, passive and active. As passive, it is the mere sense of harmony of
feeling among all the members, producing the idea and feeling of the
oneness of home. It makes a unity of affection, so that the temper, hopes
and interests of each member have a living echo and response in all the
others. It gives to home its unitive heart, preserves its vital coherence,
fuses all the hearts together, makes each a thread in the web of
home-being, where each finds its true measure, is inspired with the
home-feeling when all is right, and oppressed with home-sickness when
separated from it.
But home-sympathy is also active. As such it is "the active power that one
person has naturally of entering into the feelings of another, and being
himself affected as that other is." Each member of home has the power in
his feelings of making the feelings of all the other members his own,
though he may not have the causes of the feelings of the one with whom he
sympathizes. Thus one friend may feel the grief of another, actually and
really, though he may not suffer the loss of that friend. He can make the
emotion which that loss caused, his own. We may weep with the mother who
pours her floods of anguish upon the grave of her child, though we may not
have sustained the same loss. The husband weeps with his wife, though he
may not be able to feel the pangs which penetrate her heart. The child can
enter into the feelings of the parent, and be affected to tears or to joy
by them.
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