RELIGION AND THE HOME.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 164, 13 July 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

RELIGION AND THE HOME.

Here are two paragraphs from an impressive article in last week's New Zealand "Outlook" on religion and the home. Family piety has waned in our day. Magistrates aiid teachers are deploring the lack of parental control. Parents allow their children to grow up without any effort to guide them in the ways of God. They cherish in their best moments a hope that some other agency will remedy their neglect. Yet in spite of the splendid work of hosts of organisations and institutions in the community, it is still true that the home is a basic institution in civilised society. Human history in all its aspects shows that the home is a basic unit in all Christian education. The great need today is not for more clubs and societies, but for the revival of family piety and home training, s The mother in the home is surely the person best fitted to breathe into the opening heart of her child the first sense of God and of the Savour's love. And is it not in the. home that the virtues which make possible an ordered and wholesome society are first learned, both from precept and example? No State can excluda the Bible from the home, nor prevent parents from passing on their most sacred convictions to their children. The needs of the present and the demands of the future, both in Church and in State, cry aloud for a return to the home. Horace Buslinell spoke truly when he declared that religion never really grips a nation until it becomes domestic, until the fires of faith burn brightly on the hearths of the homes of the people.