The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

The most demoralising of all principles of belief was the discouraging teaching that human nature was fallen and incapable of reaching holiness by its own effort—the teaching that one could only come through grace and forgiveness of sins into a proper relation with temporal and eternal things. For those below the ordinary level, this position of grace produced spiritual stagnation, not to speak of the business people, who daily allowed the blood of Jesus to wipe out their day's debit in the score of morality. Only those who were naturally superior increased in holiness on being convinced that they were children of God in Christ. Mankind, on the whole, showed the deep demoralisation of a double morality. This dualism commenced as soon as the first Christians ceased to expect the return of Jesus,—an expectation which brought their life into real unity with his teaching. But this double morality has for nineteen hundred years retained man's soul and the social order in practical heathenism. Although some pure and great spirits really received aid from Christianity in their longings for infinity, and although in the Middle Ages many strong hearts tried seriously to realise its teaching, yet the majority of mankind lived and lives still in wavering irresolution. This is the result of having no place to anchor to while the citizens of antiquity had an ethic, which could be translated into reality and could turn them into sincere, steadfast personalities.

Since nineteen hundred years have proved that there is no possibility, in a humanly constructed society, of living according to the teaching of Jesus, as a practical, infallible rule of holiness, man can escape this immoral duplicity only in one way: the way already travelled over by many separate individuals, who with Prometheus cry out, "Hast thou not, thyself, completed all, O holy glowing heart!" In other words, these individuals have become convinced that Christianity is the product of humanity. Just as little as any other product of humanity does it exhaust absolute and eternal truth.

When men cease to teach their children belief in an eternal providence, without whose will no sparrow falls from the roof, they will be able, instead of this, to imprint on the minds of children the new religious conception of the divinity of a world, proceeding according to law. The new morality will be built on this new religious idea. It will be filled with reverence for the absolute conjunction of cause and effect—a connection which no grace can remove. Man's actions will really be directed by this certainty. He will not rock himself to sleep in any sort of hope, based on providence or a reconciliation, able to defer surely fixed effects. This new morality, strengthened by the realities of life, admits of logical consequences. No single command of this teaching needs to remain an empty phrase. In its system, too, there will be a place to apply all the eternal profound words uttered by Jesus or by other great human souls. These words will ever furnish further material for application, which is the same as saying material for self-application. Yet the application will be worked out in complete freedom. Each word will be used as furnishing the material just suited to that style which men wish to apply to the architecture of their personality. Yet neither the words nor the examples of one or the other teacher will be taught as absolutely binding.

The soul of the child will not be stained by tears of repentance for sins nor by the fear of hell. It will not be stained by a realism without ideas and without ideals, by the contemptuous mistrust, which the mouldering effects of fine words leave behind, like cold damp spots. The weak, as well as the strong, will progress in the happy and responsible belief in their own personality, as their only source of help. The pulse of their purpose will be strong and warm with red blood. They will not be forced to humility; they will not accept even equality with all others, or with any other one. On the contrary they will be strengthened in their right, to give their own individual stamp to their joys, their sufferings, and their works. They will be warned to do their best because it is their own; to seek their highest good, by drawing their own boundaries at the place where the rights of others begin.

While the home and the school make compromises between two opposed views of life, people obtain from neither of them any real good for the education of children. I have already shown how in one and the same school religious instruction and a certain amount of knowledge and love for nature as well as history can be communicated. In one and the same school the course of natural development and history can be taught in connection with instruction in religious history. In this instruction Judaism and Christianity will receive the first place. So the reverence and love children were wont to acquire for the personality and morality of Jesus, previously obtained in the Bible, can be increased. Guided by sincere and serious purposes one can select either plan. But, during religious instruction, to make Moses and Christ the absolute teachers of truth, and in the hours devoted to natural history, to expound Darwinism, cause more than anything else that want of logic, that moral laxity and flaccidity that can effect nothing and want nothing. Everything I have learnt, since these words were written, has strengthened a hundred fold my previous convictions that the most essential thing is not, what kind of view of life we have—this may be important enough too—but that we have enough capacity of faith to appropriate for ourselves some view of life, enough force to bring it to reality in life. But nothing works more depressingly on the ethical energy of growing generations than the dualistic view of life, received at the present time at school. The school too must exercise its choice; there must be no compromise between two schemes of education and two views of life, if the strength of will and the power of faith in young people is not to be broken. The question of a compromise is in this case not a question of application; it is a most important question of principle in education.

