From True Men as We Need Them by Fr. Bernard O’Reilly, 1894

Paradise, As Realized in the Home of the True Man

Oh! hail, my roof-tree and threshold of my home, How glad I saw thee!

Social Importance of the Sanctities of Home Life

The Catholic Church attracts those who love the simplicity of natural manners, by the harmonies of a restored creation…

The Catholic Religion is not presented to us as separated from nature, but in conjunction with it forming a grand whole, fostering all the domestic affections with manhood, gentleness, liberality, and all the virtues which conduce to the happiness of Home, banishing not more the luxuries which militate directly against the social state in general, than the false notions of spirituality which would interfere with the free action of the natural relations.

For, as a recent author says, the beauty, peace, unity, and truth of life repose on that religious equilibrium which protects the flesh against the pride of the spirit, and the spirit against the invasions of the flesh…

In truth, nothing is so natural as Catholicity—nothing so full of heart—nothing so favorable, therefore, to all the sweets of Home.

Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled elders, soft infancy that nothing can but cry, all are in the secret of its charm. —Kenelm Henry Digby

Let it not be thought that we dwell at too great a length upon this notion of Home, and all the duties and charities inseparably connected with home-life.

When one looks abroad upon the nations which once constituted Christendom, and examines seriously the causes of social and political prosperity or decay, this great fact stands forth as evidently as a bright beacon-light in the darkness over a dangerous reef:

The strength or weakness, the vitality or decadence of nations, is to be measured by the purity of their home-life, by their sacred regard for Home, its authority, and its sanctities.

Take any one people among whom Home—from that of the sovereign or chief magistrate to the lowliest and poorest citizen—is protected by law, manners, and a wholesome public opinion, against everything calculated to loosen or to weaken the sacredness of the marriage tie, the rights of parental authority as sanctioned by the Christian law and immemorial custom, or the duties of filial love and reverence— and you will find the nation distinguished for private worth, political honesty, and an enlightened love of freedom.

Abuses there may and will be in the administration of the best human institutions; but where the homes of a nation are sincerely and thoroughly Christian, public corruption must find a certain and most effective remedy in a public opinion fed by the purity and honesty of private life.

The labor bestowed on describing the Home as it ought to be, and as it still is in many Christian lands, is surely a labor well bestowed, and the pains taken to make the description of home-life so enchanting, that all may feel its charm, must assuredly be blessed of God, the Author of our nature and the unwearied promoter of its highest welfare.

Guard Inviolable the Sanctity and Privacy of the Home

In the magnificent new countries in America, Asia, and—it may be—Africa, which Providence throws open to the thrifty and over-crowded populations of Europe, it is free to every man worthy of the name, to build up a home of his own.

It was, and is still, the boast of the freeman living under the common law of England and these United States, that his home was his castle, all his own in its length and breadth, and as high as the heavens.

It must be the fault of a degenerate race, neglectful of never-to-be-abdicated rights, if the inviolability of their homes and the hallowed privacy of family life, are surrendered into the hands of the policeman or given up to the lawless curiosity of the public press.

At any rate, no one may deny that it is free to every willing and true-hearted man to create for himself a home as happy, as honored, as lasting as those visited in the present or past ages by God’s richest blessings.

Every such home should be one founded on God-given love.

“No man or woman,” says a Catholic writer, “has ever felt true love without feeling a desire to become better, and to thank God for His having given therein a foretaste of the joys of heaven.”

“Where faith (says Digby) has stamped its character on the maiden’s heart, where man is reminded of the graces of her whom he delights to serve, woman’s divine air and her countenance, her words and her sweet smile, can so separate him from all evil influences, that no obstacles upon the road to truth will be able to detain his feet from pressing forward to embrace it; and then hand in hand he is led to his second home, where love and truth made one with it, will remain with him thenceforth forever.”

This is the only sure foundation of the Home—a true mutual love hallowed by the blessing of Him who made the human heart, and tempered by the fear of His dread majesty.

“The woman was given a different assignment, that of helpmeet, mother, homemaker. We apply the word helpmeet to mean the role of the wife as she offers understanding, encouragement, support, and sometimes help. Since she is biologically created to bear children, her role as a mother is unquestioned. Her homemaking role is assumed: She must nurture her young and run the household, to free her husband to function as the provider.” -Helen Andelin

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From True Men as We Need Them, Fr. Bernard O’Reilly, 1894

Hallowed Mutual Love is All-Powerful for Good

Love is the mightiest force of the moral world, all-mighty for good when directed toward the august purposes ordained by Him who is the Creator both of the world of spirits and of the world of matter, and who delights, in aiding the workings of the human heart much more than in controlling the winds and the waves, the play of the lightning; or the pathways of the light, much more even than in regulating the vast and mysterious movements of the starry universe.

