The Long Wide Net
swim out to sea, thinking they can go as far as they please, and with gay toss of silvery scale they defy the sportsman on the beach, and after a while the fishermen begin to draw in the net, hand over hand, and hand over hand, and it is a long while before the captured fins begin to feel the net, and then they dart this way and that, hoping to get out, but find themselves approaching the shore, and are brought up to the very feet of the captors, so the memory of an early home sometimes seems to relax and let men out further and further from God and further and further from shore—five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years; but some day they find an irresistible mesh drawing them back, and they are compelled to retreat from their prodigality and wandering; and though they make desperate effort to escape the impression, and try to dive deeper down in sin, after a while are brought clear back and held upon the Rock of Ages.
If it be possible, O father and mother! let your sons and daughters go out into the world under the semi-omnipotent memory of a good, pure home. About your two or three rooms in a boarding-house or a family hotel you can cast no such glorious sanctity. They will think of these public caravanseries as an early stopping place, malodorous with old victuals, coffees perpetually steaming, and meats in everlasting stew or broil, the air surcharged with carbonic acid, and corridors along which drunken boarders come staggering at one o’clock in the morning, rapping at the door till the affrighted wife lets them in. Do not be guilty of the sacrilege or blasphemy of calling such a place a home.