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RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
IN THE FAMILY

By

Henry F. Cope

General Secretary of the Religious Education Association

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Copyright 1915 By
The University of Chicago

All Rights Reserved

Published April 1915
Second Impression September 1915
Third Impression March 1916
Fourth Impression June 1917
Fifth Impression August 1920
Sixth Impression July 1922
Seventh Impression September 1922

Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY
NEW YORK

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON
THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI
THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY
SHANGHAI

PREFACE

In the work of religious education, with which the present series of books is concerned, the life of the family rightly occupies a central place. The church has always realized its duty to exhort parents to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but very little has ever been done to enable parents to study systematically and scientifically the problem of religious education in the family. Today parents' classes are being formed in many churches; Christian Associations, women's clubs, and institutes are studying the subject; individual parents are becoming more and more interested in the rational performance of their high duties. And there is a general desire for guidance. As the full bibliography at the end of this volume and the references in connection with each chapter indicate, there is available a very large literature dealing with the various elements of the problem. But a guidebook to organize all this material and to stimulate independent thought and endeavor is desirable.

To afford this guidance the present volume has been prepared. It is equally adapted for the thoughtful study of the father and mother who are seeking help in the moral and religious development of their own family, and for classes in churches, institutes, and neighborhoods, where the important problems of the family are to be studied and discussed. It would be well to begin the use of the book by reading the suggestions for class work at the end of the volume.

With a confident hope that religion in the family is not to be a wistful memory of the past but a most vital force in the making of the better day that is coming, this volume is offered as a contribution and a summons.

The Editors

CONTENTS

1

CHAPTER I

AN INTERPRETATION OF THE FAMILY

§ 1. TAKING THE HOME IN RELIGIOUS TERMS

The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless families, irreverent children, and the decadence of the old type of separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and insufficient purposes. Where the home is only an opportunity for self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding-house, a sleeping-shelf, an implement for social advantage. While it is true that general economic developments have effected marked changes in domestic economy, the happiness and efficiency of the family do not depend wholly on the parlor, the kitchen, or the clothes closet. Rather, everything depends on whether the home and family are considered in worthy and adequate terms.

Homes are wrecked because families refuse to take home-living in religious terms, in social terms of sacrifice and service. In such homes, organized and conducted to satisfy personal desires rather than to meet social responsibilities, these desires become ends rather than agencies and opportunities.

They who marry for lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even in its form of2 self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home. It costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family life if the newly wedded youth have both been educated in selfishness, habituated to frivolous pleasures, and guided by ideals of success in terms of garish display? Yet what definite program for any other training does society provide? Do the schools and colleges, Sunday schools and churches teach youth a better way? How else shall they be trained to take the home and family in terms that will make for happiness and usefulness? It is high time to take seriously the task of educating people to religious efficiency in the home.

§ 2. THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE

The family needs a religious motive. More potent for happiness than courses in domestic economy will be training in sufficient domestic motives. It will take much more than modern conveniences, bigger apartments, or even better kitchens to make the new home. Essentially the problem is not one of mechanics but of persons. What we call the home problem is more truly a family problem. It centers in persons; the solution awaits a race with new ideals, educated to live as more than dust, for more than dirt, for personality rather than for possessions. We need3 young people who establish homes, not simply because they feel miserable when separated, nor because one needs a place in which to board and the other needs a boarder, but because the largest duty and joy of life is to enrich the world with other lives and to give themselves in high love to making those other lives of the greatest possible worth to the world.

The family must come to a recognition of social obligations. We all hope for the coming ideal day. Everywhere men and women are answering to higher ideals of life. But the new day waits for a new race. Modern emphasis on the child is a part of present reaction from materialism. New social ideals are personal. We seek a better world for the sake of a higher race. The emphasis on child-welfare has a social rather than a sentimental basis. The family is our great chance to determine childhood and so to make the future. The child of today is basic to the social welfare of tomorrow. He is our chance to pay to tomorrow all that we owe to yesterday. The family as the child's life-school is thus central to every social program and problem.

§ 3. WIDER CHILD-WELFARE

This age knows that man does not live by bread alone. Interest in child-welfare is for the sake of the child himself, not for the sake of his clothes4 or his physical condition. Concern about soap and sanitation, hygiene and the conveniences of life grows because these all go to make up the soil in which the person grows. There is danger that our emphasis on child-welfare may be that of the tools instead of the man; that we may become enmeshed in the mechanism of well-being and lose sight of the being who should be well. To fail at the point of character is to fail all along the line. And we fail altogether, no matter how many bathtubs we give a child, how many playgrounds, medical inspections, and inoculations, unless that child be in himself strong and high-minded, loving truth, hating a lie, and habituated to live in good-will with his fellows and with high ideals for the universe. Modern interest in the material factors of life is on account of their potency in making real selfhood; we acknowledge the importance of the physical as the very soil in which life grows. But the fruits are more than the soil, and a home exists for higher purposes than physical conveniences; these are but its tools to its great end. Somehow for purposes of social well-being we must raise our thinking of the family to the aim of the development of efficient, rightly minded character. The family must be seen as making spiritual persons.

§ 4. THE COST OF A FAMILY

Taking the home in religious terms will mean, then, conceiving it as an institution with a religious5 purpose, namely, that of giving to the world children who are adequately trained and sufficiently motived to live the social life of good-will. The family exists to give society developed, efficient children. It fails if it does not have a religious, a spiritual product. It cannot succeed except by the willing self-devotion of adult lives to this spiritual, personal purpose.

A family is the primary social organization for the elementary purpose of breeding the species, nurturing and training the young. This is its physiological basis. But its duties cannot be discharged on the physiological plane alone. This elementary physiological function is lifted to a spiritual level by the aim of character and the motive of love. Families cannot be measured by their size; they must be measured by the character of their products. If quality counts anywhere it counts here, though it is well to remember that it takes some reasonable quantity to make right quality in each.

The family needs a religious motive. It demands sacrifice. To follow lower impulses is to invite disaster. The home breeds bitterness and sorrow wherever men and women court for lust, marry for social standing, and maintain an establishment only as a part of the game of social competition. To sow the winds of passion, ease, idle luxury, pride, and greed is to reap the whirlwind. Moreover, it is to miss the great chance6 of life, the chance to find that short cut to happiness which men call pain and suffering.

A family is humanity's great opportunity to walk the way of the cross. Mothers know that; some fathers know it; some children grow up to learn it. In homes where this is true, where all other aims are subordinated to this one of making the home count for high character, to training lives into right social adjustment and service, the primary emphasis is not on times and seasons for religion; religion is the life of that home, and in all its common living every child learns the way of the great Life of all. In vain do we torture children with adult religious penances, long prayers, and homilies, thinking thereby to give them religious training. The good man comes out of the good home, the home that is good in character, aim, and organization, not sporadically but permanently, the home where the religious spirit, the spirit of idealism, and the sense of the infinite and divine are diffused rather than injected. The inhuman, antisocial vampires, who suck their brothers' blood, whether they be called magnates or mob-leaders, grafters or gutter thieves, often learned to take life in terms of graft by the attitude and atmosphere of their homes.1 7

§ 5. MOTIVES FOR A STUDY OF THE FAMILY

The modern family is worthy of our careful study. It demands painstaking attention, both because of its immediate importance to human happiness and because of its potentiality for the future of society. The kind of home and the character of family life which will best serve the world and fulfil the will of God cannot be determined by sentiment or supposition. We are under the highest and sternest obligation to discover the laws of the family, those social laws which are determined by its nature and purpose, to find right standards for family life, to discriminate between the things that are permanent and those that are passing, between those we must conserve and those we must discard, to be prepared to fit children for the finer and higher type of family life that must come in the future.

Methods of securing family efficiency will not be discovered by accident. If it is worth while to study the minor details, such as baking cakes and sweeping floors, surely it is even more important to study the larger problems of organization and discipline. There is a science of home-direction and an art of family living; both must be learned with patient study.

It is a costly thing to keep a home where honor, the joy of love, and high ideals dwell ever. It costs time, pleasures, and so-called social advantages, as8 well as money and labor. It must cost thought, study, and investigation. It demands and deserves sacrifice; it is too sacred to be cheap. The building of a home is a work that endures to eternity, and that kind of work never was done with ease or without pain and loss and the investment of much time. Patient study of the problems of the family is a part of the price which all may pay.

No nobler social work, no deeper religious work, no higher educational work is done anywhere than that of the men and women, high or humble, who set themselves to the fitting of their children for life's business, equipping them with principles and habits upon which they may fall back in trying hours, and making of home the sweetest, strongest, holiest, happiest place on earth.

Heaven only knows the price that must be paid for that; heaven only knows the worth of that work. But if we are wise we shall each take up our work for our world where it lies nearest to us, in co-operation with parents, in service and sacrifice as parents or kin, our work in the shop where manhood is in the making, where it is being made fit to dwell long in the land, in the family at home.

CHAPTER II

10

THE PRESENT STATUS OF FAMILY LIFE

§ 1. CONTRASTED TYPES

In a beautiful village, in one of the farther western states, two men were discussing the possible future of the home and of family life. Sitting in the brilliant moonlight, looking through the leafy shades, watching the lights of a score of homes, each surrounded by lawn and shade trees, each with its group on the front porch, where vines trailed and flowers bloomed, listening to the hum of conversation and the strains of music in one home and another, it seemed, to at least one of these men, that this type of living could hardly pass away. The separate home, each family a complete social integer, each with its own circle of activities and interests, its own group, and its own table and fireside, seemed too fine and beautiful, too fair and helpful, to perish under economic pressure. Indeed, one felt that the village home furnished a setting for life and a soil for character development far higher and more efficient than could be afforded by any other domestic arrangement—that it approached the ideal.

But two weeks later two men sat in an upper room, in the second largest city in America, dis11cussing again the future of the family. Instead of the quiet music of the village, the clang of street cars filled the ears, trains rushed by, children shouted from the paved highway, families were seated by open windows in crowded apartments, seeking cool air; the total impression was that of being placed in a pigeonhole in a huge, heated, filing-case, where each separate space was occupied by a family. One felt the pressure of heated, crowded kitchens, suffocating little dining-rooms; one knew that the babies lay crying in their beds at night, gasping their very lives away, and that the young folks were wandering off to amusement parks and moving-picture shows. Here was an entirely different picture. How long could family life persist under these conditions where privacy was almost gone and comfort almost unknown?

In the village separate home integers appear ideal; in the city they are possible only to the few. The many, at present, find them a crushing burden. Desirable as privacy is, it can be purchased at too high a price. It costs too much to maintain separate kitchens and dining-rooms under city conditions.

§ 2. COMMUNAL TENDENCIES

Present conditions spell waste, inefficiency, discomfort. The woman lives all day in stifling rooms, poorly lighted, with the nerve-racking life12 of neighbors pouring itself through walls and windows. The men come from crowded shops and the children from crowded schoolrooms to crowd themselves into these rooms, to snatch a meal, or to sleep. How can there be real family life? What joy can there be or what ideals created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.

Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community living, that just as the social life of the separate house porches in the villages has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all the activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long could the family as a unit continue under these conditions?

The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop large belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words, highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economi13cally done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.

§ 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT

It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are involved in the tendency toward communal living. At the beginning of the industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each family was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was little more than a nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such as workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home furnished nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of effort except in the church.

The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually learned their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of the house, where they played as14 children in the shavings, or watched the glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their tasks. The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of each day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a large share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system, to a large extent the family lost the father.

When the workshop left the home its most efficient school was taken from it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical, but the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy seeks to realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing; schooling was perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the incalculable value of informality and reality. The father gone and the mother still fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical training for life which home industry had afforded. On the one hand, the young became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of the voracious factory system.

This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child. Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place of the15 parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the father and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now loses the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six hours of the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The family, once living under one roof, now is found scattered; it has reached out into factory and school. Its hours of unified life have been markedly reduced.

But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in the form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made by the women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves, and meat—all formerly home products for the use of the family producing them—now were prepared in larger quantities, by mechanical processes, and were brought back into the home. Woman's labor was lightened; the older girls were liberated from the loom and they began to seek occupation, education, and diversion according to their opportunities in life.

That last step made it possible for people to think of the communization of home industry, to think of eating food cooked in other ovens than their own, to think of one oven large enough for a whole village. Many interesting experiments in co-operative living immediately sprang up. But16 the next step came slowly and, even now, is only firmly established in the cities, in the actual abandonment of the family kitchen for the community kitchen in the form of the restaurant. In such families we have unity only in the hours of sleep and recreation.

Along with abandonment of the separate kitchen there has proceeded the abandonment of the parlor in the homes of the middle classes. To lose the old, mournful front room may be no subject for tears, but the loss of the evening family group, about the fireside or the reading-lamp, is a real and sad loss. The commercialized amusements have offered greater attractions to vigorous youth. The theater and its lesser satellites, amusements, entertainments, lectures, the lyceum, and recreation-by-proxy in ball games and matches have taken the place of united family recreation. Of course this has been a natural development of the older village play-life and has been by no means an unmixed ill.

Now, behold, what has become of the old-time home life! The family that spent nearly twenty-four hours together now spends a scarce seven or eight, and these are occupied in sleeping! Little wonder that the next step is taken—the abandonment of this remainder, the sleep period, under a domestic roof, as the family moves into a hotel!

Along with the tendency toward communal working and eating we see the tendency to com17munal living by the development of the apartment building. Since roof-trees are so expensive, and since in a practical age, few of us can afford to pay for sentiment, why not put a dozen families under one roof-tree? True we sacrifice lawns, gardens, natural places for children to play; we lose birds and flowers and the charm of evening hours on porches, or galleries, but think of what we gain in bricks and mortar, in labor saved from splitting wood and shoveling coal, in janitor service! The transition is now complete; the home is simply that item in the economic machinery which will best furnish us storage for our sleeping bodies and our clothes!

We are undoubtedly in a period of great changes in family life, and no family can count on escaping the influence of the change. The one single outstanding and most potent change, so far as the character of family life is concerned, is, in the United States, the rapid polarization of population in the cities. The United States Census Bureau counts all residents in cities of over 8,000 population as "urban." In 1800 the "urban" population was 4 per cent of the total population; in 1850 it was 12.5 per cent; in 1870, 20.9 per cent; in 1890, 29.2 per cent; in 1900, 33.1 per cent; in 1910 it was estimated at 40 per cent.2 Here 18is a trend so clearly marked that we cannot deny its reality, while its significance is familiar to everyone today.

However, the village type remains; there are still many homes where a measure of family unity persists, where at least in one meal daily and, for purposes of sleeping and, occasionally, for the evening hours of recreation, there is a consciousness of home life. Yet the most remote village feels the pressure of change. The few homes conforming to the older ideals are recognized as exceptional. The city draws the village and rural family to itself, and the contagion of its customs and ideals spreads through the villages and affects the forms of living there. Youths become city dwellers and do not cease to scoff at the village unless later years give them wisdom to appreciate its higher values. The standard of domestic organization is established by the city; that type of living is the ideal toward which nearly all are striving.

The important question for all persons is whether the changes now taking place in family life are good or ill. It is impossible to say whether the whole trend is for the better; the many elements are too diverse and often apparently conflicting. Faith in the orderly development of society gives ground for belief that these changes ultimately work for a higher type of family life. The city may be regarded as only a transition stage in social19 evolution—the compacting of masses of persons together that out of the new fusing and welding may arise new methods of social living. The larger numbers point to more highly developed forms of social organization. When these larger units discover their greater purposes, above factory and mill and store, and realize them in personal values, the city life will be a more highly developed mechanism for the higher life of man. The home life will develop along with that city life.

§ 4. PURPOSEFUL ORGANIZATION

At present the home is suffering, just as the city is suffering, from a lack of that purposeful organization which will order the parts aright and subject the processes to the most important and ultimate purposes. The city is simply an aggregation of persons, scarcely having any conscious organization, thrown together for purposes of industry. It will before very long organize itself for purposes of personal welfare and education. The family is usually a group bound in ties of struggle for shelter, food, and pleasure. Such consciousness as it possesses is that of being helplessly at the mercy of conflicting economic forces. The adjustment of those forces, their subjection to man's higher interests, must come in the future and will help the family to freedom to discover its true purpose.20

It is easy to insist on the responsibility of parents for the character-training of their children, but it is difficult to see how that responsibility can be properly discharged under industrial conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull monotony of labor to care for life's finer interests. The welfare of the family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be secured in one part progress in the whole ensues.

There are those who raise the question whether family life is a permanent form of social organization for which we may wisely contend, or is but a phase from which the race is now emerging. Some see signs that the ties of marriage will be but temporary, that children will be born, not into families but into the life of the state, bearing only their mothers' names and knowing no brothers and sisters save in the brotherhood of the state. Whether the permanent elements in family life furnish a sufficiently worthy basis for its preservation is a subject for careful consideration.

§ 5. THE HOME AND THE FAMILY

The family is more important than the home, just as the man is more than his clothing. The form of the home changes; the life of the family21 continues unchanged in its essential characteristics. The family causes the home to be. Professor Arthur J. Todd insists that the family is the basis of marriage, rather than marriage the cause of the family.3 Small groups for protection and social living would precede formal arrangements of monogamy. Westermarck concludes that it was "for the benefit of the young that male and female continued to live together."4 The importance of this consideration for us lies in the thought of the overshadowing importance of this social group which we now call the family. The family is the primary cell of society, the first unit in social organization. Our thought must balance itself between the importance of this social group, to be preserved in its integrity, and the value of the home, with its varied forms of activity and ministry, as a means of preserving and developing this group, the family.

One hears today many pessimistic utterances regarding the modern home. Some even tell us that it is doomed to become extinct. Without doubt great economic changes in society are producing profound changes in the organization and character of the home. But the home has always been subject to such changes; the factor which 22we need to watch with greater care is the family; the former is but the shell of the latter.

The character of each home will depend largely on the economic condition of those who dwell in it. The homes of every age will reflect the social conditions of that age. The picture in historical romances of the home of the mediaeval period, where the factory, or shop, joined the dining-room, where the apprentices ate and roomed in the home, where one might be compelled to furnish and provision his home literally as his castle for defense, presents a marked difference to the home of this century tending to syndicate all its labors with all the other homes of the community. Since the home is simply the organization and mechanism of the family life, it is most susceptible to material and social changes. It varies as do the fashions of men.

Much that we assume to be detrimental to the life of the home is simply due to the fact that in the evolution of society the family, as it were, puts on a new suit of clothes, adopts new forms of organization to meet the changing external conditions.

§ 6. THE HOME CHANGING; THE FAMILY ABIDING

The home is of importance only as a tool, a means to the final ends of the family life; the test of its efficiency is not whether it maintains traditional forms but whether it best serves the23 highest aims of family life. We may abandon all the older customs; our regret for them, as we look back on the days of home cooking, cannot be any greater than the regrets of our parents or grandparents looking back on the spinning-wheel and the hand loom that cumbered the kitchen of their childhood. Surely no one contends that family life has deteriorated, that human character is one whit the poorer, because we have discarded the family spinning-wheel. Through the changes of a developing civilization, as man has moved from the time when each one built his own house, worked with his own tools to make all his supplies, to these days of specialized service in community living, the home has changed with each step of industrial progress, but the family has remained practically unchanged.

The family stands a practically unchanging factor of personal qualities at the center of our civilization; the family rather than the home determines the character of the coming days. In its social relationships are rooted the things that are best in all our lives. In its social training lie the solutions of more problems in social adjustment and development than we are willing to admit. The family is the soil of society, central to all its problems and possibilities.

Before church or school the family stands potent for character. We are what we are, not by the24 ideals held before us for thirty minutes a week or once a month in a church, nor by the instructions given in the classroom; we are what parents, kin, and all the circumstances that have touched us daily and hourly for years have determined we should be.

The sweetest memories of our lives cluster about the scenes of family life. The rose-embowered cottage of the poet is not the only spot that claims affectionate gratitude; many look back to a city house wedged into its monotonous row. But, wherever it might be, if it sheltered love and held a shrine where the altar fires of family sacrifice burned, earth has no fairer or more sacred spot. The people rather than the place made it potent.

Stronger even than the memories that remain are the marks of habits, tendencies, tastes, and dispositions there acquired. Many a man who has left no fortune worth recording to his sons has left them something better, the aptitude for things good and honorable, the memory of a good name, and the heritage of a life that was worthy of honor. The personal life has been always the enduring thing. Our concern for the future should be not whether we can pass on intact the forms of home organization, but whether we can give to the next day the force of ideal family life. Perhaps like Mary we would do well to turn our eyes from the25 much serving, the mechanisms of the home, to set our minds on the better part, the personal values in the association of lives in the family.

CHAPTER III

27

THE PERMANENT ELEMENTS IN FAMILY LIFE

§ 1. THE DOMINANT MOTIVE

The chief end of society is to improve the race, to develop the higher and steadily improving type of human beings. We can test the life of the family and determine the values of its elements by asking whether and in what degree they minister to this end, the growth of better persons. This is more than a theoretical aim or one conceived in a search for ideals. It is written plain in our passions and strongest inclinations. That which parents supremely desire for their children is that they may become strong in body, capable and alert in mind, and animated by worthy principles and ideals. The parent desires a good man, fit to take his place, do his work, make his contribution to the social well-being, able to live to the fulness of his powers, to take life in all its reaches of meaning and heights of vision and beauty. In true parenthood all hopes of success, of riches, fame, and ease, are seen but as avenues to this end, as means of making the finer character, of growing the ideal person. If we were compelled to choose for our children we should elect poverty, pain, disgrace, toil, and suffering if we28 knew this was the only highway to full manhood and womanhood, to completeness of character. Indeed, we do constantly so choose, knowing that they must endure hardness, bear the yoke in their youth, and learn that

With this dominating purpose clearly in mind we are prepared to ask, What are the elements of family life which among the changes of today we need most carefully to preserve in order to maintain efficiency in character development? In days when the outer shell of domestic arrangements changes, when readjustments are being made in the organization of the family, what is there too precious to lose, so worthy and essential that we waste no time when seeking to maintain it?

§ 2. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED—SOCIAL QUALITIES

The first great element to be preserved in all family life is that of the power of the small group for purposes of character development. The infant's earliest world is the mother's arms. In order to grow into a man fitted for the wider world of social living, he must learn to live in a world within his comprehension. A child's life moves through the widening circles of mother-care, family group, neighborhood, school, city, state,29 and nation into world-living. He must take the first steps before he is able to take the next ones. He must learn to live with the few as preparation for living with the many. In earliest infancy he takes his first unconscious lessons in the fine art of living with other folks as he relates himself to parents and to brothers and sisters.

Secondly, the family life affords the best agency for social training. The family is the ideal democracy into which the child-life is born. Here habits are formed, ideals are pictured, and life itself is interpreted. It is an ideal democracy, first, because it is a social organization existing for the sake of persons. The family comes nearer to fulfilling the true ideal of a democratic social order than does any other institution. It is founded to bring lives into this world; it is maintained for the sake of those lives; all its life, its methods, and standards are determined, ideally, by the needs of persons. It is an ideal democracy, secondly, because its guiding principle is that the greater lives must be devoted to the good of the lesser, the parent for the little child, the older members for the younger, in an attempt to extend to the very least the greatest good enjoyed by all. Thirdly, ideally it is a true democracy in that it gives to each member a share in its own affairs and develops the power to bear responsibilities and to carry each his own load in life. Thus the family group30 is the best possible training for the life and work of the larger group, the state, and for world-living.5 The maintenance of the ideals of the state, as a democracy, depends on the continuance of this institution with its peculiar power to train life in infancy and childhood for the life of manhood in the state. Such training can be given only in the smaller group that is governed by the motives peculiar to home and family life. The power to impress these principles depends on the size of the group. The small social organization, the family circle of from three members to even a dozen, bound by ties of affection, is the one great, efficient school, training youth to live in social terms.

Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first. Our age especially needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations, affection. The true home gives to 31every child-life the power to choose the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.

§ 3. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED—THE MORAL LIFE

Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life. "The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."6 Here the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them, "the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions. 32Neither is it a matter of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most potential school. Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are strengthened by the pleasurable emotions. It is a joy to be loyal to those we love. Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the loyalty, or the love?

The power of this small social group of the family to develop the fundamental principle of loyalty, the root of all virtues, gives a position of great importance to the affections in the family. We do well to contend for the maintenance of conditions of family living which will strengthen the33 ties of affection. If children could be thrust into the care of the state, in large groups, separated from parental care and oversight, it is difficult to see what emotional stimulus toward affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the ideal—a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values of their affections and on them to build a wise discipline for childhood by providing adequate training of parents for their duties.

Fifthly, there are some elements of the cost of family life, even its apparently unnecessary sacrifice and pain, that we do well to seek to keep. Character grows in paying the high price of maintaining a family. It is the most expensive form of living for adults. Marriages are now delayed because of the fear of the actual monetary cost; but far more serious is the cost in care, in nerves,34 in patience, in all the great elements of self-denial. No child ever knows what he has cost until he has children of his own. But this discipline of self-denial is that which saves us from selfishness. It is necessary to have some personal objects for which to give our lives if they are to be saved from centrifugation, from death through ingrowing affection. True, many bachelors and spinsters have learned the way of self-denying, fellow-serving love. But how can a true parent escape that lesson? Nor does it stop with parents; as children grow up together they, too, must learn mutual forbearance, conciliation, and, soon, the joy of service. One sees selfishness in the little child gradually fading in the practice of family service, helpfulness, consideration for others. The single child in a family misses something more important than playmates; he misses all the education of play and service. But who cannot remember many families that have grown to beauty of character under the discipline of home life, and especially when this has involved real sacrifices? The stories in the Pepper books illustrate the spirit that blossoms under the trials and hardships of the struggle of a family for a livelihood and for the maintenance of a home.

