p. 164 | ATMOSPHERES by Theodore L. Cuyler

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · March 11, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 11

ATMOSPHERES

By Theodore L. Cuyler

MANY residents in our cities return from the country every autumn with their health invigorated by breathing the pure country air. Some have been toned up by the oxygen that floats through the mountains; some by the ocean winds, that are full of saltness and strength. Others, again, light upon regions infested with miasma, and they bring back the subtle poison of the “malaria” in their bones. A good air inspires health; a bad air breeds disease and death. It is not necessary to cite the memorable case of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” to prove that nothing is more deadly than a foul, poisonous atmosphere.

What is true as to physical health is equally true as to spiritual health. No one who observes human nature closely can fail to detect the prodigious influence of atmospheres, holy and unholy, upon character and the destiny of the soul. We are all members one of another. There is an influence that goes forth insensibly from every one of us; and each one feels the influence of his or her surroundings. “What a man is—the sum total of his beliefs, affections, tastes, and habits—is contagious in its tendency.” It photographs itself upon others. The parent communicates the moral contagion to the child; the teacher, to his pupils; the author, to his readers. We may be as totally unconscious of this emanation of good or evil from us as the person who communicates a scarlet fever or a varioloid; yet the fact remains. If we are full of holy light, we can make an atmosphere of cheerful radiance. If our souls are on fire with Christ-love, others will inevitably feel the warmth. A few frigid professors can freeze a prayer-meeting; a few fervid ones can kindle it into a glow. What a tremendous spiritual heat was engendered in a certain upper room in Jerusalem, when the Divine Spirit poured like a wind and a flame into one hundred and twenty hearts! The atmosphere became charged with spiritual power. Those early disciples carried that atmosphere with them, and three thousand souls were converted in a day.

We observe the striking influence of atmosphere in certain schools. Dr. Arnold seemed to impress himself so distinctly upon the famous school at Rugby that the atmosphere became favorable to industry, truthfulness, and a high sense of honor. No one can visit the celebrated Mount Holyoke Seminary without detecting at once a subtle pervading influence that is fatal to fashion and frivolity, and yet quickening to spiritual life. The breath of Mary Lyon, its godly, courageous founder, still breathes through the institution; and hence has come that subtle inspiration which has sent over one hundred of its graduates upon foreign missions to India, Africa, and other regions of heathendom. I have known a careless, irreligious boy to enter a school in which religion was made attractive and pervading. Without being either scolded, or rebuked sharply, or even being exhorted, he has soon become changed in character by his surroundings. The steady, prayerful, and godly atmosphere of the school seemed to penetrate and mold his character, as a tonic air gives vigor to the lungs and purity to the blood. Such a school is a means of grace to a boy or girl, and affects those whom even sermons fail to touch.

Nowhere is this subtle influence of moral atmosphere so potent as in the home, which God intended to be the primary training-school for the commonwealth and the church. Let me feel assured of a family altar and the pervading influence of God’s word in every household, and I should feel no tremor of anxiety for the future of our Republic. Puritan homes made Puritan character. Out of many a lowly New England farmhouse, with a rag carpet on its floor and a few godly books on its table, have gone the Goodells, the Spauldings, and the Mills to our early foreign missions. They have given its best blood to the American pulpit and the American state. It was the religious atmosphere of the home that penetrated the very core of character.

This atmosphere of the household—which either converts to Christ or perverts to fashion, folly, and impiety—is commonly created by the parents. They are responsible for it. If the whole trend of household talk, and thought, and ambition, runs toward money-making, or social convivialities, or general godlessness of any kind, it is the father and mother who give the pitch. Nowhere is it so difficult to make the best preaching or the best Sunday-school teaching effective on character as in the malarious air of such a home. As soon expect to rear oranges in Lapland or grow sugar-cane in Labrador as to rear plants of grace in so godless an atmosphere. The parental influence penetrates through the house with as subtle a poison as escaping gas from an ill-built furnace. As Doctor Bushnell has pithily said, in his incomparable book on “Christian Nurture,” “Whatever fire the parents kindle, the children are found gathering the wood. They help as either apprentices or accessories.” If the father begins the Sabbath with some secular newspaper, the family will help him read it. If the parents go irregularly to God’s house, the children will hardly care to go at all. “If the mother is a scandalmonger, she will make her children tattlers and eavesdroppers. If she directs her servants to say at the door that she is ‘not at home,’ the children will learn to be polite liars.” If the father puts a decanter on his table, the boys will soon begin to practice with the fatal glass. That rich father who disinherited a son for drunkenness, and in the same will bequeathed his wine-cellar to certain heirs, gave a very palpable proof of the home atmosphere which had poisoned the poor boy. Parental provocations and ill-temper sour the very air of many households, so that the children can hardly escape being cross, snappish, and irritable. How can piety breathe in such an air? How can a family be trained up in the knowledge of God’s word, when the Book of books is seldom opened, and the spirit of its instructions is no more known than in the house of a Mussulman? Even in the families of many professors of religion I do not look for any conversions, for I know that the influence of the most faithful discourses will be destroyed by the malaria of the home. It was the atmosphere of Elkanah and Hannah’s godly house that produced a Samuel; it was the wretched air of Eli’s house which ruined Hophni and Phinehas.

This subject has a wide sweep. There are sudden changes in circumstances that affect character as powerfully as changes in climate affect bodily health. The rapid accumulation of wealth is carrying some Christians now up into a rarified atmosphere, where it is very hard to maintain their humility, their spiritual-mindedness and self-denial. Their new associations endanger their piety; but they need not destroy it. Some Christians grow rich and grow in grace at the same time.

Some civilians go into the foul atmosphere of politics, and preserve their Christian purity, as Theodore Frelinghuysen preserved his in the American Senate, and as Wilberforce, Gladstone, and Lord-Chancellor Cairns have preserved theirs in the British Parliament. . . . Daniel was prime-minister in idolatrous and voluptuous Babylon. Prayer was his protector. So may a true child of God go into the heated atmosphere of trade, or the highly rarified air of wealth, or the sin-polluted air of city life, or anywhere else, safely, if he only carry Christ in his heart, and keep the honor of Christ ever before his eyes. Jesus does not mean to take his disciples out of the world; but he is able to keep them from the world’s contaminations.—Theodore L. Cuyler, D. D., in Independent.