It is evident that home is not mere locality, that it is not defined by metes and bounds. From Gibraltar to Archangel, from Calcutta to the frozen seas, there are homes. One principle, one fruit-bud produces them all. Home is not a thing that can be bought or sold in the market. You may buy a homestead or a house, you may perhaps buy a wife, but you cannot buy a woman’s love. Costly furniture, rich dresses, retinues of servants, and luxurious dishes do not make homes. It is not the residence but the affection of the occupants that constitutes the home. Those who are united in the bonds of a true affection behold themselves reflected in each other, and each is to the other as another self. In the confidence of love there is repose.
My friends and neighbors, this assembly is made up of those who have been reared and have reared others in homes where parental love and filial affection were the mainsprings of action and the foundation of charitable and friendly acts. The desire to share with others the gifts a kindly Providence bestows on ourselves is bred in the atmosphere of home. All the sweet charities of life are but the overflow of these feelings and sympathies born and bred at the domestic hearthstone.
I thank you, my friends and neighbors, for the gifts of affection bestowed this night, and may the blessing of God rest upon yourselves, your children, and your homes.
Text: Luke xv. 18, 20. “_I will arise and go to my father._” “_But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him._”
The Saviour, by a beautiful and affecting story, illustrates the natural and inevitable result of a sinful course, a course of ingratitude and disobedience to God. We have placed before us the life of a Hebrew patriarch. In that land now so barren beneath the curse of God and the curse of a despotic government, but once so full of beauty and blossoming, when the Chosen People clothed its now barren mountain peaks with clambering vines and its valleys with waving grass and grain, dwelt a Hebrew, a righteous man among the kindred of his people, to whom God had given goodly land, and flocks and herds in abundance, whose tents stretched far over the plains, and who had servants born in his house. This man had two sons, one of whom was much older than the other. It was a pleasant household; the father was kind and affectionate to his servants and to the poor,--a just man, fearing God and tenderly attached to his children.