Luther at Home

These pen and picture sketches are designed to familiarize the young with the most beautiful and instructive aspects and incidents of Luther’s home-life. It is hoped, moreover, that this portraiture of the great Reformer, as he appears in the privacy of home, will serve, in some measure, to counteract the tendency to individualism in our day, and to expose the vandalism that would substitute the freedom of affinities for the sacred bonds of matrimony, and break the wedding-ring as a superstitious symbol.
No doubt there are inhumanities sheltered under the very sacredness of the domestic relations; but everything has its shadow, and evils mingle with all human relations, and there are sometimes grievous wrongs and oppressions perpetrated under the very sanctity of the home-life. But surely we are not, on this account, to break the sacred bonds of the marriage relation, and set the family group adrift in some vague conceit of social freedom or some nonsense of spiritual affinities: this would be like knocking a ship to pieces because some of the passengers are sea-sick. “This organism of the family is a ship that has carried human civilization over the waves of ages—an ark that has preserved the germs of the social state in many a deluge. Sunder the ties that hold it together, and who can estimate the ruin, or from the shattered fragments reconstruct society?”
The example of Luther may also suggest and practically illustrate what a beauty and blessedness belong to a truly Christian domestic life. How much there is to love and to enjoy in a true home; and what divergent lines of destiny reach out from the cradle to immortal issues.
And then it may suggest, to all who are married, the importance of having a home. There may be, to some, a necessity of boarding. But where such a sort of living is matter of choice from a love of ease or luxury, of fashion or a morbid fondness for society, then it cannot be too strongly deprecated. Better, it seems to us, that the family should live in a shanty, which they can call their own home, than in the stateliest mansion open to everybody; which is like lodging on the house-top and eating in the street. Especially does tender childhood need the dews of domestic influences, and cannot unfold sweetly and naturally in the gairish sunlight and the rude contacts of the roadside.
There is yet another thing suggested in this home-life of Luther, and that is, that every family needs the love and care of a father’s heart. With all that a mother may do, the home that does not feel a father’s loving sympathy is not a home. No man can have such grand enterprises, and such cares and toils, as absorbed the thoughts and busied the hands of Luther. And yet he found time and a heart for the pleasures and enjoyments of domestic life. No man has a right to let his entire heart melt away in business, and carry none of it home with him. There never was a business interest yet that ought to put out the light on the hearth-stone, or disarm a father, in the midst of his children, of kindness, cheerfulness, hope, and faith.
We trust this humble effort to portray the home-life of the great Reformer may, at least, awaken the inquiry in every reader: “What is home to me?” And as you follow Luther as he appears in these pen pictures and home scenes, will you allow and ponder the questions: “Is home a place of serious thought as well as of love and gladness? Have you an altar of prayer there? Is it overarched by the presence of God, and brightened by His benediction? Do you comprehend the meaning of the communions that are brightened by its fire-light, of the shadowy memories that fresco its walls?"