Good Form and Christian Etiquette

by S. M. I. Henry

Food should not be conveyed to the mouth with a knife, but with a fork, always excepting soup, and such sauce as must be handled with a spoon.

Do teach your children not to thrust the point of the spoon into the mouth, but to take its contents with the lips from that part nearest the handle, without the least possible sound. Teach them not to lift the spoon so full that it will drip; and as your boy grows up into mustaches he will need to learn how to take soup and sauce without defiling those manly ornaments, or else to let soup alone at the banquet. But you can teach him from childhood to handle his napkin so deftly as to keep his lips clean, even after they have put on their thatch.

As to the napkin, by all means habituate the child to its use, even if it be nothing more than a square of old calico or flour-sacking, hemmed, or even unhemmed. He can learn on a piece of his mother’s old apron how to use the fine linen of the king’s banquet-hall, and do it so daintily that the apron and the mother who wore it down to napkin dimensions will confer honor on the king’s damask.

O my sister mothers in the many humbler homes of those who love our Lord and are looking for his appearing, has it seemed to you that any of these things that I have written are trivial or burdensome, wholly outside the sphere of life in which you and your children will ever move? Are you so overburdened with many cares that you feel, when the food is cooked and placed “anyhow,” that your part is done; that the family may come “just as it happens” and eat, simply to satisfy hunger, as do the cattle in the field? Have you thought that if you could but get through the day anyhow, your duty was done? Still you must meet the certainties that are before you. Your children must bear a part in the closing scenes of the world’s history,—ask yourself if there is not something for you in these things that I have written. They have been written with a most solemn sense of their importance. They are a part of the gospel message; they concern the work which some one now in training must do before the Lord can come.

The knowledge of how to prepare and serve a hygienic dinner, as well as how to select suitable portions and decline others, at a worldly banquet, may be absolutely necessary to the winning of souls in the last call to the world.

XII.

Nothing is of more importance to success in any work than conversation. How to converse so as to win and not wound, to both give and gain, is an accomplishment which has very nearly passed into the list of lost arts. And here again good form comes to the rescue, and by its placid but arbitrary code offsets that lawlessness into which even good men have fallen in excess of zeal.

Sixty years ago the rule for children was that they “should be seen and not heard,” so that a child’s talk was almost unknown in a company of adults. This was so wrong that it has reacted in a sort of wild freedom upon the part of the children which, uncorrected, develops into the adult chatter-box and gossip, than which no character is more to be dreaded.

Bad habits of conversation are very hard to break, and since it is by the “calves (or sacrifice) of the lips” that we are especially to honor God, by “words fitly spoken,” and that we are to “give a reason for the faith that is in us,” it is not of small importance that we should know how to talk. Begin with the baby, therefore, so that the child shall grow up into correct forms of speech, and into that regard of all good form which shall not only give him at once the ears, but the hearts of the people.

I scarcely need to say, Do not use slang, for this is universally understood as out of harmony with Christian practise; but yet it may not be amiss to say that even the world of society, whose laws of behavior we are considering, would ostracize one whose language was punctuated with much slang. An oath would be more tolerable to so-called “polite ears.”