PARENTS AND CHILDREN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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Parents and Children

A SEQUEL TO
“HOME EDUCATION”

BY

CHARLOTTE M. MASON

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO. Lᵀᴰ
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1897

The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press

TO THE MEMBERS OF
THE PARENTS’ NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL UNION
THIS VOLUME
IS INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR
AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE AFFECTION AND
REVERENCE WITH WHICH THEIR
EFFORTS INSPIRE HER

Ambleside,
November 1896.

PREFACE

The following essays have appeared in the Parents’ Review, and were addressed, from time to time, to a body of parents who are making a practical study of the principles of education—the “Parents’ National Educational Union.” The present volume is a sequel to Home Education (Kegan Paul & Co.), a work which was the means of originating this Union of Parents. It is not too much to say that the Parents’ Union exists to advance, with more or less method and with more or less steadfastness, a definite school of educational thought of which the two main principles are—the recognition of the physical basis of habit, i.e. of the material side of education; and of the inspiring and formative power of the Idea, i.e. of the immaterial, or spiritual, side of education. These two guiding principles, covering as they do the whole field of human nature, should enable us to deal rationally with all the complex problems of education; and the object of the following essays is, not to give an exhaustive application of these principles—the British Museum itself would hardly contain all the volumes needful for such an undertaking—but to give an example or a suggestion, here and there, as to how such and such an habit may be formed, such and such a formative idea be implanted and fostered. The intention of the volume will account to the reader for what may seem a want of connected and exhaustive treatment of the subject, and for the iteration of the same principles in various connections. The author ventures to hope that the following hints and suggestions will not prove the less practically useful to busy parents, because they rest on profound educational principles.

CONTENTS

BOOK I
THEORY

PARENTS AND CHILDREN

CHAPTER I

THE FAMILY

“The family is the unit of the nation.”—F. D. Maurice.

It is probable that no other educational thinker has succeeded in affecting parents so profoundly as did Rousseau. Emile is little read now, but how many current theories of the regimen proper for children have there their unsuspected source? Everybody knows—and his contemporaries knew it better than we—that Jean Jacques Rousseau had not enough sterling character to warrant him to pose as an authority on any subject, least of all on that of education. He sets himself down a poor thing, and we see no cause to reject the evidence of his Confessions. We are not carried away by the charm of his style; his “forcible feebleness” does not dazzle us. No man can say beyond that which he is, and there is a want of grit in his philosophic theories that removes most of them from the category of available thought.

But Rousseau had the insight to perceive one of those patent truths which, somehow, it takes a genius to discover; and, because truth is indeed prized above rubies, the perception of that truth gave him rank as a great teacher. “Is Jean Jacques also among the prophets?” people asked, and ask still; and that he had thousands of fervent disciples amongst the educated parents of Europe, together with the fact that his teaching has filtered into many a secluded home of our own day, is answer enough. Indeed, no other educationalist has had a tithe of the influence exercised by Rousseau. Under the spell of his teaching, people in the fashionable world, like that Russian Princess Galitzin, forsook society, and went off with their children to some quiet corner where they could devote every hour of the day, and every power they had, to the fulfilment of the duties which devolve upon parents. Courtly mothers retired from the world, sometimes even left their husbands, to work hard at the classics, mathematics, sciences, that they might with their own lips instruct their children. “What else am I for?” they asked; and the feeling spread that the bringing up of the children was the one work of primary importance for men and women.

Whatever extravagance he had seen fit to advance, Rousseau would still have found a following, because he had chanced to touch a spring that opened many hearts. He was one of the few educationalists who made his appeal to the parental instincts. He did not say, “We have no hope of the parents, let us work for the children!” Such are the faint-hearted and pessimistic things we say to-day. What he said was, in effect, “Fathers and mothers, this is your work, and you only can do it. It rests with you, parents of young children, to be the saviours of society unto a thousand generations. Nothing else matters. The avocations about which people weary themselves are as foolish child’s play compared with this one serious business of bringing up our children in advance of ourselves.”

People listened, as we have seen; the response to his teaching was such a letting out of the waters of parental enthusiasm as has never been known before nor since. And Rousseau, weak and little worthy, was a preacher of righteousness in this, that he turned the hearts of the fathers to the children, and so far made ready a people prepared for the Lord. But alas! having secured the foundation, he had little better than wood, hay, and stubble to offer to the builders.

Rousseau succeeded, as he deserved to succeed, in awaking many parents to the binding character, the vast range, the profound seriousness of parental obligations. He failed, and deserved to fail, as he offered his own crude conceits by way of an educational code. But his success is very cheering. He perceived that God placed the training of every child in the hands of two, a father and a mother; and the response to his teaching proved that, as the waters answer to the drawing of the moon, so do the hearts of parents rise to the idea of the great work committed to them.

Though it is true, no doubt, that every parent is conscious of unwritten laws, more or less definite and noble according to his own status, yet an attempt, however slight, to codify these laws may be interesting to parents.

“The family is the unit of the nation.” This pregnant saying suggests some aspects of the parents’ calling. From time to time, in all ages of the world, communistic societies have arisen, sometimes for the sake of co-operation in a great work, social or religious, more recently by way of protest against inequalities of condition; but, in every case, the fundamental rule of such societies is, that the members shall have all things in common. We are apt to think, in our careless way, that such attempts at communistic association are foredoomed to failure. But that is not the case. In the United States, perhaps because hired labour is less easy to obtain than it is with us, they appear to have found a congenial soil, and there many well-regulated communistic bodies flourish. There are failures, too, many and disastrous, and it appears that these may usually be traced to one cause, a government enfeebled by the attempt to combine democratic and communistic principles, to dwell together in a common life, while each does what is right in his own eyes. A communistic body can thrive only under a vigorous and absolute rule.

A favourite dream of socialism is—or was until the idea of collectivism obtained—that each State of Europe should be divided into an infinite number of small self-contained communes. Now, it sometimes happens that the thing we desire is already realised, had we eyes to see. The family is, practically, a commune. In the family the undivided property is enjoyed by all the members in common, and, in the family there is equality of social condition, with diversity of duties. In lands where patriarchal practices still obtain, the family merges into the tribe, and the head of the family is the chief of the tribe—a very absolute sovereign indeed. In our own country, families are usually small, parents and their immediate offspring, with the attendants and belongings which naturally gather to a household, and, let it not be forgotten, form part of the family. The smallness of the family tends to obscure its character, and we see no force in the phrase at the head of this chapter; we do not perceive that, if the unit of the nation is the natural commune, the family, then is the family the social microcosm, pledged to carry on within itself all the functions of the State, with the delicacy, precision, and fulness of detail proper to work done on a small scale.

It by no means follows from this communistic view of the family that the domestic policy should be a policy of isolation; on the contrary, it is not too much to say, that a nation is civilised in proportion as it is able to establish close and friendly relations with other nations, and that, not with one or two, but with many; and, conversely, that a nation is barbarous in proportion to its isolation; and does not a family decline in intelligence and virtue when from generation to generation it “keeps itself to itself”?

Again, it is probable that a nation is healthy in proportion as it has its own proper outlets, its colonies and dependencies, which it is ever solicitous to include in the national life. So of the nation in miniature, the family; the struggling families at ‘the back,’ the orphanage, the mission, the necessitous of our acquaintance, are they not for the sustenance of the family in the higher life?

But it is not enough that the family commune maintain neighbourly relations with other such communes, and towards the stranger within the gates. The family is the unit of the nation; and the nation is an organic whole, a living body, built up, like the natural body, of an infinite number of living organisms. It is only as it contributes its quota towards the national life that the life of the family is complete. Public interests must be shared, public work taken up, the public welfare cherished—in a word, its integrity with the nation must be preserved, or the family ceases to be part of a living whole, and becomes positively injurious, as decayed tissue in the animal organism.

Nor are the interests of the family limited to those of the nation. As it is the part of the nation to maintain wider relations, to be in touch with all the world, to be ever in advance in the great march of human progress, so is this the attitude which is incumbent on each unit of the nation, each family, as an integral part of the whole. Here is the simple and natural realisation of the noble dream of Fraternity: each individual attached to a family by ties of love where not of blood; the families united in a federal bond to form the nation; the nations confederate in love and emulous in virtue, and all, nations and their families, playing their several parts as little children about the feet and under the smile of the Almighty Father. Here is the divine order which every family is called upon to fulfil; a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump, and, therefore, it matters infinitely that every family should realise the nature and the obligations of the family bond. As water cannot rise above its source, neither can we live at a higher level than that of the conception we form of our place and use in life. Let us ask the question—has this, of regarding all education and all civil and social relations from the standpoint of the family, any practical outcome? So much so, that perhaps there is hardly a problem of life for which it does not contain the solution. For example:—What shall we teach our children? Is there one subject that claims our attention more than another? Yes, there is a subject or class of subjects which has an imperative moral claim upon us. It is the duty of the nation to maintain relations of brotherly kindness with other nations; therefore, it is the duty of every family, as an integral part of the nation, to be able to hold brotherly speech with the families of other nations as opportunities arise; therefore, to acquire the speech of neighbouring nations is not only to secure an inlet of knowledge and a means of culture, but is a duty of that higher morality (the morality of the family) which aims at universal brotherhood; therefore, every family would do well to cultivate two languages besides the mother tongue, even in the nursery.

