| The Best Things in Life |
Chapter 17 |
Page 4 |
Another incident in the same article is of a young man entering a reception room with his wife. He carelessly stepped on her gown and stumbled. “Mary,” he said impatiently, “I wish you would either hold your dresses up, or have them made short.” The wife said nothing for a moment, and then she asked very pleasantly, “Charles, if it had been some other woman whose dress you had stepped on, what would you have said?” The young man was honest with himself. He bowed and said frankly, “I should have apologized for my awkwardness, and I do now most humbly apologize to you, my dear. I am truly ashamed of myself.”
The lesson of loving one another means that children should be affectionate to each other in their own home. Because you are older than your brother and sister you will not feel that it is your privilege to rule them, command them, dictate to them, to make them give up everything to you and serve you, to please you and mind you always. That is not the way love does. Jesus tells us that love gives up, that it does not demand to be served, to have things done for it by others, but rather delights to serves, to do things for others. One of the most beautiful sights one sees among children is that of an older child playing the maternal part with one who is younger, patiently humouring her, trying to comfort her, doing things to soothe her, carrying her when the little thing is tired, keeping sweet and loving when the child is fretful and irritable.
But it is not only among children that there is need for the cultivation of love in home relations. There are older people who would do well to heed the lesson. Some people seem to think of their home as a place where they can relax love’s restraint, and work off the bad humours and tempers which they have been compelled in other place to hold in check. But, on the other hand, home ought to be a man’s training place, a place in which he may learn all the sweet and beautiful ways of love. A great Hindu says, “The fittest and most practicable place for the conquest of anger, selfishness, rudeness, and impatience is in a man’s own home. Be a saint there, and it does not matter so much what you are elsewhere.”
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