A clear function becomes evident for this social group called the family. It is that of dealing with young lives, in groups bound by ties of blood and35 similarity, for purposes of the development of personal character. The family has an essentially educational function. Bearing in mind that "educational" means the orderly development of the powers of the life, we can think of our families as existing for this purpose and to be tested by their ability to do this work, especially by their ability to develop persons, young lives, that have the power, the vision, the acquired habits and experience to live as more than animals. The family is an educational institution dealing with child-life for its full growth and its self-realization, especially on character levels. The educational function suggests the features of family life which we do well to seek to preserve. Many incidental forms may pass, but the essential human relations and experiences that go to develop life and character must be maintained at any cost.

CHAPTER IV

37

THE RELIGIOUS PLACE OF THE FAMILY

§ 1. DEVELOPMENT AS A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION

The family is the most important religious institution in the life of today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this task. The higher the type of family life the more fully does it discharge its function in the education of the child.7 38

It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three stages, or types, of relationship based on the breeding of children, or three stages of development toward family life. The first is a loose and indefinite relationship existing principally between the adults, or the males and females, under which children born when not desired are neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of either parent, or of neither. Since the group, associated through infancy with at least one parent, is as yet undeveloped, any instruction will be individual and usually incidental.

The second form is that of a kind of family unity, either about the mother or the father, or both, or about a group of parents, in which the children live together and are sheltered and nurtured for their earlier years. Here, however, the real relationship of the child is to the tribe, the family is but his temporary guardian, and, at least by the age of puberty, he will be initiated into the tribal secrets. If he is a boy, he will cease to be a member of the family group and will go to live in the "men's house," becoming a part of the larger life of the tribe.8 Such moral and religious instruction as he may acquire will come from the songs, traditions, and conversation which he hears as a child.39

The third type approaches the modern ideal, with a greater or less degree of permanent unity between the two parents and with permanence in the group of the offspring. The parental responsibility continues for a greater length of time and, since the tribe makes smaller claims, and the parents live in the common domestic group, much more instruction is possible and is given. The tribal ideals, the traditions, observances, and religious rites are imparted to children gradually in their homes.

The last type brings us to the Hebrew conception of family life. It developed toward the Christian ideal. At first, polygamy was permitted; woman was the chattel of man and excluded from any part in the religious rites. But it included the ideal of monogamy in its tradition of the origin of the world, it denounced and punished adultery (Deut. 22: 22), and it gave especial attention to the training of the offspring. "And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up ... and thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house and upon thy gates" (Deut. 6: 6, 7, 9).

Much later, the messianic hope, the belief that in some Jewish family there should be born one40 divinely commissioned and endowed to liberate Israel and to give the Jews world-sovereignty, operated to elevate the conception of motherhood and, through that, of the family. It made marriage desirable and children a blessing; it rendered motherhood sacred. It tended to center national hopes and religious ideals about the family.9

There are a few glimpses of ideal family life in the Old Testament. They are all summed up in the eloquent tribute to motherhood in the words of King Lemuel in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. It must be remembered, however, that such ideals did not belong to the Jews alone, that Plutarch shows many pictures of maternal fidelity and wifely devotion, that Greek and Roman history have their Cornelia, Iphigenia, and Mallonia.10

The Jews are an excellent example of the power of the family life to maintain distinct characteristics and to secure marked development. Practically throughout all the Christian era they have been a people without a land, a constitution, or a government, and yet never without race consciousness, national unity, and separateness. Their unity has continued in spite of dispersion, persecution, and losses; they have remained a race in 41the face of political storms that have swept other peoples away. Their unity has continued about two great centers, the customs of religion and the life of the family.

§ 2. THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY

The Christian family is a type peculiar to itself, not as a new institution, for it has developed out of earlier race experience, but as controlled by a new interpretation, the spirit and conception of the home and family given in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He did not give formal rules for the regulation of homes; rather he made a spiritual ideal of family life the basic thought of all his teaching. He said more about the family than concerning any other human institution, yet he established no family life of his own. He is called the founder of the church, yet he scarcely mentions 42that institution, while he frequently teaches concerning home duties and family relations. He glorifies the relations of the family by making them the figure by which men may understand the highest relations of life. He speaks more of fatherhood and sonship than of any other relations. He gives direction for living, using the family terms of brotherhood. He points forward to ideal living in a home beyond this life. He teaches men when they think of God and when they address him to take the family attitude and call him Father.

If we sum up all the teachings of Jesus and separate them from our preconceptions of their theological content, we cannot but be impressed with the facts that he seized upon the family life as the best expression of the highest relationships; that he pointed to a purified family life, in which spiritual aims would dominate, as the best expression of ideal relationships among his followers; and that he glorified marriage and really made the family the great, divine, sacramental institution of human society.

We can hardly overestimate the importance of such teaching to the character of the family. The early Christians not only accepted Jesus as their teacher and savior; they took their family life as the opportunity to show what the Kingdom of God, the ideal society, was like. Family life was consecrated. Men and women belonged to the43 new order with their whole households. Religion became largely a family matter. The worship that had been confined to the temple now made an altar in every home and a holy of holies in the midst of every family. The scriptures that belonged to the synagogue now belonged in the home. Above all, this family existed for the purposes taught by Jesus, that men might grow in brotherhood toward the likeness of the divine Fatherhood. It was an institution, not for economic purpose of food and shelter, not for personal ends of passion or pride, but for spiritual purpose, for the growth of persons, especially the young in the home, in character, into "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

Christianity is essentially a religion of ideal family life. It conceives of human society, not in terms of a monarchy with a king and subjects, but in terms of a family with a great all-Father and his children, who live in brotherhood, who take life as their opportunity for those family joys of service and sacrifice. It hopes to solve the world's ills, not by external regulations, but by bringing all men into a new family life, a birth into this new family life with God, so securing a new personal environment, a new personality as the center and root of all social betterment. He who would come into this new social order must come into the divine family, must humble himself44 and become as a little child, must know his Father and love his brothers.

Christianity, then, not only seeks an ideal family; it makes the family the ideal social institution and order. It makes family life holy, sacramental, religious in its very nature. This fact gives added importance to the preservation and development of the ideals of family life for the sake of their religious significance and influence. It not only makes religion a part of the life of the home but makes a religious purpose the very reason for the existence of the Christian type of home. It makes our homes essentially religious institutions, to be judged by religious products.

CHAPTER V

46

THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY

§ 1. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY

With the brief statement of the history of the family and of its function in society which has already been given we are prepared to put together the two conclusions: first, that the family has an educational function, in that it exists as a social institution for the protection, nurture, development, and training of young lives, and, secondly, that it is a religious institution, the most influential and important of all religious institutions, whenever it realizes in any adequate degree its possibilities, because it is rooted in love and loyalty. It exists for personal and spiritual ideals and, in Christianity, it is inseparably connected with the teachings and the ideals of Jesus. It is educational in function and religious in character, so that it is essentially an institution for religious education. Religious education is not an occasional incident in its life; it is the very aim and dominating purpose of a high-minded family.

§ 2. WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION?

To make this the more clear we may need to clarify our minds as to certain popular conceptions47 of education. Education means much more than instruction; religious education means much more than instruction in religion. Many habitually think of an educational institution as necessarily a place where pupils sit at desks and teachers preside over classes, the teachers imparting information which is to be memorized by the pupils, so that, from this point of view, a Sunday school would be almost the only institution for the religious education of children in existence, because it is the only one exclusively devoted to imparting instruction to children in specifically religious subjects. Such a view would limit religious education in the home to the formal teaching of the Bible and religious dogma by parents. The memorizing of scriptural passages and of the different catechisms once constituted a regular duty in almost all well-ordered homes. Today it is rarely attempted. Does that mean that religious education has ceased in the home?

But education means much more than instruction. Education is the whole process, of which instruction is only a part. Education is the orderly development of lives, according to scientific principles, into the fulness of their powers, the realization of all their possibilities, the joy of their world, the utmost rendering in efficiency of their service. It includes the training of powers of thought, feeling, willing, and doing; it includes48 the development of abilities to discern, discriminate, choose, determine, feel, and do. It prepares the life for living with other lives; it prepares the whole of the life, developing the higher nature, the life of the spirit, for living in a spiritual universe.

Religious education, then, means much more than instruction in the literature, history, and philosophy of religion. It means the kind of directed development which regards the one who is developing as a religious person, which seeks to develop that one to fulness of religious powers and personality, and which uses, as means to that end, material of religious inspiration and significance and, indeed, regards all material in that light. Religious education seeks to direct a religious process of growth with a religious purpose for religious persons. Religious education is the spirit which characterizes the work of every educator who looks on the child as a spiritual nature, a religious person; it is the work of every educator who sees his aim as that of training this spiritual person to fulness of living in a society essentially spiritual.

In simplest possible terms, religious education means the training of persons to live the religious life and to do their work in the world as religious persons. It must mean, then, the development of character; it includes the aim, in the parents' minds, to bring their children up to the measure49 of the stature of the fulness of Christ. It is evident that this is a much greater task, and yet more natural and beautiful, than mere instruction in formal ideas or words in the Bible or in a catechism; that it is not and cannot be accomplished in some single period, some set hour, but is continuous, through all the days; that it pervades not only the spoken words, but the actions, organization, and the very atmosphere of the home.

§ 3. THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS

Normal persons never stop growing. Just as children grow all the time in their bodies, so do adults and all others grow all the time in mind and will and powers of the higher life whenever they live normally. We grow spiritually, not only in church and under the stimulus of song and prayer, but we grow when the beauty of the woods appeals to us, when the face lightens at the face of a friend, when we meet and master a temptation, when we brace up under a load, when we do faithfully the dreary, daily task, when we adjust our thoughts in sympathy to others, when we move in the crowd, when we think by ourselves. The educational process is continuous. The children in the home are being moved, stimulated, every instant, and they are being changed in minute but nevertheless real and important degrees by each50 impression. There is never a moment in which their character is not being developed either for good or for ill. Religious education—that is, the development of their lives as religious persons—goes on all the time in the home, and it is either for good or for ill.

Next to the idea of the continuous and all-pervasive character of this process of religious development the most important thought for us is that religious education in the home may be determined by ourselves. This continuous, fateful process is not a blind, resistless one. It is our duty to direct it. It is possible for wise parents to determine the characters of their children. We must not forget this. It cannot be too strongly insisted on. The development of life is under law. This is an orderly world. Things do not just happen in it. We believe in a law that determines the type of a cabbage, the character of a weed. Do we believe that this universe is so ordered that there is a law for weeds and none for the higher life of man? Do we hold that cabbages grow by law but character comes by chance? If there is a law we may find it and must obey it. If we may know how to develop character, with as great certainty as we know how to do our daily work, will not this be our highest task, our greatest joy, the supreme thing to do in life?51

§ 4. THE CONSEQUENT OBLIGATION

This is the first great obligation of parents and of those who are willing to accept the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. We have no right to bring into this world lives with all the possibilities that a religious nature involves unless we know how to develop those lives for the best and from the worst. When we picture what a little child may become, from the vile, depraved, despoiling beast or the despicable, sneaking hypocrite on one extreme, to the upright, God-loving, man-serving man or woman with the love of purity, honor, truth, and goodness speaking through the life, we may well pause, realizing we need more than a sentimental desire that the child may reach the heights of goodness: we must know the way there and the methods of leading the life in that way. True devotion to God and to childhood will mean more than petitions for the salvation of children; it will mean the prayer that is labor and the labor that is prayer to know how they may attain fulness of spiritual life; it will mean reverent searching into the divine ways of growth in grace. The study of the means and methods of religious education, especially of children, in the home and family, is one of the most evident and important religious duties resting on parents and all who contemplate marriage and family life.52

§ 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD?

In discussing the development of character in children one hears often the question, "Which is the earliest virtue to appear in a child?" People will debate whether it is truthfulness, reverence, kindness, or some other virtue. All this implies a picture of the child as a tree that sends forth shoots of separate virtues one after another. But the character desired is not a series of branches, it is rather like a symmetrical tree; it is not certain parts, but it is the whole of a personality. The development of religious character is not a matter of consciously separable virtues, but is the determination of the trend and quality of the whole life. Moral training is not a matter of cultivating honesty today, purity tomorrow, and kindness the day after. Virtues have no separate value. Character cannot be disintegrated into a list of independent qualities. We seek a life that, as a whole life, loves and follows truth, goodness, and service.

§ 6. EARLY TENDENCIES

But it is wise to inquire as to those manifestations of a pure and spiritual life which will earliest appear. One does not need to look far for the answer. Children are always affectionate; they manifest the possibilities of love. True, this53 affection is rooted in physiological experience, based on relations to the mother and on daily propinquity to the rest of the family, but it is that which may be colored by devotion, elevated by unselfish service, and may become the first great, ideal loyalty of the child's life. Little boys will fight and girls will quarrel more readily over the question of the merits of their respective parents than over any other issue. Almost as soon as a child can talk he boasts of the valor of his father, the beauty of his mother. Here is loyalty at work. He stands for them; he resents the least doubt as to their superiority, not because they give him food and shelter, but because they are his, because to him they are worthy; in all things they have the worth, the highest good; they are, in person, the virtue of life. Therefore in fighting for the reputation of his parents he is practicing loyalty to an ideal.

The principle of loyalty is the life-force of virtue; it is like the power that sends the tree toward the heavens, the upthrust of life. It may be cultivated in a thousand ways. Provided there is the outreach and upreach of loyalty within and that there is furnished without the worthy object, ideal, and aim, the life will grow upward and increase in character, beauty, and strength.

Next to the affectionate idealization of parents and home-folk one of the earliest manifestations54 of the spirit of loyalty in the child is his desire to have a share in the activities of the home. He would not only look like those he admires; he would do what they do. This is more than mere imitation; it is loyalty at work again. The direction of this tendency is one of the largest opportunities before parents and can make the most important contribution to character.

The religious life of the child is essentially a matter of loyalty. His faith, affections, aspirations, and endeavors turn toward persons, institutions, and concepts which are to him ideal. He does not analyze, he cannot describe, or even narrate, his religious experiences, but he affectionately moves, with a sense of pleasure, toward those things which seem to him ideal, toward parents, customs of the home or school, the church, his class, his teacher, toward characters in story-books. He is likely to think of Jesus in just that way, as the one person whom he would most of all like to know and be with. The life of virtue and the religious life then will be weak or strong in the measure that the child has the stimulating ideals which call forth his loyalty and in the measure that he has opportunity to express that loyalty. His religious life will consist, not so much in external forms perhaps, still less in intellectual statements about theology or even about his own experiences, as in a growing realization of the great55 ideals, an increasing sense of their meaning and reality within, and, on the objective side, a steady moving of his life toward them in action and habits and therefore in character and quality.

§ 7. IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS

It is worth while to insist upon two important considerations. Parents who stand as gardeners watching the growth of the tender plant of child-character may be looking for developments that never ought to come and will be disappointed because they were looking for the wrong thing. First, in watching for the beginnings of the religious life of the child in the family we are not expecting some new addition to the life, but rather the development of this whole life as a unity in a definite direction which we call religious. It is the first and most important consideration that religious education is not something added to the life as an extra subject of interest, but the development of the whole life into religious character and usefulness. Secondly, this growth of religious character is going on all the time. It is not separable into pious periods; it is a part of the very life of the family. Perhaps this increases the difficulty of our task, for it removes it from the realm of the mechanical, from that which is easily apprehended and estimated. It takes the task of the religious education of children out of the statistical56 into the vital, and reminds us that we are growing life every second, that there is never a moment when religious education is not in operation. This demands a consideration, not alone of lessons, of periods of worship and instruction, but of every influence, activity, and agency in all the family life that in any way affects the thinking, feeling, and action of the child. We are thinking of something more important than organizing instruction and exercises in religion in the home; we are thinking of organizing the family life for religious purposes, for the purpose of growing lives into their spiritual fulness.

Perhaps the capital mistake in the religious education of the family is that we overemphasize this or the other method and mechanism instead of bending every effort to secure a real religious atmosphere and soil in which young souls can really grow while we leave the process of growth more largely to the great husbandman. And the second great mistake is that we are looking for mechanical evidence of a religious life instead of for the development of a whole person. We must reinterpret the family to ourselves and see it as the one great opportunity life affords us to grow other lives and to bring them to spiritual fulness by providing a social atmosphere of the spirit and a constant, normal presentation of social living in spiritual terms.57

§ 8. THE ORGANIZATION OF LOYALTY

When parents conceive the family in these terms and so organize the life of the home, the child becomes conscious of the fact, and at once the life of the family furnishes him with his first, his nearest, and most satisfactory appeal to loyalty. He feels that which he cannot analyze or express, the spiritual beauty and loyalty of family life. That life furnishes a soil and atmosphere for his soul. It is an atmosphere made of many elements: the primary and dominating purpose of parents and older persons, the habitual life of service and love, the consciousness of the reality of the Divine Presence, the fragrance of chastened character and experience, the customs of worship and affections. These things are not easily created, they cannot be readily defined, nor can directions be given in a facile manner for their cultivation. They are the elements most difficult to describe, hardest of all to secure when lacking, least easily labeled, not to be purchased ready-made, and yet without them religious education is wholly impossible in the family. Without this immediate appeal to loyalty the loyalties of the child toward higher and divine aims do not develop early; they are retarded and often remain dormant. For us all scarcely any more important question can be presented than this: What appeals to spiritual idealism and loyalty does our family life present to the58 child? What quickening of love for goodness and purity, truth and service, is there in the home and its conduct?

60

CHAPTER VI

THE CHILD'S RELIGIOUS IDEAS

How shall I begin to talk with my child about religion? Even the most religious parents feel hesitancy here. It may not be at all due to the unfamiliarity of the subject, though that is often the case; hesitation is due principally to a conscious artificiality in the action. It seems unnatural to say, "My child, I want to talk with you about your religious life." And so it is. There is something wrong when that appears to be the only way. That situation indicates a lack of freedom of thought and intercourse with the child and a lack of naturalness in religion.

§ 1. THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFICULTY

The instinct is correct that tells us that we should be trespassing on a child's rights, or breaking down his proper reticence, in abruptly and formally questioning him about his religious life. The reserve of children in this matter must be respected. The inner life of aspiration, of conscious relationship to the divine, is too sacred for display, even to those who are near to us. He violates the child's reverence who tears away his reticence. Even though the child may not consciously object, the61 process leads him toward the irreverent, facile self-exposure of the soul that characterizes some prayer meetings. But we may, also, as easily err in the other direction and, by failing to invite the confidences of our children, lead them to suppose we have no interest in their higher life.

§ 2. CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS

First, we must be content to wait for the child to open his heart. We must not force the door. But we can invite him to open, and the one form of invitation that scarcely ever fails is for you to give him your confidence. Talk honestly, simply to him of the aspects of your religious life that he can understand. If he knows that you confide in him, he will confide in you. Here beware of sentimentality. Religion to the child will find expression in everyday experiences. Your philosophy of religion he cannot comprehend, and with your mature emotions he has no point of contact. Perhaps the best method of approach is to relate your memories of those experiences which you now see to have had religious significance to you. At the time they may have had no such special meaning. You did not then analyze them. Your child will not and must not analyze them, either; he must simply feel them.

Secondly, rid your mind of the "times and seasons" notion. There is no more reason why62 you should talk religion on Sunday than on Monday, unless the day's interests have quickened the child's questioning. There can be no set period; no times when you say, "This is the forty-five minutes of spiritual instruction and conversation." The time available may be very short, only a sentence may be possible, or it may be lengthened; everything will depend on the interest. It must be natural, a real part of the everyday thought and talk, lifted by its character and subject to its own level. Its value depends on its natural reality.

§ 3. RELIGIOUS REALITY

Thirdly, avoid the mistake of confounding conversation on "religion" with religious conversation, of thinking that the desired end has been attained when you have discussed the terminology of theology. To illustrate, in the family one hardly ever hears the word hygiene, but well-trained children learn much about the care of their bodies in health, and the family economy is directed consciously to that end. A good, nourishing meal always contributes more to health than many lectures on dietetics. Yet back, hidden away in the manager's mind, is the science of dietetics. So is it with quickening the child's power and thought in the spiritual life. We must avoid the abstract, the intellectually analytical. Religion should present63 itself concretely, practically, and as an atmosphere and ideal in the family. We parents must not look for theological interest in the child. A Timothy Dwight at ten or twelve, though once found in Sunday-school library books, is a monstrosity. The child's aspiration, his religious devotion, his love for God will find expression in almost every other way before it will be formulated into questions of a serious theological character. Nor ought we to force upon him the phrases of religion to which we are accustomed. He will live in another day and must speak its tongue. His faith must find itself in consciousness and then be permitted to clothe itself in appropriate garments of words. Those garments must be woven out of the realities of actual experiences in the child's life. We cannot prepare or make them for him. The expression of religion will be consonant with the stage of development. If his faith is to be real he must never be allowed or tempted to imagine that if only he can use the words, the verbal symbol, he has the fact, the life-experience. Try then to use words which are simple and meaningful to him and be content to wait for life to lead him to formulate vital verbal forms for himself.

§ 4. PATIENCE AND COMMON-SENSE

Fourthly, we must have faith in God's laws of growth. If we be but faithful, furnishing the soil,64 the seed, the nurture, we must wait for the increase. Many factors which we cannot control will determine whether it shall be early or late and what form it shall take. We must wait. It is high folly that pulls up the sprouting grain to see whether it is growing properly.

Fifthly, manifestations of the religious life will vary in children and in families. The commonest error is to expect some one popular form alone, to imagine that all children must pass through some standardized experiences. Mrs. Brown's Willy may rise in prayer meeting. Do not be downhearted. Willy is only doing that which he has seen his parents do, and, usually, only because they do it. Your boy, or girl, is seeking health of life, of thought, of action; is growing in character. Let them grow, help them to grow. You know they love you even when they say little about it; you do not expect them to climb to the housetop and declare their affection. A flower does not sing about the sun, it grows toward it. That is the test of the child's religion: Is he growing Godward in life, action, character?

§ 5. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD

Sixthly, deal most carefully with the child's consciousness of God. The truth is that the child in the average home has a consciousness of God. It grows out of formal references in social rites65 and customs, informal allusions in conversation, and direct statements and instruction. But frequently the resultant mental picture is a misleading one, sometimes even vicious in its moral effect. Where superstitious servants take more interest in the child's religious ideas than do his parents, we have the child whose life is darkened by the fear of an omnipotent ogre. Nursemaids will slothfully scare small children into silence by threats of the awful presence of a bogey god. The life of the spirit cannot be trusted to the hireling. Parents must be sure of the character as well as the superficial competency of those who come closest to childhood. A child's ideas are formed before he goes to school. The family cannot delegate the formation of dominant ideas to persons trained only for nursery tasks.

But frequently the mother is a misleading teacher. To her the child goes with all the big questions outside the immediate world of things. Is she prepared to answer the questions? Few dilemmas of our life today are more pathetic than this: the mother has outgrown the theology of her childhood; she remembers keenly the suffering and superstition, the struggle that followed the darkened pictures she received as a little one, but she has nothing better to offer the child. No one has taught her how to put the later, more spiritual concepts into language for the child of our day.66 Weakly she falls back on the forms of words she once abhorred.

There are certainly two approaches of reality for the child-mind to the idea of God. Two immediate experiences are rich in meaning; they are the life of the family and the wonder of the everyday world, the life and variety of nature and human activities. The first is a very simple and rich approach. By every possible means help children in the family to think of God as the great and good Father of us all. Do this in the phrasing of prayers and graces, in the answers to their questions, in the casual word. Why should we assume that the Fatherhood of God is for the adult alone? And why should it be that this rich concept dawns on us like a new day of freedom in truth in later years instead of becoming ours in childhood and so determining the habit and attitude of our lives? The finest, the ideal person is, to the child, the father. God in terms of fatherhood is the sum and source of all that is ideal in personality.

The child's keen interest in the world of nature is our opportunity to lead him to love the gracious source of all beauty and goodness. How keen is the child's enjoyment of the beauty of the world! Can we forever fix the general concept of all this beauty as the thought of God in the words of flower and leaf, mountain and stream? And might we not also connect the idea of God with the affairs67 of daily life? That depends on the parent's attitude of mind; if we think of the universal life that is behind all battles and business and affairs, there will be a difference in our answers to the thousand curious inquiries that rise in the child's mind.

Nor must we leave the child to think of God as a separate, far-off person, on a throne somewhere in the skies. The child is finding his way into a universe. The God who is a minute fraction of that universe makes possible the religion that is no more than a negligible fraction of life. The child asks concerning clouds, the sea, the trees, the birds, and all the world about him; he tends to interpret it causally and ideally. Childhood affords the great opportunity for giving the color, the beauty and glory, the life of the divine to all this universe, to instil the feeling that God is everywhere, in all and through all, and that in him we live and move and have our being. The child's joy in this world can thus be given a religious meaning. He sings

and so beauty and joy become part of his religion. His faith becomes a gladsome thing; he knows that the trees of the forest clap their hands, the mountains and the hills sing, and the morning stars chant together in the gladness of the divine life.

