But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the Beautiful Gate of all noble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably out of repair. One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline. If you have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen? Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience? What is it, I ask, that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, but simply this habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so grievously lax in so many of our English homes? In Carlyle's strong words, "Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that 'would,' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to 'should,' and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to 'shall.'"[10]
The second great pillar of the portal of noble life seems to me to show still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration, and that pillar is reverence,—that heaven-eyed quality which Dr. Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks which are anything but reverent on sacred things—have I not some reason to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine issues is threatened with extinction? Do you think that the boy who has never been taught to reverence his own mother's womanhood will reverence the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at his hands, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me?"
Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its agnosticism is due,—that deadening down and stamping out of the spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul, which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character estimable in many respects, but for the most part without noble aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms—a character, to use Saint Beuve's expressive phrase, "tout en façade sur la rue," whose moral judgments are no better than street cries; the type of man that accepts the degradation of women with blank alacrity as a necessity of civilization, and would have it regulated, like any other commodity for the market; that very common type of character which, whatever its good qualities, spreads an atmosphere of blight around it, stunting all upward growing things and flattening down our life to the dead level of desert sands.
If you would not be satisfied at your boy rising no higher than this, then, again I say, guard the springs of reverence. Do not let your pride in your child's smartness or any momentary sense of humor make you pass over any little speech that savors of irreverence; check it instantly. Exact respect for yourself and for the boy's father, the respect which is no enemy, but the reverse, to the uttermost of fondness. Insist upon good manners and respectful attention to the guests of your house. Do not despise the good old fashion of family prayers because they do not rise to all that we might wish them to be. At least they form a daily recognition of "Him in whom the families of the earth are blessed"—a daily recognition which that keen observer of English life, the late American Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, pointed out as one of the great secrets of England's greatness, and which forms a valuable school for habits of reverence and discipline for the children of the family. Insist upon the boys being down in time for the worship of God, and do not allow them to get into the habit indulged in by so many young men of "sloping" down with slippered feet long after breakfast is done and prayers are over.
Only let the springs of reverence well up in your child's soul, and then, and then only, will you be able to give your boy what, after all, must always be the greatest safeguard from shipwreck in this perilous world—religious faith, that stops him at the very threshold of temptation with the words: "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" Your very attitude as you kneel by his side with bowed head and folded hands while he says his little evening and morning prayer will breathe into his soul a sense of a Divine Presence about our bed and about our path. Your love—so strong to love, and yet so weak to save—can lead his faltering childish feet to that Love which is deeper than our deepest fall, "which knows all, but loves us better than it knows." You can press your child against the very heart of God, and lay him in the Everlasting Arms, that faint not, neither are weary; and, with the mother of St. Augustine, you may know that the child of such prayers and such tears will never perish.
"Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
FOOTNOTES:
[ [8] This is the case with our recognized medical manuals; I do not know whether it is equally true of American manuals.
[ [9] Vol. ii. See chapter on "The Position of Women."