Family Life

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: upon their children, when striving to warn them to avoid the dire ruin in which their own fatal act had involved their entire posterity. But we need not further prosecute a view which lies so manifestly open before every thoughtful reader of the Bible, and in which is to be found the true origin and...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: upon their children, when striving to warn them to avoid the dire ruin in which their own fatal act had involved their entire posterity. But we need not further prosecute a view which lies so manifestly open before every thoughtful reader of the Bible, and in which is to be found the true origin and constitution of the family circle. FIRST DOMESTIC SERVANT. Parents and children do not, however, constitute the entire family circle as it now so generally exists; there is also the domestic servant, ?a very important portion of that inmost social community. We need not ask either when or how that element was added to the family circle. Its origin is involved in the very nature of a family, and the peculiar necessities thence arising. The eldest daughter of the increasing family must have been the first to aid her mother, in the discharge of her domestic duties, especially when the attention of that mother was peculiarly engrossed with the charge of another opening life-bud, equally dear to all. And as that eldest daughter discharged her filial duty to her mother, while her own young heart was conscious of the warm pulsations of a newaffection in her position of an eldest sister; so, while something which foreshadowed the new and necessary element of a domestic servant was thus developed in the widening family circle, that element, if one of comparative servitude, was the servitude of love; and all its duties were acts of embodied kindness, equally delightful to give and to receive. Into this, also, the religious principle could not fail to enter deeply; or rather let us say, that while the parents and the eldest daughter gazed tenderly and thoughtfully on the fair infant?to them the latest and most precious work of their own Creator?they could not but feel their souls, and ...