Again; a fair young Englishwoman was staying with her mother at a German Kurhaus. They were the only English people present, and probably forgot that the Germans are better linguists than we. The young lady sat through the long meals with her book, hardly interrupting her reading to eat, and addressing no more than one or two remarks to her mother, as—“I wonder what that mess is!” or, “How much longer shall we have to sit with these tiresome people?” Had she remembered that no family can live to itself, that she and her mother represented England, were England for that little German community, she would have imitated the courteous greetings which the German ladies bestowed on their neighbours.

But we must leave further consideration of this great subject, and conclude with a striking passage from Mr. Morley’s ‘Appreciation’ of Emile. “Education slowly came to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of ideas upon education was only one phase of the great general movement towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction of such wider feeling about these relations tended strongly towards an increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous suffusion of tenderness and long attachment.” His labours in this great cause, “the restoration of the family,” give Rousseau a claim upon the gratitude and respect of mankind. It has proved a lasting, solid work. To this day, family relations in France are more gracious, more tender, more close and more inclusive, than they are with us. They are more expansive too, leading to generally benign and friendly behaviour; and so strong and satisfying is the family bond, that the young people find little necessity to ‘fall in love.’ The mother lays herself out for the friendship of her young daughters, who respond with entire loyalty and devotion; and, Zola notwithstanding, French maidens are wonderfully pure, simple, and sweet, because their affections are abundantly satisfied.

Possibly “the restoration of the family” is a labour that invites us here in England, each within the radius of our own hearth; for there is little doubt that the family bond is more lax amongst us than it was two or three generations ago. Perhaps nowhere is family life of more idyllic loveliness than where we see it at its best in English homes. But the wise ever find some new thing to learn. Though a nation, as an individual, must act on the lines of its own character, and we are, on the whole, well content with our English homes, yet we might learn something from the inclusiveness of the French family, where mother-in-law and father-in-law, aunt and cousins, widow and spinster, are cherished, and a hundred small offices devised for dependants who would be in the way in an English home. The result is that the children have a wider range for the practice of the thousand sweet attentions and self-restraints which make home life lovely. No doubt the medal has its obverse; there is probably much in French home life which we should shrink from; nevertheless, it offers object lessons which we should do well to study. Again, where family life is most beauteous with us, is not the family a little apt to become self-centred and self-sufficient, rather than to cultivate that expansiveness towards other families which is part of the family code of our neighbours?

CHAPTER II

PARENTS AS RULERS

Let us continue our consideration of the family as the nation in miniature, with the responsibilities, the rights, and the requirements of the nation. The parents represent the “Government”; but, here, the government is ever an absolute Monarchy, conditioned very loosely by the law of the land, but very closely by that law more or less of which every parent bears engraved on his conscience. Some attain the levels of high thinking, and come down from the Mount with beaming countenance and the tables of the law intact; others fail to reach the difficult heights, and are content with such fragments of the broken tables as they pick up below. But be his knowledge of the law little or much, no parent escapes the call to rule.

Now, the first thing we ask for in a ruler is, “Is he able to rule? Does he know how to maintain his authority?” A ruler who fails to govern is like an unjust judge, an impious priest, an ignorant teacher, that is, he fails in the essential attribute of his office. This is even more true in the family than in the State; the king may rule by deputy; but, here we see the exigeant nature of the parent’s functions; he can have no deputy. Helpers he may have, but the moment he makes over his functions and authority to another, the rights of parenthood belong to that other, and not to him. Who does not know of the heart-burnings that arise when Anglo-Indian parents come home, to find their children’s affections given to others, their duty owing to others; and they, the parents, sources of pleasure like the godmother of the fairy tale, but having no authority over their children? And all this, nobody’s fault, for the guardians at home have done their best to keep the children loyal to the parents abroad.

Here is indicated a rock upon which the heads of families sometimes make shipwreck. They regard parental authority as inherent in them, a property which may lie dormant, but is not to be separated from the state of parenthood. They may allow their children from infancy upwards to do what is right in their own eyes; and then, Lear turns and makes his plaint to the winds, and cries—

“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!”

But Lear has been all the time divesting himself of the honour and authority that belong to him, and giving his rights to the children. Here he tells us why; the biting anguish is the “thankless” child. He has been laying himself out for the thanks of his children. That they should think him a fond father, has been more to him than the duty he owes them; and in proportion as he omits his duty are they oblivious of theirs. Possibly the unregulated love of approbation in devoted parents has more share in the undoing of families than any other single cause. A writer of to-day represents a mother as saying—

“But you are not afraid of me, Bessie?”

“No indeed; who could be afraid of a dear, sweet, soft, little mother like you?”

And such praise is sweet in the ears of many a fond mother hungering for the love and liking of her children, and not perceiving that words like these in the mouth of a child are as treasonable as words of defiance.

Authority is laid down at other shrines than that of popularity. Prospero describes himself as,

“all dedicate

To study, and the bettering of my mind.”

And, meantime, the exercise of authority devolves upon Antonio; is it any wonder that the habit of authority fits the usurper like a glove, and that Prospero finds himself ousted from the office he failed to fill? Even so, the busy parent, occupied with many cares, awakes to find the authority he has failed to wield has dropped out of his hands; perhaps has been picked up by others less fit, and a daughter is given over to the charge of a neighbouring family, while father and mother hunt for rare prints.

In other cases, the love of an easy life tempts parents to let things take their course; the children are good children, and won’t go far wrong, we are told; and very likely it is true. But however good the children be, the parents owe it to society to make them better than they are, and to bless the world with people, not merely good-natured and well-disposed, but good of set purpose and endeavour.

The love of ease, the love of favour, the claims of other work, are only some of the causes which lead to a result disastrous to society—the abdication of parents. When we come to consider the nature and uses of the parents’ authority, we shall see that such abdication is as immoral as it is mischievous. Meantime, it is well worth while to notice that the causes which lead parents to resign the position of domestic rulers are resolvable into one—the office is too troublesome, too laborious. The temptation which assails parents is the same which has led many a crowned head to seek ease in the cloister—

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,”

if it be the natural crown of parenthood.

The Apostolic counsel of “diligence” in ruling throws light upon the nature and aim of authority: it is no longer a matter of personal honour and dignity; authority is for use and service, and the honour that goes with it is only for the better service of those under authority. The arbitrary parent, the exacting parent, who claims this and that of deference and duty because he is a parent, all for his own honour and glory, is more hopelessly in the wrong than the parent who practically abdicates; the majesty of parenthood is hedged round with observances only because it is good for the children to “faithfully serve, honour, and humbly obey” their natural rulers. Only at home can children be trained in the chivalrous temper of “proud submission and dignified obedience;” and if the parents do not inspire and foster deference, reverence, and loyalty, how shall these crowning graces of character thrive in a hard and emulous world?

It is perhaps a little difficult to maintain an attitude of authority in these democratic days, when even educationalists counsel that children be treated on equal terms from the very beginning; but the children themselves come to our aid; the sweet humility and dependence natural to them fosters the gentle dignity, the soupçon of reserve, which is becoming in parents. It is not open to parents either to lay aside or to sink under the burden of the honour laid upon them; and, no doubt, we have all seen the fullest, freest flow of confidence, sympathy, and love between parent and child, where the mother sits as a queen among her children and the father is honoured as a crowned head. The fact that there are two parents, each to lend honour to the other, yet free from restraint in each other’s presence, makes it the easier to maintain the impalpable “state” of parenthood. And the presence of the slight, sweet, undefined feeling of dignity in the household is the very first condition for the bringing up of loyal, honourable men and women, capable of reverence and apt to win respect.

The foundation of parental authority lies in the fact that parents hold office as deputies; and that, in a twofold sense. In the first place, they are the immediate and personally appointed deputies of the Almighty King, the sole Ruler of men; they have not only to fulfil His counsels regarding the children, but to represent His Person; his parents are as God to the little child, and, yet more constraining thought, God is to him what his parents are; he has no power to conceive a greater and lovelier personality than that of the royal heads of his own home; he makes his first approach to the Infinite through them; they are his measure for the highest; if the measure be easily within his small compass, how shall he grow up with the reverent temper which is the condition of spiritual growth?

More; parents hold their children in trust for society. “My own child” can only be true in a limited sense; the children are held as a public trust to be trained as is best for the welfare of the community; and in this sense, also, the parents are persons in authority, with the dignity of their office to support, and are even liable to deposition. The one State whose name has passed into a proverb, standing for a group of virtues which we have no other word to describe, is a State which practically deprived parents of the functions which they failed to fulfil to the furtherance of public virtue. No doubt the State reserves to itself virtually the power to bring up its own children in its own way, with the least possible co-operation of parents. Even to-day, a neighbouring nation has elected to charge itself with the training of its infants. So soon as they can crawl, or sooner, before ever they run or speak, they are to be brought to the “Maternal School,” and carefully nurtured, as with mother’s milk, in the virtues proper for a citizen. The scheme is as yet but in the experimental stage, but will doubtless be carried through, because the nation in question has long ago discovered—and acted consistently upon the discovery—that what you would have the man become, that you must train the child to be.

