Bits about Home Matters

by Helen Hunt Jackson

"Ah! that is a very different thing. He is, then, to do the thing that you tell him to do, because that thing is right and is needful for him; you are his guide on a road over which you have gone, and he has not; you are an interpreter, a helper; you know better than he does about all things, and your knowledge is to teach his ignorance."

"Certainly, that is what I mean. A pretty state of things it would be if children were to be allowed to think they know as much as their parents. There is no way except to break their wills in the beginning."

"But you have just said that it is not to your will as will that he is to yield, but to your superior knowledge and experience. That surely is not 'breaking his will.' It is of all things furthest removed from it. It is educating his will. It is teaching him how to will."

This sounds dangerous; but the logic is not easily turned aside, and there is little left for the advocate of will-breaking but to fall back on some texts in the Bible, which have been so often misquoted in this connection that one can hardly hear them with patience. To "Children, obey your parents," was added "in the Lord," and "because it is right," not "because they are your parents." "Spare the rod" has been quite gratuitously assumed to mean "spare blows." "Rod" means here, as elsewhere, simply punishment. We are not told to "train up a child" to have no will but our own, but "in the way in which he should go," and to the end that "when he is old" he should not "depart from it,"--i.e., that his will should be so educated that he will choose to walk in the right way still. Suppose a child's will to be actually "broken;" suppose him to be so trained that he has no will but to obey his parents. What is to become of this helpless machine, which has no central spring of independent action? Can we stand by, each minute of each hour of each day, and say to the automata, Go here, or Go there? Can we be sure of living as long as they live? Can we wind them up like seventy-year clocks, and leave them?

But this is idle. It is not, thank God, in the power of any man or any woman to "break" a child's "will." They may kill the child's body, in trying, like that still unhung clergyman in Western New York, who whipped his three-year-old son to death for refusing to repeat a prayer to his step-mother.

Bodies are frail things; there are more child-martyrs than will be known until the bodies terrestrial are done with.

But, by one escape or another, the will, the soul, goes free. Sooner or later, every human being comes to know and prove in his own estate that freedom of will is the only freedom for which there are no chains possible, and that in Nature's whole reign of law nothing is so largely provided for as liberty. Sooner or later, all this must come. But, if it comes later, it comes through clouds of antagonism, and after days of fight, and is hard-bought.

It should come sooner, like the kingdom of God, which it is,--"without observation," gracious as sunshine, sweet as dew; it should begin with the infant's first dawning of comprehension that there are two courses of action, two qualities of conduct: one wise, the other foolish; one right, the other wrong.

I am sure; for I have seen, that a child's moral perceptions can be so made clear, and his will so made strong and upright, that before he is ten years old he will see and take his way through all common days rightly and bravely.

Will he always act up to his highest moral perceptions? No. Do we? But one right decision that he makes voluntarily, unbiassed by the assertion of authority or the threat of punishment, is worth more to him in development of moral character than a thousand in which he simply does what he is compelled to do by some sort of outside pressure.