RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION
“Let the child wait till he has grown and then choose his own religion,” said an English statesman in the hearing of Coleridge. Coleridge, leading his friend into the garden, said: “I have decided not to put out any vegetables this spring, but to wait till August and let the garden decide for itself whether it prefers weeds or strawberries.” This is the logic of the delayed instruction theory.—A. B. Bunn Van Ormer, “Studies in Religious Nurture.”
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RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION DENIED
In the psychological confession of a writer (Sentenis), a German philosopher whom his father had submitted to the experiment advised by the author of “Émile,” he tells us that, left alone by the death of a tenderly loved wife, this father, a learned and thoughtful man, had taken his infant son to a retired place in the country; and not allowing him communication with any one, he had cultivated the child’s intelligence through the sight of natural objects placed near him, and by the beauty of language, almost without books, and in carefully concealing from him all idea of God. The child reached his tenth year without having either read or heard that great name. But then his mind formed what had been denied it. The sun which he saw rise each morning seemed the all-powerful benefactor of whom he felt the need. He soon formed the habit of going at dawn to the garden to pay homage to that god that he himself had made. His father surprized him one day, and showed him his error by teaching him that all fixt stars are so many suns distributed in space. But such was the keen disappointment and the grief of the child deprived of his worship, that the father, overcome, acknowledged to him that there is a God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth.—A. B. Bunn Van Ormer, “Studies in Religious Nurture.”
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Religious Narrowness—See [Regularity, Ecclesiastical].
RELIGIOUS TRAINING
Suppose a sculptor should take a piece of marble and stand it in front of his studio on the sidewalk, and should invite every passer-by to have a stroke at it with mallet and chisel, shaping it according to the fancy or the caprice of the moment, and then at the end of the year have it suddenly endowed with life, and ask it to choose what it would be—the shape of a god or of a satyr, of beauty or ugliness, pure and white or stained and soiled—this man would be rational as compared with the one who believes that you can let a child grow up until he is twenty unbiased, without absorbing any religious ideas or convictions, and then freely choose what he will be. If you do not bias the child, the first that he meets on the street, or in his school, or among his companions, will begin the work of biasing, of impression, of education, of training; for this is a continuous process. Whether you will or not, it is something over which you have no choice. It is something that will be done either wisely and well, or unwisely and ill.—Minot J. Savage.
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