The Warriors

by Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay

The first rule is parental. The primitive monarchy is in the home. A young baby cries. The trained nurse turns on the light, lifts the baby, hushes it, sings to it, rocks it, and stills its weeping by caresses and song. When next the baby is put down to sleep, more cries, more soothing and disturbance, and the setting of a tiny instinct which shall some day be will—the power of control.

The grandmother arrives on the scene. When baby cries, she plants the little one firmly in its crib, turns down the light, pats and soothes the tiny restless hands that fight the air, watches, waits. From the crib come whimpers, angry cries, yells, sobs, baby snarls and sniffles that die away in a sleepy infant growl. Silence, sleep, repose, and the building of life and nerve and muscle in the quiet and the darkness. The baby has been put in harmony with the laws of nature—the invigoration of fresh air, sleep, stillness—and the little one wakens and grows like a fresh, sweet rose. The mother, looking on, learns of the ways of God with men.

Firmness is the true gentleness. There is a form of authority which must be as implacable as the divine decree. Mercy is the requiring of obedience to law; it is not a cajoling training in law-defiance, which shall one day break the mother's heart and upset the social relations of the world.

The next rule is personal: the direction of one's own energy in the way of one's own will. The child moves his hands, his feet; he turns his rattle up and down, and shakes it about. He discovers that he can pull things toward him and push them away; that he can reach things that are higher than his head. He begins to creep. He touches things that are the other side of the world from him, that is, across the room. He plucks fibres from the rug or carpet; swallows straws, buttons, and little strings. He pounds, and sets up vibrations of pleasant noise; he clashes ten-pins, he blows his whistle, squeezes his rubber horse and man, rattles the newspaper, flings about his bottle and his blocks. He feels himself a self-directing power, and at times asserts this power against the will of those who would make him do what he does not want to do. The love of rule is in him, and he lays his little hands on power.

Education determines whether this power shall be for good or for evil. We cannot take away power from any child—he shall move the affairs of nations—but we can direct this love of power, or crush it; strengthen it, or weaken it; turn it toward the highest help of man, or deflect it to tyranny, cruelty, and crime.

Child-training is guidance in the way of God's decrees. It is not the setting of one's own ideas upon a little child; it is not the gratification of one's own love of power; it is not the satisfaction of one's own self-conceit. It is a firm, humble striving to carry on the harmony of the universe: to bring up the child to love order, justice, mercy, and truth.

Education is the teaching of how to direct energy for the universal good. It lays hold of a child and, out of his destructive instincts—the instinct to bang, and pull, and tear to pieces—it develops creative power, the inventive genius that lies hid within him. It takes the pure love of noise, and trains it to pitches, harmonies, intervals, and makes a musician of the boy who used to whack his spoon. It takes the alphabet and the early pothooks, and the boy by and by combines them into literature. The apples and the peaches which he is taught to exchange justly are by and by transmuted into trade and commerce. He brings cargoes from Cuba and Ceylon, trades with Japan and Hawaii, and the Asiatic isles. The energy of block-building is developed into sculpture, architecture, and civil engineering. The stamping of his foot in anger is directed to determination, perseverance, the rule of the brave spirit, the unconquerable will. Nothing is more marvellous than this grave upbuilding.

The next rule is social: the direction of personal energy that shall leave a distinct impress on other lives. It is long before we realize that for each exertion we are responsible; that what we do is held against us in strict account, not only by fate, which builds our destiny for us out of our own deeds, but by every other person with whom we come in contact. Our fellows check off daily against us so much vitality, so much magnanimity, so much idleness, cruelty, spite, goodness, selfishness, meanness, or loving-kindness. Life holds a record of our every deed, and from no least responsibility can we make our escape. We are the prisoners of events which we ourselves have brought about.

The discipline of ethics, of home-training, of the Church, and of religious teaching is addressed fundamentally to this social consciousness of ours, this responsibility which we cannot evade. To bear rule aright is to go forth into the world to build up, in authority, talent, and influence, the kingdom of God.

1. There is the agricultural phase of social rule. A man tills a farm. It has upon it trees, streams, woodland, and meadow-land. He may rule—to what end? If he rules it for his own personal ends—merely to fill his granaries, and lay up gold—he rules it for miserliness, with a sort of thrift that is as passing in inheritance as the flying April rain.