Whatever we may say to children on the subject of religion, whether directly or in teaching by indirection through songs and worship, must pass over somehow into action in order to have meaning and reality. It must be realized in order to be real. The difficulty that appears is that of connecting the daily act with its spiritual significance. Yet that is not as difficult as it seems. If the act has religious significance to us, if we form the habit of really worshiping God with our work, seeking in it to do his will, the child will know it. We cannot keep that hidden. The spiritual life will never be more real to the child than it is to us, and no amount of moralizing or spiritualizing about our acts or his will give them religious significance.
At least one person will testify that, after being brought up in a really religious home, the most strikingly religious memory of that home is an occasion when he delightedly carried a tray of food to a sick neighbor. It was doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are acts repeated until they pass from the volitional to the involuntary. The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a share in all our ministries.[12]
The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social activities for students to carry out.[13] The parents ought to know what is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of service suggested for the children, these activities lose all perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a normal part of life.
Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for, and that joy will be their strength.
§ 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE
The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life. Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or ride in private cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy remain the passive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert him from the pauper habit.
The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of passive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to shield them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men. Vain is all family worship, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in heart. The family may make this the normal way to live.
If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight in self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial, and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.
The whole attitude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of the family. The greedy family makes the grafting citizen. The grasping home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace. Greater than the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizenship in your home. No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beatitudes or week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home. Home action and attitude count for more than all besides.
It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole social duty unselfishly.