Such a view of the world comes not by prearranged and indoor interviews. One must walk68 out into the good outdoor world for the opportunity and the inspiration. The garden plot, the park, and, best of all, the open fields and woods speak to a child and furnish us an open book from which we may teach him to read. Recalling religious impressions, the writer would testify to feeling nothing deeper, as a result of church attendance in childhood, than the shapes of seats and the colors of walls; but there remain deep impressions of wonder, beauty, and the meaning of God from Sunday mornings spent with his father under the great beeches in Epping Forest, listening to the reading and singing of the old hymns, or joining in conversation on the woods and the flowers, and even on the legends of Robin Hood in the forest.

§ 6. THE EVERYDAY OPPORTUNITIES

Seventhly, natural conversation affords the best opportunity for direct instruction. A child is a peripatetic interrogation. His questions cover the universe; there are no doors which you desire to see opened that he will not approach at some time. There is great advantage when the religious question rises normally; when the child begins it and when the interest continues with the same naturalness as in conversation on any other subject. Then questions usually take one of three forms: mere childish, curious questions, questions on conduct, and questions on religion in its organized form.69

The child's curiosity is the basis of even those questions which have usually been credited to preternatural piety. The tiny youngster who asks strange questions about God asks equally startling ones about fairies or about his grandmother. But his questions give us the chance to direct him to right thoughts of God. Here we need to be sure of our own thoughts and to keep in mind our principal purpose, to quicken in this child loyalty to the highest and best. He must be shown a God whom he can love and, at the same time, one who will call for his growing loyalty, his courage, and devotion. Everything for the child's future depends on the pictures he now forms. We all carry to a large degree our childhood's view of God.

Some of the child's questions probe deep; how shall we answer them? When you know the truth tell him the truth, being sure that it is told in language that really conveys truth to his mind. The danger is that parents will attempt to tell more than they know, to answer questions that cannot be answered, or that they will, in sloth or cowardice or ignorance, tell children untrue things. If a child asks, "Did God make the world?" the answer that will be true to the child may be a simple affirmative. If the child asks or his query implies, "Did God make the leaves, or the birds, with his fingers?" we had better take time to show70 the difference between man's making of things and the working of the divine energy through all the process of the development of the world. When the child asks, "Mother, if God made all things, why did he make the devil?" it would surely be wise and opportune to correct the child's mental picture of a personal anti-God and to take from him his bogey of a "devil." But the question of the relation of God to the existence of evil would remain, and the best a parent could do would be to illustrate the necessities of freedom of choice and will in life by similar freedom in the family.

It must be remembered that children's curious questions are only their attempt to discover their world, that they have no peculiar religious significance, but that they afford the parent a vital opportunity for direct religious instruction. These questions must be treated seriously; something is missing in parental consciousness when the child's questions furnish only material for jesting relation to the family friends.

§ 7. MORAL TEACHING

Questions on conduct: Scores of times in the day the children come in from play or from school and tell of what has happened. Their more or less breathless recitals very often include vigorous accounts of "cheating," "naughtiness," unfair play,71 unkind words, discourtesies, all dependent as to their character on the age of the children and all opening doors for free conversation on duties and conduct. Here lies one of the large opportunities for moral instruction. There is no need to attempt to make formal occasions for this; so long as children play and live with others they are under the experience of learning the art of living with one another; this is the simple essence of morality. The parent's answers to their questions on conduct, the comments on their criticisms, and the conversation that may easily be directed on these subjects count tremendously with the child in establishing his ideals and modes of conduct. Returning to his play, there is no mightier authority he can quote than to say, "My mother says—," or "My father says—."

Let no one say that instruction in moral living is not religious, for there can be no adequate guidance in morals without religion, nor can the religious quality of the life find expression adequately except through conduct in social living. Children need more than the rules for living; they must feel motives and see ideals. They do not live by rules any more than we do. Besides the rule that is known there must be a reason for following it and a strong desire to do so. All ethical teaching needs this imperative and motivation of religion, the quickening of loyalty to high72 ideals, the doing of the right for reasons of love as well as of duty and profit.

The father's opportunity comes especially with the boys. They are sure to bring to him their ethical questions on games and sport; he knows more about boys' fights and struggles than does the mother. When the boys begin to discuss their games the father cannot afford to lack interest. Trivial as the question may seem to be, it is the most important one of the day to the boy and, for the interests of his character, it may be the most important for many a day to the father. If he answers with sympathy and interest this question on a "foul ball" or on marbles or peg-tops, he has opened a door that will always stay open so long as he approaches it with sincerity; if he slights it, if he is too busy with those lesser things that seem great to him, he has closed a door into the boy's life; it may never be opened again. Children learn life through the life they are now living. Real preparation for the world of business and larger responsibilities comes by the child's experiences of his present world of play and schooling and family living. To help him to live this present life aright is the best training that can be given for the right living of all life.

Questions on organized religion: As children grow up, the church comes into their range of interests. Just as they often make the day school73 focal for conversation, as they recount their day's work there, so they retain impressions of the church school, of the services of the church, and will always ask many questions about this institution and its observances. Here is the opportunity, in free conversation, to tell the child the meaning of the church, the significance of membership therein, and to lead him to conscious relationship to the society of the followers of Jesus. (See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church.")

75

CHAPTER VII

DIRECTED ACTIVITY

Probably all parents find themselves at some time thinking that the real, fundamental problem of training their children lies in dealing with their superabundant energy. "He is such an active child!" mothers complain. Were he otherwise a physician might properly be consulted. But the child's activity does seriously interfere with parental peace. It takes us all a long time to learn that we are not, after all, in our homes in order to enjoy peaceful rest, but in order to train children into fulness of life. That does not mean that the home should be without quiet and rest, but that we must not hope to repress the energy of childhood. One might as well hope to plug up a spring in the hillside. Our work is to direct that activity into glad, useful service.

§ 1. VALUE OF ACTIVITY

The things we do not only indicate character, they determine it. Our thoughts have value and power as they get into action. To bend our energies toward an ideal is to make it more real, to make it a part of ourselves. Children learn by doing—learn not only that which they are doing but life itself.76

It may be doubted whether a child ever grew who did not plead to have a share in the work he saw going on about him. That desire to help is part of that fundamental virtue of loyalty of which we have spoken above; it is his desire to be true to the tendency of the home, to give himself to the realization of its purposes. Of course he does not think this out at all. But this desire on the part of the child to have a hand in the day's work is the parent's fine opportunity for a most valuable and influential form of character direction.

One of the tests of a worthy character is whether the life is contributory or parasitic, whether one carries his load, does his work, makes his contribution, or simply waits on the world for what he can get. A religious interpretation of and attitude toward life is essentially that of self-giving in service. "My Father worketh hitherto and I work." "I must be about my Father's business." How noticeable is the child's interest in the vivid word-picture of One who "went about doing good"!

§ 2. THE BLESSING OF LABOR

The home is the first place for life's habituation to service. The child is greatly to be pitied who has no duties, no share in the work. Where the hands are unsoiled the heart is the easier sullied. It is the height of mistaken kindness, one of the common errors of an unthinking, superficial affec77tion, to protect our children from work. This is a world of the moral order and of the glory of work.

When the child is very small it must learn this by having committed to it very simple duties. As soon as it is able to handle things it may learn to do that which is most helpful with those things, to care for its toys, to put them away neatly. A child can learn while very young to take care of its spoon, of certain clothes, of chair, and pencil and paper. True, it is much easier to "pick up" after the child; but to do so is to yield to our own sloth. The more tedious way is the one we must follow if we would train the child.

Besides the care of his possessions the child will gladly take a share in the general work of the home. Let some daily duty be assigned to each one; such simple responsibilities as picking up all papers and magazines and seeing that they are properly stacked or disposed of may be given to one; another may sweep the stairs every day with a whisk broom (in one instance a boy of eight did this daily); another may be "librarian," caring for all books; each one, after eight years of age, should make her own bed; each one should be entirely responsible for his own table in his room. Many homes permit of many other "chores," such as keeping up the supply of small kindling, caring for a pet or even a larger animal, keeping a little personal garden or vegetable plot. Under those normal conditions78 of living, which some day we may reach, where each family, or all families, have trees and flowers and ample space, the opportunities are increased for joyous child activities which consciously contribute to social well-being as a whole.

§ 3. RELIGION IN ACTION

Perhaps some will say, this is not religious education, it is everyday training. Yes, it is "everyday training," but it is the training of a religious person with the religious purpose of habituating the child to give his life in service to his world. That is precisely what we need—religion in everyday action. The atmosphere and habitual attitude and conversation of the family must be depended on to give a really religious meaning to these everyday acts, to make them as religious as going to church, perhaps more so, and so to make them a training for the life that is religious, not in word only, but in deed and in truth.

Whatever we may say to children on the subject of religion, whether directly or in teaching by indirection through songs and worship, must pass over somehow into action in order to have meaning and reality. It must be realized in order to be real. The difficulty that appears is that of connecting the daily act with its spiritual significance. Yet that is not as difficult as it seems. If the act79 has religious significance to us, if we form the habit of really worshiping God with our work, seeking in it to do his will, the child will know it. We cannot keep that hidden. The spiritual life will never be more real to the child than it is to us, and no amount of moralizing or spiritualizing about our acts or his will give them religious significance.

At least one person will testify that, after being brought up in a really religious home, the most strikingly religious memory of that home is an occasion when he delightedly carried a tray of food to a sick neighbor. It was doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are acts repeated until they pass from the volitional to the involuntary. The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a share in all our ministries.12 80

The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social activities for students to carry out.13 The parents ought to know what is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of service suggested for the children, these activities lose all perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a normal part of life.

Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for, and that joy will be their strength.

§ 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE

The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life. Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or 81ride in private cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy remain the passive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert him from the pauper habit.

The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of passive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to shield them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men. Vain is all family worship, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in heart. The family may make this the normal way to live.

If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight82 in self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial, and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.

The whole attitude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of the family. The greedy family makes the grafting citizen. The grasping home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace. Greater than the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizenship in your home. No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beatitudes or week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home. Home action and attitude count for more than all besides.

It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole social duty unselfishly.

§ 5. FAMILY TRAINING FOR SOCIAL LIVING

The supreme test of the religious life here is ability to live among men as brothers and to cause83 the conditions of the divine family to be realized on earth. If we can realize that the purpose of Jesus was to bring men into the family of God, that the aim of all religious endeavor is the family character in men and women and the conditions of that family in all society, we must surely appreciate the possibility of the human family as a training school for this larger family of humanity.

The infant approaches social living by the pathway of the society of the family. We all go out into life through widening circles, first the mother's arms, then the family, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the nation, the world-life. Each circle prepares for the next. The family is the child's social order; its life is his training for the larger life of nation and human brotherhood.

Just how men and women will live in society is determined principally by the bent of their characters in the social order of the family. Their attitude to the world follows the attitude of the family, especially of the parents. They interpret the larger world by the lesser. The home is the great school of citizenship and social living.

All the moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the coming generation84 to live in a religious society, in one which will steadily move toward the divine ideal of perfect family relations through brotherhood and fatherhood. Its business is not to get children ready for heaven, but to train them to make all life heavenly. Its aim is not alone children who will not tear down the parents' reputation, but men and women who will build up the actual worth and beauty of all lives.

The realization, in the family, of the purpose of training youth to social living and service in the religious spirit depends on two things: a spirit and passion in the family for social justice and order, and the direction of the activities of the family toward training in social usefulness.

Only the social spirit can give birth to the social spirit. True lovers of men, who set the values of life and of the spirit first, who give their lives that all men may have freedom and means to find more abundant life, come out of the families where the passion of human love burns high. The selfish family, self-centered, caring not at all in any deep sense for the well-being of others, existing to extract the juice of life and let who will be nourished on the rind, becomes effective to make the social highwayman, the oppressor. From such a family comes he who breaks laws for his pocketbook and impedes the enactment of laws lest human rights should prevent his acquisition of wealth; he who85 hates his brother man—unless that brother has more than he has; the foe of the kingdom of goodness and peace and brotherhood.

And goodness is as contagious as badness. Children catch the spirit of social love and idealism in the family. Where men and women are deeply concerned with all that makes the world better for lives, better for babies and mothers, for workers, and, above all, for the values of the spirit gained through leisure, opportunities, and higher incentives; where the family is more concerned with folks than with furniture; where habitually it thinks of people as Jesus did, as the objects most of all worth seeking, worth investing in, there children receive direction, habituation, and motivation for the life of religion, the life that binds them in glad love to the service of their fellows, and makes them think of all their life as the one great chance to serve, to make a better world, and to bring God's great family closer together here.

CHAPTER VIII

87

THE HOME AS A SCHOOL14

The home is so mighty as a school because, requiring little time for formal instruction, it enlists its scholars so largely in informal activities. It trains for life by living; it trains as an institution, by a group of activities, a series of duties, a set of habits. If the home is to prepare for social living it will be most of all and best of all by its organization and conduct as a social institution.

§ 1. AN IDEAL COMMUNITY

For the purposes of society homes must be social-training centers; they must be conducted as communities if their members are to be fitted for communal living. No boy is likely to be ready for the responsibilities of free citizenship who has spent his years in a home under an absolute monarchy; or, as is today perhaps more frequently the case, in a condition of unmitigated anarchy. A free society cannot consist of units not free. The problems of parental discipline arise and appear as persistently irritating and perplexing 88stumbling-blocks in many a home simply because that home is organized altogether out of harmony and relation with the normal life in which it is set. Society environing the home gives its members the habits of twentieth-century autonomy, individual initiative and responsibility, together with collective living and working, while the home often seeks to perpetuate thirteenth-century absolutism, serfdom, and subjection. In social living outside the home we learn to do the will of all; in the home we attempt to compel children to do the will of one.

§ 2. COMMUNITY INTERESTS

The home organized as a social community will give to every member, according to his ability, a share in its guidance and will expect from every member the free contribution of his powers. Its rules will be made by the will of all, and its affairs governed, not by an executive board composed of the parents, but by the free participation and choice of all. The young will learn to choose by choosing; will learn both how to rule and to be ruled by a share in ruling.

To be explicit, suppose a piece of furniture is desired for the home. Two plans at least are possible: first, the "head of the home" may go forth and purchase it without consulting anyone, or after advising with the other "head"; or,89 second, before a purchase is made, the wisdom of such an addition to the furniture may be suggested in the open council of the whole family and the purchase discussed and determined by all. Such councils, usually coming at or after the principal meal, freely participated in by all, give even to the youngest a sense of the cost of a home, of the care that goes into it, with, what is more important, a sense of a share in these cares and costs; they cultivate habits of prudence, of consideration of a matter, of steady judgments, of deference to the wishes and wisdom of others. Of still greater importance is another practical issue of such a plan—that every member of the household has a new sense of proprietorship with deepened responsibility. Instead of thinking of any household possession as father's or mother's, or even mine, it becomes ours. The parents no longer need to say, "Children, do not mar the furniture; it costs money to replace it." The children know that already, and they have the same pride in the home possessions and the same desire to preserve them as they have in that which is peculiarly their own. A habit of mind results from such a course so that, by thinking in terms of common possession of the best things of life, there is cultivated that respect for the rights of others which is simply right social thinking.

The same plan could be pursued in relation to almost every interest of the family—as the planning90 of the annual vacation and outing, the holidays, picnics, and birthday celebrations, the church and religious exercises. Above all, in the last mentioned, this social spirit may be cultivated. The father may cease to be the "high priest" for his family and become a worshiper along with the other members. The effect will be that his children are more likely to stay as worshipers with him than if they gazed on him as on some lonely elevation, unrelated to them in his religious exercises. The reading, the song, the prayers, the comment and discussion, the story-telling, and all that may make up the regular specific religious activities of the family should be such that all may have a share in them. Nothing could be finer, diviner, and bring larger helpfulness for social living than the attempt of the least little lisping child to throw herself into the unified family act of prayer, as when one little tot, unable to say the Lord's Prayer, united in worship at the time of that act by saying, as reverently as possible, "One, two, three, four, five," etc., up to ten. The ability to count was her latest accomplishment; counting to ten was bringing the very best thing she then had and, in the act of family worship, offering her part to the Most High. A fine sense of worship and a desire to be one with the others in this united, communal service prompted the participation.91

§ 3. COMMUNITY SERVICE

Community service may be cultivated in the home. Here is the ideal social community, where there are neither parasites nor paupers, where all give of their best for the best of all. No one doubts that the baby gives its full share of happiness and cheer, and the aged their offering of consolation and experience; but the difficulty is supposed to be with the lad and the girl who would rather play than work. Usually this is because the habits of co-operation in the life of this community have been too long neglected. The small boy or girl had no share in its work. Parents are too busy to think through the matter of finding suitable duties for all. It is so much easier to do things one's self, even though the child misses the benefits of participation. More frequently the blame lies in the fact that parents desire to shield children from labor. Some would have them grow up without knowing what they count as the degradation of toil. But a boy who knows nothing of the "chores" has missed half the joys of boyhood, and has a terribly hard lesson ahead of him when he goes out to relate himself to life. No matter what one's station may be, there is a part to be played, and one's piece of work to be done. The greatest unkindness we can do our children is to train them to lives that do not play their part. The home is our chance to train a man to harmonious usefulness92 in his world. Not only should the family train to social co-operation and service, but it should train to efficiency therein. Do not let your child's duties become a farce; let them exact as much of him as the world will exact also; that is, efficiency, accuracy, thoroughness, and fidelity.

§ 4. A SCHOOL OF SOCIAL MINISTRY

The family trains lives for social ministry. The unsocial lives come out of unsocial homes. The home that exists for itself alone trains lives that exist only for themselves; these are the homes that throw the sand of selfishness into the wheels of society; they ultimately effect social suicide through selfishness. The attitude and atmosphere of the home are of first importance here. As we think, so will our children act. If the home is to us a place without responsibilities for the neighborhood, without duties to neighbors, without social roots, then it is a school for industrial, commercial, and social greed and warfare. As we think in our hearts and talk at our table, so are we educating those who sit thereat.

If we would have our homes really efficient and worthy agencies for education in social living, the first thing to do is to seek the social atmosphere, to cultivate all those influences which young lives unconsciously absorb. We all know that character comes through environment in large measure, and93 that the mental and spiritual environment is by far the most potent. Here is something that affects us more than the finest or poorest furniture and that gives the real zest and flavor to any meal. The choice of our own reading enters here, not only the matter of reading in sociology, but of all reading, as to whether it blinds with class prejudices, intensifies caste feeling, or atrophies social sympathy by pandering to selfishness and sensuousness. The control of our own feelings and judgment enters here. Do we sedulously cultivate charity for others? Do we stifle impatience, bitterness, class feeling? Do we guide the conversation of visitors and the family group so that antisocial passions are subdued and a spirit of brotherly love and compassion for all is cultivated? Here men and women have opportunity to give evidence of a change of heart; here they need that awakening to social consciousness which is a new birth, a regeneration into the life of the Son of Man who came to give his life.

By its active ministry the family is training for social living. When a child carries a bowl of soup to some sick or needy one, he learns a lesson never to be forgotten. The memories of hours of planning and preparation for some neighborly service—the making of bread, the packing of a box, the preserves for the sick—shine out like sunshine spots along childhood's ways; they direct manhood's steps.94

We are gradually learning that social duties are not learned save through social deeds; that even the most carefully prepared and perfectly pedagogical systems of instruction fail, standing alone. The college student uses the laboratory method in his sociology—though we know that sociology may be as far from social living as the poles are apart. The Social Service Association of the Young Men's Christian Association has given up attempts to teach social duty in favor of the plan of undertaking specific pieces of social activity. The home must adopt the laboratory method. The important thing is, not what the father or mother may systematically teach about the social duties of the children, but what kinds of service, of ministry and normal activity they may lead the children to; that is, in what ways they may all together discharge their functions in society.

§ 5. FAMILIES AS COMMUNITY FACTORS

Each family must clearly see its normal relations to its community, to the social whole; first, as an association of social beings having social duties, obligations, and privileges; then, to see that the ordering of the daily life is the largest single factor in determining the value of the family to the development of the community, fitting harmoniously into the larger community, and rendering its share of service.95

The disorderly home spreads its immoral contagion beyond its walls, out into the front yard, out and up and down the street, and all through the village and city. The City Beautiful cannot come until we have the Home Beautiful. Training each one to play his part in keeping the house in order, picking up and setting in place his own tools and playthings, preventing and removing litter, scraps, and elements of disorder and discomfort, acquiring habits of neatness based on social motives—these things make more for the city of beauty and health than all our lectures on clean cities.

No family lives to itself. Young people need to see clearly how their homes and their habits in the home impinge on other homes and lives. This is impressed upon us in an accentuated and acute degree in city living. One can hardly imagine a finer discipline of grace than apartment living, though one may well question whether it is not morally and hygienically flying in the face of the natural order. We may not have for a long time municipal ordinances forbidding boiled dinners, limburger, and phonographs in city apartments; but if, unfortunately, we are compelled to live in these modern abominations, we ought to cultivate a conscience that will not inflict our idiosyncrasies, either in culinary aromas or in musical taste, on our neighbors. But there are matters greater than96 these by which the home trains for social thoughtfulness. No man has a right to grow weeds at home, because the seeds never stay there. A howling dog, a disease-breeding sty, a fly-harboring stable, must be viewed, not from the point of the family's convenience, but from that of others' welfare.

§ 6. TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP

The family has a duty to train children for Christian citizenship. No other institution can take its place even here. Courses of lectures in churches and settlements effect excellent results, and the study of civics from the moral and ideal viewpoint should be encouraged in the schools; but the home is the place where, after all, citizens are trained and the value or menace of their citizenship determined. If we stop long enough to get a clear understanding of what we mean by citizenship this will be the more evident.

Citizenship is the condition of full communal, social living in a democracy. It is not a special department or activity of a man's life which he exercises once in a while, as at the primary or at the polls or through the political campaign; it is a permanent condition, the condition of his social living in a democracy. It seems to be worth while to think of this enough to be quite sure of it, for we have thought too long of citizenship as a special aspect of one's life or as an occasional duty; we97 have called for good citizenship at times of election and have been content with dormant citizenship at other times; we have said that one was exercising his citizenship when he voted, and have forgotten that he was exercising it or abusing or neglecting it as he walked the streets, talked with his neighbors, or in any way lived the life that has relations to other lives.

Matters of citizenship are simply matters of social living, as social living expresses itself through what we call government; that is, through communal, civic, national administration and regulation. Citizenship is social control in action, not through political activity alone, but through all that concerns civic and communal life. In view of this it may be worth while to look a little more closely into the relations of family life to this matter of the determination of the character of our citizenship.

The family is an agency for religious training in citizenship. The family is the first, smallest, and still the most common and potent social group. It is the community in which we nearly all learn communal living. At first it is a child's world, then comes his city, and then his nation, but ere long again the family is his own kingdom. Its ideals, constantly interpreted in action, determine our ideals. Where the father is greedy, self-centered, regarding the home as solely for his convenience as his private boarding-house, where he is a despotic98 boss, why should not the son at least tolerate bossism in his city if he does not himself pattern after his father on a wider scale and regard the city or the state as his private boarding-house and the treasury as his private manger? Where the mother is a petty parasite, what wonder the children regard with indifference, if not even with admiration, the whole system of civic and social barnacles, leeches, and other parasites?

The very organization of the home must prepare for civic duty by laying upon all appropriate duties and activities. It ought to be an ideal type of community. But that can never be until we take the training of parents seriously in hand; until we cease to delegate the pedagogy of courtship, marriage, and home-founding to the comic supplements of the Sunday papers and to the joke columns. Parents must themselves be trained for the business of the organization of homes as educational agencies.

The life and work of the home ought to train religiously for citizenship, by causing each to bear his due share of the burdens of all. Where the child has been forced to do the indolent parent's share, to support the slothful father, he can only look forward to the time when he will be free to support only himself, and have no other than purely egoistic obligations; this is an utterly immoral conception, and one squarely opposed to good citizenship. Where the boy or the girl has99 been trained to regard all toil as dishonorable, where each has been taught scrupulously to avoid every burden, they come into social living with habits set against bearing their share and toward making others carry them. The indolent parent makes the tax-dodging citizen, as the indulgent parent often makes the place-hunting citizen who becomes a tax on the public.

The ideals of the family determine the needs of citizens. Its conversation, its reading, its customs, set the standard of social needs. Where the father laughs at the smartness of the artful dodge in politics, where the mother sighs after the tinsel and toys that she knows others have bought with corrupt cash, where the conversation at the meal-table steadily, though often unconsciously, lifts up and lauds those who are out after the "real thing," the eager ears about that board drink it in and childish hearts resolve what they will do when they have a chance. Where no voice speaks for high things, where no tide of indignation against wrong sweeps into language, where the children never feel that the parents have great moral convictions—where no vision is, the people perish.

Yet to realize this civic responsibility of the home would be, in the greater number of instances, to remedy it. In those other instances where there are no civic ideals, where the domestic conscience100 is dead, there rests upon the state, upon society, for its own sake, the responsibility to train those children so that, at any rate, they will not perpetuate homes of this type. We may do very much by the stimulation and direction of parents. Men need but to be reminded of their duty to make it a part of their business to train their children in social duty.

