There is No Place Like Home

There are three institutions that may properly be called divine: the home, the state, and the church. The home comes first, first in time and first in importance.

1921 Walther League Messenger

The following brief article, titled “Home”, appeared in the October 1921 issue of the Walther League Messenger, Volume 30, Number 3, on page 71.

“There is no place like home.” This proverbial saying is used of the home chiefly as a place of real satisfaction and happiness; and this in spite of the fact that there are many homes in which there is anything but happiness.

But “there is no place like home” is true in another sense. Just because the home is the place of the purest and most real enjoyment and happiness, it is also the mightiest agency for developing and maintaining those virtues and qualities that are absolutely essential to real contentment and happiness among men whatever their relations to one another may be.

There are three institutions that may properly be called divine: the home, the state, and the church. The home was divinely instituted when God in Eden brought Adam and Eve together as man and wife and commanded them to live together and to beget children. The state was divinely instituted when God gave authority to men to enact such laws and regulations as might seem needful to order, safety and general well-being in material and temporal affairs. The church was divinely instituted when God sent His Son into the world to redeem men from sin and the power of the devil and gather them into a communion of believers through the Spirit and by the means of grace.

The home comes first, first in time and first in importance. If the home is what it should be, so that the young are trained up according to divine requirement, then there will be no trouble in solving the problems which concern the state. And again if the home were what it should be, a truly Christian home, then the Church’s victory over the world would be a comparatively easy fight.

Rev. Sheatsley in Lutheran Standard