There never yet existed two young hearts kept pure for each other by the Great Author of our nature, and united for life-long companionship through the most ancient and sacred of His ordinances, whom He did not destine to be to each other a source of purest bliss, a mutual power toward all excellence, and the parents of a race of Godlike men and women, if they would themselves only be faithful to the light that is in them!

Here lies the secret of so much sin and misery, of so many scandals among every class of society, of the ruin of so many homes and the breaking of so many hearts. The mighty force of lawful love is placed, like every other most precious gift of God to man, in the keeping and under the control of man’s free will.

He is left free by his Maker, to use the gift or neglect it, to apply it to the divinest purposes or to pervert it to the worst.

Man has but a limited control of the mighty elementary forces of nature. The storms which sport with his best-built ships on the ocean, the inundations which yearly devastate his fields and wreck his habitation, the earthquake-power that levels the proudest cities in the twinkling of an eye and engulfs whole continents in the deep, the very fire given him for so many useful and salutary ends, all show him continually that he is not their master.

Nay, more than that, the very steam which he generates and utilizes as the agent of his most triumphant progress, annihilates him at every turn, as if to convince him that his most glorious conquests can never be achieved over elements that he was not born to subdue.

The strength of man and his chief glory lie in his mastery over his own soul, and in his power of binding to himself the souls of others. His worst sin consists in the neglect of subduing his own evil passions, of cultivating and developing the good that is in himself; in the neglect of his duties toward the souls knit to his own, given him to guard from evil, to advance in all good, to love as God has loved us, by continual devotion and self-sacrifice in favor of the beloved.

Man is Responsible for the Fall in Eden

The story of the two first human beings ought to be a lesson full of warning and most wholesome instruction for every human pair, who start in life together under the sanction of God’s blessing.

No, Eve was not the author of the transgression that ruined human happiness and sullied human life at their very origin. Eve was not the head of the race. She was derived from Adam and created for him. We stood not or fell not in her and through her. Man was the head.

In him it was decreed that the entire race should stand or fall. When the woman, whom he was bound to guard and watch over far more jealously and diligently than over his beauteous domain of Paradise, fell, in great part, it may be, because he was neither diligent nor watchful in his charge over her unsuspecting innocence and comparative helplessness, we had not yet fallen.

Her sin was her own, and was not to be imputed to us. Had Adam continued innocent, then he would not have forfeited the sublime rank to which in him all human nature had been elevated.

He fell, tempted, to be sure, by his now guilty communion; but he fell freely, with his eyes open, with a full knowledge of the consequences of his disobedience, with a lively sense of the immense debt he owed to his Creator and Benefactor, and he fell to gratify his own sensuality.

No other motive is assigned in Scripture. His fall, utterly unjustifiable and utterly disgraceful as it was, dragged us all down; and the ruin caused thereby required the coming down to our level in our assumed flesh and blood of that Eternal Son, through whom all things had been made, and by whom alone the ruin of all things could be repaired.

Even so now, let us not close our eyes to the luminous fact—the ruin of the Home comes through man: woman’s baneful agency is but indirect, accidental, at the very most, secondary or subsidiary.

The head of the Home is man, the head of society is man; the destroyer of the moral world is man; its restoration and salvation must be through woman.

At any rate, certain it is that at the head of the moral order here below is man; when he fails, then there follows disorder everywhere.

Quote for the day….

Her soul, her life, is given you “to dress and to keep” and on your appreciating her nature and her worth, on your knowing how to call forth by your love, your care, your devotion to her service, by the sunlight of your examples much more even than by your mere love and tenderness—must depend whether or not you shall have a home-garden, a paradise—or a hell upon earth. -Rev. Bernard O’Reilly, 1894

From True Men as We Need Them by Rev. Bernard O’Reilly

To you, O man of the world, your home-garden, your paradise—the source of your purest and dearest felicity on this side of the grave, is the mind and heart and soul of your wife, your companion, the mother of your children.

Her soul, her life, is given you “to dress and to keep” and on your appreciating her nature and her worth, on your knowing how to call forth by your love, your care, your devotion to her service, by the sunlight of your examples much more even than by your mere love and tenderness—must depend whether or not you shall have a home-garden, a paradise—or a hell upon earth.

