And formed of God without a parent’s mind,
Commits her eggs, incautious, to the dust,
Forgetful that the foot may crush the trust;
And, while on public nurseries they rely,
Not knowing, and too oft not caring why,
Irrational in what they thus prefer
No few, that would seem wise, resemble her."
To nurse means to educate or draw out and direct what exists in a state of mere involution. It means to protect, to foster, to supply with appropriate food, to cause to grow or promote growth, to manage with a view to increase. Thus Greece was the nurse of the liberal arts; Rome was the nurse of law. In horticulture, a shrub or tree is the nurse or protector of a young and tender plant. We are said to nurse our national resources. Isaiah, in speaking of the coming Messiah and the glory of his church, says, "Thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side." "Kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers."
The place or apartment appropriated to such nursing is called a nursery. Thus a plantation of young trees is called a nursery. Shakspeare calls Padua the nursery of arts. We call a very bad place the nursery of thieves and rogues. Dram-shops are the nurseries of intemperance. Commerce is called the nursery of seamen. Universities are the nurseries of the arts and sciences. The church on earth is called the nursery of the church in heaven. Christian families are called the nurseries of the church on earth, because in the former its members are nursed and propagated for the purpose of being transplanted into the latter.
In the same sense and for the same reason, the Christian home is the nursery of the young,—of human nature in its normal state. And as home is the nursery of the state as well as of the church on earth and in heaven, we must see that it is a physical, intellectual and religious nursery. We shall briefly consider it in these aspects. Indeed the Christian home cannot be considered in a more interesting and responsible light. The little child, dedicated to God in holy baptism, is entirely helpless and dependent upon the ministrations of the nursery. There is the department of its first impressions, of its first directions, of its first intellectual and moral formation, of the first evolution of physical and moral life. There the child exists as but the germ of what is to be. It grows up under the fostering care and plastic power of the parents. God’s commission to them in the nursery is, to bring up these germs of life, in His nurture admonition.