Since I set down these words, many points of view have been brought out in this connection. One which made a sensation when it was published, in 1890, was Professor Dodel's book, Moses or Darwin? The author showed how deeply Darwinism was implanted in science and in civilisation; how popular education was restricted, because it was kept remote from the scientific views of the present day and forced into the circle of ecclesiastical ideas. Religious instruction is simply a crime against the psychological law of development. For children are taught by a theological system to think about abstract conceptions, while they are in no condition to do it. The worst is, he said, that in high schools the theory of development is now taught as scientific truth, while in the common schools, built and maintained by the same government, the myth of the Mosaic story of creation continues to be taught, in the sharpest contrast with what science and living nature teach the child. This is an immoral and dishonest state of affairs that must be brought to an end.

It is my deepest conviction that man, without religion in the emotional element of his nature, can pursue no ideal ends, cannot see beyond his own personal interest, cannot realise great purposes, cannot be ready to sacrifice himself. Religious enthusiasm broadens our soul, binds us to the acts we hold as ideals. But because Christianity weighs upon the soul and can no longer be the connecting link of all factors in our conduct, earnest men are abandoning it more and more, influenced by purely religious reasons. Such men should not have their children brought up as Christians, under the excuse that the child requires Christianity. Here, as in other cases, in which adults are not agreed about what the child needs, we should try to get, not from adults but from children themselves, some information about their real needs. In this way we can learn that the child himself begins at a very early period to be concerned with the eternal riddles of mankind, to be troubled with the questions of whence and whither. At the same time one discovers that the sincere and honest childish nature is opposed to the Christian explanation of the world, until the child's sincerity is dulled and he either takes without question what is taught, or in his own soul denies what his lips must repeat, or finally allows his heart to be possessed by the only nourishment offered to his religious needs.

My own recollections of childhood caused me to make observations of the religious ideas of children at an early period. I have now before me comprehensive accounts of this investigation, going back twenty-five years. I recollect my own fierce hate against God, when I, at the age of six years, heard of the death of Jesus being caused by God's demand for an atonement, and at ten years I recall my denial of God's providence, when a young workman died far away from his wife and his five children, to whom his existence was so necessary. My brooding about the existence of God took on this occasion the form of a challenge. I wrote in the sand, "God is dead." In doing so I thought, If there is a God, he will kill me now with a thunderbolt. But since the sun continued to shine, the question was answered for the time being; but it soon turned up again. I had no other religious instruction than reading the Bible on Sunday, preaching on Sunday, and reading from the catechism, which, by the way, was never explained. Yet the New Testament belonged to my play books; I learnt in it to love Jesus as profoundly as other great personalities of whom I read. But during the confirmation period, I received explanations of the Bible; in them every point, every name in the Gospel was explained, every sentence made the basis of hair-splitting distinctions, to show the fulfilment of prophecies and the edifying hidden meaning of every word, that formerly seemed so simple. The dogma of the Trinity for example was shown to be contained in the second verse of Genesis. This was a terribly sad discovery for me, that the living book of my childish heart and my childish imagination could be so stone dead. That religious indifference is a frequent result of religious instruction, that spiritual maladies come from the desire to convert the souls of children, numerous proofs can be given. I have heard children of six years speak with holy horror of their four-year-old brother who dug with a spade on Sunday. On the other hand I have heard a six-year-old child who was dragged in one day to three church services ask after reflection whether it was not more tolerable to go to hell immediately.

The Judaic Christian conception of a creative and sustaining providence, which gives the fullest perfection to all things, is so absolutely opposed to all that experience and evolution teaches us about existence, that one cannot even conceive of the possibility of holding both ideas theoretically at the same time. Much less can one practically unite them by the paste of compromise. The child with sharp-sighted simplicity does not allow himself to be deceived. If we do not wish to speak the truth then let us not speak to children about life at all—life in its unity and diversity, its manifold creative acts, its process of continuous creation, its eternal divine subjection to law.

But this means that it is impossible to save the Christian God for children, after the child begins to think about this God, in whom he is taught blind confidence. Nor can the child be prepared in this way for the new conception of God with its religious, its uniting and elevating power, I mean for the conception of a God whose revealed book is the starry heavens, and whose prophetic sight is in the unfathomable sea, and in the deeps of man's heart, the God who is in life and is life. Nothing shows better how imperfect is the real belief of modern thinkers, than the fact that they always teach their children a system which they do not wish to live by spiritually themselves, but which they hold as indispensable for the moral and social future of the child.