the brother still a brother, and do not father and mother remain father and mother in defiance of all unfilial pronouncements of divorce? In Jesus’s view the second family relationship was as indissoluble as the first. If one were to argue from a certain standpoint it might be easy to claim that it must be even more indissoluble. A man does not choose his first home. It represents a necessity against which he may not strive. But he does choose his second home, and it represents a union for which he is himself distinctly responsible. Why should a man be allowed to divorce himself from the home which is founded by his liberty while still being inexorably bound to the home which was founded without his choice? Jesus taught that the very constitution of society, as resting on the word of God, demanded that the second home be as sacredly unbreakable as the first. The “one flesh” must not be severed in either case.

Hence it comes about that, while the law of Jesus does not allow divorce, unless for the one reason mentioned later, it does not forbid separation. The sin does not consist in putting away the wife when conditions are unbearable; it does consist in marrying another. He does not insist that the quarrelsome shall live amid their brawls; but he does insist that they shall not go into another experiment that degrades a sacred covenant. We do not long listen to the specious arguments for easy divorce, with the privilege of remarriage, without discovering that these arguments affirm either that personal purity is impossible or that personal convenience and pleasure are the primary demands of life. Jesus did not so teach. Dr. Peabody, in his matchless discussion of Jesus’s teaching about the family, well says: “The family is, to Jesus, not a temporary arrangement at the mercy of uncontrolled temper or shifting desire; it is ordained for that very discipline in forbearance and restraint which are precisely what many people would avoid, and the easy rupture of its union blights these virtues in their bud. Why should one concern himself in marriage to be considerate and forgiving, if it is easier to be divorced than it is to be good?” (Jesus Christ and the Social Question, p. 159.) That these words touch the evil heart of many modern divorces there can be no doubt. The emphatic teaching of Jesus was that marriage should not be regarded as a breakable agreement of convenience, but rather as an indissoluble pledge of permanent union.

Whether Jesus allowed any exception to this law remains a debatable matter among the scholars. Some contend that the “save for fornication” clause is an interpolation, and that the teaching of Jesus admitted no divorce whatsoever. Others contend that the gospel writers who omit this clause regarded the one reason for divorce as so certain that it was not deemed necessary to mention its legitimacy. It may be claimed with a show of reason that the regarding of adultery as an exceptional sin against the married life stands for something instinctive in human nature. Notwithstanding all statements that desertion and abuse and drunkenness may be so aggravated as to constitute offenses worse than fornication, normal men and women continue to assign a lonely infamy to the sin of carnal unfaithfulness. If Jesus did use the exceptional clause there is not wanting evidence that his word is confirmed by an all but universal feeling. Many races have been disposed to decree that the sin of adultery is the one iniquity sharp and incisive enough to sever the “one flesh.” Perhaps it is safe to affirm that the great majority of good men and women do not shrink from the exception as being unworthy of Jesus’s teaching. But, the exception being granted, that teaching is clear and uncompromising. When that teaching becomes the law of the world divorce courts will be largely emptied and the marriage vows will be assumed with less haste and with more solemnity.

The New Testament is thus seen to be the headquarters of that conception of marriage that alone gives a firm foundation to the home. It is impossible to conceive what would have been the dismal statistics of divorce, if Jesus had made the marriage bond of slender strength. Truly the situation is bad enough as it is. Often the causes for divorce are trivial; sometimes they are deliberately arranged by the separating parties! and occasionally the much-married comedian is hailed on the stage with a joking tolerance. But when more than ninety per cent of the marriages of the land stand the tests of time and are kept in fidelity until the “one flesh” is severed by death, it is evident that some strong force still guards the home from desecration.

We need not inquire what that force is; it is the Word of Christ. Among those who follow him least, he has made divorce “bad form”; among those who follow him somewhat, he has made it doubtful morals; while among those who accept him as Lord and Master, he has made it sacrilege and blasphemy. The devotees of pleasure and convenience and lust may well quarrel with the decree of Christ. The devotees of compromise may seek to refine and discount his explicit law. Yet all those who see in the home the very center and heart of a properly organized society, as well as the very ordination of the Lord God Almighty, will not cease to be grateful that Christ spoke so unmistakably concerning its solemn sanction. He fixed forever the difference between the civil marriage and the Christian marriage. He filled the marriage service with religious terms. “The sight of God,” “instituted of God,” “mystical union,” “holy estate,” “Cana of Galilee,” “reverently, discreetly, and in the fear of God,” “God’s ordinance,” “forsaking all other,” “so long as ye both shall live,” “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health,” “the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” “God hath joined together,” “in holy love until their lives’ end”—all these words are Christ’s words, his Spirit confirmed them in the service of his church. That service may well close with the prayer which declares that his is “the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.”

