Aromatherapy
What is the aroma of your house and of your life? What a convicting and probing question!
Last night I read the small booklet “Classical Christian Education and the Homeschool”, and came across this great quote in the context of exhortations that the children and home atmosphere are more important that the academic goals. It applies to parents directly, before schooling begins and regardless of the schooling choices made. Emphases mine, abridgement theirs.
A child’s character is forming under a principle, not of choice, but of nurture. The spirit of the house is breathed into his nature, day by day. The anger and gentleness, the fretfulness and patience — the appetitires, passions, and manners — all the variant moods of feeling exhibited round him, pass into him as impressions, and become seeds of character in him; not because the parents will it, but because it must be so, whether they will or not. They propogate their own evil in the child, not by design, but under a law of moral infection [...] The spirit of the house is in the members of the children by nuture, not by teaching, not by any attempt to communicate the same, but because it is the air the children breathe. [...] Understand that it is the family spirit, the organic life of the house, the silent power of a domestic godliness, working as it does, unconsciously and with soveriegn effect — this it is which forms your children to God.
–Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture, 1861
Wow ! It is refreshing to see in print what seems to be true. I would like to read this book. Thanks for sharing Mystie.