THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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and cold of the world without. There is no fire for the warming of a home like the fire of zeal for the service of humanity. A family bound together by mutual love, levying a tax upon the bounties of nature and the arts of man to make the abode beautiful, delighting in one another’s peace and comfort, but with no thought or hope or effort for the world outside, is a case of arrested development. It is just here that so many of us make our fatal mistakes. We imagine that personal happiness is large enough as an aim for beings created in the image of God—the Eternal Giver.
The supreme essential, then, for the attainment of the ideal home, is the serving of some large ideal for the world. This is the characteristic of the ideal which we can ingraft upon the actual in our hands. We can not bring about, in a moment, the changes in the minds of men and women which will give women equal opportunities with men in the culture and use of their powers, nor compel men to receive those ideals of personal purity which shall issue in a nobler type of manhood; but the great aim, the service of the world, this is for us all. Make your home great by great aims.
The family is the most important social institution of mankind only because it affords the finest opportunities for the production and rearing of a higher social being, who shall be able to nobly discharge his duty as a responsible member of the social body.
Home is the gift of the child to civilization. Shall not the home return the gift to the race by sending forth men and women who have learned the art of living together in so Divine a fashion that they shall be able to practice it in the school, the shop, the market, the nation and the world?