Perhaps such public deposition of parents is the last calamity that can befall a nation. These poor little ones are to grow up in a world where the name of God is not to be named; to grow up, too, without the training in filial duty and brotherly love and neighbourly kindness which falls to the children of all but the few unnatural parents. They may be returned to their parents at certain hours or after certain years; but once alienation has been set up, once the strongest and sweetest tie has been loosened and the parents have been publicly delivered from their duty, the desecration of the home is complete; and we shall have the spectacle of a people growing up orphaned almost from their birth. This is a new thing in the world’s history, for even Lycurgus left the children to their parents for the first half-dozen years of life. Certain newspapers commend the example for our imitation, but God forbid that we should ever lose faith in the blessedness of family life. Parents who hold their children as, at the same time, a public trust and a divine trust, and who recognise the authority they hold as deputed authority, not to be trifled with, laid aside, or abused—such parents preserve for the nation the immunities of home, and safeguard the privileges of their order.

Having seen that it does not rest with the parents to use, or to forego the use of, the authority they hold, let us examine the limitations and the scope of this authority. In the first place, it is to be maintained and exercised solely for the advantage of the children, whether in mind, body, or estate. And here is room for the nice discrimination, the delicate intuitions, with which parents are blessed. The mother, who makes her growing-up daughter take the out-of-door exercise she needs, is acting within her powers. The father of quiet habits, who discourages society for his young people, is considering his own tastes, and not their needs, and is making unlawful use of his authority.

Again, the authority of parents, though the deference it begets remain to grace the relations of parents and child, is itself a provisional function, and is only successful as it encourages the autonomy, if we may call it so, of the child. A single decision made by the parents which the child is, or should be, capable of making for itself, is an encroachment on the rights of the child, and a transgression on the part of the parents.

Once more, the authority of parents rests on a secure foundation only as they keep well before the children that it is deputed authority; the child who knows that he is being brought up for the service of the nation, that his parents are acting under a Divine commission, will not turn out a rebellious son.

Further, though the emancipation of the children is gradual, they acquiring day by day more of the art and science of self-government, yet there comes a day when the parents’ right to rule is over; there is nothing left for the parents but to abdicate gracefully, and leave their grown-up sons and daughters absolutely free agents, even though these still live at home; and although, in the eyes of their parents, they are not fit to be trusted with the ordering of themselves: if they fail in such self-ordering, whether as regards time, occupations, money, friends, most likely their parents are to blame for not having introduced them by degrees to the full liberty which is their right as men and women. Anyway, it is too late now to keep them in training; fit or unfit, they must hold the rudder for themselves.

As for the employment of authority, the highest art lies in ruling without seeming to do so. The law is a terror to evil-doers, but for the praise of them that do well; and in the family, as in the State, the best government is that in which peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, are maintained without the intervention of the law. Happy is the household that has few rules, and where “Mother does not like this,” and “Father wishes that,” are all-constraining.

CHAPTER III

PARENTS AS INSPIRERS

Part I

M. Adolf Monod claims that the child must owe to his mother a second birth—the first into the natural, the second into the spiritual life of the intelligence and moral sense. Had he not been writing of women and for women, no doubt he would have affirmed that the long travail of this second birth must be undergone equally by both parents. Do we ask how he arrives at this rather startling theory? He observes that great men have great mothers; mothers, that is, blest with an infinite capacity for taking pains with their work of bringing up children. He likens this labour to a second bearing which launches the child into a higher life; and as this higher life is a more blessed life, he contends that every child has a right to this birth into completer being at the hands of his parents. Did his conclusions rest solely upon the deductive methods he pursues, we might afford to let them pass, and trouble ourselves very little about this second birth, which parents may, and ofttimes do, withhold from their natural offspring. We, too, could bring forward our contrary instances of good parents with bad sons, and indifferent parents with earnest children; and, pat to our lips, would come the Cui bono? which absolves us from endeavour.

Be a good mother to your son because great men have good mothers, is inspiring, stimulating; but is not to be received as the final word. For an appeal of irresistible urgency, we look to natural science with her inductive methods; though we are still waiting her last word, what she has already said is law and gospel for the believing parent. The parable of Pandora’s box is true to-day; and a woman may in her heedlessness let fly upon her offspring a thousand ills. But is there not also “a glass of blessings standing by,” into which parents may dip, and bring forth for their children health and vigour, justice and mercy, truth and beauty?

“Surely,” it may be objected, “every good and perfect gift comes from God above, and the human parent sins presumptuously who thinks to bestow gifts divine.” Now this lingering superstition has no part nor lot with true religion, but, on the contrary, brings upon it the scandal of many an ill-ordered home and ill-regulated family. When we perceive that God uses men and women, parents above all others, as vehicles for the transmission of His gifts, and that it is in the keeping of His law He is honoured—more than in the attitude of the courtier waiting for exceptional favours—then we shall take the trouble to comprehend the law, written not only upon tables of stone and rolls of parchment, but upon the fleshly tablets of the living organisms of the children; and, understanding the law, we shall see with thanksgiving and enlargement of heart in what natural ways God does indeed show mercy unto thousands of them that love Him and keep His commandments.

But His commandment is exceeding broad; becomes broader year by year with every revelation of science; and we had need gird up the loins of our mind to keep pace with this current revelation. We shall be at pains, too, to keep ourselves in that attitude of expectant attention wherein we shall be enabled to perceive the unity and continuity of this revelation with that of the written Word of God. For perhaps it is only as we are able to receive the two, and harmonise the two in a willing and obedient heart, that we shall enter on the heritage of glad and holy living which is the will of God for us.

Let us, for example, consider, in the light of current scientific thought, the processes and the methods of this second birth, which, according to M. Monod, the child claims at the hands of his parents. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” is not only a pledge, but is a statement of a result arrived at by deductive processes. The writer had great opportunities for collecting data; he had watched many children grow up, and his experience taught him to divide them into two classes—the well-brought up, who turned out well; and the ill-brought up, who turned out ill. No doubt, then, as now, there were startling exceptions, and—the exception proves the rule.

But, here as elsewhere, the promises and threatenings of the Bible will bear the searching light of inductive processes. We may ask, Why should this be so? and not content ourselves with a general answer, that this is natural and right: we may search until we discover that this result is inevitable, and no other result conceivable (except for alien influences), and our obedience will be in exact proportion to our perception of the inevitableness of the law.

The vast sum of what we understand by heredity is not to be taken into account in the consideration of this second birth; by the first natural birth it is, that “his father and mother, his grandfather and grandmother, are latent or declare themselves in the child; and it is on the lines thus laid down in his nature that his development will proceed. It is not by virtue of education so much as by virtue of inheritance that he is brave or timid, generous or selfish, prudent or reckless, boastful or modest, quick or placid in temper; the ground tone of his character is original in him, and it colours all the subsequently formed emotions and their sympathetic ideas.... The influence of systematic culture upon any one is no doubt great, but that which determines the limit, and even in some degree the nature of the effects of culture, that which forms the foundations upon which all the modifications of art must rest, is the inherited nature.”

If heredity means so much, if, as would seem at the first glance, the child comes into the world with his character ready-made, what remains for the parents to do but to enable him to work out his own salvation without let or hindrance of their making, upon the lines of his individuality? The strong naturalism, shall we call it, of our day, inclines us to take this view of the objects and limitations of education; and without doubt it is a gospel; it is the truth; but it is not the whole truth. The child brings with him into the world, not character, but disposition. He has tendencies which may need only to be strengthened, or, again, to be diverted, or even repressed. His character—the efflorescence of the man wherein the fruit of his life is a-preparing—character is original disposition, modified, directed, expanded by education, by circumstances, later, by self-control and self-culture, above all, by the supreme agency of the Holy Ghost, even where that agency is little suspected, and as little solicited.

How is this great work of character-making—the single effectual labour possible to human beings—to be carried on? We shall rest our inquiries on a physiological basis; the lowest, doubtless, but therefore the foundation of the rest. The first-floor chambers of the psychologist are pleasant places, but who would begin to build with the first floor? What would he rear it upon? Surely the arbitrary distinction between the grey matter of the brain and the “mind” (or thoughts or feelings) which plays upon it, even as the song upon the vocal chords of the singer, is more truly materialistic than is the recognition of the pregnant truth that the brain is the mere organ of the spiritual part, registering and effecting every movement of thought and feeling, whether conscious or unconscious, by appreciable molecular movement, and sustaining the infinite activities of mind by corresponding enormous activity and enormous waste; that it is the organ of mind, which, under present conditions, is absolutely inseparable from, and indispensable to, the quickening spirit. Once we recognise that in the thinking of a thought there is as distinct motion set up in some tract of the brain as there is in the muscles of the hand employed in writing a sentence, we shall see that the behaviour of the grey nerve-substance of the cerebrum should afford the one possible key to certitude and system in our attempts at education, using the word in the most worthy sense—as its concern is the formation of character.

Having heard Dr. Maudsley on the subject of heredity, let us hear him again on this other subject, which practically enables us to define the possibilities of education.