CHAPTER IX

101

THE CHILD'S IDEAL LIFE

The modern child is likely to miss one of the great character enrichings which his parents had, in that he is in danger of growing up entirely ignorant of the poetic setting of religious thought in historic and dignified hymns. The great hymns have done more for religious thought and character than all the sermons that have ever been preached. Even in the adult of the purely intellectual cast the hymn, aided by rhythm, music, repetition, and emotion, is likely to become a more permanent part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a world of imagery!

§ 1. SONG AND STORY

Very early life's ideals are presented in poetic form; plays, school-life, love of country, friendships, all take or are given metric expression. So, for children, hymns have a perfectly natural place. The child sings as he plays, sings as he works, sings in school, and, as long as life and102 memory hold, these words of song will be his possession; in declining years, when eyes are failing and other interests may wane, fragments of childhood's songs and youth's poems will sing themselves over in his memory; while in the years between how often will some stanza or line spring into the focus of thought just at the moment when it can give brave and helpful direction!

Those years of facile memorization should be like the ant's summer, a period of steady storing in mind of the world's treasures of thought. No man ever had too many good and beautiful thoughts in his memory. Few have failed to recall with gratitude some apparently long-forgotten word of cheer, light, and inspiration stored in childhood. The special virtue of the hymn, among all poetic forms of great thoughts, is that memory is strengthened by the music and the thought further idealized by it, while frequent repetition fixes it the more firmly and repetition in congregational song adds the high value of emotional association.

But what kinds of memory treasures are being given to the modern child in the realm of religion? In by far the greater number of instances in the United States neither church nor Sunday school nor home brings to him any knowledge of the great hymns of religion.15 In the churches that use 103these hymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday services; he is in the children's service or the school, while in the majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified hymns. Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance, cavort, or drone through the frivolities of "popular" gospel songs is only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to divorce worship and thought, to make worship a matter of purely superficial emotions, and to form the habit of expressing religion, the highest experience of life, in language, often irreverent and almost always trivial, slangy, or ridiculous. It is an insult to the intelligence of children to ask them to sing

It is the duty of parents to know what their children are learning in the Sunday school. Not only are they often missing the opportunity to lay up the treasure of elevating, inspiring thoughts; they are acquiring crude, mistaken, misleading theological concepts in the hideous, revolting figures of "evangelistic songs"; they are storing their minds with atrocities in English and in figures of speech; they are acquiring the habits of104 sentimentality in religion and inhibiting the finer, higher feelings. They are blunting their higher feelings by repeating incongruous and nauseating figures of being "washed in blood," or they are carelessly singing sentiments they do not understand.

What can the family do about this? It ought to assert its rights in the church. It ought to protest and rebel against the debauching of mind and the degrading of religion (all for the sake of selling trashy books at $25 per hundred). A parent would do better to keep his child from church and Sunday school than to permit his mind to be filled with the sanguinary pictures of God, the mediaeval theology of the modern songbook, and its offenses against truth in thought and form. But the family can work positively and more effectively by providing good hymns for children in the home.

§ 2. TRAINING IN SONG

Almost without exception all children will sing if encouraged early in life. In the family group one has only to start a familiar song and soon all will be singing. It is just as natural to sing "Abide with Me" when the family sits together in the evening as it is to start "My Alabama Choo-choo." Children like the swing of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" just as much as in the northern105 states they like "Marching through Georgia." If they do not know the hymns the home is the best of all places in which to learn them.

A large section of real family life is missing in families that do not sing together. A home without song lacks one of the strongest bonds of family unity, and the after-years will be deprived of a memory dear indeed to many others. Days often come when the wheels of family life seem to develop friction, when little rifts seem to throw the members far apart, but the evening song brings them together. The unity of action, of feeling, the development of emotions above the day's irritation and strife, all help to new joys in family living.

We may well think of the fine songs and the great hymns together. There is no fixed wall between "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," and "The Son of God Goes Forth," nor between "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Jerusalem the Golden." The modern home has the musical instruments to lead in song—though they are not always essential—and lacks only the planning and forethought to develop the joys of song. It must provide the thought that applies the simpler forms of musical expression to the sweetening and enriching of life.

Let no one say, "My family is not musical." That simply means that your family does not take106 time for music and song. Build on the training in patriotic and folk-songs given in the schools; sing these same songs over in the home and then associate with the best of them the best of the hymns. Cultivate the habit of binding the whole realm of feeling in music together, the hymns and the songs, to make religion mean beauty and devotion and to make the finer sentiments of life truly religious.

This costs time and thought. Someone must plan that the books of songs and hymns are provided, that the opportunity is given, and that wise, unobtrusive leadership is there. Have ready several copies of the book containing the best hymns. Think out your plan of procedure in advance, selecting the songs, or at least the first one. Then at the right time simply begin to play that song and you will scarcely need to invite the children to sing with you.

Should anyone doubt whether children will enjoy singing good hymns, he may purchase a few records for the phonograph, for example, "O Come All Ye Faithful," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "O Zion Haste," "Holy, Holy, Holy," "Abide with Me." These will suit those of from ten upward; younger children will enjoy "Can a Little Child Like Me," "Brightly Gleams Our Banner," "Jesus Loves Me." "I Think When I Read That Sweet Story," and "For the Beauty of107 the Earth," though they will join gladly in the other hymns. Or, instead of using the phonograph, sit down quietly at the piano and play these hymns, with just enough emphasis for the children to catch the rhythm, and they will soon be standing at the piano singing with you.16

§ 3. PLAY ACTIVITY

The child is a playing animal. Play is not an invention of the devil, designed to plague parents and to lead children to waste their time. It is nature's best method of education, for when a child plays he is simply reaching forward in his activities to the realization of his ideals. Play is idealized experiences. There is always a significance of wider and maturer experience in children's play. Therefore the family must find space and time and adaptation of organization to the child's need of spontaneous, free activity in play.

The special religious value of play lies in the fact that the child in his games is experimenting with life, learning its lessons; especially is he learning the art of living with other lives. It is our religious duty to see to it that our children become 108used to living in society by playing in social groups. Scarcely anyone is more to be pitied than the lonely child standing in the corner of the playground, able only to watch the games, because parental prohibition has already made him a solitary and unsocial creature.

The educational potencies of play are so great that we dare not leave its activities to chance. Parents must study the power of play, its psychological and educational values, in order to direct its activity to the highest good.

The adequate care of a child's play-life will involve, in addition to the trained intelligence of the parents, provision for space in the house and also outdoors, willingness to subordinate our peace and our pleasure to the child's play at times, a reasonable though not necessarily expensive provision of play materials, attention to the character of the plays and playmates. The home will not lose its harmony and beauty if it is filled with playing children. Its function has to do with their development rather than with the preservation of chairs.

CHAPTER X

110

STORIES AND READING

If we would teach religion to our children we must adopt the method of Jesus; that of telling stories. The story has the advantage, first, of its natural interest, and, then, of the indirect manner of its presentation of the truth, together with the fact that that truth is embodied in a statement of life and experience. Besides, story-telling to any person of active interests is one of the easiest and most stimulating methods of teaching.

§ 1. STORY-TELLING

So much has already been written on the art of telling stories that only a few suggestions are needed here. First, understand why you tell the story. Normally a double motive enters in, namely, the conveyance of truth in life, at the same time affording real pleasure to the listeners. Either motive alone will be inadequate. You cannot convey the truth without the desire to give pleasure; you cannot make the pleasure worth while without the truth. But this is the place to insist that the truth which you desire to convey must find its way to the conviction of the child through the story and not through any moral or preface or particular statement which you may111 make. The moral or lesson must be clear to you but carefully held in reserve to direct the matter and manner of the story.

Secondly, be prepared to pay the price of this most effective method of instruction. It will cost the reservation of a certain amount of time both for acquiring the story and for relating it. It will require careful thought and planning, especially to be sure that the story is told in sympathy with the child's world. People who are too busy to tell their children stories are, perhaps fortunately, coming to realize that they are too busy to have children. If it looks like a waste of time to turn off the lights and sit by the firelight for from twenty to thirty minutes, we shall need to revise our estimates of the value of child-character. Nor must we shrink from the investment of time in preparation for the narration of the story; if it is worth telling, it is worth telling well.

Thirdly, keep a record of sources of stories. This may be preserved in a notebook. One parent used a card-index for this purpose. There are a few books published containing good collections.17 112You will find most valuable your own little book in which you have noted down the fugitive stories and short selections which are to be found in general literature.18

Fourthly, do not tell a story so as to close the child's interest in the narrative. Stories ought to lead to inquiry and further reading in the book or other source from which they have been drawn; indeed, story-telling is one excellent method of quickening an interest in reading.

Fifthly, allow the children to retell the stories to one another. Often the whole family will be entertained and helped by the explanation which a small child will give of the story he has learned by hearing it repeated a few times from his mother's lips.

Sixthly, telling Bible stories to children in the quiet hour is the best of all methods to stimulate their interest in the Bible itself. It is much better to tell the story in your own language than to read it either in the Bible or in a paraphrase. For one reason, you will never tell it twice the same way, and children will watch with interest changes in the narration. As soon as they can read, secure 113some of the simple Bible narratives and put these in their hands.19

§ 2. BOOKS AND READING

A home without books is like a house with only one window; it can look out in only one direction, in that of the present. It knows only a limited world; its children have a short measure of the joy of life, they can know here only those whom they see today, their friends must be few, their world narrow and confined.

If the books are not in your home the children will find them elsewhere. Unless the school kills the taste for reading, as it sometimes does, the young folks will open ways somehow into the ideal realm of books. As they grow up, the book takes the place of the story. The printed page is the child's key to all routes of travel, routes that lead to other times and lands, routes that lead to other people and into their hearts and minds. The child sees conduct and feels it as it is in action in lives before him, but he begins to discriminate and to analyze it only through reading; souls are revealed where the purpose of the writer is that the reader may see the springs of action in the character portrayed. Fiction, biography, travel, 114and adventure soon pass from the merely exterior happenings to the discovery of meanings in character.

§ 3. DANGERS OF READING

Since the book needs only one for its enjoyment, while the story requires two, there is less control over reading. There is only one way to be sure that children are not devouring vicious books and that is to make sure that they have an ample supply of healthful, helpful ones. This is especially necessary in a day that caters to sloth in reading. The tendency is for reading to take the facile decline from book to cheap magazine, from magazine to newspaper, and from the newspaper to skimming the headlines and the "funnies." The cheaper papers appeal to the lowest intelligence and strike at the line of least moral and mental resistance. Reading enriches the life but little and may impoverish it greatly unless there is developed the habit of drawing on the world's great treasures of thought and feeling. Open windows in your children's souls by giving them books; keep them open by encouraging the reading habit. Great souls wait for them, willing to converse and become their friends and teachers if they will but take down these books from the shelves and open them with an eager mind.115

§ 4. DEVELOPING GOOD TASTE

What can be done to quicken a love of good reading in children? Recognize that not all children develop this appetite at the same age, that girls read more than boys, that boys usually have a period of decline in reading interest from seventeen to twenty-one or even later. But everything really depends on whether we ourselves love good books and keep them on hand. One of the life-centers of a family should be the bookshelf, while the picture of the evening lamp and the reading group will constitute one of its best memories. Where books are at hand and where they are used daily, the children need little urging to read. Now this does not mean that yards of choice editions make a book-loving family. There is a difference between bindings and books. It means books known and loved, familiar friends for daily converse, books on handy shelves and fit to be used as common food.

Do you know what your children read? Do you watch as carefully the food of mind and spirit as you do that of the body? Do you show an interest in the books they plan to draw from the public library? Can you guide them intelligently when they ask for suggestions of interesting books? Do you know the healthful, suitable ones?116

§ 5. PROMOTION OF THE READING INTEREST

The Sunday school might aid greatly in promoting the habit of selecting and reading good books. Children often come home from day school clamoring for some book which the teacher has recommended as interesting and valuable. The Sunday-school teacher's recommendation would also carry weight. In every church, whether there exists a Sunday-school library or not, there ought to be a library or book committee which would watch for the right reading for the different grades and would cause the titles of good books to be placed on a bulletin board. Further, such a committee might very well place a copy of the book selected in the teacher's hand in order that the teacher might call the attention of the class directly to it. Of course the range of selection should be as wide as the world of books and should include fiction, romance, song, and story.20 Parents could do the same sort of thing. Why not talk up the best books we remember? As to those old-time books, we need to realize that tastes change. Perhaps they owed much of their interest to their vivid descriptions of contemporary life. Therefore we must commend the new books, those that belong to the children's own days, too. This can be done, provided we really know the books, 117not by saying, "We should like you to read Sandford and Merton," but rather, "There is a capital story in Captains Courageous; have any of you read it?" Leave the matter there, or, at most, go only far enough to stimulate interest.

CHAPTER XI

119

THE USE OF THE BIBLE IN THE HOME

If we keep clearly in mind the aim of religious education in the family as that of the development of the lives of religious persons, the place and value of the Bible will be evident. It will be used as a means of developing and directing lives. This will be quite different from a perfunctory use because our fathers used it or a use under the compulsion of the fear lest some strange evil should befall us, some visitation of an offended deity.

§ 1. THE CHILD'S NEED

Children need the Bible as a part of their social heritage. Just as they get a larger life, inspired and stimulated by the realization of their connection with the past of their family and their country, so the Bible brings them into connection with the religious history of the race. General history brings heroic forefathers into the stream of consciousness; we feel the push of their lives. So the Bible reveals the stream farther back and makes us part of the process of life in unity with great characters and great movements.

The child has a right to the Bible as his literary heritage. Here in the Bible is the precipitation of120 the ideals of a people unique in the place which religion held in their lives. Here is a literature which is the source of much of the best in the language and reading of the child's life. Its phrases are beautiful and convenient embodiments of religious ideals; they will have a steadily developing richness of meaning as life opens out to the child.21

§ 2. DIFFICULTIES

The difficulties in the way of the use of the Bible in the home are: the crowded programs, or a lack of time due to the absence of any program for the days; a feeling of unnaturalness in the special reading of this book; the decay of the custom of reading aloud; parental ignorance of the Bible and especially of its beauties for the young; and the excessive amount of task-reading frequently required by the schools. The Sunday school also sometimes offends in this respect by overemphasis on academic tasks for home work.

§ 3. METHODS

First, let parents use the Bible themselves. Use the books as you wish children to use them. This will be the longest step you can take toward the solution of the problem.

Secondly, use the Bible naturally. When children have an aversion to the Bible it is due usually 121to two causes: the peculiar place and use of the book which makes it a thing apart from life, and often an object of dread; and the practice of using it as a task-book, to be opened only in order to prepare Sunday-school lessons. Just as it takes years to overcome the aversion set up against English literature by its analytical study in the schools, so that the child becomes a man before he voluntarily reads Dickens, Thackeray, the poets, and essayists, in the same manner we have succeeded in making the Bible undesirable to youth. If you read passages aloud, use the tone of voice which would be appropriate if this was a new book not bound in leather. Read it for pleasure as one would read a literary masterpiece—not because opinion might frown on you if you had not read the classic. Does someone object that that would be to degrade the Bible to the level of secular writings? You cannot degrade a literature; it makes its own level and our labels do not affect it. Certain it is that a pious tone of voice will not protect the Bible from the secular level. But to use it unnaturally will degrade it in the opinion of those who hear us.

Thirdly, make its use a pleasure. All children enjoy story-telling and listening to reading. Many parents practice the children's hour, some period in the day when they will, alone with the children, read and talk with them. Let the Bible story be122 the reward of a good day, something promised as an incentive to good behavior. Children delight, not alone in the story itself, but in rhythmic passages, in the poetic flights of Isaiah and the beautiful imagery of the Psalms. To them it is natural and pleasant to think of the hills that skipped and the stars that sang and the trees that gave forth praise. They know the song of nature and are happy to find it put into words.

Fourthly, use the Bible as a book of life. How many times a day do questions of conduct arise in the family! How often do children ask what is right, and freely discuss the question! Here is a book rich in precept and example on at least many of the questions. There are pictures of actual lives meeting real temptations; there are the epigrammatic precepts of Proverbs and of the teachings of Jesus. Call attention to them, not as settling the question out of hand, but as testimony to the point. Accustom children to getting the light of the Bible on their lives, remembering that this book is a light and not a fence nor a code of laws.

Fifthly, use the Bible in worship. This does not conflict with the plea for its use naturally, for worship should be as natural as any of the social pleasures of the family. Here select those passages for reading which count most for the spirit of worship. It is a good plan to read a short passage,123 suitable for memorizing, so frequently that children learn it and are able to repeat it in concert. Be sure that all the passages read or recited are short. It will often be wise to preface the reading with a brief account of its original circumstances, so that all may hear the words as the actual utterances of a real man living in real life.

Sixthly, provide material which helps to make the Bible interesting, and which helps children to see its pictures through the eyes of geography and history.22

Seventhly, make the use of the Bible possible at all times for all. See that as soon as the child can read he has his own Bible, that it is in large, readable type, as much like any other book as possible. It is no evidence of grace to ruin the eyes over diamond-text Bibles. If possible, also provide separate books of the Bible, in modern literary form and some in the idiom of our day.23

§ 4. DOUBTFUL METHODS

It is doubtful whether good comes from the use of the Bible as a riddle-book, nor do the "Bible games" tend to develop a natural appreciation of 124the book. There is no new light but rather a confusing shadow thrown on the character of Joseph by the foolish conundrum concerning Pharaoh making a ruler out of him. Sending a child to the Bible to discover the shortest verse, the longest, the middle one, etc., trains him to regard it as an odd kind of book, to think of it as a dictionary, and to use it less.

We assume too readily that a knowledge of the separate details of biblical information, such as the date of the Flood, the age of Methuselah, the names of the twelve tribes, the twelve apostles, the books of the two Testaments, is the desired end. But one might know all these things and many more and be not one whit the better. For the child surely the desirable end is that he may feel deeply the attractiveness of the character of Joseph or of Jesus, may say within himself, "What a fine man; I want to be like him." Be sure the persons are real, that you see them living their lives in their times, just as you live your life now.

CHAPTER XII

126

FAMILY WORSHIP

Family worship has declined until, at least in the United States, the percentage of families practicing daily worship in the home is so small as to be negligible. If this meant that a general institution of religion had passed out of existence the fact would be highly significant. But it is well to remember that family worship has never been a general institution. We have generalized the picture of the "Cotter's Saturday Night" so eloquently drawn by Burns; it has been applied to every night and to every fireside. Daily family worship was observed in practically all the Puritan homes of New England; but there is no evidence for it as a uniform custom, either in other parts of this country or in other parts of the world, save perhaps in sections of Scotland. True, there were many families which observed the custom; but there were also many families of church members and doubtless of truly religious people in which family worship as a regular institution was unknown. This has been especially true in the type of family life which has developed under modern social conditions. Further, even so simple an exercise as grace at meals has not always been a general custom.127

§ 1. PAST CUSTOMS

But the fact today is that family worship is so rare as to be counted phenomenal wherever found. The instances, though not general, were common a generation ago. Many are living to whom family worship afforded the largest part of their conscious and formal religious education. Following the morning meal, or, occasionally, the evening meal, the family waited while the father, or the mother in his absence, read a portion of the Scriptures and offered prayer. In other families the act of worship would be the closing one of the day, perhaps participated in by the older members only, the younger children having repeated their prayers at bedside on retiring. A thousand happy and sacred associations gather about the memories of these occasions: the sense of reverence, the feeling that the home was a sacred place, the impression of noble words and elevating thoughts, the reflex influence of the prayer that committed all to the keeping and guidance of God.24

§ 2. WHY FAMILY WORSHIP?

Parents need to see the values in family worship. We have been insisting on the primary importance of the religious interpretation of the family as an 128institution, on the power of the religious motive, and the atmosphere of religion. But wherever there is a truly religious motive and a permanent religious atmosphere these will find definite expression in acts easily recognized as religious. Love is the motive and atmosphere of the true home, but love blossoms into words and bears fruit in a thousand deeds. The life of love dies without reality in act. Ideals are precipitated in expressive acts. So is it with religion in the home; it must not only be real in its sincerity, it must be realized, must pass over into conduct and action, as suggested above in chaps. vii and viii. And it must do this in ways so sharply defined and readily recognized as to leave no doubt as to their meaning. True, all acts may be religious and thus full of worship—this is most important of all—but worship expressly unites all such acts in a spirit of loyalty and aspiration.

Worship is a necessity for the sake of the ideal unity of the family life. Just as the individual must not only feel the religious emotion but must also do the thing called for, so must this united personality of the family give expression to its faith and aspiration, its motives and emotions, in such a manner that, acting as a social unit, all can together put the inner life into the outer form. The social value of family worship is the strongest reason for its maintenance. It is the united act129 of the family group, the one in which group consciousness is expressly directed to the highest possible aims. Every period of worship brings the family into unity at an ideal level.

The expression of religion in definite forms is necessary for children, too, as furnishing a means by which they can manifest their feeling of the higher meaning of family life. The reality of that feeling is stimulated in the daily, common life of the right family; the hour of worship is one out of many definite forms of its concrete expression. It is the form which gathers up the totality of feeling and aspiration into an act of worship and praise toward God, the Father of all families. It is evident there cannot be true worship in the family that is irreligious in its essential qualities, in its character, in its ideals and atmosphere.

§ 3. ADVANTAGES

The period of worship is a necessity in interpreting to all the spirit and meaning of a religious family. It objectifies the inner life. It makes definite, tangible, and easily remembered the general impressions of religion. It precipitates the atmosphere of religion into definiteness. In the chemical laboratory of a university there is usually a decided atmosphere of chemistry, but no one expects to become a chemical engineer by absorbing that atmosphere, nor even to attain a simple130 working knowledge by merely general impressions. Definiteness aids in gathering up our knowledge, our impressions.

The reading of the Bible in the home will give, when the passages are wisely chosen, forms of language into which the often chaotic but nevertheless valuable and potential emotions of youth fall as into a beautiful mold; they become remembered forms of beauty thereafter.

Family worship furnishes opportunity for direct religious instruction. When the home life has its regular institution, as regular as meals and play, the formality, the apparent abnormality of conversation about religion, is absent. Children expect and look forward to the period when the family will lay other things aside to think on the eternal values. Their questions in the breathing-space that always ought to follow worship become perfectly natural and sincere.

Family worship lifts the whole level of family life. Ideally conceived, it simply means the family unity consciously coming into its highest place. Children may not understand all the reading nor enter into the motives for all parts of the petition, but they do feel that this moment is the one in which the family enters a holy place. They feel that God is real and that their family life is a part of his whole care and of his life. One short period of natural reverence sends light and calm all131 through the day. Where the home is the place where true prayer is offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship; here and into this group there cannot easily enter strife, bickerings, or baseness. One short period, five minutes or even less, of quietness, of united turning toward the eternal, gives tone to the day and finer atmosphere to the home.

What our community life might be like without the churches, faulty or incompetent as we may know some of them to be, what that life would lose and miss without them is precisely, and perhaps in larger degree, what the family life misses without its own institution of regular devotion and worship.

§ 4. THE DIFFICULTIES

We can always afford to do that which is most worth while doing; our essential difficulty is to shake off the delusion of the lesser values, the lower prizes, to realize that, of all the good of life, the characters of our children, the gain we can all make in the eternal values of the spirit, in love and joy and truth and goodness, is the gain most worth while. We tend to set the making of a living before the making of lives. We need to see the development of the powers of personality, the riches of character, as the ultimate, dominant purpose of all being. Once grasp that, and hold132 to it, and we shall not allow lesser considerations, such as the pressure of business, the desire for gain, for ease, for pleasure, for social life, to come before this first and highest good; we shall make time for definite conscious religion in the life of the family.25

§ 5. TYPES OF WORSHIP

There are three simple forms which worship takes in the family: first, grace offered at the meals; secondly, the prayers of children on retiring and, occasionally, on rising; thirdly, the daily gathering of the family for an act of the spirit. The statement of the three forms reads so as to give them a formal character, but the most important point to remember is that wherever they are true acts of worship they are formal only in that they occur at definite, determined times and places. The acts have no merit in themselves. Merely to institute their observance will not secure religious feeling and life in the home. These three observances have arisen because at these times there is the best and most natural opportunity for the expression of aspiration, desire, and feeling.133

§ 6. METHODS OF FAMILY WORSHIP

1. Grace at meals.—Shall we say grace at meals? To assent because it is the custom, or because it was so done in our childhood's home, may make an irreligious mockery of the act. Perhaps, too, there are some who even hesitate to omit the grace from an unspoken fear that the food might harm them without it. All have heard grace so muttered, or hurriedly and carelessly spoken, void of all feeling and thought, that the act was almost unconscious, a species of "vain repetition."

There are two outstanding aspects of the asking of a blessing—the desire to express gratitude for the common benefits of life, and the expression of a wish, with the recognition of its realization, that at each meal the family group might include the Unseen Guest, the Infinite Spirit of God. That wish lifts the meal above the dull level of satisfying appetites. Just as, in good society, we seek to make the meal much more than an eating of food, "a feast of reason and a flow of soul," so does this act make each meal a social occasion lifted toward the spiritual. The one thought at the beginning, the thought of the reality of the presence of God, and of the nearness of the divine to us in our daily pleasures, gives a new level to all our thinking.