More and more careful students of both sociology and Christianity will see that no safe conception of marriage can be found save in the words of the Lord. The civil contract idea is full of peril. The case of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English poet, is in evidence. The illustration may be extreme, but it will the better show the sure goal of that theory of marriage that forgets God. Shelley, for a time at least, was an outright atheist. Bowing God out of the universe, he could not consistently leave God in his theory of marriage. His college thesis was an argument for atheism. Given sufficient provocation and motive, Shelley was sure to reach the limit of a godless idea of marriage. It seems almost impossible for men with a literary mania to see social or moral fault in their heroes, and their tendency often is to absolve writers of genius from the usual laws. Shelley married the daughter of a retired innkeeper. In two years he separated from his wife and two children. Three years later the wife drowned herself, meeting voluntarily a fate which Shelley was to meet involuntarily. An apologist for Shelley says, “The refinements of intellectual sympathy which poets desiderate in their spouses Shelley failed to find in his wife, but for a time he lived with her not unhappily; nor to the last had he any fault to allege against her, except such negative ones as might be implied in his meeting a woman he liked better.” The more we study this language the more does its superficiality impress us. Let it be said that Shelley was young and heedless when he first married; let it be said, also, that he was in general strangely lovable and warmly philanthropic; and let it be said, even, that he was in his lifetime execrated beyond his deserts. But it would not be so easy to palliate his conduct if one’s own daughter had drowned herself to end her sorrow, or if one’s own daughter had traveled with him, unmarried, over France and Switzerland! Somehow literary admiration plays tricks on moral natures. Doubtless the judgment of Shelley on the basis of his boyish poem “Queen Mab” was unfair, even as its surreptitious publication without his consent was unfair. None the less one may trace a connection between his college production in defense of atheism and his later domestic conduct. No marriage has a sure foundation apart from a religious sanction. The more we consider the possibilities suggested by this confessedly extreme illustration, the more will we cling to the strict theory of Jesus as against the limping logic of any loose sociologist.

We have thus seen that the foundation of the home comes to the Bible, and particularly to the goal of the Bible’s revelation in Christ, for its solidity. Other foundations are fashioned of yielding sand. The marriage ceremony might well be modified in some minor regards; but the word of Christ will insist that the ceremony shall represent no flimsy contract. While he rules the pronouncement will be, “God hath joined together”; and the human response will remain, “till death us do part.”

The relation of Jesus to the home goes farther than his word about marriage, deep and far-reaching as that is. His life emphasized the sacredness of the family relation. He went back from the scene in the Temple to be “subject unto his parents.” He wrought his first miracle on the occasion of a marriage. Many of his miracles of mercy were performed in answer to a family plea. He heard the cry of a mother when he healed the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman, and again when he raised up the son of the widow of Nain. He heard the cry of a father when he cast out the evil spirit and restored a stricken son, clothed and in his right mind. He heard the cry of sisters when he stood weeping at the grave of Lazarus. The domestic plea quickly reached his heart and summoned his aid. It was so even in the personal sense. In the agony of the crucifixion he did not fail to commend his mother to the care of his best-to-do disciple, and to cause the writing of that simple statement, “From that day that disciple took her into his own home.”

Indeed, through all the life of Jesus he glorified the family, unless the family stood in the way of his truth or work. Emerson said once, “I will hate my father and my mother when my genius calls me.” We all know where Emerson got those words; they were not written on his own authority. Jesus made our human ancestry subject to our divine ancestry. Above the earthly parents he saw the heavenly Father. The God who ordained the home was above the home. But Jesus would allow no other exception. He himself lived by that supreme law. He was homeless in obedience to his own divine mission. There is a peculiar illustration of this, hidden somewhat by our awkward distribution of the Bible into chapters and verses. The seventh chapter of John ends with the words, “They went every man to his own house.” It is not difficult for us to reproduce the scene, even with its Oriental touches. The discussion of the day is over. The hearers did what men and women have been doing ever since—they turned to the twinkling lights of their homes. Soon the crowds had disappeared and the various persons had joined themselves to their family groups. The homeless One was left alone. The first verse of the eighth chapter of John says, “Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.” It was just an instance of his tragedy, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” The homelessness of Jesus was vicarious. Sometimes still he calls his own into the same vicariousness. He separates sons and daughters from their fathers and mothers and sends them afar to preach his kingdom. Wherever those homeless ones may go, the meaning of home takes on a new and sacred meaning. They carry with them the Word and Spirit of him who, being weary, invited the weary ones to come to him for rest; being thirsty, invited the thirsty ones to drink of the water of life; being poor, invited the poor to come to him for riches; being dead, invited the dying ones to look to him for eternal life; and, being homeless, still commands the world to look to him for the spirit of home. Even though he himself went down into the darkness of the Mount of Olives, ever since his day the people that have heard and heeded his word have found the lights of home more inviting and the mission of the home more divine.