“That which has existed with any completeness in consciousness leaves behind it, after its disappearance therefrom, in the mind or brain, a functional disposition to its reproduction or reappearance in consciousness at some future time. Of no mental act can we say that it is ‘writ in water;’ something remains from it, whereby its recurrence is facilitated. Every impression of sense upon the brain, every current of molecular activity from one to another part of the brain, every cerebral action which passes into muscular movement, leaves behind it some modification of the nerve elements concerned in its function, some after-effect, or, so to speak, memory of itself in them which renders its reproduction an easier matter, the more easy the more often it has been repeated, and makes it impossible to say that, however trivial, it shall not under some circumstances recur. Let the excitation take place in one of two nerve cells lying side by side, and between which there was not any original specific difference, there will be ever afterwards a difference between them. This physiological process, whatever be its nature, is the physical basis of memory, and it is the foundation of the development of all our mental functions.

“That modification which persists, or is retained, in structure after functions, has been differently described as a residuum, or relic, or trace, or disposition, or vestige; or again as potential, latent, or dormant idea. Not only definite ideas, but all affections of the nervous system, feelings of pleasure and pain, desire, and even its outward reactions, thus leave behind them their structural effects, and lay the foundation of modes of thought, feeling, and action. Particular talents are sometimes formed quite, or almost quite, involuntarily; and complex actions, which were first consciously performed by dint of great application, become automatic by repetition; ideas which were at first consciously associated, ultimately coalesce and call one another up without any consciousness, as we see in the quick perception or intuition of the man of large worldly experience; and feelings, once active, leave behind them their large unconscious residua, thus affecting the generation of the character, so that, apart from the original or inborn nature of the individual, contentment, melancholy, cowardice, bravery, and even moral feeling are generated as the results of particular life-experiences.”

Here we have sketched out a magnificent educational charter. It is as well, perhaps, that we do not realise the extent of our liberties; if we did, it may be, such a fervour of educational enthusiasm would seize us, that we should behave as did those early Christians who every day expected the coming of the Lord. How should a man have patience to buy and sell and get gain had it been revealed to him that he was able to paint the greatest picture ever painted? And we, with the enthralling vision of what our little child might become under our hands, how should we have patience for common toils? That science should have revealed the rationale of education in our day is possibly the Divine recognition that we have become more fit for the task, because we have come to an increasing sense of moral responsibility. What would it be for an immoral people to discern fully the possibilities of education? But how slow we are! how—

“Custom lies upon us with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!”

It is now more than five-and-twenty years since these words of Dr. Maudsley, and many of like force by other physiologists, were published to the world. We have purposely chosen words that have stood the test of time; for to-day a hundred eminent scientific men, at home and abroad, are proclaiming the same truths. Every scientist believes them! And we? We go on after our use and wont, as if nothing had been said; dropping, hour by hour, out of careless hands, seeds of corn and hemlock, of bramble and rose.

Let us run over the charter of our liberties, as Dr. Maudsley sums them up.

We may lay the physical basis of memory: while the wide-eyed babe stretches his little person with aimless kickings on his rug, he is receiving unconsciously those first impressions which form his earliest memories; and we can order those memories for him: we can see that the earliest sights he sees are sights of order, neatness, beauty; that the sounds his ear drinks in are musical and soft, tender and joyous; that the baby nostrils sniff only delicate purity and sweetness. These memories remain through life, engraved on the unthinking brain. As we shall see later, memories have a certain power of accretion—where there are some others of a like kind gather, and all the life is ordered on the lines of these first pure and tender memories.

We may lay the foundation of the development of all the mental functions. Are there children who do not wonder, or revere, or care for fairy tales, or think wise child-thoughts? Perhaps there are not; but if there are, it is because the fertilising pollen grain has never been conveyed to the ovule waiting for it in the child’s soul.

These are some of the things that—according to the citations we have given from Dr. Maudsley’s Physiology of Mind—his parents may settle for the future man, even in his early childhood:—

His definite ideas upon particular subjects, as, for example, his relations with other people.

His habits, of neatness or disorder, of punctuality, of moderation.

His general modes of thought, as affected by altruism or egoism.

His consequent modes of feeling and action.

His objects of thought—the small affairs of daily life, the natural world, the operations or the productions of the human mind, the ways of God with men.

His distinguishing talent—music, eloquence, invention.

His disposition or tone of character, as it shows itself in and affects his family and other close relations in life—reserved or frank, morose or genial, melancholy or cheerful, cowardly or brave.

CHAPTER IV

PARENTS AS INSPIRERS

Part II

“Sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”—Thackeray.

The last chapter closed with an imperfect summary of what we may call the educational functions of parents. We found that it rests with the parents of the child to settle for the future man his ways of thinking, behaving, feeling, acting; his disposition, his particular talent; the manner of things upon which his thoughts shall run. Who shall fix limitations to the power of parents? The destiny of the child is ruled by his parents, because they have the virgin soil all to themselves. The first sowing must be at their hands, or at the hands of such as they choose to depute.

What do they sow? Ideas. We cannot too soon recognise what is the sole educational instrument we have to work with, and how this one instrument is to be handled. But how radically wrong is all our thought upon education! We cannot use the fit words because we do not think the right thing. For example, an idea is not an “instrument,” but an agent; is not to be “handled,” but, shall we say, set in motion? We have perhaps got over the educational misconception of the tabula rasa. No one now looks on the child’s white soul as a tablet prepared for the exercise of the educator’s supreme art. But the conception which has succeeded this time-honoured heresy rests on the same false bases of the august office and the infallible wisdom of the educator. Here it is in its cruder form: “Pestalozzi aimed more at harmoniously developing the faculties than at making use of them for the acquirement of knowledge; he sought to prepare the vase rather than to fill it.” In the hands of Froebel the figure gains in boldness and beauty; it is no longer a mere vase to be shaped under the potter’s fingers; but a flower, say, a perfect rose, to be delicately and consciously and methodically moulded, petal by petal, curve and curl; for the perfume and living glory of the flower, why these will come; do you your part and mould the several petals; wait, too, upon sunshine and shower, give space and place for your blossom to expand. And so we go to work with a touch to “imagination” here, and to “judgment” there; now, to the “perceptive faculties,” now, to the “conceptive;” in this, aiming at the moral, and in this, at the intellectual nature of the child; touching into being, petal by petal, the flower of a perfect life under the genial influences of sunny looks and happy moods. This reading of the meaning of education and of the work of the educator is very fascinating, and it calls forth singular zeal and self-devotion on the part of those gardeners whose plants are the children. Perhaps, indeed, this of the Kindergarten is the one vital conception of education we have had hitherto.

But in these days of revolutionary thought, when all along the line—in geology and anthropology, chemistry, philology, and biology—science is changing front, it is necessary that we should reconsider our conception of Education. We are taught, for example, that “heredity” is by no means the simple and direct transmission, from parent, or remote ancestor, to child of power and proclivity, virtue and defect; and we breathe freer, because we had begun to suspect that if this were so, it would mean to most of us an inheritance of exaggerated defects: imbecility, insanity, congenital disease—are they utterly removed from any one of us? So of education, we begin to ask, Is its work so purely formative as we thought? Is it directly formative at all? How much is there in this pleasing and easy doctrine, that the drawing forth and strengthening and directing of the several “faculties” is education? Parents are very jealous over the individuality of their children; they mistrust the tendency to develop all on the same plan; and this instinctive jealousy is right; for, supposing that education really did consist in systematised efforts to draw out every power that is in us, why, we should all develop on the same lines, be as like as “two peas,” and (should we not?) die of weariness of one another! Some of us have an uneasy sense that things are tending towards this deadly sameness. But, indeed, the fear is groundless. We may believe that the personality, the individuality, of each of us, is too dear to God, and too necessary to a complete humanity, to be left at the mercy of empirics. We are absolutely safe, and the tenderest child is fortified against a battering-ram of educational forces.

The problem of education is more complex than it seems at first sight, and well for us and the world that it is so. “Education is a life;” you may stunt and starve and kill, or you may cherish and sustain; but the beating of the heart, the movement of the lungs, and the development of the faculties (are there any “faculties”?) are only indirectly our care. The poverty of our thought on the subject of education is shown by the fact that we have no word which at all implies the sustaining of a life: education (e, out, and ducere, to lead, to draw) is very inadequate; it covers no more than those occasional gymnastics of the mind which correspond with those by which the limbs are trained: training (trahere) is almost synonymous, and upon these two words rests the misconception that the development and the exercise of the “faculties” is the object of education (we must needs use the word for want of a better). Our homely Saxon “bringing up” is nearer the truth, perhaps because of its very vagueness; any way, “up” implies an aim, and “bringing” an effort.

The happy phrase of Mr. Matthew Arnold—“Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life”—is perhaps the most complete and adequate definition of education we possess. It is a great thing to have said it; and our wiser posterity may see in that “profound and exquisite remark” the fruition of a lifetime of critical effort. Observe how it covers the question from the three conceivable points of view. Subjectively, in the child, education is a life; objectively, as affecting the child, education is a discipline; relatively, if we may introduce a third term, as regards the environment of the child, education is an atmosphere.

We shall examine each of these postulates later; at present we shall attempt no more than to clear the ground a little, with a view to the subject of this paper, “Parents as Inspirers”—not “modellers,” but “inspirers.”

