Religious Education in the Family

by Henry Frederick Cope

§ 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE

The father owes it to his family to give himself at his best, that is, as far as possible, when his vitality is freshest and his powers keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children, time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith, did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public propaganda.

Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families. Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, while so readily granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge? There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but they are not willing to learn how to grow them.

§ 3. FATHERING AS A MAN'S TASK

It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you. Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in real touch with the boy's world.

Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion. Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.

Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves. All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of peace.

Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of our children.

The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious person to them.

I. References for Study