I shall go with you tonight to the dearest and most sacred spot on earth to you and me - a spot around which clusters the sweetest associations and the most precious memories. I shall speak tonight of home.
The longer I live, the more I visit from home to home, the more I see of the sorrows and cares, the successes and failures of this life, the more I am impressed that the home problem is the greatest problem of our civilization. The homes of our country are so many streams pouring themselves into the great current of moral, social and political life. If the home life is pure, all is pure. The home is the center of everything.
From the proper or improper settlement of the home question comes more of joy or sorrow, more of weal or woe, than from all other questions combined. Build your palaces, amass your great fortunes, pile up your luxuries all about you, provide for the satisfaction of every desire, but as you sit amid these luxuries and wait for the staggering steps of a drunken son or contemplate the downward steps of a wayward daughter, happiness flies out of your heart and your home. Their is nothing that can render happy the parents of godless, wayward children.
Around the home circle of the cottage or the palace are great possibilities of joy or sorrow than in all the rest of the world. Not only does the happiness of the world center in the home, but the moral, social and civil life of the world emanates form the home.
Every drunkard, every gambler, every debauchee, every lost character once sat on Mother's lap and learned the mother tongue and the mother thought and mother action - the mother life. The downfall of every character can be traced to some defect in the home life.
If God Almighty has fixed it up so that we cannot take our children to Heaven with us, He has put us in a horrible condition. The prettiest picture earth furnishes is a whole family on the way to Heaven; the most horrible picture is a whole family on the way to Hell. I believe in the truth of the proverb of this Book: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." A child properly trained up to the proper point will not go astray.
The normal way to get rid of drunkards is to quit raising them; the normal way to get rid of liars, thieves and debauchees is to quit raising them.