It is only as we recognise our limitations that our work becomes effective: when we see definitely what we are to do, what we can do, and what we cannot do, we set to work with confidence and courage; we have an end in view, and we make our way intelligently towards that end, and a way to an end is method. It rests with parents not only to give their children birth into the life of intelligence and moral power, but to sustain the higher life which they have borne. Now that life, which we call education, receives only one kind of sustenance; it grows upon ideas. You may go through years of so-called “education” without getting a single vital idea; and that is why many a well-fed body carries about a feeble, starved intelligence; and no society for the prevention of cruelty to children cries shame on the parents. Only the other day we heard of a girl of fifteen who had spent two years at a school without taking part in a single lesson, and this by the express desire of her mother, who wished all her time and all her pains to be given to “fancy needlework.” This, no doubt, is a survival (not of the fittest), but it is possible to pass even the Universities’ Local Examinations with credit, without ever having experienced that vital stir which marks the inception of an idea; and, if we have succeeded in escaping this disturbing influence, why we have “finished our education” when we leave school; we shut up our books and our minds, and remain pigmies in the dark forest of our own dim world of thought and feeling.

What is an idea? A live thing of the mind, according to the older philosophers, from Plato to Bacon, from Bacon to Coleridge. We say of an idea that it strikes us, impresses us, seizes us, takes possession of us, rules us; and our common speech is, as usual, truer to fact than the conscious thought which it expresses. We do not in the least exaggerate in ascribing this sort of action and power to an idea. We form an ideal—a, so to speak, embodied idea—and our ideal exercises the very strongest formative influence upon us. Why do you devote yourself to this pursuit, that cause? “Because twenty years ago such and such an idea struck me,” is the sort of history which might be given of every purposeful life—every life devoted to the working out of an idea. Now is it not marvellous that, recognising as we do the potency of an idea, both the word and the conception it covers enter so little into our thought of education?

Coleridge brings the conception of an “idea” within the sphere of the scientific thought of to-day; not as that thought is expressed in Psychology—a term which he himself launched upon the world with an apology for it as an insolens verbum,[1] but in that science of the correlation and interaction of mind and brain, which is at present rather clumsily expressed in such terms as “mental physiology” and “psycho-physiology.”

In his method he gives us the following illustration of the rise and progress of an idea:—

“We can recall no incident of human history that impresses the imagination more deeply than the moment when Columbus, on an unknown ocean, first perceived that startling fact, the change of the magnetic needle. How many such instances occur in history, when the ideas of nature (presented to chosen minds by a Higher Power than Nature herself) suddenly unfold, as it were, in prophetic succession, systematic views destined to produce the most important revolutions in the state of man! The clear spirit of Columbus was doubtless eminently methodical. He saw distinctly that great leading idea which authorised the poor pilot to become a ‘promiser of kingdoms.’”

Notice the genesis of such ideas—“presented to chosen minds by a Higher Power than Nature;” notice how accurately this history of an idea fits in with what we know of the history of great inventions and discoveries, with that of the ideas which rule our own lives; and how well does it correspond with that key to the origin of “practical” ideas which we find elsewhere:—

“Doth the plowman plow continually to ... open and break the clods of his ground? When he hath made plain the face thereof, doth he not cast abroad the fitches, and scatter the cummin, and put in the wheat in rows, and the barley in the appointed place, and the spelt in the border thereof? For his God doth instruct him aright, and doth teach him....

“Bread corn is ground; for he will not ever be threshing it.... This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in wisdom.”[2]

Ideas may invest as an atmosphere, rather than strike as a weapon. “The idea may exist in a clear, distinct definite form, as that of a circle in the mind of a geometrician; or it may be a mere instinct, a vague appetency towards something, ... like the impulse which fills the young poet’s eyes with tears, he knows not why.” To excite this “appetency towards something”—towards things lovely, honest, and of good report, is the earliest and most important ministry of the educator. How shall these indefinite ideas which manifest themselves in appetency be imparted? They are not to be given of set purpose, nor taken at set times. They are held in that thought-environment which surrounds the child as an atmosphere, which he breathes as his breath of life; and this atmosphere in which the child inspires his unconscious ideas of right living emanates from his parents. Every look of gentleness and tone of reverence, every word of kindness and act of help, passes into the thought-environment, the very atmosphere which the child breathes; he does not think of these things, may never think of them, but all his life long they excite that “vague appetency towards something” out of which most of his actions spring. Oh! the wonderful and dreadful presence of the little child in the midst.

That he should take direction and inspiration from all the casual life about him, should make our poor words and ways the starting-point from which, and in the direction of which, he develops—this is a thought which makes the most of us hold our breath. There is no way of escape for parents; they must needs be as “inspirers” to their children, because about them hangs, as its atmosphere about a planet, the thought-environment of the child, from which he derives those enduring ideas which express themselves as a life-long “appetency” towards things sordid or things lovely, things earthly or divine.

Let us now hear Coleridge on the subject of those definite ideas which are not inhaled as air, but conveyed as meat to the mind:—[3]

“From the first, or initiative idea, as from a seed, successive ideas germinate.”

“Events and images, the lively and spirit-stirring machinery of the external world, are like light, and air, and moisture to the seed of the mind, which would else rot and perish.”

“The paths in which we may pursue a methodical course are manifold, and at the head of each stands its peculiar and guiding idea.”

“Those ideas are as regularly subordinate in dignity as the paths to which they point are various and eccentric in direction. The world has suffered much, in modern times, from a subversion of the natural and necessary order of Science ... from summoning reason and faith to the bar of that limited physical experience to which, by the true laws of method, they owe no obedience.”

“Progress follows the path of the idea from which it sets out; requiring, however, a constant wakefulness of mind to keep it within the due limits of its course. Hence the orbits of thought, so to speak, must differ among themselves as the initiative ideas differ.”

Have we not here the corollary to, and the explanation of, that law of unconscious cerebration which results in our “ways of thinking,” which shapes our character, rules our destiny? Thoughtful minds consider that the new light which biology is throwing upon the laws of mind is bringing to the front once more the Platonic doctrine, that “An idea is a distinguishable power, self-affirmed, and seen in its unity with the Eternal Essence.”

The whole subject is profound, but as practical as it is profound. We absolutely must disabuse our minds of the theory that the functions of education are, in the main, gymnastic. In the early years of the child’s life it makes, perhaps, little apparent difference whether his parents start with the notion that to educate is to fill a receptacle, inscribe a tablet, mould plastic matter, or nourish a life; but in the end we shall find that only those ideas which have fed his life are taken into the being of the child; all the rest is thrown away, or worse, is like sawdust in the system, an impediment and an injury to the vital processes.

This is, perhaps, how the educational formula should run: Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin; but,

“God has made us so,”

that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food. The child is an eclectic; he may choose this or that; therefore, in the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand, for thou knowest not which shall prosper, whether this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.

The child has affinities with evil as well as with good; therefore, hedge him about from any chance lodgment of evil suggestion.

The initial idea begets subsequent ideas; therefore, take care that children get right primary ideas on the great relations and duties of life.

Every study, every line of thought, has its “guiding idea;” therefore the study of a child makes for living education, as it is quickened by the guiding idea “which stands at the head.”

In a word, our much boasted “infallible reason”—is it not the involuntary thought which follows the initial idea upon necessary logical lines? Given, the starting idea, and the conclusion may be predicated almost to a certainty. We get into the way of thinking such and such manner of thoughts, and of coming to such and such conclusions, ever further and further removed from the starting-point, but on the same lines. There is structural adaptation in the brain tissue to the manner of thoughts we think—a plan and a way for them to run in. Thus we see how the destiny of a life is shaped in the nursery, by the reverent naming of the Divine Name; by the light scoff at holy things; by the thought of duty the little child gets who is made to finish conscientiously his little task; by the hardness of heart that comes to the child who hears the faults or sorrows of others spoken of lightly.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “We beg pardon for the use of this insolens verbum, but it is one of which our language stands in great need.”—S. T. Coleridge.

[2] Isaiah xxviii.

[3] Method—S. T. Coleridge.

CHAPTER V

PARENTS AS INSPIRERS

Part III

It is probable that parents as a class feel more than ever before the responsibility of their prophetic office. It is as revealers of God to their children that parents touch their highest limitations; perhaps it is only as they succeed in this part of their work that they fulfil the Divine intention in giving them children to bring up—in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

How to fortify the children against the doubts of which the air is full, is an anxious question. Three courses are open—to teach as we of an older generation have been taught, and to let them bide their time and their chance; to attempt to deal with the doubts and difficulties which have turned up, or are likely to turn up; or, to give children such hold upon vital truth, and, at the same time, such an outlook upon current thought, that they shall be landed on the safe side of the controversies of their day, open to truth, in however new a light presented, and safeguarded against mortal error.

The first course is unfair to the young: when the attack comes, they find themselves at a disadvantage; they have nothing to reply; their pride is in arms; they jump to the conclusion that there is no defence possible of that which they have received as truth; had there been, would they not have been instructed to make it? They resent being made out in the wrong, being on the weaker side—so it seems to them,—being behind their times; and they go over without a struggle to the side of the most aggressive thinkers of their day.

Let us suppose that, on the other hand, they have been fortified with “Christian Evidences,” defended by bulwarks of sound dogmatic teaching. Religion without definite dogmatic teaching degenerates into sentiment, but dogma, as dogma, offers no defence against the assaults of unbelief. As for “evidences,” the rôle of the Christian apologist is open to the imputation conveyed in the keen proverb, qui s’excuse, s’accuse; the truth by which we live must needs be self-evidenced, admitting of neither proof nor disproof. Children should be taught Bible history with every elucidation which modern research makes possible. But they should not be taught to think of the inscriptions on the Assyrian monuments, for example, as proofs of the truth of the Bible records, but rather as illustrations, though they are, and cannot but be subsidiary proofs.

