On the Training of Parents

by Ernest Hamlin Abbott

Indeed, from the earlier months, life after death, "the happiness of the good, and the misery of the wicked," were topics of "frequent and delightful conversation with her parents."

In her last hours she expressed her assurance that she would be saved, and her last audible words were, "I am not afraid to die." Thus ended this brief life of four years and twenty-six days.

An example of such training would be hard to find among parents of the present day. This is not because there are no parents who have Parson Hurd's convictions; neither is it because there are none who have his confidence in the capacity of children. It is because there are lacking parents who have both the convictions and the confidence. The reason why many parents fail where James Mill and Parson Hurd succeeded is that they try to make compromise between two contradictory theories. Although they wish to give their children a full complement of doctrines, they either do not possess the full complement themselves, or do not believe that their children are mature enough to receive it. The spectacle of adults attempting to instruct a primary class in the Logos Doctrine by the kindergarten method is thoroughly modern.

If the way of Parson Hurd and James Mill seems to us either too hard or unreal, there is another way that may be found. That is the studious exclusion of religion from the life—even from the knowledge—of our children. It was this way that J. S. Mill supposed his father set him traveling. Of course he was mistaken when he said in his autobiography that he never had religious belief. He was embowered in religious, though not in Christian, or even in theistic, belief. The way that he walked was erroneously marked on his map; that was all. This is worth noting because it indicates how easily even a logician may miss this obscure way of no religion. Those who would lead their children by this route must avoid the very shadow of religion as they would that of the upas. Indeed, against even the air that has passed the shadow of religion they must quarantine their children. Religion is infectious. It can be conveyed by the subtlest means. To it children are perilously liable. Against it there seems to be no trustworthy antitoxin. Children are surrounded by infected people. A chance word may deposit the germ. One child out of the brood may thus fall a victim to a particularly virulent species of religion simply because he never had it in a mild form. Nevertheless, it is possible to establish a quarantine that may chance to remain effective for years. By this means children may be kept from a knowledge of religion just as many are safely, or dangerously, kept from a knowledge of what most people regard as advanced physiology. One family, I am told, has taken this way. How successful it has proved, I cannot say. All I have heard is that one member of the family is now enlisted in the ministry. This does not necessarily betoken failure. The theory was simply that each child was to be kept immune until he was old enough to decide for himself whether or not he would take the infection. This way is not the way of indifference. It cannot be followed by any one who is not profoundly affected by religion, whether hostile or friendly to it. It may require less routine diligence than the other way, but it requires more anxious circumspection.

Different from either of these is that third way blazed by the developing traits of our children. Those who take it cannot regard religion as a form of doctrines or practices to be handed over to their child ready-made; neither can they regard it as a superfluity, which they are to withdraw from their child until he can choose to avoid it as a danger or accept it as a luxury. They can regard it only as a mode of life and therefore a mode of growth. They conceive it to be quite as perfect when it is genuinely manifested in the immaturities of the boy or girl as when it is shown in the riper forms of old age.

Not that they undervalue doctrines. They know that there never was a religion that did not formulate itself. They look, however, for the doctrines to follow the religion, not the religion the doctrines. They are not surprised when they find their children constructing a philosophy of religion for themselves. Once upon a time a little girl was heard to address her dolls: "There's us, and Bridget, and Jews. We're all made of the same material; and we all have the same Father; I guess the difference is that some are more refined than others." No grown-up could have given her in the same number of words a more thoroughly typical example of theology: a union of anthropology, biology, and metaphysics, with a quasi-ethical conclusion. No ecumenical creed could have been more valid for the generation that produced it than could this brief philosophy be for her.

Those who would take this third way well know, too, that there are some phases of religion from which it may be well, if possible, to save children for a time. It is no more necessary to feed them on Dante's "Inferno" than on Welsh rabbit. This, however, is very different from enforcing abstinence from all religious food.

Conceding as much as this, then, to dogma and to caution, those who do not object to seeing a child grow will—let him grow. They will not be surprised if he looks out on the world with wonder. Neither will they be surprised if his wonder is slow in reaching satiety. It is sometimes very leisurely.

Davy, aged six, asked one day at table: "Mamma, what's above the clouds?"

"Air."