^ The way to train the child is to train yourself. What you are, he will be. If your hands are morally dirty, his life will be dirtied by the home handling he gets. If he is to obey his mother he must breathe in a spirit of obedience from his mother. Your child will never obey more than you do. The spirit of disobedience in your heart to God, of failure to obey, of preferring your own way to God's, will be breathed in by your child as surely as he breathes the air into his lungs, A spirit of quiet confidence in God, in the practical things that pinch and push, will breathe itself into the child, A poised spirit, a keen mind, a thoughtful tongue, a cheery hopefulness, an earnest purpose, in mother and father will be taken into the child's being with every breath. And the reverse is just as true. Every child is an accurate bit of French- plate faithfully showing the likeness of mother and father and home. We must be in heart what we would have the child be in life,i
2. A successful parent will be one who makes the training of the children a constant and religious study. It is the last subject in the world to be left to haphazard. From the first a clear aim must be kept in view, " Is my great object that this boy shall be a true, a noble, a God-fearing man, serving his day and generation in the way God shall appoint ? " That is the question which the parent puts to himself,
^ Among the Bishop's obiter dicta on education is the follow- ing : — " The old heathens had very right notions about the way in which a child ought to be trained up. They had great belief in a pure domestic education. One of them said, ' Let nothing unclean ever enter into the house where a little child is,' no drunken man, no quarrelling father or mother, no bad language, no careless, slovenly habits ; let nothing of the sort be seen in the house where dwells the little child. A Roman poet has said, 'The greatest possible reverence is due to a child.' Some parents are wonder- fully careless about what sort of things they say before their
' S D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Home Ideals, 253.
PROVERBS XXII. 6 313
children. They seem to forget that the little children are listen- ing, and that their characters are being formed by ten thousand insensible influences that surround them day by day." ^
3. Parents must live near to God if they are to make God real to their children. A mother must hold very real converse with her Lord if His reality is to become obvious to her little ones. " As a child," says one, " I have had a feeling that God and Jesus were such particular friends of mamma's, and were honoured more than words could tell." If such an impression is to be created, depend upon it God and Jesus must be particular friends of ours. No talk, however pious, can create that impression unless the hallowed friendship actually exists.
^ Mrs. Haldane [the mother of James and Eobert Haldane, who did so much for evangelical religion in Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century] belonged to a family in which there had been much true religion. " She lived," said her eldest son, " very near to God, and much grace was given to her." When left a widow, it became her chief concern to bring up her children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." From their infancy she laboured to instil into their minds a sense of the importance of eternity, particularly impressing upon them the necessity of prayer, and teaching them to commit to memory and understand psalms, portions of the Shorter Catechism, and of Scripture. In a memorandum found among his papers, her youngest son James says: "My mother died when I was very young, I believe under six, yet I am convinced that the early impression made on my mind by her care was never entirely effaced ; and to this, as an eminent means in the hand of God, I impute any serious thoughts which, in the midst of my folly would sometimes intrude upon my mind, as well as that still small voice of conscience which afterwards led me to see that all below was vanity without an interest in that inheritance which can never fade away." He adds : " I mention this more par- ticularly because it may lead Christian parents to sow in hope the seed of Divine truth in the minds of their children, and may prevent their considering their efforts unavailing even where the things which they have taught seem to have been uttered in vain. No means of grace is, I apprehend, more, perhaps none is so much, countenanced of God as early religious instruction." ^
* J. W. Digglp, The Lomcashire Life of Bishoj) Fraser, 231.
* The Lives of Robert and James Alexaiider Haldane, 11.
314 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
4. Without love in the home, all the parents' efforts will fail. Love is the only atmosphere in which the spirits of little children can grow. Without it the wisest precepts only choke, and the best- prepared knowledge proves innutritions. It must be a large love, a wise love, an inclusive love, such as God alone can shed abroad in the heart. Love of that kind is very frequently found in " huts where poor men lie," and consequently the children issuing out of them have been better trained than those whose parents have handed them over to loveless tutors or underlings.