Religious Education in the Family

by Henry Frederick Cope

§ 2. PROTECTIVE LYING

But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form. It may be called protective lying. Ask the little fellow with the jam-smeared face, "Have you been in the pantry?" and he is likely to do the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat that makes it easier to hide from their enemies. He valiantly answers "No, Mother." He would protect himself from your reproof. There has been awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires your approbation most of all. The moral struggle with him is very brief; he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.

What shall we do? First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions. The jam was there and you were not. It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and sufficient to establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others, and against his own good.

Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper, and confidant. I like better the God to whom a little fellow in Montana prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help him to do and know the right.

§ 3. OLDER CHILDREN

But protective lying presents a more serious problem with older children. The school-teacher and parent meet it, just as the judge and the employer meet it in adults. The cure lies early in life. Truth-telling is as much a habit as lying is. Perhaps it is more easily practiced; its drafts are on the powers of observation and memory rather than on those of imagination. Along with the child's imaginative powers there must be developed the powers of exact observation and description. Exact observation and description or relation are but parts of the larger general virtue of precision. Help children at every turn of life to be right—right in doing things, right in thinking, in saying, and in execution. Precision at any point in life helps lift the life's whole level. Truth-telling is not a separable virtue. You cannot make a boy truthful in word if you let him lie in deed. You cannot expect he will speak the truth if you do not train him to do the truth, in his play, in ordering his room, in thinking through his school problems, and in thinking through his religious difficulties. Truth-telling is the verbal reaction of the life which habitually holds that nothing is right until it is just right.

Two things would, ordinarily, make sure of a truthful statement, instead of a protective lie, in answer to your question: first, that the young person has been trained to the habit of seeing and stating things as they are—and that you really give him a chance so to state them, and, secondly, that to some degree there has been developed a recognition of considerations or values that are higher than either escape from punishment or the winning of your approbation. He will choose the course that offers what seems to him to be the greater good; he will choose between punishment, with rectitude, a good conscience, a sense of unity with the higher good, of peace with God his friend, a greater approximation to your ideal, on the one side, and, on the other, escape from punishment.

Everything in that crisis will depend on how real you have made the good to be, how much the sense of the reality of God and his companionship has brought of joy and friendship, and how high are his values of the actual, the real, the true.

§ 4. AT THE CRISIS

But what shall we do as we meet the lie on the lips of the child? First, as already suggested, do not wait until you meet it. Train the child to the truthful life. Second, be sure you do not make too heavy moral demands. Remember the instinct to protect himself from immediate punishment or disapprobation is stronger than any other just then. Do not ask him to do what the law says the prisoner may not do, incriminate himself. We have no right to put on our children tests harder than they can bear. Often we put those which are harder than we could face. What you will do just then depends on what you have been doing for the training of the child or youth. Do not expect him to solve problems in moral geometry if you have neglected simple addition in that realm.