Common Sense Applied to Religion; Or, The Bible and the People

by Catharine Esther Beecher

To the common remark that the mothers must do this at home, it is replied, in the first place, that the mothers, to a great extent—as the general rule, having but few exceptions—are not qualified to do this; and, next, if they were, they have not the health, or they have not the time, or they have not the will to do so. When men wish to perfect and honor any profession, they provide endowments to sustain teachers of the highest order. Thus, for example, though it may be said that farmers can best train their sons for their own profession, still agricultural professorships in our colleges, and teachers sustained by endowments, are found to be indispensable to honor and raise that pursuit to a science and a profession.

While the young women of the nation see every thing else more honored and provided for than the very profession and future business of their lives, they will grow up to neglect and despise such duties.

The education of woman, to be what Heaven designed for the race, should unite the home training of the parents with the school training of the teacher. Instead of taking young girls from all domestic interests and pursuits, and turning all the energies of their nervous system into the intellectual department of the brain, there should be an equable and healthful training, at once, of the bodily powers, the social and domestic habits, the intellect, and the moral nature; and in effecting this, the parents and the teachers should work together harmoniously. It is in reference to this that the tendency of this age and country to conduct the education of the higher and middling classes in boarding-schools instead of at home is most disastrous. Boarding-schools should be the exceptions to meet the wants of a sparse population. Instead of this, the country sends its daughters to city boarding-schools, and the city sends to country boarding-schools, and so home education is becoming more and more neglected.

The consequences to the health, happiness, and moral interests of woman are more and more disastrous.

In reference to this, the efforts of the above association have been confined to establishing what it is hoped would become model institutions in the centres of influence of the states where they were located, in which the funds should not be spent in providing great buildings to take children away from all home influences and domestic pursuits, but rather in providing such teachers and influences as would have a direct bearing on the homes of the pupils, and aid the parents in cultivating home habits, home virtues, and home tastes and pursuits.

This brief history of the writer's efforts is given because its results will now be seen to form a part of the "history of the dogma" which is the subject of this section.

For, during the whole period of these efforts to promote the right training of the human mind by woman as the Heaven-appointed minister for this end, the influence of this dogma has been constantly forced on attention as the real antagonistic force. That is to say, the whole energies of the Christian Church, in its distinctive character, are organized to remedy the evil after the mind is educated wrong, while little is attempted by the powerful agency of organization to secure its right education. In proof of this, it will be seen that all the great benevolent organizations for which collections are enforced from the pulpit are for adults, with one only seeming exception. There is an organization to send Bibles, another to send tracts and colporteurs, another to send missionaries abroad, another to send home-missionaries, another for the sailor, another for the slaves, another to educate ministers, another to raise up colleges, another for temperance, and so on. All these have as their direct aim those who are educated wrong, and are to be redeemed from sinful habits. Not one has any direct reference to the formation of right habits in the daily training of every-day life.

The Sunday-school is the only seeming exception. But this is only a weekly exercise of an hour or two, in which every sect secures the training of its children in its own religious system, while this system, in most cases, is based on the Augustinian doctrine of the inability of children to feel or do a single right thing till they are "regenerated," while not only the teaching, but the Sunday libraries for children all enforce this dogma. The practical influence of this, though counteracted more or less by other influences, is fairly illustrated in the mental history of the author in the Introduction.

Thus the Christian Church has all its organizations to cure diseased and miseducated mind, and not a single one to prevent this ruin by its right training.

This being so, this effort to promote the neglected and yet great end of Christian effort has been looked on with indifference, or as a small concern to receive its mite, while all others are to receive their hundreds and thousands.