There is yet another consideration which must be noted ere we receive the full message of Jesus about the home. The teaching of Jesus concerning God was almost wholly based on a figure of speech derived from the home. In the Old Testament God is mentioned under the title of fatherhood but seven times. Five times he is spoken of as the father of the Jewish people; twice he is spoken of as the father of individual men. Only once in the sweep of the ancient Scriptures is there found a prayer addressed to God as Father. God was the King of kings, and the Lord of hosts; he was Creator and Lawgiver. But in the knowledge of the people he was not yet Father. The world waited long ere men found an Elder Brother who could break the spell of their orphanhood and reveal to them a Father. When Jesus desired to tell men what God was like he went to their homes and found therein the form of his teaching. He sprinkled the New Testament with the domestic name of God. Two hundred and sixty-five times God is spoken of under the title of Fatherhood. The sacredness of the home relation could not receive holier emphasis.

Thus the homes which are founded by the Lord become revelations of the Lord. Domestic relations are teachers of theology. Well may we speak of a Family Bible! There is such a Bible. The illustration of theology is the family illustration. Some day we shall recover that theology, and we shall place the theologies that have superseded it in their secondary place. Jesus was the final Teacher of theology, and we must give him the primacy. Under his teaching every true home is a symbol of the divine household; every true parent is a limited representative of God; every true son is an example of the filial spirit that is religion. The path of prayer starts with the word Father. The doctrine of providential care is explained by the word Father. The call to obedience refers to the will of the Father. The deeper tragedy of sin comes from the fact that the offense is against the Father. Conversion is a return to the Father.

Taking, then, the direct teaching of Jesus with reference to marriage as the founding of the home, taking his life in its merciful relation to the home, and taking his teaching about God as based on the home, we are justified in saying that Jesus was the Prophet and Saviour of the Family. The vision that he gave of the other life took on that form again. He declared that he was preparing a place for his own, and he called that place the “Father’s house.” He was likewise preparing a home this side of the many mansions. A Carpenter he was. He has builded many sanctuaries, some for worship, and some for the mercy that we show to the sick, and aged, and destitute. But the Carpenter of Nazareth is the builder of the true home. His word lays its foundations, raises its walls, places its capstone, and furnishes its atmosphere of peace and love. The home that is placed on any other word cannot stand the shock of the tempest. It is based on sand; and when the winds and rains and storms of passion come, the home will fall, and great will be the fall thereof. The world needs to-day the lesson of Jesus about the home; and it needs, also, the spirit of Jesus in the home. When men and women yield to that spirit, extravagance will be checked, forbearance will be increased, love will be promoted, peace will be established. Husband and wife will not then plead that Jesus’s strict decree concerning marriage may be annulled. Earthly homes will be like vestibules of the Father’s House.

There remains for brief discussion the relation of the Epistles of the New Testament to the home life of the people. The tendency here has been to give undue emphasis to certain phases of Paul’s teaching. Some reformers, especially some radical feminists, have spoken of the great apostle’s teaching with scant respect. The command to wives to obey their husbands has been kept apart from the command to husbands to love their wives even as Christ loved the church. Christ loved the church so that he gave his life for it; and when husbands love their wives to that sublime extent, obedience is no longer demanded for tyranny. All technical matters aside, it will be seen that the apostolic treatment of the domestic relations, touching the relative duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and servants, shows a marked balance. When each party keeps his portion of the precepts, and is strictly minded to fulfill precisely his part of the apostolic contract, debates about primacy and authority find their gracious solution in mutual love. Unless we should wish to make undue account of Saint Paul’s doctrine of the husband’s primacy, we cannot say that his attitude toward womankind was marked by anything other than utmost respect. Just what his own domestic experiences were is a question of age-long doubt. If we study his actual references to women we shall find a series of compliments too deep to serve as the expression of a superficial gallantry and too genuine to allow the author to be classed as a hater of the mothers and sisters and wives of the race. Near the end of his life Paul caught the vision of his Master. Beyond his wanderings he saw a destination; above his imprisonments he saw a freedom; after his shipwrecks he saw a haven; and the destination and freedom and haven were all expressed in the words “at home.” “At home,” “at home with the Lord,” this was Paul’s conception of the waiting heaven. He, too, exalted the home by making it the forefigure of heaven.

We have now presented enough to justify the statement that the Bible is the stanch friend of the home. As long as men and women read and obey the Book, and love and follow the Lord of the Book, their feet will turn reverently homeward as to the place of God’s appointing, as to the school of God’s own discipline, as to the place of God’s own joy, and as to the anteroom of God’s own heaven.