How shall we say grace, or "ask a blessing"? First, with simplicity and sincerity. Avoid long, elaborate, ornate phrases. It is better to err in134 rhetoric than in feeling and reality. The sonorous grace may soon become stilted and offensive. It is better to say in your own words just what you mean, for that will help all, even to the youngest, to mean what they say with you.

Vary the form of petition. Sometimes let it be the silent grace of the Quakers; sometimes children will enjoy singing one of the old four-line stanzas, as

One might use the first three of the following lines for breakfast and the last three at another meal:

or

One especially needs to guard against the purely dietetic grace, the one that only asks that the deity will aid digestion, as that form so often heard, "Bless these mercies to our use."27

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Should we say grace on all occasions of meals? What shall we do at the social dinner in the home? The answer depends on the purpose of the grace. Is it not that in our own group we may have the consciousness of the presence of God? When the meal is that of our own group with a friend or two, we bring the friends into the group and the act of family worship is maintained. Usually this is the case. So it will be when the group is entirely at one in this desire: the asking of grace will be perfectly natural. But when the group is a large one, when the sense of family unity is lost, or when the observance would seem unnatural, it is better to omit it. Grace in large gatherings often seems an uncovering of the sacred aspects of the home life.

2. Bedtime prayers.—What of children's bedtime prayers? Many can remember them. To many the most natural, helpful time for formal periods of prayer is in the quiet of the bedroom just before retiring. But there is a grave danger in establishing a regular custom of bedside prayers for children, a danger manifest in the very form of certain of these prayers, as

It is as though the child were saying, "The day is ended during which I have been able to take care of myself, the hours of helpless sleep begin, and I ask God to take care of me through the terrors of the136 night." For some children, at least, the night has been made terrible by that thought; they have been led to feel that the day was safe and beautiful, but that the night was so dangerous and fearful that only the great God could keep them through it, and it was an open question whether their prayer for that keeping would be heard.

One must avoid also the notion that such prayers are part of a price paid, a system of daily taxation in return for which heaven furnishes us police protection.

The best plan seems to be to encourage children to pray, to establish in them the habit of closing the day with quiet, grateful thoughts, to watch especially that the prayers learned in early life do not distort the child's thoughts of God, and to make the evening prayer an opportunity for the child to express his desires to God his Father and Friend. Having done this, as the children grow up it is best to leave them free to pray when and where they will. One may properly encourage the evening, private prayer; but the child ought to have the feeling that it is not obligatory, that it must grow out of his desire to talk with God, and, above all, that it has no special connection with the hour and act of retiring for sleep but rather, so far as time is concerned, with the closing of the day. Mothers must see far beyond the charm of the picture formed by the little white-robed figure at her knee. There137 is no hour so rich in possibilities for this growing life. It is one of the great opportunities to guide its consciousness of God.28

3. General family prayers.—It is true that, in many homes, under modern conditions of business, it is almost impossible for the family to be united at the hour when worship used to be customary, following breakfast. However, that is not the only hour available. In many respects it is a poor one for the purpose of social worship; it lacks the sense of leisure. But there are few families where the members do not all gather for the evening meal. It is not difficult to plan at its close for ten minutes in which all shall remain. Without leaving the table it is possible to spend a short time in united, social worship. Or, by establishing the custom and steadily following it, it is possible to leave the table and in less than ten minutes find ample time for worship in another room.

Really everything depends at first on how much we desire to have family worship, whether we see its beauty and value in the knitting of home ties, in the elevation of the family spirit, and in the quickening of the religious ideas. We find time to eat simply because we must; when the necessity of the spirit is upon us we shall find time also to worship and to pray.138

Next to the will to make time comes the question of method. First, determine to be simple, natural, and informal. A stilted exercise soon becomes a burden and a source of pain to all. In whatever you do, seek to make it possible for all to have a share by seeing that every thought is expressed within the intelligence of even the younger members, that is, of those who desire to have a share. This does not mean descending to "baby-talk." Just read the Twenty-third Psalm; that is not baby talk, but a child of seven can understand what is meant up to the measure of his experience; the language is essentially simple though the ideas are sublime.

Secondly, insure brevity. For that part of worship in which all are expected regularly to unite, ten minutes should be ample. Some excellent programs will not take more than half this time. Family worship is not a diminutive facsimile of church worship. Doubtless the experiment has failed in many families because the father has attempted to preach to a congregation which could not escape. Keep in mind the thought that this is to be a high moment in each day in which every member will have an equal share.

Thirdly, plan for the largest possible amount of common participation. This is to be the expression of the unity of the family life. Children enjoy doing things co-operatively and in concert.139

Fourthly, treat the occasion naturally in relation to other affairs. Proceed to the worship without formal notice, without change of voice, and without apology to visitors. Take this for granted. At the close move on into other duties without the sense of coming back into the world. You have not been out of it; you have only recognized the eternal life and love everywhere in it.

4. Suggestions of plans.—There are given below seven outlines of plans of worship. They are plans which have been in use and have been tried for years. Their only merit is simplicity and practicability; but they are at least worthy of trial. There is no special significance in the arrangement of the days and this may be changed in any way desirable. Further, all plans should be elastic; there will come special days, such as festivals and birthdays, when the program should be varied. For example, on a birthday the child whose anniversary then occurs should have the privilege of making the choice of recitation or reading or of determining the order of all the parts of this brief period of worship.

CHAPTER XIII

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SUNDAY IN THE HOME

Almost every family finds Sunday a problem. Other days are well occupied with full programs; this one has a program for only part of its time. Other days are rich with the liberty of happy action, but this one is frequently marked by inaction, repression, and limitations. As soon as the evanescent pleasure of Sunday clothes has passed, for those for whom it existed at all, the children settle down to endure the day.

§ 1. THE MEANING OF THE DAY

Fathers and mothers who vent a sigh of relief when Sunday is over must marvel at the strains of "O day of joy and gladness." Yet this day defeats its purpose when it is of any other character. We have no right to rob it of its joy and its healing balm. On the day made for man, sacred to his highest good, whatever hinders the real happiness of the child ought to be set aside.

Instead of accepting traditions regarding the method of observing the Sunday, would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, For what use of the day can we properly be held responsible? Here are so many—fifty-two a year—days of special146 opportunity. To us who complain that business interferes with the personal education of our children through the week, what ought this day to mean? To us who lament the little time we can spend with our families, what ought this day to mean? And what ought we to try to make it mean to children?

We call this God's day; what must some children think of a God who robs his day of all pleasure? If this is the kind of day he makes, then how unattractive would be his years and eternity! It is the day when we have our best opportunity to show them what God is like, to interpret his world and his works in terms of beauty, kindness, riches of thought, and love.

It ought to be the day reserved for the best in life, for the treasures of affection, for the uses of the spirit. Whatever is done this day must come to this test, Is this a ministry to the life of goodness, truth, and loving service? Does this enrich lives? In other words, we may put the broad educational test to the day and its program and determine all by ministry to growing lives.

§ 2. CONSERVING THE VALUES

The family faces the problem of the opposition between the rights of man on this day and the greed of commerce, the fight between a day of rest and a day of work. Man's right to rest is assured,147 legally, but commerce in the name of amusement and in the guise of petty and unnecessary trading constantly maintains its fight to invade the day of rest, to turn it from ministry to man as a person to the dull level of the week of ministry to things. The home has much at stake in this struggle. It needs one day free from the life that tears its members apart, free from the toil that engrosses thought, free for its members to live together as spiritual beings.

In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life. It is devoted to personality, to man's rights as a religious being.

Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one another, shall look into faces of friends and companions! And this opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one family. That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the church family. If we think of the day as affording148 us the pleasure of social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. Of course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.31

Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the presence of one another which is the essential life of the family. It has always been a good custom for friends to visit on this day, for families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather again for a few hours. It is the day when we have time to discover how much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when, looking into the eyes of those we love, we see "the light that never was on sea or land," the ultimate good!

The hours of being together are the hours of real education. Children cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church.149

§ 3. THE PROBLEM OF PLAY

What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday? Is there any other kind of child? They all want to. It is as natural for a child to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary. A child is a growing person learning life by play. Because play seems trivial to us we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day devoted to the higher life. In some families play is forbidden because children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate piety and pleasure.

Shall we then throw down all barriers and make this day the same as all others? No, rather make the day different by throwing down barriers that stand on other days. Let this be the day when the barriers between father and sons, parents and children, are let down and all can enter into the joy of living.

Play is to a child the idealization of life's experiences and the realization of its ideals. That is why he plays at school, idealizing the everyday life; that is why he plays at housekeeping, at being in church, at being a railway engineer, even a highwayman or an outlaw. The traditional games are the game of life itself in terms of childhood. Play as idealized experience and realized ideals is to the child what the church, worship, and the reading of fiction and essays are to the adult. Play is the150 child's method of reaching forward into life's meaning. Some games as old as history carry a weight of human tradition and experience as rich for a child as the adult obtains from historical review and from association with the past. There is a sense in which the child playing these games opens the Bible of the race.32

We cannot make children over into our pattern; we have to learn from them. Indeed, we come to life through their ways. We must become as little children. Before we settle the question of play on Sunday we do well to be sure that we know what play means to children, that we really grasp something of its educational value and its religious potency. Then we can proceed to a family policy in Sunday play.

§ 4. A POLICY ON PLAY

Keep the day as one of family unity. Help the child to think of it as a day protected for the sake of family togetherness. You can play that for this day the ideal is already realized of a family life uninterrupted by the demands of labor and business.

Maintain the unity by doing the ideal things together. Go to the place of worship together, provided it is the place where the child can find expression for spiritual ideals. If the Sunday 151school does not really lift the child-life and really teach the child, if it is not honest with him and makes no suitable provision for his developing nature, he will be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at home. That means the application of parents to this hour.33 It banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the better type of Sunday school is more and more to be found; children are more and more receiving a ministry actually determined by their needs. So far as the church service is concerned the ideal situation is found when a parallel service is provided for children, based on their needs and capacities. As to attendance, under other circumstances, in the family pew, that depends on whether the child is gaining an aversion to the church by the torture and tedium often involved. Without doubt many adults acquired the settled habit of sleeping in church because that was the only possible relief in childhood.34

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Maintain the family unity by stepping into the child's ideal life. Expect activity and use it. Why should we assume that because the adult finds a Sunday nap enjoyable the child will be blessed by enforced silence? I would rather see a father playing catch with his boys on Sunday than see the boys cowed into silence while he slept a Sabbath sleep. Children will play. Their play is innocent; more, it may be helpful and educative; we can insure these values in it by our participation. That is the parent's opportunity for a closer sympathy with his children. Playing together is the closest living, thinking, and feeling together. Where games are shared, confidences, secrets, and aspirations are shared, too. Besides, the participation of the adult may tend to tone up the game and to moderate boisterousness.

Seek the beautiful. Speaking as one who has been under both the puritanical regulation and the so-called "continental" freedom of Sunday observance, nothing seems much more beautiful than the sight of an entire family playing at home, in the park, or off in the woods or the fields of the country. Life is strengthened, ideals are lifted, family ties knit closer, gratitude is quickened, and courage stimulated by play of this kind.

§ 5. POINTS OF DIFFERENCE

But because it is evidently most important that this day should be different from other days, it is153 well to mark that difference in our plays and pleasures and to follow some simple principles for Sunday play.

First, make it the day of the best plays. The participation of parents will tend to have this effect. Sometimes some forms of play may be reserved for this day.

Secondly, our play should never interfere with the rights of those who desire to be quiet or to observe the day in ways differing from ours. We must respect the rights of all.

Thirdly, our play must not cause additional or unnecessary labor.

Fourthly, our play must not interfere with the pleasures of others. For instance, in the city children who can use the public tennis courts every day should keep off them on Sunday in order to give opportunity to those who can use them only on that day.

Having said so much on play on Sundays, we must not leave the impression that play is the principal thing. It would be the principal thing for children compelled to work or confined in crowded tenements on all other days. This is a day of rest. Play should not be carried beyond the rest and refreshment stage.

Nor must we assume that a recognition of play involves neglect of worship and instruction. Both should be cherished among the delights of the day. Every attempt to make the day a happy one, by154 normal play, associates the emphasis on worship with increased happiness in the child's mind.

§ 6. THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON PROBLEM

"What shall we do?" the children ask restlessly on Sunday afternoons, and it is by no means a strange question. All the week they have their school work, on Saturdays their play. No wonder Sunday afternoon seems dull. Yet if we older ones use it aright this is our opportunity to give them the best time of all the week. We can make this part of the day really a holiday if we just take time to plan it right. There is something wrong in the home in which the child, as he grows up, does not look forward happily to his Sunday afternoons.

Sunday afternoon should be a family festival time. Keep it sacred to the family. Business and social life claim us all the week, and the church claims its share of this day; but these afternoon hours we can, if we will, reserve for our own home life, for the closer drawing together of children and parents. To hold this time sacred for the children and their interests will help to solve "the Sunday afternoon problem."

1. The child's question, "What shall I do next?"—Children are dynamic, perpetually active. They grow in the direction toward which their activities are turned. Repression is impossible. We must either find the best things for them to do, or let155 them chance on things good or bad. The following outline for Sunday afternoon is given in the hope that it may help to answer the "what next."

2. "The Family Book."—To start The Family Book, mother or father raises the question at dinner: "What was the best Sunday of all last year, and why was it the best?" Everyone, from the oldest down to the least, should have a chance to tell. The statements of the older ones will encourage the younger.

That question will start another: What is the very best thing we can remember about the year past? Let everyone take a pencil and paper and in just ten minutes decide on and write down the one thing best worth remembering. Perhaps the baby cannot write yet, but he or she will want paper and pencil, too. Now, instead of making our answers known to one another, we fold the papers and keep them till the evening meal. We will open them then and talk it all over. Afterward we are going to copy the answers into a new book we are going to make.156

This new book is to be called The Family Book, and we expect to put into it all the pleasant things we wish to record about our home and family. Any blank book with ruled lines will do. Some time today we will elect a keeper of the book, and before we go to bed we will see the first entry in that book under the title, "Happy Memories of 1915." That will make a good beginning for The Family Book. Next Sunday we will discuss and set down in the book the happy memories of the intervening week.

3. The festival name.—Now, we have been sitting, talking, and writing as long as the children will care to be still. Suppose we all go outdoors together, every one of us. What if the weather is bad? It is seldom truly bad, and there is so much real happiness in going out in all weathers together.

But where shall we go? There is no fun in walking simply for exercise or health. Well, says father, we can decide where to go by naming the day. How? We will find the most interesting birthday or anniversary that falls today or during the next week. If one of the family has a birthday then, that one shall choose our walk for us. If not, then when we have chosen the national hero or heroine whose birthday falls near this time, or the event the anniversary of which comes nearest, we will go, if possible, where something will remind us of that person or event.157

So we fall to discussing the possibilities. We search through almanacs until we find the anniversary that suits us all. Perhaps one of the parents has anticipated all this by looking up the matter, and has a good name to suggest. Or the older ones may consult a dictionary of dates. It may turn out to be the birthday of a national hero. In the city he may have a statue; in the country may be found the kinds of woods, flowers, or animals he loved.

4. The exploring party.—But even after the walk it will not be long before the little ones are asking, "What can we do next?" So we organize the exploring party. Our object is to discover the countries, scenes, strange peoples, and most interesting persons we have heard of in the Bible. We are to find them in the advertising sections of old magazines. Let each one take a magazine and go through it, looking for oriental scenes, for pictures of incidents and of men and women that will remind him of Bible scenes and characters. These are to be cut out, explained, and arranged in the order of time, as they happened, every member of the family helping. The same plan may be applied to scenes of missionary work, using blank books for stories of heroism which children will illustrate with the magazine pictures.

5. Home thoughts.—"Home, sweet home," is just a corner of the afternoon saved for the158 discovery and reading of selections that are worth keeping in our memories and are also likely to help us hold our homes in some measure of the love and reverence they deserve. There are songs of home that ought never to be forgotten.

6. Religious reading and songs close the day happily.—Children love religious reading and songs, provided they are offered for their worth and not as an exercise, or to be learned as an empty duty. Take down your Bible and read Psalm 100, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands"; see whether they do not all enjoy the music and majesty of those lines. You will not find it difficult to secure their co-operation in learning that by heart.

Then close the day with an hour of song. The children will remember songs learned thus all their lives; therefore those worth remembering should be chosen. For one, there is that dear old song many of us learned at mother's knee, "Jesus loves me, this I know." That and others that are appropriate can be found in almost every hymnbook. Many books of school songs also have a few hymns and Sunday songs that children like.

Parents are puzzled, perhaps most of all, to choose appropriate stories to read to the children on Sunday. Youngsters prefer, of course, the told story to the read one, but if you wish to read you will make no mistake in selecting Christie's Old Organ; 159Aunt Abbey's Neighbors, by Annie T. Slosson; The Book of Golden Deeds, by Charlotte M. Yonge; and Telling Bible Stories, by Louise S. Houghton. Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them, by Richard Wyche, and Story Telling, by Edna Lyman, will serve as good guides to what to tell, and how to tell it.

7. Naming the day.—From week to week variety should enter into the Sunday program. On the Sunday following the one described above we can begin at the dinner table the happy task of "naming the day." We can decide whether it shall be called after one of our own number, whose birthday falls near this date, or after one of the anniversaries of the week following.

Perhaps someone suggests calling it after the feast day of the church year observed by certain churches. That should lead to discussion and investigation of the meaning of the day.

When all are agreed on a name, write it under its date on your wall calendar. It will be a convenient suggestion for next year, unless the decision is for a different name when the day again comes round. It will also call to mind some of the interesting discussions which it aroused.

After this we might call for The Family Book, which now contains, you will recall, the family's decision as to the best Sunday and the happiest occurrences of the year before. The keeper,160 appointed last week, must bring it out. We can read what we wrote a week ago and decide on the things worth entering this week. Records of birthdays, special happenings to each of the family, the bright sayings of little ones, and the visits of friends and relatives all should go in.

8. "I remember" stories.—While The Family Book is open is the psychological moment for father and mother to tell stories of their childhood. Every child likes to hear the story that begins, "I remember," and feels a thrill of pride in belonging to something that goes back and has a history. The old family album is a never-failing source of delight, not so much because of the pictures as because of what they suggest of family traditions.

Now is a good time to select some certain thing which shall be used only on this day, such as a festival lamp or candlestick, some festival plates or dishes—just one thing or set of things toward the use of which we can look forward during the week. This helps to make Sunday what we used to call "a treat."

9. Golden deeds.—Last week we started The Family Book in which to keep a record of all the happy experiences that belong to our family. This week we begin another book. In it we expect to place every week just one splendid story, the account of a golden deed, some piece of everyday kindness or heroism of which we have read or heard161 or which we have witnessed. Everyone is to have a chance to contribute to this book, all the family deciding by vote each week as to which story should be placed on its pages.

Did you read in the paper this week of some brave or kindly deed done by a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? Did you see someone do an act of kindness? Cut out the account or write out the story and have it ready for your own Golden Deed Book. Everyone must watch all the week for the right kind of stories. It is wonderful how much good you will find in the world when you are looking for it.

Sunday afternoons all the family can hear each story and talk over its fine points of virtue and goodness. Thus may be developed an appreciation of the human qualities that are really admirable. We can discuss also the probability of certain of the stories and the righteousness of the deeds.

Any blank book will do, or even a composition book. It will help to keep hands happily occupied if you make your own covers and cut out gilt letters for the title. Often you can find pictures to illustrate the stories chosen; sometimes you may prefer to draw the illustrations. Keep The Golden Deed Book in a safe and convenient place, because there ought to be something to go into it every week. For instance, did you read the other day of the young man who jumped in front of a162 train to save a young girl? He lost his life, but he saved hers. Can you find that story and put it in the book? Perhaps you have found one that seems even more fitting.

10. Various plans.—Giving happiness creates it. Plan something every Sunday for the happiness of others. Occasionally go in a body to call on someone who will be made happy by the visit.

If you walk in the park or elsewhere, see how many things you can discover that you have read about in the Bible or know to be mentioned there.

Try the game of "guessing hymns." While someone plays the familiar tunes, each takes a turn at identifying them and the hymns to which they belong.

Set aside twenty minutes for each one to write a letter to send to the brother or sister, relative or friend, at a distance. Even the baby can scratch something which he thinks is a "real enough" letter in penciled scribbles.

Close the day with quiet reading and song, or with the memory exercise in which all endeavor to repeat some simple psalm or a few verses, like the Beatitudes. All children like to repeat the Lord's Prayer in family concert.

164

CHAPTER XIV

THE MINISTRY OF THE TABLE

Shall the periods for meals be for the body only or shall we see in them happy occasions for the enriching of the higher life? Upon the answer depends whether the table shall be little more than a feeding-trough or the scene of constant mental and character development. In some memories the meals stand out only in terms of food, while pictures of dishes and fragments of food fill the mind; in others there are borne through all life pictures of happy faces and thoughts of cheer, of knowledge gained and ideals created in the glow of conversation.

§ 1. THE OPPORTUNITY

The family is together as a united group at the table more than anywhere besides. Table-talk, by its informality and by the aid of the pleasures of social eating, is one of the most influential means of education. Depend upon it, children are more impressed by table-talk than by teacher-talk or by pulpit-talk. They expect moralizing on the other occasions, but here the moral lessons throw out no warning; they meet no opposition; they are—or ought to be, if they would be effective—a165 natural part of ordinary conversation and, by being part and parcel of everyday affairs, they become normally related to life. The table is the best opportunity for informal, indirect teaching, and this is for children the natural and only really effective form of moral instruction.

The child comes to these social occasions with a hungry mind as well as with an empty stomach. His mind is always receptive—even more so than his stomach; at the table he is absorbing that which will stay with him much longer than his food. Even if we were thinking of his food alone, we should still do well to see that the table is graced by happy and helpful conversation; nothing will aid digestion more than good cheer of the spirit; it stimulates the organs and, by diverting attention from the mere mechanics of eating, it tends to that most desirable end, a leisurely consumption of food.

The general conversation of the family group has more to do with character development in children than we are likely to realize, and the table is peculiarly the opportunity for general conversation. Here, most of all, we need to watch its character and consider its teaching effects. Where father scolds or mother complains the children grow fretful and quarrelsome. Where father spends the time in reciting the sharp dealing of the market or the political ring, where mother166 delights in dilating on the tinsel splendors of her social rivalries, they teach the children that life's object is either gain at any cost or social glory. But it is just as easy to do precisely the opposite, to speak of the pleasures found in simpler ways, to glory in goodness and kindness, and to teach, by relating the worthy things of the day, the worth of love and truth and high ideals. The news of the day may be discussed so as to make this world a game of grab, inviting youth to cast conscience and honor to the winds and to plunge into the greedy struggle, or so as to make each day a book of beautiful pictures of life's best pleasures and enduring prizes.

§ 2. DIRECTING TABLE-TALK

But table-talk, helpful, cheerful, and educative, does not occur by accident. It comes, first, from our own constant and habitual thought of the meals in social and spiritual, as well as in physical, terms. And it reaches its possibilities as we endeavor to create and direct the kind of conversation that is desired. "Let all your speech be seasoned with salt," wrote the apostle, and we might add, let your salt be seasoned with good speech. That is the quality we must seek, the seasoning of healthful, saving, and not insipid, speech.

One of the great advantages of "grace before meat" lies in this: it gives a tone to the occasion.167 Its chief meaning is surely that we remind ourselves of the ever-present guest who is also the giver of all good. Where the grace is not a perfunctory act, but rather the welcoming of such a guest, the meal has started on a high level. We cannot do better than so to act and speak as those who take the divine presence for granted. We need not preach about it; we need only to assume it and move on the level of that friendship. Children will feel it; they will seek to answer to it, and will find pleasure in the very thought which they have perhaps never expressed in words.

The central idea of the grace suggests another means of helpful influences at the table, by bringing into our homes, for the meals, the friends whose lives will lift these younger ones. It is worth everything to live even for an hour with good and broadening lives. There are obligations to our guests to be considered, and their wishes should be consulted, but one always feels that children are being cheated when they are sent to eat at another table and deprived of the peculiar intimate touch with lives that bring the benefits of travel and experience. Ask your own memory what some persons who ate at the table with you in childhood meant to you.

The wise hostess knows that even when she brings together the group of mature folks, and even when they are wise and witty, she must be168 prepared adroitly to inspire the conversation or it may flag at times. How much more does the conversation need direction where we have the same group every day composed largely of immature persons! When you have thought of all the portions and all the plates, have you thought of the food for the spirit?

Before suggesting methods of selection and direction, let a word of explanation be said: food for the spirit is not confined to theology, to hymns and the Bible; it is whatever will help us to feel and think of life as an affair of the spirit. And this must come in very simple terms, by the elementary steps, for young folks. It will be whatever will in any way help us to live more kindly, more cheerfully, more as though this really were God's world and all folks his family. Whatever does this is truly religious.

§ 3. METHODS

Plan for the food of the spirit as seriously at least as for the food of the body. Learn to recognize poisons and also indigestibles. The first are subjects of scandal, bitterness of spirit, malice, impatience, tale-bearing, unkindly criticism, and discontent. The second are subjects too heavy for children: your formal theology would be one of them, your judgments on some intricate subjects may be among them. It is seldom wise to announce169 negative injunctions, but we can make up our own minds to avoid the conversational poisons and, when they appear, it is always easy to push them out. Even when the unpleasant subject is so common to all and has been so impressive in the day's experience that it threatens to become the sole, absorbing topic, we can say, "We won't talk of it at table! Let's find something better." But we must then have ready the something better; that will be possible only by forethought.

