The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 1919. HOUSES AND HOMES

New Zealand Tablet, 5 June 1919, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 1919. HOUSES AND HOMES

fKE are a nomadic people. The fever of <jM 'ffw/F movement is in our blood. Of .us in>jx\\W aV/ deed may it be said that we have here NsS/aj/, no lasting city. There is probably no country in the world in which people travel so much in proportion to the popu- ■*'' lation. And quite apart from ordinary casual journeying, there is hardly any one in which people change their abode so often and so easily. To-day a family finds itself living in Auckland, tomorrow it moves to Wellington, and, perhaps, before a year is out,-' to Christchurch. And worse than, all, when our people have by hard labor and years of toil made a little money on the land, the call of the town comes to them, and they too often sell out and betake themselves to a life of weariness of doing ;■ nothing in some of our unattractive towns or cities. To . one who comes from a land where homes were sacred things .and where the ancient Roman appeal to hearths I and fire-

sides had its full force, all this seems not only a pity, but a sin. It is a pity, for one reason, because too often the old people who move at the instance of the young are never more happy, and, for another, because people who never strike root, who are deracines , as Maurice Barres would say, - are seldom the stuff but of which much good comes to a country. And it is a sin to cut off ? old , associations and old memories of home from children, who lose more thereby than anyone who does not knew what home means and how powerful in afterlife is its appeal can understand. * In the old world, how' different it was. The solid people, the heart of the nations, were those who clung to home, The home was a sanctuary for them ; it was consecrated and blessed by a thousand unspeakable and tender memories. We have led wanderers from America to pray beside a stone on which the names of our grandfather’s grandfathers were almost obliterated by time we have walked with them in fields which came down from father to son for centuries-; and we could feel how, because of all they had heard from their parents of this old home, before they ever saw the waves whitening on the Irish coasts, every field and tree and hill was sacred to them. Home thus becomes a spiritual thing, a centre of gravity for all thne to which nameless, superhuman forces draw across the world. A sign of it is the familiarity of the sons and daughters of exiles with the places they never saw, places that mean more to them than the palaces and the cities of which the old world is rightly proud. They have that tradition because their fathers and mothers had homes in the real sense, shrines of peace, refuges from the cares and the sorrows of life, sacred centres of faith and patriotism more powerful in their influence than any schools. In Italy pilgrims go in thousands to visit the model of all homes at Loreto, in France to the home of Joan of Arc. In the Holy House of Loreto the Divine Lord of us all lived in subjection to Mary and Joseph, to teach us the value of home-life and its importance for Christianity. In her home Joan was bred and reared on the principles which her parents learned from Nazareth, and so became France’s saviour and her noblest type of patriotism and purity. The humble homes of green Erin have sent forth across the world the priests and nuns and the pious men and women to whose faith is due whatever of true religion is in the new world to-day. And if in the past there had been no home traditions and no home training of the old kind who can tell what the Church and the world would have lost ? No doubt there is home-life wherever good parents are found, but stability and tradition help in untold ways and a lasting place of abode on this earth is in some way a help towards attaining the spiritual home for which we are all destined hereafter in Heaven, * The wise Irish Prelate who founded the Tablet used to exhort his. flock to settle on the land and to stay on it. Time has shown how sound was his advice. Were he alive to-day his great heart would bleed at the sight of so many Catholics who after hard toil and : years of industry have given up their farms in order to live in towns where they die of dry rot and where their children in all likelihood help to swell the frivolous throngs that support the debasing picture- Back to the land would be his call did he live to-day, and whosoever shall succeed in persuading our people that to have and to hold the land is the best contribution they can make towards our future here will accomplish a great work. But whether on the land or in the cities it should be the aim of heads of families to found a home that will be to their children what the homes of the old world were to the children that were brought up in them. A home means a house to live in, and the first thing secured for that house ought to be the blessing of God without whose aid all labor is vain. The home of Nazareth is the model of all homes; and a fixed dwelling that would prove a focus of spiritual associations to every member of the family is something worth while striving for. We arc a long way off

yet from the spirit that built the old homes ; but with God’s help parents can do much to revive the spirit of their forefathers and to establish here in this new land homes that shall be like, the tree Isdragil in the course of years, with their roots deep down among the graves of the dear dead and their flowering branches spreading towards Heaven.