Parents and children

by Charlotte M. Mason

THE LAW AGAINST US—HEREDITY.

Who are they whom General Booth cheerfully undertakes to re-fashion and make amenable to the conditions of godly and righteous and sober living? Let us hear the life history of many of them in his own words:—

“The rakings of the human cesspool.”

“Little ones, whose parents are habitually drunk.... Whose ideas of merriment are gained from the familiar spectacle of the nightly debauch.”

“The obscenity of the talk of many of the children of some of our public schools could hardly be outdone, even in Sodom and Gomorrah.”

And the childhood—save the word!—of the children of to-day reproduces the childhood of their parents, their grand-parents, who knows? their great-grand-parents. These are, no doubt, the worst; but the worst must be reckoned with first, for if these slip through the meshes of the remedial net, the masses more inert than vicious slide out through the breaks. In the first place, then, the scheme embraces the vicious by inheritance; proposes to mix up with the rest a class whose sole heritage is an inconceivable and incalculable accumulation of vicious inclinations and propensities. And this, in the face of that conception of heredity which is quietly taking possession of the public mind, and causing many thoughtful parents to abstain from very active efforts to mould the characters of their children.

Those of us whose attention has been fixed upon the working of the law of heredity until it appears to us to run its course, unmodified and unlimited by other laws, may well be pardoned for regarding with doubtful eye a scheme which has, for its very first condition, the regeneration of the vicious; of the vicious by inherited propensity.

THE LAW AGAINST US—HABIT.

Use is second nature, we say. Habit is ten natures; habit begins as a cobweb, and ends as a cable. “Oh, you’ll get used to it,” whatever it is. Dare we face the habits in which these people have their being? It is not only the obscene speech, the unholy acts; that which signifies is the manner of thoughts we think; speech, act, are the mere outcome; it is the habitual thought of a man which shapes that which we call his character. And these, can we reasonably doubt that every imagination of their heart is only evil continually? We say, use is second nature, but let us consider what we mean by the phrase; what is the philosophy of habit so far as it has been discovered to us. The seat of habit is the brain; the actual grey nervous matter of the cerebrum. And the history of a habit is shortly this: “The cerebrum of man grows to those modes of thought in which it is habitually exercised.” That ‘immaterial’ thought should mould the ‘material’ brain need not surprise nor scandalise us, for do we not see with our eyes that immaterial thought moulds the face, forms what we call countenance, lovely or loathsome according to the manner of thought it registers. The how of this brain growth is not yet in evidence, nor is this the time and place to discuss it; but, bearing in mind this structural adaptation to confirmed habit, what chance, again, we say, has a scheme which has for its first condition the regeneration of the vicious, vicious not only by inherited propensity, but by unbroken inveterate habit?

THE LAW AGAINST US—UNCONSCIOUS CEREBRATION.