First, save up during the day, or between the meals, the best thoughts, the cheering, kind, ideal, and amusing incidents. Cultivate the habit of saying to yourself, "This is something for us all to enjoy tonight at the table."

Secondly, expect the other members to bring their best. Ask for "the best news of the day" from one and another. Encourage them to tell of good things seen and done and of pleasant and ideal things heard and spoken.

Thirdly, use the incidents as the basis of discussion. Let children tell what they think of moral situations. Often they will quote the opinions of teachers and others. Always you will secure under these circumstances the unreserved expression of what they actually think. A free, informal conversation of this sort where opinions are kindly examined and compared is the finest kind of teaching.170

Fourthly, do not forget the grace of humor. To see the odd, whimsical, startling side of the incident or experience trains one to see the interplay of life, to catch a ray of light from all things, and to moderate our tendency to permit our tragedies to pull the heavens down.

Fifthly, use this period to strengthen the consciousness of family unity by recounting past happy experiences and discussing plans of family life. In one family there are few meals from October to Christmas that do not include reminiscences of the summer in the woods and by the water, or from Christmas to June without plans for the next summer in the same place. Then, too, if you are contemplating something new, a piano, a chair, an automobile, talk it all over here. Let each one have his share in the planning. The effect is most important for character; the children acquire the sense of a share in the family community life. They get their first lessons in citizenship in this group, and they thus learn social living. Then when the chair, or what not, is bought, it is not alone the parents' possession; it belongs to all and all treat it as the property of all.

Sixthly, introduce great guests who cannot come in person. It is fine fun to say, "We have with us tonight a man who loved bees and wrote books." Let them guess who it was; help, if neces171sary, by an allusion to The Life of the Bee and The Blue Bird. They will want to know more about Maeterlinck and they will joyously imagine what they would say to him and how he would answer, what he would eat and how he would behave. In this way we may enjoy knowing better Lincoln, Whittier, Florence Nightingale, and an innumerable company.

Seventhly, this is the place to remind ourselves that table-manners are no small part of the moral life. By the habituation of custom we can establish lives in attitudes of everyday thoughtfulness for others, in the underlying consideration of others which is the basis of all courtesy. Children's questions on table-etiquette must be met, not only by the formal rules, but also by their explanation in the intent of every gentle life to give pleasure and not pain to others, so to live in all things as to find helpful harmony with other lives and to help them to find and be the best. It is not only impolite to grab and guzzle, it is unsocial and so unmoral, because it is both a bad example and a distressing sight to others. It is irreligious, because whatever tends to make this life less beautiful must be offensive to the God who made all things good.

If we ourselves seek to maintain beauty, order, and kindliness in the conduct of the table, our children acquire a love of all that makes for beauty172 and order and kindliness, for righteousness in the little things of life. A clean tablecloth may be a means of grace. You have to try to live up to it. Order and quietness in eating are not separable from the rest of the life. To lift up life at any point is to raise the whole level. To let it down at any point is to let all down. But to lift up the level of conversation at the table is to raise the level of the entire occasion and to make it more than a period of eating, to convert it into a festival, a joyous occasion of the spirit. The meal should be in all things worthy of the unseen guest.

How near we all come together at the table! In its freedom how clearly are we seen by our children! Here they know us for what we are and so learn to interpret life.

173

CHAPTER XV

THE BOY AND GIRL IN THE FAMILY

Much that has been said so far has had in mind only the problems of dealing with younger children in the life of the home. Indeed, almost all literature on education in the family is devoted to the years prior to adolescence. But older boys and girls need the family and the family needs them. Many of the more serious problems of youth with which society is attempting to deal are due to the fact that from the age of thirteen on boys have no home life and girls, especially in the cities, are deprived of the home influences.

§ 1. THE GROWING BOY

The life of the family must have a place for the growing boy. It must make provision for his physical needs; these are food, activity, rest, and shelter. Youth is a period of physical crisis. Health is the basis of a sound moral life. Many of the lad's apparently strange propensities are due to the physical changes taking place in his body and, often, to the fact that it is assumed that his rugged frame needs no care or attention.35 174

It will take more than tearful pleading to hold him to his home; he can be held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makeshift bed, and the general home organization which long ago assumed that a boy could be left out of the reckoning.

The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a chance to do part of the work, not only its "chores," but also its forms of service. But even a boy's attitude to the "chores" will depend on whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his training for the larger citizenship and society of service.36 175

The boy is a playing animal. Not all homes can be fully equipped with play apparatus. But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as though children needed nothing but meals and beds. The shame of the modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for passive adults. To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to force him out to the life of the streets. The thoughtless self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.37

But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the grass and among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation. For the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary, and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof. If possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.38

176

A workbench in the attic or basement has saved many a boy from the street. Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the purpose of a salon.39

§ 2. RELIGIOUS SERVICE

In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to one form of participation in the religious life. Whatever the family gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world. The form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the means of determining his share in such extension. The child's gifts to the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own account—partly his own direct earnings—appropriated for this or for other purposes by himself and with 177the advice of his parents. Family councils on forms of participation in ideal activities, by gifts and by service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.40

The boy needs friendship. Not all his needs can be met by the schoolboys whom he may bring into his room, nor can they all be met by his mother's affection. He needs a father. The most serious obstacle to the religious education of boys is that most of them are half-orphans; intellectually and spiritually they have no fathers. The American ideal seems to be that the man shall be the money-maker, the woman the social organizer, and the children shall be committed to hired shepherds or left to shift for themselves.

§ 3. THE FATHER AND THE BOY

No one else can be quite the teacher for the boy that his father ought to be. No man can ever commit to another, still less to some tract or book, the duty of guiding his boy to sanity and consecration in the matter of the sex problems.

The first word that needs to be said on this subject is that such problems receive safe and sufficient 178guidance only in the atmosphere of affection and reverence. Do not attempt to teach this boy of yours as though you were dealing with a class in physiology. The largest thing you can do for him is to quicken a reverence for the body and for the functions of life. By your own attitude, by your own expressions and opinions, lead him to a hatred and abhorrence of the base, filthy, and bestial, to a healthy fear and detestation of all that despoils and degrades manhood, and to a reverence for purity, beauty, and life.41

Be prepared to give him, on the basis of reverence, the clean, clear facts. Be sure you have the facts. Do not think he is ignorant; he is in a world seething with conversation, stories, pictures, and experiences of evil. The trouble is that his facts are partial, distorted, and unbalanced by positive errors; his knowledge is gained from the street and the school-yard. Only a personal teacher can help him unravel the good from the bad, the true from the false. Do not trust to your own general knowledge; take time to read one of the simple and sane books on this subject.42 Be ready to lead him aright. Remember this subject has provoked 179a large number of books, many of which are foolish and others unwholesome. Do not try to deputize your duty to some doubtful book.

§ 4. FATHERING THE BOY

But the boy needs more than instruction on a special subject; he needs personality, he needs the time and thought of, and personal contact with, his father. Men who do not live with boys never know what they lose. And alas, see what the boy misses! He has been his mother's boy up to school age when school takes him and gives him a woman's guidance, while the Sunday school is likely to keep him—for a while only—under the eye of some dear sister who "just loves boys." The system is a vicious one. The lad needs developed masculinity. If he gets it neither in school nor in the home he will find it on the street corner, through the vicious boy-leader of the degrading poolroom or the alleys.

The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering your young men if you lost your boys.43 180

§ 5. THE GROWING GIRL

Almost all that has been said about the boy applies to the girl of the same years. Let a special plea be entered here against the notion that girls are favored when sheltered from a share in the activities of the home. They desire to express their ideals as much as do boys. Much of the so-called craze for amusements is due to the fact that the family is so organized that there is no vent to the ideals there, no chance to have a share in the business of life. Young folks with the sense that "this is our home," not "our parents', but ours" bend their energies to its adorning, and find in it the chance to realize some of their passion for beauty and for service.44

Mothers usually do better than do fathers in the matter of sex instruction. Yet they usually begin too late, long after the little girl has acquired much misleading information in the school. Here, too, the first aim must be to quicken reverence for life, to set up the conception of the beauty and dignity of sex functions before the baser mind of the street has had an opportunity to interpret them in terms of the dirt.45

Above all, with boys and girls, the whole subject, including marriage and the founding of a family, 181must ever be treated with dignity and reverence. Foolish parents jest with their girls about their beaux and boast that their little ones are playing at courtship. If they could realize the wonder awakened, followed by pain and then by hardened sensibilities and coarsened ideals, they would sacrifice their jests for the sake of the child's soul. We wonder that youth treats lightly the matter of social purity when we have treated the sacred relations of life as a jest. If this family in which they now live is to be a place of sacred associations, of real religious life, the whole matter of marriage and the family must be treated with reverence. Their practice will not rise above our everyday ideals as expressed in casual conversation and in our own practice.

CHAPTER XVI

183

THE NEEDS OF YOUTH

Families are for the spiritual development of youth as well as of childhood. The home is for the young people as well as for the younger ones. But the very period when they slip from church school is also the period when they are often lost to the real life of the family. In some measure this is due to the natural development of the social life. The youths go out to work, move forward into enlarging social groups which demand more of their free time. They are learning the life of the larger world of which they are now a part.

§ 1. THE SCHOOL OF YOUTH

But the family is still the home of these young people; normally it is still the most vital educational influence for them. Yet there is no problem more baffling than that of family ministry for, and leadership of, the higher life of youth.

It is a short-measure interpretation of the home which thinks of it as only for young children and old folks. The young men and women from sixteen to twenty and over still need training and direction; they need close touch with other lives in affection and in an ideal atmosphere. In a few years they,184 too, will be home-makers, and here in the home they are very directly learning the art of family life.

For youth there are few effective schools, outside the home, other than the streets and the places of commercialized amusement. Even where the other agencies of training are used, such as college, classes, and associations (such as the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A.), life, at that period, needs the restraints on selfishness that come from family life, the refining and socializing power of the family group.

§ 2. SPECIAL NEEDS OF YOUTH

What are the special needs of youth upon which the family may base a reasonable program for their higher needs?

First, the need of sound physical health. This is a period of physical adjustment. Rapid bodily growth is nearly or quite at an end; new functions are asserting themselves. The new demands for directed activity may, under the ambitious impulses of youth, make undue drafts on the energies. The apparent moodiness that at times characterizes this period may be due to poor health. The moral strain of the period will need sound muscles and good health. Parents who would sit up all night—perhaps involuntarily—when the baby has the colic treat with indifference sickness in youth and185 too readily assume that the young man or the young woman will outgrow these physical ills. But bodily maladjustment or incapacity has most serious character effects. To live the right life and render high service one needs to be a whole person, with opportunity to give undivided attention and undiminished powers to the struggle of life.

Secondly, this is peculiarly the period of the joy of friendships. The social nature must have its food. This young man has discovered that the world consists of something besides things; it is full of people. He is just learning that they are all persons like himself. He enters the era of conscious personal relationships. He would explore the realm of personality. He touches great heights of happiness as other lives are opened to him. It is all new and wonderful, this realm of personality, with its aspects of feeling, thinking, willing, and longing.

§ 3. MAINTAINING FRIENDSHIP WITH YOUTH

Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their friendship? They will never tell us, for this world is too new and strange for facile description; they are always bashful about their hunger for persons until they find the same hunger and joy in us. We imagine that they are indifferent to us; the trouble is we are hidden from them.186 We seldom give them a chance to talk as friend to friend, not about trifling things, but about life itself and what it means. Perhaps at no point do parents exhibit less ability for sympathetic reconstruction and interpretation of their own lives than here. They recall the pleasures of childhood and provide those pleasures for the children. Why not recall the hunger of eighteen years of age and give these youths the very bread of our own inner selves? Or do we, when they ask this bread, give them the stone of mere provision for their physical needs or the scorpion of careless indulgence in things that debase the tastes?

One perplexing phenomenon must not be overlooked: it will often happen that young people pass through a period of what appears to be parental aversion. There will sometimes seem to be suspicion, violent opposition, and even hatred of parents. This is no occasion for despair. It is a stage of development. It is due to the attempt of a will now realizing its freedom under social conditions to adapt itself to the will that has hitherto directed it. To some degree the sex consciousness, which leads to viewing the parents in a new light, may enter in. It may be easily made permanent, however, if parents do not do two things: first, adjust themselves and their methods to the new social freedom of the youth, and, secondly, fling open the doors into their true187 selves now fully understandable by these men and women.

But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of youth. Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will feed. Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere. If they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere. You can scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth. If you are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but you will lose a life or lives. Here is the opportunity of the home to enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many lives.

§ 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD

As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than others. Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel him to make a selection. The same law is operative with the young woman. Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities; it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther. But father and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as they see188 their children taking their first evident steps toward home-making. What an opportunity is theirs!

Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just where some of the most serious mistakes are made. This is no time for teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule. If you treat this essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke. The home is the place where the home is treated most irreverently. Of course one must not take too seriously those "calf" courtships, prematurely fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or kindly, simple advice will help most of all.

To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth's idealism, make high vows and stand on high places. Give them at least the opportunity to enter your inmost self, to find there all the light you can give them and all the memory of your own joys and hopes. Make them feel, though you need not say it, that they are at the threshold of a temple. If to you this is an affair of the spirit it will be a matter of religion to them.189

Approached in such a temper, many of the practical problems of courtship settle themselves. Take the case of the young man at home. If he knows that you think with him of the high meaning of this experience he will not hesitate to bring the young woman to the home. She will feel your attitude. Upon this level questions of times and seasons, hours in the parlor, and all the matters of their relations will settle themselves. If you treat courtship as a matter of the spirit he will do just what he most of all wants to do, treat this woman who is to be his mate as a person, a spirit, with reverence and love that lifts itself above lust. This is the only ground upon which you can appeal to either in matters of conduct at this time. The conventions of society they will despise; but the inner law speaks to them when the outer letter has no meaning.

§ 5. THE SOCIAL LIFE

We must expect our children to go out into their larger world. The beginning of adolescence is the normal time of their social awakening, their conversion from a nature that turns in upon itself to one that moves out into a world of persons. For them, now, the home group ought to be seen as a society as well as a family, as the social group gathering about a definite ideal and mission into which they should delight to project themselves.190 The appeal of religion is peculiarly vivid just now, for it involves a recognition of one's self as a person with the power of personal choices and with the opportunity to find association with other persons. The family must aid its young people to see the opportunity which the church offers for ideal social relationships which direct themselves to high and attractive service.

§ 6. AMUSEMENTS

What should the family do about the question of the amusements of young people?

Healthy young persons must have recreation. They will seek it on its highest level first and find their way down the facile descent of commercialized amusements only as the higher opportunities are denied them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this need the home must minister by the provision of space, time, opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth, selfishness, preoccupation, or a mistaken idea of an empty innocence of life you make recreation and social intercourse impossible in the family, the young people will find it on the street or in the crowd. In the family that plans191 for recreation and provides facilities and time for young people to play the problem is a minor one.

But young people will naturally desire to project themselves into the social amusements of the larger groups. Then we ought to know what those amusements are; we must be able to advise, from actual knowledge, not from hearsay or prejudice, as to the healthful and worth while. The home must insist on the provision in the community for the safe socialization of amusements. The thousands of young girls in the cities, who tramp the pavements down to dance halls, primarily are only seeking the satisfaction of a normal craving; and they, on their way to the dance halls, pass the splendid plants of the schools and the churches, standing dark and idle. Families must develop a public opinion that will demand, for the sake of their young people, a provision for amusement and recreation that, instead of poisoning the life, shall strengthen, dignify, and elevate it. If the demand for clean drinking-water is a proper one, is the demand for healthful food for the life of ideals less so?

There can be no doubt of the attitude of any home with the least conscience for character toward all forms of public amusements in which young people are herded promiscuously for the mere purpose of killing time in trivialities. The "white cities" with their glittering lights and baubles are192 often moral plague colonies. The amusements debase the intellect, blunt the moral sensibilities, and appeal to the baser passions. They are the low-water mark, we may hope, of commercialized amusement. But they remind us that young people demand company and change from the monotony of the day's toil. They ask us as to the provision we are making for young people and challenge us to use their inclinations for good.

But besides these "shows" there are many dignified forms of social recreation. Good music is to be heard and good plays are to be seen.

The theater, whether of the regular drama or of the motion-picture type, offers a perplexing problem, principally because, in the first place, American people have been too busy conquering a new soil and making a living to give careful thought to the social side of aesthetics and recreation, and, secondly, because the ministry of social recreation has fallen almost entirely under the dominance of the same trend; it has been thoroughly commercialized. We cannot cut the puzzling knot by simply prohibiting all forms of public theatrical entertainment. For one reason, these forms shade off imperceptibly from the church service to the extremes of the vaudeville. But the simple fact is that we no longer indiscriminately class all theaters as baneful and immoral; we are coming to193 see their potentialities for good. If the young will go, as they will—and ought—to the theater, and if the theater can lift their ideals, parents would do well to guide their children in this matter and to enlist the aid of the theater.

It is worth while to come to a sympathetic understanding of the place of the drama and the opera, to see what they have meant in the education of the race and what is the significance, to us, of the fact of the strong dramatic instinct in childhood. Naturally the subject can only be mentioned here and the suggestion be offered that parents take time to cultivate an appreciation of good orchestral and concert music and of the drama.

The social life will find outlet in other directions. Young people need our aid to find social groups which will inspire and develop them, especially groups that are serviceful.

§ 7. THE CALL TO SERVICE

This is the period when ideals begin to give direction to the hitherto undirected activity of childhood and youth. Young people are idealists. They see no height too giddy, no task too hard, no dream too roseate, and no hope unattainable. If the times are out of joint they believe they were "born to set them right." Whatever is wrong or imperfect they would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we are194 loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth. Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blasé view of the world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's passion and let it breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and conversation the life of ideals.

Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and active minds—not with sleepy fatalism—believe in their boys, have boys who believe in them.

They wait for leadership. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of indifference to social reform195 and other types of ideal service, get back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.

They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.

They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God's world. The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to you—as you have been doing all along—by your daily attitude; you will have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly196 discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to realize the God-vision of the world.

198

CHAPTER XVII

THE FAMILY AND THE CHURCH

If the family is engaged in the development of religious character through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close relations with the other great social institution engaged in precisely the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained, these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.

As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home constitutes the first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of life.

§ 1. RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME

Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the developing199 relations of children to the church, would be largely solved if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these two institutions. The institutional difficulties occur because these relations appear to be competitive. Here is the family with its interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time, interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.

But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions. We carelessly think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests of which are in a different sphere. We think of the church as an independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or shortcomings and to criticize it if it200 fails to meet our standards, just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.

This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the church and the children. If the church is a thing apart we can analyze its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw recruits. It marches by while we stand on the curb. But here, surely, is one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms: the church is no more than our own selves associated for certain purposes. If the church fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we would a bridge that failed to carry a reasonable load? We do but condemn ourselves. If my church is not fit to send my children to, then I must help to make it fit. Before falling back on the lazy man's salve of caustic ridicule, before taking the seat of the scornful, before setting in the child's mind an aversion to this institution, based on my opinion, let me be sure I have done all that lies in my power to better it. True, I am only one; but surely, where so many family tables are each Sunday devoted to finding fault with the church201 and its services, I can find many others who will aid in at least stimulating a sense of personal responsibility for any incompleteness in the church.

The family cannot afford to take the attitude of hostile criticism, for it is thus fighting its first and most natural ally, the one other institution engaged in its own special work. If the forces for spiritual character be divided, how easily do the opposing forces enter in and occupy! The family needs the support of the wider public opinion of the church, insisting on the supremacy of righteousness. The family needs the co-operation of the church in its task of developing religious lives. The family needs the power of this larger social body controlling social conditions and making them contributory to character purposes. The family needs the stimulus which a larger group can give to children and young people.

This does not mean that we must never criticize the church. It is not set off in a niche protected from the acid of secular tongues and minds. Ministers of the gospel are unduly resentful of criticism, perhaps because, after they leave the seminary, no one has a fair opportunity to controvert their publicly stated opinions. But the church needs the cleansing powers of kindly, wise, creative criticism. Anyone can find fault, but he is wise who can show us a better way. This church is the family's ally; it is our business to aid her to202 greater effectiveness. The new church for our own day awaits the services of the men of today.

The purpose of the family is the basis of alliance with the church. As in every other relation and purpose of the home, so here: the dominant factor is the conscious function of the home and family. If the home is really a religious institution it will seek natural alliance with all other truly religious institutions. Ideally, what is a church but a group of families associated for religious purposes? Is not the church simply a number of families co-operating in the ideal purposes of each family, the development of the lives of religious persons and the control of social conditions for the sake of that purpose? Without entering into disputation as to the relationship of little children to the church, is there not just this relation to the human society called the church, that it is a grouping of families for the purpose of the divine family?

§ 2. THE FAMILY IDEAL IN THE CHURCH

Would there be any question as to the naturalness of the relation of our children to the church if the family ideal so controlled our thinking as to saturate theirs? Is not this the present need, that both family and church shall conceive the latter in family terms? By this is meant, not simply that we shall think of what is called "a family church," a church into which we succeed in pro203jecting our families in a fair degree of integrity, but that we shall think of the organization and mission of the church in terms of family life and of the ideal of the divine family. Keeping in mind the general definition already given of a family as persons associated for the development of spiritual persons, let us hold the church to that same ideal; the lives of persons associated in the broadest fellowship that includes both God and man for the purposes of spiritual personality. The church then should be the expression of that family of which Jesus often spoke, the family that calls God Father and man brother.

Closer and more helpful relations between family and church follow where the principles of the family prevail in the latter. The family is an ideal democracy because it exists primarily for persons. It places the value of persons first of all. So with the true church; it will exist to grow lives to spiritual fulness, and to this end all buildings, adornments, exercises, teachings, and organizations will be but as tools, as means serving that purpose. As the family sees its house, table, and activities designed to personal ends, so will the church. In an institution existing to grow lives, the great principle of democracy and of the family will prevail, viz., that to the least we owe the most. Just as the home gives its best to the little child, so will the church place the child in the midst. Just204 as the home exists for the child and thus holds to itself all other lives, so will the church some day exist for the little ones and so hold and use all other lives.

The prime difficulty of relating the children in our families to the average church lies in the fact that they are children, while the church is an adult institution. Its buildings are designed for adults—save in rare and happy exceptions;46 its services are designed for adults; it has a more or less extraneous institution called a school for the children. The church spends its money for adults; it compasses sea and land to make one proselyte and coerce him back in old age, and allows the many that already as children are its own to drift away. It often fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the development of such lives through childhood and youth. They must hear again the Master's voice regarding "these little ones," regarding the significance of the child. And all must be loyal to his picture of his Kingdom as a family and 205must, therefore, do what all true families do, become child-centric. A church in which children occupy the same place that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a place for the children. It will be a natural and unnoticed transition from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.

§ 3. A PLACE FOR ALL IN THE CHURCH

The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an insistence on the family conception and the family program in the church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and specially designed worship for child-life—suitable forms of service and activity. Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be carried over to provide them in the church.

Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church by their attitude toward it as the larger family group. To think and act toward this institution as our home, the wider home of the families, is to establish similar habits of thought in children. Such a concept is not206 always easy to maintain; the church includes many of different habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general life. Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility toward the weaker and immature. This family, the church, just like our own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all minister to others.

The principal service which the family may render to the church is, then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for religious culture and service. Surely this should be the attitude toward membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service. The family may well hold that relationship steadily before its members. In childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who learn. The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering the way of the religious life and the art of its service. The fellowship grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child's relationship passes over from the passive to the active, from207 the involuntary to the voluntary—just as it does in the home—and develops, as the child comes into social consciousness, into a recognition of himself as belonging to a social organization for specific purposes.

§ 4. CHILD UNITY WITH THE CHURCH

At some time every child of church-attending parents will want to know whether he "belongs to the church." One must be very careful here, regardless of the ecclesiastical practice, to show the child that he is essentially one with this body, this religious family. He may be too young to subscribe his name to its roll, but he belongs at least to the full measure of unity appreciable by his mind. He must not be permitted to think of himself as an outsider. Indeed, no matter what our theology may hold, every religious parent believes that his children belong to God. Do they not also belong to the church in at least the sense that the church is responsible for their spiritual welfare?

The sense of unity must be developed. Writing the child's name on the "Cradle Roll" of the church school may help. Assuming, as he develops, that he is a part of this spiritual family, naturally expecting that he will have an increasing share in its life, will help more. Parents who dedicate their children to God pass on to them the stimulus208 of that dedication. A church service of dedication is likely to impress them with a feeling of unity with the church; seeing other children so dedicated they know that a similar occasion occurred in their own early lives.

The forms of relationship must develop with the nature of the child. The church needs not only a graded curriculum of instruction but a graded series of relationships by which children, step by step, come into closer conscious social unity, each step determined by their developing needs and capacities.

It is easy to say that the responsibility lies with the church to provide these methods of attachment. But the church we have been sketching is a congeries of families, after all, and it will do just what these families, particularly the parents in them, stimulate it to do.

