Promised Rewards and threatened Punishments.
9. It is necessary to be extremely moderate and cautious in employing the influence of promised rewards or threatened punishments as a means of promoting early piety. In a religious point of view, as in every other, goodness that is bought is only a pretense of goodness—that is, in reality it is no goodness at all; and as it is true that love casteth out fear, so it is also true that fear casteth out love. Suppose—though it is almost too violent a supposition to be made even for illustration's sake—that the whole Christian world could be suddenly led to believe that there was to be no happiness or suffering at all for them beyond the grave, and that the inducement to be grateful to God for his goodness and submissive to his will, and to be warmly interested in the welfare and happiness of man, were henceforth to rest on the intrinsic excellence of those principles, and to their constituting essentially the highest and noblest development of the moral and spiritual nature of man—how many of the professed disciples of Jesus would abandon their present devotion to the cause of love to God and love to man? Not one, except the hypocrites and pretenders!
The truth is, that as piety that is genuine and sincere must rest on very different foundations from hope of future reward or fear of future punishment, so this hope and this fear are very unsuitable instrumentalities to be relied on for awakening it. The kind of gratitude to God which we wish to cherish in the mind of a child is not such as would be awakened towards an earthly benefactor by saying—in the case of a present made by an uncle, for instance—"Your uncle has made you a beautiful present. Go and thank him very cordially, and perhaps you will get another." It is rather of a kind which might be induced by saying, "Your uncle, who has been so kind to you in past years, is poor and sick, and can never do any thing more for you now. Would you like to go and sit in his sick-room to show your love for him, and to be ready to help him if he wants any thing?"
True piety, in a word, which consists in entering into and steadily maintaining the right moral and spiritual relations with God and man, marks the highest condition which the possibilities of human nature allow, and must rest in the soul which attains to it on a very different foundation from any thing like hope or fear. That there is a function which it is the province of these motives to fulfill, is abundantly proved by the use that is sometimes made of them in the Scriptures. But the more we reflect upon the subject, the more we shall be convinced, I think, that all such considerations ought to be kept very much in the back-ground in our dealings with children. If a child is sick, and is even likely to die, it is a very serious question whether any warning given to him of his danger will not operate as a hindrance rather than a help, in awakening those feelings which will constitute the best state of preparation for the change. For a sense of gratitude to God for his goodness, and to the Saviour for the sacrifice which he made for his sake, penitence for his sins, and trust in the forgiving mercy of his Maker, are the feelings to be awakened in his bosom; and these, so far as they exist, will lead him to lie quietly, calmly, and submissively in God's hands, without anxiety in respect to what is before him. It is a serious question whether an entire uncertainty as to the time when his death is to come is not more favorable to the awakening of these feelings, than the state of alarm and distress which would be excited by the thought that it was near.
The Reasonableness of Gentle Measures in Religious Training.
The mother may sometimes derive from certain religious considerations the idea that she is bound to look upon the moral delinquencies and dangers which she observes in her children, under an aspect more stern and severe than seems to be here recommended. But a little reflection must convince us that the way to true repentance of, and turning from sin, is not necessarily through the suffering of terror and distress. The Gospel is not an instrumentality for producing terror and distress, even as means to an end. It is an instrumentality for saving us from these ills; and the Divine Spirit, in the hidden and mysterious influence which it exercises in forming, or transforming, the human soul into the image of God, must be as ready, it would seem, to sanction and bless efforts made by a mother to allure her child away from its sins by loving and gentle invitations and encouragements, as any attempts to drive her from them by the agency of terror or pain. It would seem that no one who remembers the way in which Jesus Christ dealt with the children that were brought to him could possibly have any doubt of this.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CONCLUSION.
Any person who has acquired the art of examining and analyzing his own thoughts will generally find that the mental pictures which he forms of the landscapes, or the interiors, in which the scenes are laid of the events or incidents related in any work of fiction which interests him, are modelled more or less closely from prototypes previously existing in his own mind, and generally upon those furnished by the experiences of his childhood. If, for example, he reads an account of transactions represented as taking place in an English palace or castle, he will usually, on a careful scrutiny, find that the basis of his conception of the scene is derived from the arrangement of the rooms of some fine house with which he was familiar in early life. Thus, a great many things which attract our attention, and impress themselves upon our memories in childhood, become the models and prototypes—more or less aggrandized and improved, perhaps—of the conceptions and images which we form in later years.
Nature of the Effect produced by Early Impressions.