Week 6
Day 5

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Home Dedication

Home Dedication

Unless Jehovah builds the house,
They labor in vain who build it....
Behold, sons are an inheritance of Jehovah;
The fruit of the belly is His reward. (Psalm 127:1, 3)

Man may be compared to a house in which are a number of rooms, one of which leads into another. They who are in truths as to the understanding only are not in any room of the house, but only in the court [or yard] . But so far as through the understanding truth enters into the will, so far the man enters into the rooms and dwells in the house. Moreover, in the Word man is compared to a house, and the truth which is of the understanding alone is compared to a court; but the truth which has been made also of the will, and has there become good, is compared to an inhabited room and to the very bedroom. (AC 10110:3)

To collect memory-knowledges, and by their means frame the external man, and build it up, is not unlike building a house; and therefore such things are signified in many passages of the Word by “building,” and by “building houses,” as in Isaiah:

I create new heavens and a new earth; they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them; they shall not build and another inhabit. (Isa. 65:17, 21-22)

Here “houses” mean where there are wisdom and intelligence, thus where there are the knowledges of good and truth; for the Lord’s kingdom is here treated of, namely, the new heavens and the new earth. (AC 1488)

That there are duties proper to the man , and duties proper to the wife; and that the wife cannot enter into the duties proper to the man, nor the man into the duties proper to the wife, and rightly perform them....

One of the things people know in the world is that a husband’s duties are in some way joined together with the duties of his wife, and that a wife’s duties are connected to the duties of her husband, and that these conjunctions and connections are the assistance they give each other and are according to that assistance.

But the primary duty which confederates, affiliates, and gathers the souls and lives of two married partners together into one is their shared concern in raising children. In this concern a husband’s duties and a wife’s duties are distinct and at the same time are joined together. They are distinct, because the responsibility of nursing and raising little children of both sexes, and also of educating girls to the age when they can be married and associate with men, is a duty that belongs to the wife. On the other hand, the responsibility of raising boys after early childhood to the time of adolescence, and after that until they become independent, is a responsibility that belongs to the husband. But these duties are joined together through consulting each other, supporting each other, and many other kinds of mutual assistance.... People also know that these duties, viewed in respect to their distinctness and conjunction, make one home. (CL 174, 176)

Infants and boys, so long as they are under nurses and teachers, do not indeed perform goods of use. But still they learn to perform them, and must have them for an end; thus the good of use is in the end. In order that a house may be built, the materials must first be provided, and the foundation laid, and the walls erected; and so finally it is inhabited. The good of a house is the dwelling in it. (Charity 129)

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