§ 5. INCIDENTAL DIFFICULTIES

But what of those instances in which parents are convinced that the church does not furnish a normal and healthy atmosphere for the child's spiritual life? There are churches where the Sunday school is simply a training school in insubordination, confusion, and irreverence, or where religion is so taught as to cultivate superstition and to lead eventually either to a painful intellectual reconstruction or to a barren denial of all faith.209 There are churches of one type so devoted to the entertainment of adults, to the ministry to the pride of the flesh and the lust of things, that a child is likely to be trained to pious pride and greed, or of another type, in which religion is a matter of verbiage, tradition, and unethical subterfuge.

Parents must be true to their responsibilities. The family is the child's first religious institution. Fathers and mothers are not only the first and most potent quickeners and guides in the religious life, but they are primarily responsible for the selection of all other stimuli to that life. Under the drag of our own indifference we must not withhold from the child the good he would get even from the church we do not particularly enjoy; neither dare we, for fear of criticism or ostracism, force the child under influences which, in the name of religion, would chill and prevent his spiritual development, would twist, dwarf, or distort it. Responsibility to the spiritual purpose of the family is far higher than any responsibility to a church. The churches are ordered for the souls of men.

What shall we do in the family when the sermon is always tediously dull? Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for them parallel to the adult service of210 worship.47 Next, try to overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If that is essentially your attitude, you cannot complain if your children are dissatisfied unless they too are entertained according to their childish appetites. When the sermon is poor, put it where it belongs proportionately and enlarge on the many good features of church fellowship and service.

In a word, let the church be to the family that larger home where families live together their life of fellowship and service in the spirit and purpose of religion and where there is a natural place for everyone.

CHAPTER XVIII

212

CHILDREN AND THE SCHOOL

Wise parents will know the character of the influences affecting their children at all times. At no time can their responsibility be delegated to others. There is a tendency to think that when children go to school the family has a release from responsibility. But the school is simply the community—the group of families—syndicating its efforts for the formal training of the young. Every family ought to know what the community is doing with its children. The school belongs to all; it is not the property of a board, nor a private machine belonging to the teaching force; it belongs to us and we owe a social duty as well as a family obligation to understand its work and its influence on the children.

Parents ought to visit the school. Wise principals and teachers will welcome them, setting times when visits can best be made. The visitors come, not as critics, but as citizens and parents. The principal benefits will be an acquaintance with the teachers of our children and a better understanding of the conditions under which the children work for the greater part of the day. By far the larger number of teachers most earnestly desire char213acter results from their work. It will help them to know that we are interested in what they are doing.

§ 1. HOME AND SCHOOL CO-OPERATION

Parents and teachers, both desiring spiritual results, can find means of co-operation. Parent-teacher clubs and associations have done much to bring the home and the school together. Meeting regularly in the evening, so that fathers, too, can attend, gives opportunity to work out a common understanding to raise the spiritual aims of the school, and to discover means by which the families may aid in securing better conditions for school work.

One of the most important considerations relates to the moral effect of the school life and environment. We are committed in this country to the principle that the public school cannot teach religion, but this by no means relieves it of responsibility for moral character. The family needs this ally. Children expect instruction in the school and they feel keenly the power of its ideals and the standards established by its methods and requirements. The family and the school greatly need to co-ordinate their efforts here to the end that there may be under way in both an orderly program for the moral training of children.214

§ 2. THE SCHOOL TEACHING PARENTS

The school may help the home if arrangements are made for parents to meet regularly and receive instruction in those forms of moral training which can best be given at home. This is one method of solving the vexed question of sex instruction. Many hesitate as to the wisdom of such instruction in schools; but no one doubts that it ought to be and could be given in families but for the fact that parents are both ignorant of what to tell and indifferent to the matter. It may be that some day the state will not only say that the child must go to school, but also that every parent intrusted with children must either prove ability to train and instruct in these and other matters or go to school to obtain the necessary training. The state would not go beyond its province if it required ignorant parents—and that means most of us in matters of moral training—to go to school and learn our business. And without waiting for such compulsion the school may now offer opportunity for all parents to obtain the desired information. Teachers are especially trained to an understanding of child-nature and to methods of pedagogy; they are prepared to teach many things we ought to know; why should not the family obtain the advantage of such expert knowledge?

The school would also be within its province if it undertook to stimulate the indifferent parents,215 both rich and poor, to an appreciation of the educational task and opportunity of the home. Each institution greatly needs the other. The school reaches all the children of all the people; might it not be made a larger means of helping all the parents of all the children to quickened moral responsibility and to greater educational efficiency?

§ 3. CONTROLLING SCHOOL CONDITIONS

The family ought to know the conditions at the school outside the recitation or working hours. Few parents have any conception of the power of the playground over moral character. Perhaps a smaller number realize how dangerous are some of the elements at work there. Play of itself is immensely valuable, but play means playfellows, and some of these are simply purveyors of indecency and moral contagion in conversation and act. We are required to send our children to school; we have a right to demand freedom from moral contagion. Do you know what goes on in secret places on the grounds? Do you know that the vilest ideas and phrases are current in pictures, cards, on scraps of paper, and in handwriting on walls, not only in the high schools, but often among children of from six to twelve years of age? This is too large a subject to be developed properly here. It is one familiar to all wide-awake school216 men and women and ought to be equally so to the parents of children. Where the school combats this evil the home should intelligently aid; where the school is indifferent the family dare not rest until either the indifference is quite dispelled or the indifferent dismissed.

Do not expect to get the facts concerning these suggested conditions by inquiry among your children. They are reticent, naturally, on such matters when talking with adults; besides, the sense of school honor holds them to silence. If they tell you voluntarily, you are happy in their free confidence. Do not betray it; simply let it lead you to make further inquiry at the school from the authorities and stimulate you to insist that, for the sake of the spiritual good of the young, the school must furnish conditions of moral health.

CHAPTER XIX

DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES

Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness, occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our children—or of our neighbors' children—to a focus and throw them in high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry passions rule, when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of development.

A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.219

Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt, as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort of training.

§ 1. THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION

The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the perfect tree in the sapling. Character comes by development; it is not born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper, sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?220

When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the development of those powers, their training-field and school.

Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other, in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him to be born six feet tall.

A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent, then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his moral221 upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not. And is it not to be the same with the child?

We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.

§ 2. THE COLLISION OF WILLS

Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of will.222

When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing entity, able to elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive, Godlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle and adjust itself with all other persons.

When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take time to think what it means. Keep your temper. Do not break before the other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied. From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from force and tradition to a moral plane.

Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request. You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his life.223

Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an unjust man.

Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience. Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circumstances it would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration—as a drop of acid on a finger tip—than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in other cases.

Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not drift,224 is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.

§ 3. ANGER

An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so near the surface that a pin-prick sets them loose. Usually a study of their cases will show either that the attitude of angry opposition to everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or that it was acquired in the adolescent period.

The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person; there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school of normal social living.

Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character of the225 child or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons, first, as furnishing the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control, to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace and interfere with the well-being of others.

It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.

In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl will make a very tardy passage through the normal experience of social aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pass quickly. A few allow this period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at this period, or to a lack of healthful friendships.

§ 4. METHODS OF DEALING WITH ANGER

It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant will not help the case. He226 may feel the emotion of your anger but misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first exercises in training character.

Consider the future. Each family is a social unit, a little world. Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality, under similar circum227stances, serve in the business of mature life? Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character. Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must guide it.

When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own temper.

Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, train him in self-control. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but228 it is the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and school and street.

Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the misery of the life without friends, the joy of friendships.

Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of forgiveness and, if the occasion229 warrants, the dignity and courage of the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how great is the victory of forgiveness.48

CHAPTER XX

231

DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (Continued)

§ 1. QUARRELS

A child who never quarrels probably needs to be examined by a physician; a child who is always quarreling equally needs the physician. In the first there is a lack of sufficient energy so to move as to meet and realize some of life's oppositions; in the other there is probably some underlying cause for nervous irritability.

It is perfectly natural for healthy people to differ; in childhood's realm, where the values and proportions of life are not clearly seen, where social adjustments have not been acquired, the differences in opinions, as in possessions, lead to the expression of feeling in sharp and emphatic terms. Rivalry and conflict are natural to the young animal. Children do not wilfully enter into conflicts any more than adults; they are only less diplomatic in their language, more direct, and more likely to follow the word with attempts at force.

In few things do parents need more patience than in dealing with children's quarrels. First, seek to determine quietly the merits of the cause; but do not attempt to pronounce a verdict. It is seldom wise to act as judge unless you allow the232 children to act as a jury. But ascertain whether the quarrel is an expression somewhere of anger against injustice, wrong, or evil in some form. Sometimes their quarrels have as much virtue as our crusades. It is a sad mistake to quench the feeling of indignation against wrong or of hatred against evil. A boy will need that emotional backing in his fights against the base and the foes of his kind. While rejoicing in his feeling, show him how to direct it, train him to discriminate between hatred of wrong and bitterness toward the wrongdoer. Help him to see the good that comes from loving people, no matter what they do.

Our methods of dealing with a quarrel will do more to develop their sense of justice than all our decisions can. Be sure to get each one to state all the facts; insist on some measure of calmness in the recital. Keep on sifting down the facts until by their own statements the quarrel is seen stripped of passion and standing clear in its own light. Usually that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary acknowledgment of wrong. The boys—or girls—have for the first time seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without prejudice. They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we when convinced against our wishes.233

When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still not offer a verdict. Put the case to the contestants and let them settle it. Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to insist on exact statements of fact. That course should be excellent training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man's side, in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious quarrels of later life. Teach children to think through their differences.

The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own attitude.234

Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new, self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them. Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he will have to live some day.

§ 2. FIGHTING

The best of men are likely to have a secret satisfaction in their boys' fights, and the bravest of mothers will deplore them. The fathers know how hard are the knocks that life is going to give; the mothers hope that the boys can be saved from blows. A man's life is often pretty much of a fight, every day struggling in competition and rivalry; we have not yet learned the lesson of co-operation, and we still tend to think of business as a battlefield. Something in us calls for fighting; we have to use the utmost strength at our command to fight the evil tendencies of our own hearts; often we rejoice in life as a conflict. It feels good to235 find causes worth fighting for. If all this is true of the man, it is not strange that the small boy, scarce more than a young savage, will find opportunities for conflict. He is more dependent on the weapons of force than is his father. He cannot cast out the enemy with a ballot, nor with a sneer or biting sarcasm, nor by some device or strategy of business or affairs. He can only hit back. Taken altogether, boys settle their differences as honestly at least as do men.

Moreover, children's fights are not as cruel as they seem to be; even the bloodshed means little either of pain or of injury. A boy may be badly banged up today and in full trim tomorrow; it is quite different with the wounds bloodlessly inflicted by men in their conflicts.

Does all this mean that boys should be encouraged to fight? No; but it does mean that when Billy comes home with one eye apparently retired from business, we must not scold him as though he were the first wanderer from Eden. That fight may have been precisely the same thing as a croquet game to his sister, or any test of skill to his big brother, or a business transaction to his father; it was a mere contest of two healthy bodies at a time when the body was the outstanding fact of life. The fight may give us our chance, however, to aid him to a sense of the greatness of life's conflict, to a sense of the qualities that make the236 true fighter. It may leave him open to the appeal of true heroism. We must make light of the victory of brute strength, just as we may make light of his wounds and scars, and glorify the victory of the mind and will.

The boy who fights because he lacks control of temper needs careful training. He gets a good deal of discipline on the playground and street, but it is not always effective; the beatings may only further undermine control. But the lack of self-control will manifest itself in many ways and must be remedied at all points. The discipline of daily living in the family must come into play here.

§ 3. SELF-CONTROL

The matter of self-control is not separable into special features; one cannot learn control under one set of moral circumstances without learning it for all. The boy who strikes without thinking is simply one who acts without thinking. He tends to throw away the brakes of the will. The regain of control comes only through training at every point in deliberation of action.

Probably there is no other point at which children so frequently and readily learn control as in the matter of speech. The family where all speak at once, where a babel of sounds leads to a rivalry of vocal organs, is not only a nuisance to the neighbors, it is a school of uncontrolled action237 to the children. Just to learn to wait, even after the thought is formed into words, until it shall be my turn or my opportunity to speak is a fine discipline of control. To do that every day, year after year, tends to break up the hair-trigger process of action.

Control is gained also by the acquisition of the habit of thought regarding general courses of action. We can hardly expect meditation on the part of little children. But those who are older, those entering their teens, may and should be able to think things out, to plan out the day's actions, to determine their own ways of conduct. Children who have the custom of quiet, private prayer often develop ability to see their conduct in the calm of those moments. They get a mental elevation over the day and its deeds.

§ 4. GOOD FIGHTS

The evident danger of undue deliberation of action must be met by another cure of the personal-conflict spirit; that is, the substitution of games of rivalry and skill for the unorganized rivalry and "game" of fighting. The transition from the bloody arena to the excitement of a game is very easy and natural. But the game is the boy's great chance to learn life as a game to be played according to the rules. All that the fight calls for—courage, endurance, skill, quickness of238 action, and grim persistence—comes out in a good game. Here is a suitable youthful realization of the fight that is worth waging. Our participation in the youths' games, our appreciation of their points, our joy in honestly won success, is the best possible way to lead up to their taking life in terms of a good fight, a grand game, a real chance to call out the heroic qualities. Turn every fighting instinct into the good fight that will clarify and elevate them all.

CHAPTER XXI

DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (Continued)

§ 1. LYING

Parents are likely to be wilfully blind to the faults of their children. But some faults cannot be ignored; they must surely quicken the most indifferent parent to thought. We suffer a shock when our own child appears as a wilful liar.

"What shall I do when I catch the child in an outright lie? Surely he knows that is wrong and that he is wilfully doing the wrong!"

First, be sure whether he is "lying." Lying means a purposeful intent to deceive by word of mouth or written word. When Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist he described a burglary that never happened, so far as he knew. He intended the reader to feel that it was true. Was he lying? No; because he simply used his imagination to paint a scene which was part of a great lesson he desired to teach the English public. Even had he had no great moral purpose, it would still not have been a lie, just as we do not accuse the writer of even the most frivolous novel of lying. He is simply creating, or imitating, in the field of imagination.

Imagination is the child's native world. When the little girl says, "My dolly is sick," she is saying241 that which is not so, but instead of reproving her for lying, you prepare an imaginary pill for the doll. Many children's lies are simply elaborations of their doll- and plaything-imaginings. When my little daughter told me, and insisted upon it, that she had seen seven bears, of varied colors, on the avenue, should I have reproved her for lying? Was it not better to humor her fancy, to draw it out, to give it free play, being careful gradually to let her know that I knew it was fancy? I entered into the game with her and enjoyed it so long as we all understood it was only fancy. It is a crime to crush a child's power of creating a world by imagination, a fair world, set in the midst of this world where things are imperfect, jarring, and disappointing, a world in which everything is always "just so."

But one must also carefully aid the child in distinguishing between the world of fancy and the world of fact. This takes time and patience. We must not rob the life of fancy nor must we allow the habits of freedom with ideas to pass over into habits of carelessly handling realities. Along with the development of fancy we must train the powers of exact observation and statement of facts. The child who saw seven bears, red, green, yellow, etc., must go to see real bears and must tell me exactly their colors and forms. Daily training in exactitude of statements of real242 facts is the best antidote for a fancy that has run out of its bounds. It establishes a habit of precision in thinking which is the essence of truth-telling.

§ 2. PROTECTIVE LYING

But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form. It may be called protective lying. Ask the little fellow with the jam-smeared face, "Have you been in the pantry?" and he is likely to do the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat that makes it easier to hide from their enemies. He valiantly answers "No, Mother." He would protect himself from your reproof. There has been awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires your approbation most of all. The moral struggle with him is very brief; he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.

What shall we do? First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions. The jam was there and you were not. It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and sufficient243 to establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others, and against his own good.

Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper, and confidant. I like better the God to whom a little244 fellow in Montana prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help him to do and know the right.

§ 3. OLDER CHILDREN

But protective lying presents a more serious problem with older children. The school-teacher and parent meet it, just as the judge and the employer meet it in adults. The cure lies early in life. Truth-telling is as much a habit as lying is. Perhaps it is more easily practiced; its drafts are on the powers of observation and memory rather than on those of imagination. Along with the child's imaginative powers there must be developed the powers of exact observation and description. Exact observation and description or relation are but parts of the larger general virtue of precision. Help children at every turn of life to be right—right in doing things, right in thinking, in saying, and in execution. Precision at any point in life helps lift the life's whole level. Truth-telling is not a separable virtue. You cannot make a boy truthful in word if you let him lie in deed. You cannot expect he will speak the truth if you do not train him to do the truth, in his play, in ordering his room, in thinking through his school problems, and in thinking through his religious difficulties. Truth-telling is the verbal reaction of the life245 which habitually holds that nothing is right until it is just right.

Two things would, ordinarily, make sure of a truthful statement, instead of a protective lie, in answer to your question: first, that the young person has been trained to the habit of seeing and stating things as they are—and that you really give him a chance so to state them, and, secondly, that to some degree there has been developed a recognition of considerations or values that are higher than either escape from punishment or the winning of your approbation. He will choose the course that offers what seems to him to be the greater good; he will choose between punishment, with rectitude, a good conscience, a sense of unity with the higher good, of peace with God his friend, a greater approximation to your ideal, on the one side, and, on the other, escape from punishment.

Everything in that crisis will depend on how real you have made the good to be, how much the sense of the reality of God and his companionship has brought of joy and friendship, and how high are his values of the actual, the real, the true.

§ 4. AT THE CRISIS

But what shall we do as we meet the lie on the lips of the child? First, as already suggested, do not wait until you meet it. Train the child to the truthful life. Second, be sure you do not make246 too heavy moral demands. Remember the instinct to protect himself from immediate punishment or disapprobation is stronger than any other just then. Do not ask him to do what the law says the prisoner may not do, incriminate himself. We have no right to put on our children tests harder than they can bear. Often we put those which are harder than we could face. What you will do just then depends on what you have been doing for the training of the child or youth. Do not expect him to solve problems in moral geometry if you have neglected simple addition in that realm.

Punishment by the blow or the immediate sentence will be futile. The offender must know he has trespassed in a realm beyond your administration and rule; he has done more than commit an offense against you. Whatever consequences follow—such as your hesitation to accept his word—must evidently be a part of the operation of the entire moral law. Help him to see that lying strikes at the root of all social relations and would make all happy and prosperous living, all friendship, and all business impossible by destroying social confidence.

Facing the crisis, do not demand more than your training gives you a right to expect. Often, instead of the direct categorical question as to guilt, we must gradually draw out a narrative of the events in question; we must patiently help247 the child to state the facts and to see the values of exactitudes. Without preaching or posing we must bring the events into the light of larger areas of time and circles of life, help him to see them related to all his life and to all mankind and to the very fringes of existence, to God and the eternal. That cannot be done in a moment; it is part of a habit of our own minds or it is not really done at all. At the moment we can, however, make the deepest impression by insistence on the importance of the actual, the real, the exactly true.

CHAPTER XXII

DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (Concluded)

§ 1. DISHONESTY

Many parents appear to think that the child's concepts of property rights and of fair dealing are without importance. Habits of pilfering are permitted to develop and success in cheating wins admiration. Low standards are accepted and religion is divorced from moral questions. The family attitude practically assumes that all persons cheat more or less and that it is necessary only to use wisdom to insure freedom from conviction.

Responsibility lies at home. We shall never have an honest generation until we have honest men and women to breed and train it. It is folly to think we can lay on the public schools the burden of the moral education of the young. Much is already being attempted there; yet little seems to be accomplished because the home, having the child before and after school and for a longer period each day, furnishes no adequate basis in habits, ideals, and instruction for the moral work of the school. If parents assume that one cannot succeed with absolute integrity, that dishonesty in some degree is necessary to prosperity, then children will learn that lesson despite all that may250 be said elsewhere. Honest children grow where, in answer to the false statement, "You will starve if you do business honestly," parents say, "Then we will starve."

But the very home life itself can be a teacher of dishonesty. Is it largely a matter of sham and pretense for the sake of social glory? Does it prefer a cheap veneer to a slowly acquired genuine article? Is the front appearance that of a dandy while the backyard looks like a slattern? Is the home striving for more than it deserves? Is it trying to get more out of life than it puts in? Evading taxes, avoiding duties, a community parasite, does it commend to children the arts of social cheating and lying? Such homes teach so loudly that no voice could be heard in them.

Given the atmosphere, ideals, and practices of the honest life in the home itself, the problems of conduct, in the realm of these rights, are more than half solved. Here in the home the real training for the life of business takes place. Not for an instant can we afford to lower standards here, nor to lose sight of the life-long power of our ideals, our habits, and our attitudes on the conduct of the next generation. Do parents know that the problems of lying, cheating, quarreling are the great, vital questions for their children, much more important than industrial or professional success in life; that on these all success is predicated? If251 they do, surely they cannot regard the problems which arise as mere incidents; surely they will provide for the culture of the moral life as definitely as for the culture of the physical or the intellectual!

§ 2. LESSONS IN HONESTY

But children also acquire habits from their playmates. Whenever the act of pilfering appears, the wrong must be made clear. Some sense of property rights is necessary; not the right, as some assume, to do what you will with a thing because you have it, but the right to enjoy and usefully employ it. Help children to see the difference between mine and thine. Slovenly moral thinking often comes from too great freedom in forgetful borrowing within the family. In this little social group the members must first acquire the habits of respect for the rights of others. Through toys, tools, and books the lesson may be learned so early that it becomes a part of the normal order of things.

Children can learn that the game of life has its rules and that the breach of these rules spoils the game and prevents our own happiness. They can learn, too, that these are not arbitrary rules; they are like the laws of nature; they are the conditions under which alone it is possible for people to live together and to make life worth while. Gambling is wrong because it is unsocial; it is the attempt to gain without an equivalent giving.252 Cheating is wrong, no matter how many practice it, just as surely as cheating is wrong in the game on the playground.

Children are really peculiarly sensitive to the social consciousness. In school under no circumstances will they do that which the school custom forbids or the older boys condemn. In the home, despite contrary appearances, the opinion of elders, brothers, sisters, and parents is the recognized law. Every small boy wants to be like his big brother. Children's conduct may be guided by an understanding of the social will outside the school and home. Help them to know that all people everywhere in organized society condemn cheating and dishonesty.49

Sentiment and emotional feeling must back up all teaching of conduct. Your stories and readings should be selected with this in mind. The approbation of parents and of the great Father of all enters as an effectual motive.

But parents seldom understand these problems; they attempt to deal with each one as it arises until they are weary of the seemingly endless procession and abandon the task. Their endeavors are based on faint memories of such problems in their own youth or on rule-of-thumb proverbial 253philosophy about morals and children. Does not the development of moral ability and culture deserve at least as much attention as any other phase of the child's life? After all, what do we most of all desire for all our children—position, fame, ease? or is it not rather simply this, that, no matter what else they do, they may be good and useful men and women? Then what are we doing to make them good and useful?

A clear view of the need for moral training, a belief that is possible, will surely lead to serious attempts to learn the art of moral training. In this they need not be without guidance. There is a number of good books on character development in the child.50 The foundation for all such training of parents ought to be laid in an understanding of what the moral nature is, and then of the laws of its development. Later the specific problems may be separately considered.

§ 3. TEASING AND BULLYING

Teasing is the child's crude method of experimentation in psychological reactions; the teaser desires to discover just how the teased will respond. It degenerates, by easy steps, into a thoughtless infliction of pain in sheer enjoyment of another's misery, and then into brutal bullying. When only two children are together mere teasing will not 254last long; either the teaser will tire of his task or his teasing will turn to that lowest of all brutalities, delight in inflicting pain on weaker ones.

But teasing is a serious problem in many families; the whole group sometimes lives in an atmosphere of ridicule, derision, and annoyance. Teasing is likely to appear at its worst wherever a group is gathered, for the guilty ones are under the stimulus of the praise of others; they inflict mental pain for the sake of winning approbation.

Teasing has a pedagogical basis. A certain amount of ridicule acts healthfully on most persons. Even children need sometimes to see their weaknesses, and especially their faults of temper, in the light of other eyes, in the aspect of the ridiculous. But children are seldom to be trusted to discipline one another; freedom to do so is likely to develop hardness, indifference to the sufferings of others, and arrogance from the sense of lordship. The corrective of ridicule is safe only as it is a kindly expression of the sense of humor. The ability to see and to show just how foolish or funny some situations are will turn many a tragedy of childhood into a comedy. Whenever children laugh at the distresses or faults of others, help them to laugh at their own. Cultivate the habit of seeing the odd, the whimsical, the humorous side of things. A sound sense of kindly humor often will save us all from unkind teasing.255

§ 4. SOME CURES FOR TEASING

Help the habitual and unkind teaser to see how cowardly the act is, to see how it is against the spirit of fair play. Call on him to help the weaker one. If he is teasing for some fault of temper or some habit, show him the chance that is afforded to do the nobler deed of helping another to overcome that fault.