Let us look at the third course; and first, as regards the outlook upon current thought. Contemporary opinion is the fetish of the young mind. Young people are eager to know what to think on all the serious questions of religion and life. They ask what is the opinion of this and that leading thinker of their day. They by no means confine themselves to such leaders of thought as their parents have elected to follow; on the contrary, the “other side” of every question is the attractive side for them, and they do not choose to be behind the foremost in the race of thought.

Now, that their young people should thus take to the water need not come upon parents as a surprise. The whole training from babyhood upward should be in view of this plunge. When the time comes, there is nothing to be done; openly, it may be, secretly if the home rule is rigid, the young folk think their own thoughts; that is, they follow the leader they have elected; for they are truly modest and humble at heart, and do not yet venture to think for themselves; only they have transferred their allegiance. Nor is this transfer of allegiance to be resented by parents; we all claim this kind of “suffrage” in our turn when we feel ourselves included in larger interests than those of the family.

But there is much to be done beforehand, though nothing when the time comes. The notion that any contemporary authority is infallible may be steadily undermined from infancy onwards, though at some sacrifice of ease and glory to the parents. “I don’t know” must take the place of the vague wise-sounding answer, the random shot which children’s pertinacious questionings too often provoke. And “I don’t know” should be followed by the effort to know, the research necessary to find out. Even then, the possibility of error in a “printed book” must occasionally be faced. The results of this kind of training in the way of mental balance and repose are invaluable.

Another safeguard is in the attitude of reservation, shall we say? which it may be well to preserve towards “Science.” It is well that the enthusiasm of children should be kindled, that they should see how glorious it is to devote a lifetime to patient research, how great to find out a single secret of nature, a key to many riddles. The heroes of science should be their heroes; the great names, especially of those who are amongst us, should be household words. But here, again, nice discrimination should be exercised; two points should be kept well to the front—the absolute silence of the oracle on all ultimate questions of origin and life, and the fact that, all along the line, scientific truth comes in like the tide, with steady advance, but with ebb and flow of every wavelet of truth; so much so, that, at the present moment, the teaching of the last twenty years is discredited in at least half a dozen departments of science. Indeed, it would seem to be the part of wisdom to wait half a century before fitting the discovery of to-day into the general scheme of things. And this, not because the latest discovery is not absolutely true, but because we are not yet able so to adjust it—according to the “science of the proportion of things”—that it shall be relatively true.

But all this is surely beyond children? By no means; every walk should quicken their enthusiasm for the things of nature, and their reverence for the priests of that temple; but occasion should be taken to mark the progressive advances of science, and the fact that the teaching of to-day may be the error of to-morrow, because new light may lead to new conclusions even from the facts already known. “Until quite lately, geologists thought ... they now think ... but they may find reason to think otherwise in the future.” To perceive that knowledge is progressive, and that the next “find” may always alter the bearings of what went before; that we are waiting, and may have very long to wait, for the last word; that science also is “revelation,” though we are not yet able fully to interpret what we know; and that ‘science’ herself contains the promise of great impetus to the spiritual life—to perceive these things is to be able to rejoice in all truth and to wait for final certainty.

In another way we may endeavour to secure for the children that stability of mind which comes of self-knowledge. It is well that they should know so early, that they will seem to themselves always to have known, some of the laws of thought which govern their own minds. Let them know that, once an idea takes possession of them, it will pursue, so to speak, its own course, will establish its own place in the very substance of the brain, will draw its own train of ideas after it. One of the most fertile sources of youthful infidelity is the fact that thoughtful boys and girls are infinitely surprised when they come to notice the course of their own thoughts. They read a book or listen to talk with a tendency to what is to them “free-thought.” And then, the “fearful joy” of finding that their own thoughts begin with the thought they have heard, and go on and on to new and startling conclusions on the same lines! The mental stir of all this gives a delightful sense of power, and a sense of inevitableness and certainty too; for they do not intend or try to think this or that. It comes of itself; their reason, they believe, is acting independently of them, and how can they help assuming that what comes to them of itself, with an air of absolute certainty, must of necessity be right?

But what if from childhood they had been warned, “Take care of your thoughts, and the rest will take care of itself; let a thought in, and it will stay; will come again to-morrow and the next day, will make a place for itself in your brain, and will bring many other thoughts like itself. Your business is to look at the thoughts as they come, to keep out the wrong thoughts, and let in the right. See that ye enter not into temptation.” This sort of teaching is not so hard to understand as the rules for the English nominative, and is of infinitively more profit in the conduct of life. It is a great safeguard to know that your “reason” is capable of proving any theory you allow yourself to entertain.

We have touched here only on the negative side of the parent’s work as prophet, inspirer. There are perhaps few parents to whom the innocence of the babe in its mother’s arms does not appeal with pathetic force. “Open me the gates of righteousness, that I may go in unto them,” is the voice of the little unworldly child; and a wish, anyway, that he may be kept unspotted from the world is breathed in every kiss of his mother, in the light of his father’s eyes. But how ready we are to conclude that children cannot be expected to understand spiritual things. Our own grasp of the things of the Spirit is all too lax, and how can we expect that the child’s feeble intelligence can apprehend the highest mysteries of our being? But here we are altogether wrong. It is with the advance of years that a materialistic temper settles upon us. But the children live in the light of the morning-land. The spirit-world has no mysteries for them; that parable and travesty of the spirit-world, the fairy-world, where all things are possible, is it not their favourite dwelling-place? And fairy tales are so dear to children because their spirits fret against the hard and narrow limitations of time and place and substance; they cannot breathe freely in a material world. Think what the vision of God should be to the little child already peering wistfully through the bars of his prison-house. Not a far-off God, a cold abstraction, but a warm, breathing, spiritual Presence about his path and about his bed—a Presence in which he recognises protection and tenderness in darkness and danger, towards which he rushes as the timid child to hide his face in his mother’s skirts.

A friend tells me the following story of her girlhood. It so happened that extra lessons detained her at school until dark every day during the winter. She was extremely timid, but, with the unconscious reserve of youth, never thought of mentioning her fear of “something.” Her way home lay by a river-side, a solitary path under trees—big trees, with masses of shadow. The black shadows, in which “something” might lie hid—the swsh-sh, swsh-sh of the river, which might be whisperings or the rustle of garments—filled her night by night with unabated terror. She fled along that river-side path with beating heart; but, quick as flying steps and beating heart, these words beat in her brain, over, and over, and over, the whole length of the way, evening by evening, winter after winter: “Thou art my hiding-place; Thou shalt preserve me from trouble; Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.” Years after, when the woman might be supposed to have outgrown girlish terrors, she found herself again walking alone in the early darkness of a winter’s evening under trees by the swsh-sh of another river. The old terror returned, and with it the old words came to her, and kept time the whole length of the way with her hasty steps. Such a place to hide him in should be the thought of God to every child.

Their keen sensitiveness to spiritual influences is not due to ignorance on the part of the children. It is we, not they, who are in error. The whole tendency of modern biological thought is to confirm the teaching of the Bible: the ideas which quicken come from above; the mind of the little child is an open field, surely “good ground,” where, morning by morning, the sower goes forth to sow, and the seed is the Word. All our teaching of children should be given reverently, with the humble sense that we are invited in this matter to co-operate with the Holy Spirit; but it should be given dutifully and diligently, with the awful sense that our co-operation would appear to be made a condition of the Divine action; that the Saviour of the world pleads with us to “Suffer the little children to come unto Me,” as if we had the power to hinder, as we know that we have.

This thought of the Saviour of the world implies another conception which we sometimes leave out of sight in dealing with children. Young faces are not always sunny and lovely; even the brightest children in the happiest circumstances have their clouded hours. We rightly put the cloud down to some little disorder, or to the weather, but these are the secondary causes which reveal a deep-seated discontent. Children have a sense of sin acute in proportion to their sensitiveness. We are in danger of trusting too much to a rose-water treatment; we do not take children seriously enough; brought face to face with a child, we find he is a very real person, but in our educational theories we take him as “something between a wax doll and an angel.” He sins; he is guilty of greediness, falsehood, malice, cruelty, a hundred faults that would be hateful in a grown-up person; we say he will know better by-and-by. He will never know better; he is keenly aware of his own odiousness. How many of us would say about our childhood, if we told the whole truth, “Oh, I was an odious little thing!” and that, not because we recollect our faults, but because we recollect our childish estimate of ourselves. Many a bright and merry child is odious in his own eyes; and the “peace, peace, where there is no peace,” of fond parents and friends is little comfort. It is well that we “ask for the old paths, where is the good way;” it is not well that, in the name of the old paths, we lead our children into blind alleys, nor that we let them follow the new into bewildering mazes.

CHAPTER VI

PARENTS AS INSPIRERS

Part IV

“One of the little boys gazing upon the terrible desolation of the scene, so unlike in its savage and inhuman aspects anything he had ever seen at home, nestled close to his mother, and asked with bated breath, ‘Mither, is there a God here?’”—John Burroughs.

