^ You are bound to initiate your children, not merely to the joys and desires of life, but to life itself ; to its duties, and to its moral Law of Government. Few mothers, few fathers, in this irreligious age — and even especially in the wealthier classes — understand the true gravity of their educational mission. Few mothers, few fathers, remember that the numerous victims, the incessant struggles, and the lifelong martyrdom of our day, are in a great measure the fruit of the egotism, instilled thirty years back by the weak mothers and heedless fathers who allowed their children to accustom themselves to regard life, not as a mission and a duty, but as a search after happiness, and a study of their own well-being.2
(a) God. — It cannot be inculcated with too much force and frequency that the very highest truths are those which should be imparted at the earliest possible period in a child's history. It is important that as soon as the laws of a child's mind can admit the thought, it should be taught concerning Him who made it and all things, and who rules in heaven and on earth.
* J. Ramsay MacDouald, Margaret Ethel MacDonald, 130. ^ Life and Writings of Josc^ih Mazzini, iv. 287.
PROVERBS XXII. 6 321
^ A child takes in nothing more easily than the thought of One who made the flowers of the earth and the stars of the sky ; and as it early comes to know what is meant by love to its parents, it may easily be taught to know what is meant by love to God.i
(h) Christ. — If we are in the wrong way, the more vigorously we prosecute the journey the sooner will disaster come. If we do not train children in truth and righteousness, it would be better that we should not train them at all, Christ is the truth, and the Scriptures the standard by which truth may be known. This is not only religiously the best solution of the question, but philosophically the only solution that can be given.
^ I have no right to pray for my children unless I am, by my lips and by my life, labouring ceaselessly to lead them to the Saviour's feet. " Wherefore criest thou unto me ? Speak ye to the children ! " I never read that text without thinking of Susanna Wesley. Was there ever a mother like that mother of the Wesleys ? One night she had been praying for her great family. "At last," she says, "it came into my mind that I might do more than I do. I resolved to begin. I will take such proportion of time as I can best spare every night to discourse with each child by itself." How Susanna Wesley kept that good resolution, and with what tremendous and earth-shaking results, the whole world very well knows.^
(c) The Bible.— If we do not adopt the Bible as our standard in training the young, moral training is impossible. If in moral principles every man is his own lawgiver, there is no law at all, and no authority. You may train a fruit-tree by nailing its branches to a wall, or by tying them to an espalier railing ; but the tree whose branches have nothing to lean on but air is not trained at all. It is not a dispute between the Scriptures and some other rival standard, for no such standard exists or is proposed. It is a question between the Bible as a standard, and no standard at all.
^ With all my heart I believe that the best basis for education, with which no other documents, catechetical or otherwise, can be compared, is the Holy Scriptures. I should deplore, with more sorrow than I can express, if the time should ever come when these sacred Scriptures — the most simple, as they are the highest literature in the world, the most fitted to instil goodness into the
1 E. Mellor, The Hem of Christ's Garment, 63. ' F. W. Boieharu, Mountains in tfie Mist, 251, PS. CXIX.-SONG OF SOL. — 21
322 THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
mind of the child, as they are the most fitted to inspire all noble- ness and piety and charity in the heart of man, — I should deplore if the time ever came when the reading and teaching of these Scriptures should form no longer a part of our common educa- tional system. I believe absolutely in the power of the teacher to read and explain the Holy Scriptures without any sectarian admixture. I believe that all that has been said on this point is simply theory, and that practically there is no difficulty. Sectarianism ! why the whole spirit of the Bible is opposed to sectarianism. Its living study, its simple reading, are the best correction of sectarianism ; and our Churches, one and all, are only sectarian in so far as they have departed from the Bible and thrown it aside.^
(3) By a good example. — Good instruction is sunlight, but it will not of itself develop and mature a godly life. Children are far less influenced by precept than by example, and it is often the saddest feature in home training that there is so glaring a disparity between the instructions of parents and their own visible and unmistakable life. Our lives are the forces which are in most constant operation upon the minds and hearts of our children. Our character is a stream, a river flowing down upon our children hour by hour. What we do here and there to carry an opposing influence is, at best, only a ripple that we make on the surface of the stream; it reveals the sweep of the current, nothing more. If we expect our children to go with the ripple instead of the stream we shall be disappointed.