Let the cowardly teaser reap the consequences of his own act; he must bear the burden of the critic, the expectation of perfection. Teasing him for his own shortcomings will sometimes cure him, but usually he loses his temper quickly. Make him feel the injustice of the teaser's method. If he is a bully he needs bullying. If ever corporal punishment is wise it is in such a case. He who inflicts pain simply because he can deserves to endure pain inflicted by someone stronger. But one must be careful not to confirm him in the coward's code. The injustice of it he must see, see by smarting under it. If ever punishment before others is wise it is in this case; for surely he who delights in humiliating others must be humiliated. But though justice suggests this course, experience shows that it does not always work; the bully only bides his time, and, cherishing resentment, he wreaks it on the weaker ones.

The best cure for brutal teasing will take a longer time than is involved in a thrashing. Besides,256 the teaser will get his thrashings very soon from other boys. It requires time to change the habits that make bullying possible. Try gradually helping him to see the beauty and pleasure of helpfulness. Give him a chance to give pleasure instead of pain. Help him to taste the joy of praise, the praise that helps more than all teasing criticism. Help him to see that it is more truly a mark of superiority to help, to cheer, to do good, than to oppress and tease. Take time to habituate him in helpfulness.

In dealing with teasing in the family, two other things are worth remembering: First, the teased must be taught the protective power of indifference. Teasers stop as soon as their barbs fail to wound; the fun ends there. Laugh at those who laugh at you, and they will soon cease. Secondly, the atmosphere and habit of the family determine the course of teasing. Where carping criticism and unkindly ridicule abound, children cannot be blamed for like habits. Where the sense of humor lightens tense situations, where we sacrifice the pleasure of stinging criticism for the sake of encouraging those who most need it, children are quick to catch those habits too. The teasing child usually comes out of a family of similar habits. On seeing our children engaged in teasing others, our first thought ought to be as to the extent to which we may have been their example257 in this respect. Constant watchfulness on our part against the temptations to tease will have an effect far more potent than all attempts to talk them out of the habit; it will lead them out.

CHAPTER XXIII

259

THE PERSONAL FACTORS IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Whoever will stop to review his early educational experience will be impressed with the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught, while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says. The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.

There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality. The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the persons away you remove all educational potencies.260

The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people. Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives. Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational agency, from its religious reality.

§ 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES

All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers, save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and, besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of fathers.

There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood wholly in physiological terms, imagining—if they think about it at all—that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only they know how to bear, feed,261 and clothe children properly. True, such duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good provider" who provides only things for his family, no matter with what generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves first of all.

He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best business in the world, the development of children's characters.

Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them those social advantages which he missed in youth.

But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality. It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home is left headless and soon heartless. If262 we at all desire the fruits of character in the home we must give ourselves personally.

It is not alone the habitué of the saloon or the idler in clubs and fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of being worse than an infidel. A father belongs to his home more than he belongs to his church. There have been men, though probably their number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.

§ 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE

The father owes it to his family to give himself at his best, that is, as far as possible, when his263 vitality is freshest and his powers keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children, time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith, did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public propaganda.

Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families. Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, while264 so readily granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge? There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but they are not willing to learn how to grow them.

§ 3. FATHERING AS A MAN'S TASK

It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you. Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in real touch with the boy's world.

Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home265 and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion. Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.

Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves. All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self266 as well as the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of peace.

Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of our children.

The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious person to them.

CHAPTER XXIV

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Whether we can remedy the ills of family living today or not, we can determine the character of the family life of the future. The homes of tomorrow are being determined today. The children who swing their feet in schoolrooms and play in our gardens will control family living very soon. We can do little to reconstruct the old order; we can do everything to determine the new. When the mountain sides have been made bare, forest conservation cannot save the old trees, but it can prepare for new growths. Ours is the larger opportunity because we can determine the ideals of our children. Today we can determine that they shall not suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind ignorance that compelled us to find our own way. We shall see that, first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first. If family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of things, of materialism.269

§ 1. A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER

The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a conscience for character through all our thinking on the family. We are really half-ashamed to talk of character. We blush for ideals but we have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of the things of beauty and we love only the useful. So we have become ashamed of the ideals of the home. Not only do we passively acquiesce in the popular attitude of indifference or derision, but we voice it ourselves. We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital infelicities. We would be ashamed to be caught singing "Home, Sweet Home." What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary, culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire, turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and start out from for real living. They are private hotels.270

If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life. More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient right-doing. In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program of beginning today ourselves to set first things first, to conserve the human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in school and church and home count first of all for character. And that broader education we ourselves must test first of all by this, whether it makes youth competent to live aright, cultivates the love of worthy ideals, and makes him willing and able to pay the price of a trained life consecrated to the service of his world, to the love of his fellows, and to the making of a new world.

We shall need, first, to safeguard the primary motives that enter into the founding of families. Those motives begin to develop early. They are in the making in childhood. Somehow we must plan the education of youths so that they will think of homes and of marriage in new terms. Possibly the public school will not only teach the physiology of marriage and the bare physical facts of sexual purity, but will teach new ideals of family271 life; it will count it at least as much a duty to cultivate a love of home as it is to cultivate a love of country. It can set so clearly the final objective of character that even children shall see that life has higher ends than money-making and the family greater purposes than garish social display.

§ 2. THE CHURCH AIDING

Certainly the church must seek to quicken and develop new ideals of family life; it must bring religion to our hearths and homes; it must worry less about a "home over there," and show how truly heavenly homes may be made here. It must not only get youth ready to die, it must prepare them to live; to live together on religious terms. It will do this, not only by general discussions in the pulpit, but by special instruction in classes. No church has a clear conscience in regard to any young person contemplating the duties of a family whom it has not directly instructed in the duties of that life.

It is a strange spectacle, if we would stop long enough to look at it, of the church proclaiming a way of life but scarcely ever teaching it. In any church there is a large number of young people under instruction; what are they learning? Usually a theological interpretation of an ancient religious literature. Some still are learning to hate all other persons whose religion differs from272 the brand carried in that institution. In a few years these youths will be bearing social burdens, facing temptations, taking up duties; does their teaching relate at all to these things? No, indeed, that would be "worldly"; it would seem to be sacrilegious to teach them how actually to be religious. The business of the church school is still largely that of filling minds with theological data rather than training young, trainable lives to become religious schoolboys, religious voters, religious parents. How many have been at all influenced by Sunday-school teaching when they stepped into a polling-booth, when they chose a life-mate, when they guided or disciplined their children? If religious education does not at all influence us in the great events of life, of what value is it to us? Must it not be counted a sheer waste of time?

If we would conserve the human values of the family we must train youth to a religious interpretation of the home. If we cannot do that in the church we might as well confess that the church cannot touch the sources of human affairs.

§ 3. IDEALS AND METHODS

No matter what the breadth of the interests of the public school, youth will still need training for family living given under religious auspices and with the religious aim. The day school may273 give courses in domestic economy, but family living demands more than ability to sweep a room or cook an egg. In fact, no one can be competent to meet its higher demands unless at least two things are accomplished, first, that he, or she, is led to see the family as essentially a religious, spiritual institution because it is an association of persons for the purpose of developing other persons to spiritual fulness; secondly, that he, or she, is moved to willingness to count the work of the family, its purpose and aim, as the highest in life and that for which one is willing to pay any price of time, treasure, thought, and endeavor.

This means that the fundamental need is that our young people shall grow up with a new vision and a new passion for the home and family. That passion is needed to give value to any training in the economics or mechanics of the home; and that training is precisely the contribution which the church should make to all departments of life today. It is the prophet, the interpreter, revealing the spiritual meanings of all daily affairs and quickening us to right feeling, to highly directed passion for worthy ideals.

From the general teaching, the high message of the church, directed to this special problem, there must be formed in the mind of the coming generation a new picture of the family, a new ethics of its life, a new evaluation of its worth. That can come274 in part by the prophetic message from the pulpit, but it will come more naturally and readily by regular teaching directed to the actual experiences and the coming needs of the young people who are to be home-makers. The soaring ideals pass over their heads, but when you teach the practice, the details of the life of the family in the spirit of these ideals, as interpreted and determined by the higher conception, then they catch the vision through the details.

We need two types of classes in church schools in relation to the life of the family: First, classes for young people in which their social duties as religious persons are carefully taught and discussed. Perhaps such courses should not be specifically on "The Family," but this institution ought, in the course, to occupy a place proportionate to that which belongs to it in life. The instruction should be specific and detailed, not simply a series of homilies on "The Christian Family," "Love of Home," etc., but taking up the great problems of the economic place of the family today, its spiritual function, questions of choice of life-partners, types of dwelling, finances and money relations in the family, children and their training, and the actual duties and problems which arise in family living.

All topics should be treated from the dominant viewpoint of the family as a religious institution275 for the development of the lives of religious persons. The courses should be so arranged as to be given to young people of about twenty years of age, or of twenty to twenty-five. They should be among the electives offered in the church school.

The second type of class would be for those who are already parents and who desire help on their special problems. Many schools now conduct such classes, meeting either on Sunday or during the week.51 Work on "Parents' Problems," "Family Religious Education," and similar topics is also being given in the city institutes for religious workers. No church can be satisfied with its service to the community unless it provides opportunity for parents to study their work of character development through the family and to secure greater efficiency therein. Such classes need only three conditions: a clear understanding of the purpose of meeting the actual problems of religious training in the family, a leader or instructor who is really qualified to lead and to instruct in this subject, and an invitation to parents to avail themselves of this opportunity.276

The value of such a class would be greatly enhanced if it should be held in close co-ordination with similar classes or clubs conducted by the public schools.52 Here all the parents of the community meet in the school building, not to discuss how the teachers may satisfy parental criticism, but to learn what the school has to teach on modern educational methods applied to the life of the child, especially in the family, and mutually to find ways of co-operation between the home and the school for the betterment of the child.

279

280

APPENDIXES

281

APPENDIX I

SUGGESTIONS FOR CLASS WORK

This book is designed for individual reading or for use in classes. It is not a textbook of the same character as a textbook in mathematics or history, but the material is arranged so as to be both easily readable and of ready analysis for classes. There are two methods of following the course: one by work conducted under a regular teacher in a class, and the other by private or correspondence study.

§ 1. THE CLASS

The class should be composed of parents and other adults, inasmuch as the work is designed for them. It may be a class in connection with the Sunday school in a church, a class conducted by a mothers' club or congress or by a parent-teacher association, or it may be organized under other auspices. Or it might be organized by a group of parents in any community. The class need not consist of either fathers or mothers alone, as the work is planned for both. In any case the work of teaching will be facilitated if, in addition to the customary officers of the class, the teacher will appoint a librarian, whose duties would be to ascertain for the members of the class where the282 books for study and for reference may be obtained, that is, whether they are in the public library, church library, or in private collections, and also, whenever it is desired to purchase books, where they may best be secured.

§ 2. THE TEACHER

The primary requisite for the teacher will be an eagerness to learn, a sufficiently deep interest in the subject to lead to thorough study. No one can teach this class who already knows all about the subject. A spirit sympathetic with the child and the life of the family and a mind willing to study the subject will accomplish much more than facile rhetorical familiarity with it. The best teacher will not often be "an easy talker" on the family; class time is too precious to be occupied with a lecture. While, naturally, one who is a parent will speak with greater experience than another, the ability to teach this subject cannot be limited to fathers and mothers; physiological parenthood is less important than spiritual parenthood. The teacher must have, then, willingness to study the subject, ability to teach as contrasted with mere talking, sympathy with parenthood, and a passion for the religious personal values in life.

§ 3. GENERAL METHOD

The teacher's aim will be to make this course definitely practical. The book is not concerned283 so much with theories of the family as with the present problems of the family, and especially with those that relate to moral and religious education. There must be a sense of definite problems to be concretely treated in all lessons. The teacher will therefore encourage discussion, but will also avoid the tendency to drift into desultory conversation. Direct the discussion to avoid tedious détours on side issues. Direct the discussion to avoid the tendency to treat superficially all the subject at one session. It will be necessary frequently to insist that attention be focused upon the immediate problems suggested by the lesson for the day, and to ask the class to wait until the subjects which they in their eagerness suggest shall come in their due order.

Encourage personal experiences as sidelights and criticisms on the text, but remember that no single experience is conclusive. Beware of the over-elaboration and detailed narration of experiences.

Insist on a thorough study of the text. Students should be so prepared as to make a lecture superfluous and to allow discussion to take the place of review and explanation. The greatest danger in parents' classes is that the members do not study; class work becomes indefinite and soon loses value. Again, the members of the class often are unwilling to be governed by the schedule of lessons, and the284 class drifts into aimless conversation. Adult students especially need to be turned from the tendency to regard educational experience as having come to an end with their school days. The members of this class will need encouragement; they must be stimulated patiently until they have re-formed some habits of study and rediscovered the pleasures of systematic thinking. The best stimulus will be a teacher so convinced of the supreme importance of the subject to be studied as to lead the members to recognize its importance and the insignificance of any price they may pay for efficient spiritual parenthood.

§ 4. CLASS WORK

At the first session teach chap. i, which is introductory. Draw out discussion on the points suggested therein, and assign this chapter and the one following for the next session. The first lesson will give the teacher opportunity to explain and illustrate the method of study, presentation, and discussion.

Assign the work carefully each week, calling especial attention to the "References for Study." Secure promises from as many as possible to read at least one of these references and to prepare a written report, on one sheet of paper, for presentation at the next session. Ask others to look into the special points which will be found in the references given under the heading "Further Reading."285

In beginning a lesson it will be wise to call to mind first the principle running through the book, that the great work of the family is the development of religious persons in the home; then call to mind the application of this principle in the last lesson. Make your review very brief.

Next, bring out the leading topic of the lesson for the day. This should be done so as to present a vital issue and a live topic to the class. Very often the best way of doing this is to state a concrete case involving the issue discussed. The presentation of a definite set of circumstances or a fairly complete experience involving the fundamental principles under discussion is an instance of teaching by the "case method." If the teacher will consider how the law student is trained by the study of particular cases, the advantage of the method will be clear. Be sure that the "case" selected will include the principles to be taught. Prepare the statement of the case beforehand. This should be done in a very brief narrative, so giving the instance as to enable the class to see the reality of the question. Be sure that your instance is itself vital and probable. A class of adults will especially need such points of vital contact. By announcing the topic in advance the teacher will often be able to obtain definite cases in point from the members.286

With the case thus presented take the points in the text and apply them, first to the special case alone, but with the purpose of developing the principles involved in that and similar cases. Beware of the special danger of the case method, namely, that the class may discuss the specific instances rather than the principles.

Teaching is more than telling; it is stimulating other minds to see and comprehend and state for themselves. Therefore the teacher must first comprehend and be able to state for himself. Avoid repeating the phrases of the text. Get them over into your own language and see that the class does the same. Do not fail to call for the brief reports on reading, and to make them a real part of the subject of discussion.

Questioning is the natural method of stimulating minds. Use the question method, but do not confine yourself to "What does the author say on this?" Direct your questions to the points stated and the issues raised so as to compel students to think on the topics and so as to draw out the results of their thinking. Form your own judgments and help the class to form theirs too. Remember that the purpose of the class is to get people thinking on the great subjects discussed. The text is not written in order that groups of students may learn the author's statements, but that they may be led to think seriously on all these287 matters and stimulated to do something about them.

Use the "discussion topics" given at the end of each lesson. They are not designed to furnish a syllabus of the lesson, but to suggest important questions for discussion, some of which may barely be mentioned in the text. They may be used in assigning the advance work, giving topics to different students, and they may be used in your review of the previous lesson.

A syllabus of each lesson will be helpful, provided it be prepared by the students themselves. Encourage the careful reading of the lesson by every member of the class, letting the syllabus grow out of this.

Notebooks will have their largest value if used at home for two purposes: first, to set down the student's analysis of the book as he reads, secondly, to record the student's observations on definite problems and on practice in the home. Note-taking in the class will have very little value unless it is backed up by study at home.

Generalization. Have clearly in your own mind a definite concept of the general principle underlying each section. Read through each section until you can state the principle for yourself. Bring your teaching into a focus at the point of that principle before the lesson ends. Try to get the members of the class to state the principle in their own words.288

In action: The principles will have little value unless translated into practical methods; direct your teaching to their actual use in families. Your generalization is for guidance into application. Urge that the plans described be actually tried. Expect this and call for reports on plans tested in the daily experience of families. If a number of students would try, for example, the plan of worship suggested for two or three weeks and report their experiences in writing, together with the accounts of any other plans tried, a valuable budget of helpful knowledge could thus be gathered.53

Conference plan: Some classes will be able to meet twice a week, taking the lesson at one session and at another spending the time in conference. At the conference period the program might provide for (1) brief papers by members of the class on topics personally assigned, (2) abstracts or summaries of assigned readings, (3) discussion on the particular points raised in the papers, and (4) conference on unsettled questions from the lesson for the class period preceding.289

Club work: A parents' club might be organized, either in a church or in connection with a school, which would use this textbook, follow the study work with conferences, and would secure for its own use a library of the books listed after each chapter. Such a club would be able to put into practice some of the plans advocated and could encourage their application in groups of families.

APPENDIX II

290

A BOOK LIST

The following books would be found useful for the working library of a class or club following the study of this text or for a section of the church library on the home and family. The books marked with an asterisk are the ones which may be regarded as of first practical value to parents and others studying the development of character in the life of the family.

In addition to the titles mentioned below, the the references at the end of each chapter in this book will furnish a list of other sources of valuable material.

296

INDEX

297 Activity in relation to character, 75

Amusement of young people, 190

Anger, Dealing with, 224


Bible, Methods of using the, 121

Bible, The, in the home, 119

Blessing at table, 133

Book list on the family, 290

Books and reading, 113

Boy, The, in the family, 173

Boys' play, 175

Bullying, 253


Character, A constructive policy for, 269

Child nature, Books on, 291

Child unity with the church, 207

Child welfare, Religious meanings of, 3

Childhood characteristics, 53

Christian family, The, as a type, 41

Church, The, and the children, 204

Church, The, and the family, 198

Church, The, and the program of the home, 271

Citizenship, Training for, 96

Class work, Plans of, 281

Community, The, in relation to the home, 88

Community service, 91

Conversation, Religious, 62

Courtship, 188


Dishonesty, 249


Economic development of the home, 13

Educational function, The, of the family, 46

Educational process, The, 49


Factory system, The, and the home, 14

Family as an institution, Books on the, 290

"Family Book," 155

Family defined, 5

Family ideal in the church, 202

Family life, Dominating motive of, 27

Family worship, 126

Family worship, Methods of, 133

Father, The, and the boy, 177

Father, The, and the family, 263

Fighting among children, 234

Function of the family, 46

Future of the family, 268


Girl, The, in the family, 180

God, The consciousness of, 64

Grace at table, 133


Hebrew family life, 39

Home and school co-operation, 213

298 Home, is it passing? 10

Home, Religious interpretation of, 1

Home versus family, 18, 22

Honesty, Training in, 249

Hymns for children, 102


Jesus' teaching on the family, 42


Loyalty as the basic principle, 31, 54

Loyalty, The organization of, 57

Lying and the moral problem, 240


Meals, Conversation at, 165

Moral crises, Dealing with, 218

Moral life, religious roots in the family, 31

Moral teaching, 70

Moral training, Books on, 294

Motive, Religious, in the family, 2

Music in the family, 105


Organization of home, Purpose of, 19


Parental aversion, 186

Parenthood and religious training, 260

Parents' classes, 274

Parents trained in schools, 214

Petulancy in children, 233

Play activity, 107

Play, A policy of, 150

Play on Sunday, 149

Prayers, Children's, 135

Prayers, Family, 137


Quarrels of children, 231

Questions, Children's, 69


Reading, Developing taste for, 115

Religious character of the family, 46

Religious development of the child, 52

Religious education in the family, Books on, 293

Religious education, Meaning of, 47

Religious growth of the child, 55

Religious history of the family, 37

Religious ideas of children, 60

Religious service, 78, 80


School, The home as a, 87

Schools, Public, and the home, 212

Self-control, Developing, 227, 236

Social life of youth, 189

Social qualities to be developed, 28

Social training, 29, 82, 92

Socialization of the home, 16

Song and story, 101

Spiritual values, Place of, 30

Stories and reading, 110

Story-telling, 110

Sunday afternoon problem, 154

Sunday in the home, 145

Sunday play, 149


Table, Ministry of the, 164

Table-talk, 169

Teasing and bullying, 253


Will, Training the, 221

Work and character, 76

Worship in the family, 126

Worship, Outlines of, 139


Youth in the home, 183

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

299

THE CONSTRUCTIVE STUDIES

The Constructive Studies comprise volumes suitable for all grades, from kindergarten to adult years, in schools or churches. In the production of these studies the editors and authors have sought to embody not only their own ideals but the best product of the thought of all who are contributing to the theory and practice of modern religious education. They have had due regard for fundamental principles of pedagogical method, for the results of the best modern biblical scholarship, and for those contributions to religious education which may be made by the use of a religious interpretation of all life-processes, whether in the field of science, literature, or social phenomena.

Their task is not regarded as complete because of having produced one or more books suitable for each grade. There will be a constant process of renewal and change, and the possible setting aside of books which, because of changing conditions in the religious world or further advance in the science of religious education, no longer perform their function, and the continual enrichment of the series by new volumes so that it may always be adapted to those who are taking initial steps in modern religious education, as well as to those who have accepted and are ready to put into practice the most recent theories.

As teachers profoundly interested in the problems of religious education, the editors have invited to co-operate with them authors chosen from a wide territory and in several instances already well known through practical experiments in the field in which they are asked to write.300

The editors are well aware that those who are most deeply interested in religious education hold that churches and schools should be accorded perfect independence in their choice of literature regardless of publishing-house interests and they heartily sympathize with this standard. They realize that many schools will select from the Constructive Studies such volumes as they prefer, but at the same time they hope that the Constructive Studies will be most widely serviceable as a series. The following analysis of the series will help the reader to get the point of view of the editors and authors.

KINDERGARTEN, 4-6 YEARS

The kindergarten child needs most of all to gain those simple ideals of life which will keep him in harmony with his surroundings in the home, at play, and in the out-of-doors. He is most susceptible to a religious interpretation of all these, which can best be fostered through a program of story, play, handwork, and other activities as outlined in

PRIMARY, 6-8 YEARS, GRADES I-III

At the age of six years when children enter upon a new era because of their recognition by the first grade in the public schools the opportunity for the cultivation of right social reactions is considerably increased. Their world still, however, comprises chiefly the home, the school, the playground, and the phenomena of301 nature. A normal religion at this time is one which will enable the child to develop the best sort of life in all these relationships, which now present more complicated moral problems than in the earlier stage. Religious impressions may be made through interpretations of nature, stories of life, song, prayer, simple scripture texts, and handwork. All of these are embodied in

JUNIOR, 9 YEARS, GRADE IV

When the children have reached the fourth grade they are able to read comfortably and have developed an interest in books, having a "reading book" in school and an accumulating group of story-books at home. One book in the household is as yet a mystery, the Bible, of which the parents speak reverently as God's Book. It contains many interesting stories and presents inspiring characters which are, however, buried in the midst of much that would not interest the children. To help them to find these stories and to show them the living men who are their heroes or who were the writers of the stories, the poems, or the letters, makes the Bible to them a living book which they will enjoy more and more as the years pass. This service is performed by

JUNIOR, 10-12 YEARS, GRADES V-VII

Children in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades are hero-worshipers. In the preceding grade they have had a brief introduction to the life of Jesus through their childish explorations of the gospels. His character has impressed them already as heroic and they are eager to know more about him, therefore the year is spent in the study of

In the sixth grade a new point of approach to some of the heroes with whom the children are already slightly acquainted seems desirable. The Old Testament furnishes examples of men who were brave warriors, magnanimous citizens, loyal patriots, great statesmen, and champions of democratic justice. To make the discovery of these traits in ancient characters and to interpret them in the terms of modern boyhood and girlhood is the task of two volumes in the list. The choice between them will be made on the basis of preference for handwork or textbook work for the children.303

Paul was a great hero. Most people know him only as a theologian. His life presents miracles of courage, struggle, loyalty, and self-abnegation. The next book in the series is intended to help the pupil to see such a man. The student is assisted by a wealth of local color.

HIGH SCHOOL, 13-17 YEARS

In the secular school the work of the eighth grade is tending toward elimination. It is, therefore, considered here as one of the high-school grades. In the high-school years new needs arise. There is necessary304 a group of books which will dignify the study of the Bible and give it as history and literature a place in education, at least equivalent to that of other histories and literatures which have contributed to the progress of the world. This series is rich in biblical studies which will enable young people to gain a historical appreciation of the religion which they profess. Such books are

In the high-school years also young people find it necessary to face the problem of living the Christian life in a modern world, both as a personal experience and as a basis on which to build an ideal society. To meet this need a number of books intended to inspire boys and girls to look forward to taking their places as home-builders and responsible citizens of a great Christian democracy and to intelligently choose their task in it are prepared or in preparation. The following are now ready:

ADULT GROUP

The Biblical studies assigned to the high-school period are in most cases adaptable to adult class work. There are other volumes, however, intended only for the adult group, which also includes the young people beyond the high-school age. They are as follows:

It is needless to say that the Constructive Studies present no sectarian dogmas and are used by churches and schools of all denominational affiliations. In the grammar-and high-school years more books are provided than there are years in which to study them, each book representing a school year's work. Local conditions, and the preference of the Director of Education or the teacher of the class will be the guide in choosing the courses desired, remembering that in the preceding list the approximate place given to the book is the one which the editors and authors consider most appropriate.

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