The last chapter introduced the thought of parents in their highest function—as revealers of God to their children. To bring the human race, family by family, child by child, out of the savage and inhuman desolation where He is not, into the light and warmth and comfort of the presence of God, is, no doubt, the chief thing we have to do in the world. And this individual work with each child, being the most momentous work in the world, is put into the hands of the wisest, most loving, disciplined, and divinely instructed of human beings. Be ye perfect as your Father is perfect, is the perfection of parenthood, perhaps to be attained only in its fulness through parenthood. There are mistaken parents, ignorant parents, a few indifferent parents, even, as one in a thousand, callous parents; but the good that is done upon the earth is done, under God, by parents, whether directly or indirectly.

Parents, who recognise that their great work is to be done by the instrumentality of the ideas they are able to introduce into the minds of their children, will take anxious thought as to those ideas of God which are most fitting for children, and as to how those ideas may best be conveyed. Let us consider an idea which is just now causing some stir in people’s thoughts.

“We read some of the Old Testament history as ‘history of the Jews,’ and Job and Isaiah and the Psalms as poetry—and I am glad to say he is very fond of them; and parts of the Gospels in Greek, as the life and character of a hero. It is the greatest mistake to impose them upon children as authoritative and divine all at once. It at once diminishes their interest: we ought to work slowly up through the human side.”[4]

Here is a theory which commends itself to many persons because it is “so reasonable.” But it goes upon the assumption that we are ruled by Reason, an infallible entity, which is certain, give it fair play, to bring us to just conclusions. Now the exercise of that function of the mind which we call reasoning—we must decline to speak of “the Reason”—does indeed bring us to inevitable conclusions; the process is definite, the result convincing; but whether that result be right or wrong depends altogether upon the initial idea which, when we wish to discredit it, we call a prejudice; when we wish to exalt, we call an intuition, even an inspiration. It would be idle to illustrate this position; the whole history of Error is the history of the logical outcome of what we happily call misconceptions. The history of Persecution is the tale of how the inevitable conclusions arrived at by reasoning pass themselves off for truth. The Event of Calvary was due to no hasty mad outburst of popular feeling. It was a triumph of reasoning: the inevitable issue of more than one logical sequence; the Crucifixion was not criminal, but altogether laudable, if that is right which is reasonable. And this is why the hearts of religious Jews were hardened and their understanding darkened; they were truly doing what was right in their own eyes. It is a marvellous thing to perceive the thoughts within us driving us forward to an inevitable conclusion, even against our will. How can that conclusion which presents itself to us in spite of ourselves fail to be right?

Let us place ourselves for one instant in the position of the logical and conscientious Jew. “‘Jehovah’ is a name of awe, unapproachable in thought or act except in ways Himself has specified. To attempt unlawful approach is to blaspheme. As Jehovah is infinitely great, presumptuous offence is infinitely heinous, is criminal, is the last crime as committed against Him who is the First. The blasphemer is worthy of death. This man makes himself equal with God, the unapproachable. He is a blasphemer, arrogant as Beelzebub. He is doubly worthy of death. To the people of the Jews is committed in trust the honoured Name; upon them it is incumbent to exterminate the blasphemer. The man must die.” Here is the secret of the virulent hatred which dogged the steps of the blameless Life. These men were following the dictates of reason, and knew, so they would say, that they were doing right. Here we have the invincible ignorance which the Light of the world failed to illumine; and He,

“Who knows us as we are,

Yet loves us better than He knows,”

offers for them the true plea, “They know not what they do.” The steps of the argument are incontrovertible; the error lies in the initial idea,—such conception of Jehovah as made the conception of Christ inadmissible, impossible. Thus reasoned the Jew upon whom his religion had the first claim. The patriotic Jew, to whom religion itself was subservient to the hopes of his nation, arrived by quite another chain of spontaneous arguments at the same inevitable conclusion:—“The Jews are the chosen people. The first duty of a Jew is towards his nation. These are critical times. A great hope is before us, but we are in the grip of the Romans; they may crush out the national life before our hope is realised. Nothing must be done to alarm their suspicions. This Man? By all accounts He is harmless, perhaps righteous. But He stirs up the people. It is rumoured that they call Him King of the Jews. He must not be permitted to ruin the hopes of the nation. He must die. It is expedient that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” Thus the consummate crime that has been done upon the earth was done probably without any consciousness of criminality; on the contrary, with the acquittal of that spurious moral sense which supports with its approval all reasonable action. The Crucifixion was the logical and necessary outcome of ideas imbibed from their cradles by the persecuting Jews. So of every persecution; none is born of the occasion and the hour, but comes out of the habit of thought of a lifetime.

It is the primal impulse to these habits of thought which children must owe to their parents; and, as a man’s thought and action Godward is—

“The very pulse of the machine,”

the introduction of such primal ideas as shall impel the soul to God is the first duty and the highest privilege of parents. Whatever sin of unbelief a man is guilty of, are his parents wholly without blame? Let us consider what is commonly done in the nursery in this respect. No sooner can the little being lisp than he is taught to kneel up in his mother’s lap, and say “God bless ...” and then follows a list of the near and dear, and “God bless ... and make him a good boy, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.” It is very touching and beautiful. I once peeped in at an open cottage door in a moorland village, and saw a little child in its nightgown kneeling in its mother’s lap and saying its evening prayer. The spot has ever since remained to me a sort of shrine. There is no sight more touching and tender. By-and-by, so soon as he can speak the words,

“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,”

is added to the little one’s prayer, and later, “Our Father.” Nothing could be more suitable and more beautiful than these morning and evening approaches to God, the little children brought to Him by their mothers. And most of us can “think back” to the hallowing influence of these early prayers. But might not more be done? How many times a day does a mother lift up her heart to God as she goes in and out amongst her children, and they never know! “To-day I talked to them” (a boy and girl of four and five) “about Rebekah at the well. They were very much interested, especially about Eliezer praying in his heart and the answer coming at once. They said, ‘How did he pray?’ I said, ‘I often pray in my heart when you know nothing about it. Sometimes you begin to show a naughty spirit, and I pray for you in my heart, and almost directly I find the good Spirit comes, and your faces show my prayer is answered.’ O. stroked my hand and said, ‘Dear mother, I shall think of that!’ Boy looked thoughtful, but didn’t speak; but when they were in bed I knelt down to pray for them before leaving them, and when I got up, Boy said, ‘Mother, God filled my heart with goodness while you prayed for us; and, mother, I will try to-morrow.’” Is it possible that the mother could, when alone with her children, occasionally hold this communing out loud, so that the children might grow up in the sense of the presence of God? It would probably be difficult for many mothers to break down the barrier of spiritual reserve in the presence of even their own children. But could it be done, would it not lead to glad and natural living in the recognised presence of God?

A mother who remembered a little penny scent-bottle as an early joy of her own, took three such small bottles home to her three little girls. They got them next morning at the family breakfast and enjoyed them all through the meal. Before it ended the mother was called away, and little M. was sitting rather solitary with her scent-bottle and the remains of her breakfast. And out of the pure well of the little girl’s heart came this, intended for nobody’s ear, “Dear mother, you are too good!” Think of the joy of the mother who should overhear her little child murmuring over the first primrose of the year, “Dear God, you are too good!” Children are so imitative, that if they hear their parents speak out continually their joys and fears, their thanks and wishes, they too will have many things to say.

Another point in this connection: the little German child hears and speaks many times a day of der liebe Gott; to be sure he addresses Him as “Du,” but du is part of his everyday speech; the circle of the very dear and intimate is hedged in by the magic du. So with the little French child, whose thought and word are ever of le bon Dieu; he also says Tu, but that is how he speaks to those most endeared to him. But the little English child is thrust out in the cold by an archaic mode of address, reverent in the ears of us older people, but forbidding, we may be sure, to the child. Then, for the Lord’s Prayer, what a boon would be a truly reverent translation of it into the English of to-day. To us, who have learned to spell it out, the present form is dear, almost sacred; but we must not forget that it is after all only a translation; and is, perhaps, the most archaic piece of English in modern use: “which art,”[5] commonly rendered “chart,” means nothing for a child. “Hallowed” is the speech of a strange tongue to him—not much more to us; “trespasses” is a semi-legal term, never likely to come into his everyday talk, and no explanations will make “Thy” have the same force for him as “your.” To make a child utter his prayers in a strange speech is to put up a barrier between him and his “Almighty Lover.” Again, might we not venture to teach our children to say “dear God”? A parent, surely, can believe that no austerely reverential style can be so sweet in the Divine Father’s ears as the appeal to “dear God” for sympathy in joy and help in trouble, which flows naturally from the little child who is “used to God.” Let children grow up aware of the constant, immediate, joy-giving, joy-taking Presence in the midst of them, and you may laugh at all assaults of “infidelity,” which is foolishness to him who knows his God as—only far better than—he knows father or mother, wife or child.

Let them grow up, too, with the shout of a King in their midst. There are, in this poor stuff we call human nature, founts of loyalty, worship, passionate devotion, glad service, which have, alas! to be unsealed in the earth-laden older heart, but only ask place to flow from the child’s. There is no safeguard and no joy like that of being under orders, being possessed, controlled, continually in the service of One whom it is gladness to obey.

