CHAPTER VIII
The Moral Code
In attempting to explain and enforce a moral code, the first and most essential need is to formulate definitely to oneself the code which one proposes to enforce and to explain. There is nothing from which children, and subject human beings generally, suffer so much as the incoherence of the thought of those in authority over them. Before you can begin to lay down the law you must know what that law is, and your heart, soul, and spirit must not only know it, but approve it, before you can gain a willing obedience to it from those on whom you wish to impose it. By this I do not mean only that we ought to make up our minds whether this, that, or the other isolated act is right or wrong, as it occurs, but that we ought to have a clear perception and knowledge of the things that are right and the things that are wrong, and have a standard which we can apply to any new action brought under our notice, so that, measuring the new act by our old standard, we shall be able to say, with some sort of rough accuracy, "This is wrong," or "This is right."
And the standard of expediency is not a good one for this purpose, nor is the standard of custom, nor yet the standard of gentility or the standard of success in life. Children are not good judges of expediency. The law of mere custom will not be strong enough to bind them when desire calls with enchanting voice to forbidden things. Gentility and the gospel of getting on will leave them cold. You may at first deal merely with a succession of unrelated particulars, saying, "This is right," "This is wrong," beating down the children's questionings by your mere Ipse dixit; but a time will come when it will not be enough, in answer to their "Why is it wrong?" "Why is it right?" to answer "Because I say so." The child will want some other standard which he himself can apply. The standard of what you say may be a shifting one, and anyhow, he cannot be at all sure what you will say unless he knows what is your standard, the standard by which you will decide whether to say, in any given case, that a thing is wrong or right. And in order that you may clearly set before the child your own moral standard you must first have set it very clearly before yourself. It is not enough to say, "Stealing is wrong," "Lying is wrong," "Greediness is wrong." If you feel that these things are wrong because they are contrary to the will of God, you will not find that that explanation is sufficient for a child unless he knows very much more about God than His name and certain miraculous and incomprehensible attributes of His. He will want to know what is the will of God, to which these wrong things are contrary. And he will want very much to know the definite right as well as the definite wrong. You will have to give the child a standard that can be applied to positives as well as negatives.
There is a very simple standard by which to measure the actions of children—and, much more severely, our own actions. It is set up in the words of Christ: "Do unto others as you would they should do unto you"—a standard so simple that quite little children can understand and apply it, a standard so severe that were it understood and applied by us who are no longer children, the warped, tangled, rotten web we call civilisation could not endure for a day. There is no other standard by which a child can judge its own actions, and yours, and judge them justly.
Having fixed your standard it will be necessary to try your own actions by it as well as the child's. And this standard will give you the only vital code of morality, because it compels the continual exercise of imagination, the continual preening and flight of the wings of the soul. You cannot order your life by that Divine precept without a hundred times a day asking yourself, "How should I like that, if I were not myself?" without continually putting yourself, imaginatively, in some one else's place. And when the child asks, "Why is it wrong to steal?" you can lead him to see how little he would like to have his own possessions stolen. When he asks, "Why is it wrong to lie?" you may teach him to imagine his own bitterness if others should deceive him. It is, of course, much easier to say, "It is wrong because I say so," or even "because God says so"; but if you want to mark it right or wrong, to grave it deeply and ineffaceably on the tables of the heart and the soul, teach the child to see for himself how things are right and wrong—and to judge of them by that one Divine and unfailing rule.
Of course even when the child knows what is right he will not always do it, any more than you do: and one of the questions to be considered is how you shall deal with those lapses from moral rectitude of which he, no less than you, will often be guilty. Punishments, the old savage punishments, were revenge, and nothing but revenge, a desire to "pay out" the offender, to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. More humane and reasonable legislators have sought to prove that punishment is curative—that the fear of punishment will deter people from doing wrong. A distinguished official of the Home Office gave it as his opinion only the other day that punishment, no matter how severe, will not act as a deterrent, if there is ever so slight a chance of the criminal's escaping it. What would deter would be the certainty of punishment, however slight. Now since you are not omniscient you cannot pretend to your child that if he does wrong you are certain to know and to punish him: if you are silly enough to pretend it, he will find you out immediately, and estimate your lie at its true blackness. You can, however, without any pretence, assure him that if he does wrong he himself will know it, that it will make him feel unclean and nasty, and miserable till he is able to wash himself in the waters of repentance and forgiveness. That if he acts meanly and dirtily he will feel dirty and mean, and if he acts bravely and cleanly he will feel clean and brave. And he will find that what you say is true. But not unless you shall have succeeded in convincing him that your standard is a true standard, and that the things which that standard shows to be wrong are wrong indeed. Here is the highest work of the imagination: to teach the child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged that the knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.
No one desires, of course, that a child should be always feeling his own moral pulse: if he has learned that there is a right and a wrong way he will not be always bothering about which way he may be living—it will be only when something goes amiss that he will stop and consider. Just as one does not stop to think whether one is breathing properly, only when one chokes one knows that one isn't.