The Unfolding Life / A Study of Development with Reference to Religious Training

by Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

The dangers and opportunities growing out of this strong tendency toward segregation can not be overestimated. A walk along a city street in the evening reveals the fact that the nurture of the sidewalk and the ice cream parlor has largely supplanted the nurture of the home on the social side. The table with the evening lamp—"the home's lighthouse"—and the family circle complete about it, are an almost unknown experience in the life of the average American child. In a recent convention a speaker, who is in charge of a great penal institution filled with human derelicts, said he believed it to be as much a duty of the church to preserve at least one evening a week sacred to the home, as to designate another for the prayer meeting or preaching service.

The home ought to be the center of the child's social life. Why can not the lights and music and companionship there be made as attractive as the lights of the corner store, or billiard hall, or the sound of the street piano, which pave the way to the saloon and the dance hall later? That boys and girls will congregate during this period and the next is a law unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. Nurture asks whether the home does not furnish a better environment during this energetic, habit forming and irresponsible period than the corner store or the "gang?" It asks whether the society of those invited within its doors for a good time, under the sympathetic and watchful eye of the father and mother, is not apt to be more conducive to true character building than the society of the chance acquaintance with no credentials save his skill in story telling and initiation into fascinating mysteries? It asks still further, in this age of hero worship, whether the home should not erect the ideals of manhood and womanhood through example, through books, through honored guests who have achieved true distinction instead of delegating this privilege to the group around the bonfire or the man who gathers the admiring circle to listen to the salacious tale? The home which provides for this social craving within its sheltering walls, blending the faces of father and mother with those of companions in the most joyous of good times, and, after the evening altar, when the lights are darkened, knows that each pillow is pressed by its own pure face, that home is a bulwark of the nation and the ante chamber to one of God's many mansions.

May God have pity on the thousands of children who live in houses, but are homeless.

HERO WORSHIP

In this new interest in his fellows, all figures do not stand out in equal proportion against the child's horizon. Some loom very high, and in the inner chamber of the soul, incense is burning at their shrine. Out of the earlier interest in people, and desire to imitate their actions, there begins to emerge the great passion of hero worship with all its power in shaping ideals and determining character. If it be true, indeed, that life grows like what it gazes fixedly upon, then nurture has here an important work.

The hero of any period must inevitably embody that which the life most admires at the time, hence physical strength and skill, courage and daring will be prominent factors in a boy's hero in this period. This hero may be, perchance, the physical director of the Y.M.C.A., the champion baseball or football player, an explorer or adventurer, a desperado, or—happy case—a father who has not forgotten how to swim and fish and hunt and play ball. A boy always longs to place his father on the throne of his heart, if he is given a chance, but the fathers who covet that place enough to pay the price for it are too few.

A hard working mechanic said to a friend, "I made up my mind I would rather have a backache when my boys were little than a heartache later on," and so no day's task was so heavy, up toil so exhausting that when he came home at night his two boys could not claim him. The cramped muscles would unlimber behind the bat, the tired limbs would forget their weariness in the jaunt that had been planned with father, and during the hours of freedom the three were chums in sports, in interests, in confidence. They say there is no more beautiful sight in that town today than two stalwart, manly fellows arm in arm with the father, who counts it the joy and pride of his life to have mounted the hero's throne in the hearts of his sons.

While boys always choose a man as their hero, girls may choose either the masculine or feminine character. They are still near enough Nature's heart to glory in wildness and abandon, and the subtle delicacy of true womanhood has not the charm for them now it will have later. Yet it is part of the priceless dower of motherhood to so share in the daughter's life through sympathy and understanding that, to "be like mother" will embody all the aspirations of a girlish heart.

"THE READING CRAZE"

The flame of hero worship is fed from two sources—the life of some one near to the child and the passionate delight in reading which characterizes the years from about ten to fifteen and is especially marked from twelve to fourteen. The choice of books will naturally be governed by the strongest interests. We are not surprised, therefore, that every page must teem with life and chronicle some achievement, preferably in the physical realm, for in the thought of the junior, "Greater is he that taketh a city than he who ruleth his own spirit."