There is no delicacy, no purity of thought and word and act—no feeling of respect or reverence so exalted—no chivalrous devotion to the honor, the unblemished name, the generous and holy purposes of a true woman—to be compared with the all-embracing sentiment of God-given love in the sinless soul of a man, united, through God’s blessing, with the maiden chosen in accordance with God’s will.

Catholics, who are thoroughly acquainted with the sacred character of the matrimonial union, who know what untold graces are set apart for their whole after-life by the sacramental blessing, enter upon married life with mingled joy and fear—because they are made aware both of their responsibilities and of the mighty aids divinely given them, to make of their whole career one long day of rejoicing, because it must be one long day of generous devotion to duty.

The husband’s first duty, under God’s service, is to his wife. He must give himself to her as she has left all to follow him. His must be—from his bridal hour to his dying day—one long, uninterrupted, most loving and unstinted service to her. He must, every day that he rises, set her image higher in his heart; reverence her more, seek to have others know her worth better, and show her greater honor.

It is the death of conjugal love, where respect diminishes in the heart instead of daily increasing, and where that delicacy and courtesy in word and manner which we call outward respect, is dispensed with on pretext of nearness and intimacy and unreserve.

Make it, therefore, the law of your life, that as the years of your wedded life pass by, they shall find, beside the ever-blooming flower of love in the center of your home-garden the flower of undying reverence. One cannot live without the other.

And to the wife we must say: If you would have your husband’s love and respect

to know no fading—make it a sacred duty to God, every day of your life, to invent new methods of showing your companion that your love is ever young and fresh as the flowers that bloom on high in the City of God.

Let men of culture and position, who owe to those beneath them—much more than to those of their own level—the light of good example, read and ponder carefully every word in the following exquisite lines from a woman: “If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange

And be all to me? Shall I never miss

Home-talk and blessing, and the common kiss

That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,

When I look up, to drop on a new range

Of walls and floors…another home than this?

Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is

Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change?

That’s hardest! If to conquer love, has tried,

To conquer grief tries more…as all things prove;

For grief indeed is love and grief beside.

Alas! I have grieved so, I am hard to love—

Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,

And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.”

A priestly voice is daily and hourly wont to guide the young amid the first trials and bitternesses of wedded life, as well as amid the storms which attend on its noon and its setting.

The reader knows also how precious and safe a refuge fathers and mothers alike find in that guidance, when worldly wisdom and worldly friendship are of no avail.

It was, nevertheless, best that these lessons should be given from the experience of persons of worldly station.

We have listened to the most intimate secrets of a true manly heart, still in death for many a year: the accents seem to come from the depths of the sanctuary. And this last wayside flower of poetry we have culled, as we seemed to pass from the altar and the awe of the cemetery, will also have its pregnant reminder.

Yes, loved and infinitely dear as are the ties of the home of childhood, when a woman turns her back upon it and puts her hand in her husband’s hand to walk the earth alone with him, it is as if a deluge had swept over her past, and her spirit, in going back in thought to the fireside of father and mother, found nothing but a ruin, with her loved ones all dead to her.

In her grief for the separation, she turns to the Ark of her husband’s home and heart like the dove sent forth by the great patriarch; has she not a right that her husband shall open his “heart wide and fold within, the wet wings” and drooping spirit of her to whom he is now all in all?

There are so many who fail, on the very threshold of their new existence, to understand the yearning of their companions for the home-life they have lost, and to make up by unselfish and unbounded tenderness for this great loss!

We crave pardon for dwelling thus at length on the necessity—so all-important, so indispensable—of this union, of hearts between husband and wife. Without it there is no home, no home-life, no true family.

We have insisted upon it, because without it there can be no life-work done to any good or meritorious purpose by the wedded pair, become thus most miserable yoke-fellows. God only grant them to say, each to the other:

“The world (our home-world) waits

For help. Beloved, let us love so well,

Our work shall still be better for our love,

And still our love be sweeter for our work,

And both commended, for the sake of each,

By all true workers and true lovers born.”

Most blessed are those who can thus look back to the parental home, and dwell with rapture on the memory of such a union between the father and mother who reared them! Still are they not to forget that this great gift of hallowed conjugal love was only bestowed for the dear and sweet work of making home a paradise not only for their children, but for their own parents, if privileged to possess them and shelter them there, for their servants, and for their friends.

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The wisdom and training you give to your child will determine the outcome. It is not the time to give in to weariness, indifference, laziness or careless neglect. Their souls are in your hands…. -Finer Femininity

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