With the Children on Sundays / Through Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate into the City of Child-Soul

by Sylvanus Stall

I knew a mother who regularly on Sunday afternoons gathered her children about her and read them religious books and literature. In her considerable family, every child became eminently useful. One, who was a university professor, told me that those Sunday afternoons with his mother in the nursery embodied the most formative influences of his life.

I know another family, of some seven or eight children, where Sunday was always used for religious instruction with the children. With the reading and other things, they always "played church", and the experience of those early childhood days made the boys splendid public talkers, and the girls were also very capable in the same direction. No better school of oratory was ever organized.

I know another family of four children, where the entire family looked forward throughout the week to the special and larger pleasure which Sunday always brought. They grew up naturally into a religious life, and developed that ability for public address and service which could not so well be gained in any other way.

Sunday is about the only day in most of households where the father is home with his family. It adds greatly to the pleasure and impressiveness of the day and its services if the father, with the mother, enters heartily into the spirit of that which will be all the more enjoyed by the children. It will enable him also to stamp his personality deeper into the character of his children than possibly any other opportunity which may be afforded him in life.

These brief object talks grew out of the necessities found in the author's own parish. When called to the pastorate of the Second English Lutheran Church, of Baltimore, I found a depleted congregation, while at the same time the Sunday-school was one of the largest and most flourishing in the city. It was then for the first time that I introduced regularly the preaching of "Five-minute object sermons" before the accustomed sermon on Sunday morning. In a very brief period, about one-fourth of the infant department and two-thirds of the main department of the school were in regular attendance upon the Sunday morning service, and, even after this particular form of address had been discontinued, the teachers and scholars continued regularly to come direct from the morning session of the school to the services of the church.

These sermons were preached without notes, were subsequently outlined and then spoken into the phonograph, put in manuscript by a phonographer, and, that the simplicity of style and diction might be preserved, were printed with only slight verbal changes.

The objects used in illustrating these talks have been chosen from among the ordinary things of every-day life. Such objects have the advantage of being easily secured, and on account of their familiarity also prove more impressive, and being more often seen, more frequently recall to mind the truths taught.

To any thoughtful student who has marked the simple language and beautiful illustrations used by that Great Preacher and Teacher who "spake as never man spake," it will be unnecessary to say a single word in justification of this method of presenting abstruse truths to the easy comprehension of the young. Upon all occasions Jesus found in the use of the ordinary, every-day things about Him, the easy means of teaching the people the great truths of divine import. The door, the water, the net, the vine, the flowers which sprang at His feet, the birds that flew over His head, the unfruitful tree that grew by the wayside, the wheat and the tares that grew together in the field, the leaven which a woman hid in three measures of meal, the husbandman pacing his field engaged in sowing his grain, the sheep and the goats which rested together on the slopes waiting to be separated each into their own fold, the old garment mended with a piece of new cloth, the mustard seed, the salt—anything that chanced to be about the Master was used as an illustration, that He might plainly and impressively teach the people the saving truths of redemption and salvation. May we not also reasonably suppose that if Jesus were upon the earth to-day He would still exercise this same distinguishing wisdom in the use of the common, every-day things by which He would now find Himself surrounded?

Let it be distinctly understood that this book is not a substitute for the regular services of God's House. I believe in "the Church in the house," but I also believe that the entire family, including the children, should also be in the Church on the Lord's day. The absence of the children from the services of the sanctuary is one of the alarming evils of our day. There are but few congregations where children can be found in any considerable numbers. No one will attempt to deny the sad consequences which must follow as the inevitable results of such a course. The children at eight years of age who have not already begun to form the habit of church attendance, and are not quite thoroughly established in it at sixteen, will stand a very fair chance of spending their entire life with little or no attachment for either the Church or religious things. The non-church going youth of this decade will be the Sabbath-breakers and irreligious people of the next.

Who are to blame for this state of affairs, and to whom are we to look for the correction of this existing evil?