We lose sight of the fact in our modern civilisation, but a king, a leader, implies warfare, a foe, victory—possible defeat and disgrace. And this is the conception of life which cannot too soon be brought before children.

“After thinking the matter over with some care, I resolved that I cannot do better than give you my view of what it was that the average boy carried away from our Rugby of half-a-century ago which stood him in the best stead—was of the highest value to him—in after life.... I have been in some doubt as to what to put first, and am by no means sure that the few who are left of my old schoolfellows would agree with me; but, speaking for myself, I think this was our most marked characteristic, the feeling that in school and close we were in training for a big fight—were, in fact, already engaged in it—a fight which would last all our lives, and try all our powers, physical, intellectual, and moral, to the utmost. I need not say that this fight was the world-old one of good with evil, of light and truth against darkness and sin, of Christ against the devil.”

So said the author of “Tom Brown” in an address to Rugby School delivered on a recent Quinquagesima Sunday. This is plain speaking; education is only worthy of the name as it teaches this lesson; and it is a lesson which should be learnt in the home or ever the child sets foot in any other school of life. It is an insult to children to say they are too young to understand this for which we are sent into the world. A boy of five, a great-grandson of Dr. Arnold, was sitting at the piano with his mother, choosing his Sunday hymn; he chose “Thy will be done,” and, as his special favourite, the verse beginning, “Renew my will from day to day.” The choice of hymn and verse rather puzzled his mother, who had a further glimpse into the world of child-thought when the little fellow said wistfully, “Oh, dear, it’s very hard to do God’s work!” The difference between doing and bearing was not plain to him, but the battle and struggle and strain of life already pressed on the spirit of the “careless, happy child.” That an evil spiritual personality can get at their thoughts, and incite them to “be naughty,” children learn all too soon, and understand, perhaps, better than we do. Then, they are cross, “naughty,” separate, sinful, needing to be healed as truly as the hoary sinner, and much more aware of their need, because the tender soul of the child, like an infant’s skin, is fretted by spiritual soreness. “It’s very kind of God to forgive me so often; I’ve been naughty so many times to-day,” said a sad little sinner of six, not at all because any one else had been at the pains to convince her of naughtiness. Even “Pet Marjorie’s” buoyancy is not proof against this sad sense of shortcoming:—

“Yesterday I behaved extremely ill in God’s most holy church, for I would never attend myself nor let Isabella attend, ... and it was the very same Devil that tempted Job that tempted me, I am sure; but he resisted Satan, though he had boils and many other misfortunes which I have escaped.”—(At six!)

We must needs smile at the little “crimes,” but we must not smile too much, and let children be depressed with much “naughtiness” when they should live in the instant healing, in the dear Name, of the Saviour of the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] “Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton.” Messrs. Kegan Paul & Co.

[5] Catholics say “who art.”

CHAPTER VII

THE PARENT AS SCHOOLMASTER

“The schoolmaster will make him sit up!” “Sit up,” that is, “come when he’s called,” apparently, for the remark concerned a young person who went on spinning his top with nonchalance, ignoring an intermittent stream of objurgations from his mother, whose view was that bedtime had arrived. Circumstances alter cases, but is it unheard of in higher ranks of life to trust to the schoolmaster to make a child “sit up,” after a good deal of mental and moral sprawling about at home?

“Oh, he’s a little fellow yet; he will know better by-and-by.”

“My view is, let children have a delightful childhood. Time enough for restraint and contradiction when they go to school.”

“We do not hold with punishing children; love your children, and let them alone, is our principle.”

“They will meet with hardness enough in the world. Childhood shall have no harsh memories for them.”

“School will break them in. Let them grow like young colts till the time comes to break them. All young things should be free to kick about.”

“What’s bred in the bone must come out in the flesh. I do not care much for all this clipping and shaping of children. Destroys individuality.”

“When he’s older, he will know better. Time cures many faults.”

And so on; we might fill pages with the wise things people say, who, for one excellent reason or another, prefer to leave it to the schoolmaster to make a child “sit up.” And does the schoolmaster live up to his reputation? how far does he succeed with the child who comes to him with no self-management? His real and proud successes are with the children who have been trained to “sit up” at home. His pleasure in such children is unbounded; the pains he takes with them unlimited; the successful careers he is able to launch them upon exceed the ambition of those most wildly ambitious of human beings (dare we say it?)—parents, quiet, sensible, matter-of-fact parents. But the schoolmaster takes little credit to himself for these happy results. Schoolmasters and schoolmistresses are modest people, though they are not always credited with their virtues.

“You can do anything with So-and-so; his parents have turned him out so well.” Observe, the master takes little credit to himself (by no means so much as he deserves); and why? Experience makes fools wise; and what then of those who add experience to wisdom? “People send us their cubs to lick into shape, and what can we do?” Now the answer to this query concerns parents rather closely: what and how much can the schoolmaster do to make the boy “sit up” who has not been to the manner bred?

No suasion will make you “sit up” if you are an oyster; no, nor even if you are a cod. You must have a backbone, and your backbone must have learned its work before sitting up is possible to you. No doubt the human oyster may grow a backbone, and the human cod may get into the way of sitting up, and some day, perhaps, we shall know of the heroic endeavours made by schoolmaster and mistress to prop up, and haul up, and draw up, and anyhow keep alert and sitting up, creatures whose way it is to sprawl. Sometimes the result is surprising; they sit up in a row with the rest and look all right; even when the props are removed they keep to the trick of sitting up for awhile. The schoolmaster begins to rub his hands, and the parents say, “I told you so. Didn’t I always say Jack would come right in the end?” Wait a bit. The end is not yet. The habits of school, as of military life, are more or less mechanical. The early habits are vital; reversion to these takes place, and Jack sprawls as a man just as he sprawled as a child, only more so. Various social props keep him up; he has the wit to seem to “sit up”; he is lovable and his life is respectable; and no one suspects that this easy-going Mr. John Brown is a failure; a man who had the elements of greatness in him, and might have been of use in the world had he been put under discipline from his infancy.

Sprawling is an ugly word, but the attitude we are thinking of is by no means always inelegant. Scott gives a delightful illustration of one kind of mental sprawling in “Waverley”:—

“Edward Waverley’s powers of apprehension were so quick as almost to resemble intuition, and the chief care of his preceptor was to prevent him, as a sportsman would phrase it, from overrunning his game; that is, from acquiring his knowledge in a slight, flimsy, and inadequate manner. And here the instructor had to combat another propensity too often united with brilliancy of fancy and vivacity of talent—the indolence, namely, which can only be stirred by some strong motive of gratification, and which renounces study as soon as curiosity is gratified, the pleasure of conquering the first difficulties exhausted, and the novelty of pursuit at an end.” And the story goes on to show, without laborious pointing of the moral, how Waverley by name was wavering by nature, was ever the sport of circumstances because he had not learned in youth to direct his course. He blunders into many (most interesting) misadventures because he had failed to get, through his studies, the alertness of mind and the self-restraint which should make a man of him. Many pleasant things befall him, but not one of them, unless we except Rose Bradwardine’s love—and when did woman study justice in the bestowal of her favours?—not one did he earn by his own wit or prowess; each advantage and success which came to him was the earnings of another man. The elder Waverley had not only fortune but force of character to make friends, so we are not made sad for the amiable young man for whom we must needs feel affection; he does nothing to carve out a way for himself, and he does everything to his own hindrance out of pure want of the power of self-direction, but his uncle has fortune and friends, and all ends well. For the sake, no doubt, of young persons less happily situated, and of parents who are not able to play the part of bountiful Providence to sons and daughters whom they have failed to fit for the conduct of their own lives, the great novelist takes care to point out that Edward Waverley’s personal failure in life was the fault of his education. His abilities were even brilliant, but “I ought” had waited upon “I like” from his earliest days, and he had never learned to make himself do the thing he would.

Now it is this sort of “bringing under” that parents are apt to leave to the schoolmaster. They do not give their children the discipline which results in self-compelling power, and by-and-by, when they make over the task to another, the time for training in the art of self-mastery has gone by, and a fine character is spoiled through indolence and wilfulness.

But why will it not do to leave it to the schoolmaster to make a child “sit up”? It is natural for a child to be left free as a bird in matters of no moral significance. We would not let him tell lies, but if he hate his lessons, that may be Nature’s way of showing he had better let them alone.

We must face the facts. We are not meant to grow up in a state of nature. There is something simple, conclusive, even idyllic, in the statement that so-and-so is “natural.” What more would you have? Jean Jacques Rousseau preached the doctrine of natural education, and no reformer has had a greater following. “It’s human nature,” we say, when stormy Harry snatches his drum from Jack; when baby Marjorie, who is not two, screams for Susie’s doll. So it is, and for that very reason it must be dealt with early. Even Marjorie must be taught better. “I always finish teaching my children obedience before they are one year old,” said a wise mother; and any who know the nature of children, and the possibilities open to the educator, will say, Why not? Obedience in the first year, and all the virtues of the good life as the years go on; every year with its own definite work to show in the training of character. Is Edward a selfish child when his fifth birthday comes? The fact is noted in his parents’ year-book, with the resolve that by his sixth birthday he shall, please God, be a generous child. Here, the reader who has not realised that to exercise discipline is one of the chief functions of parenthood, smiles and talks about “human nature” with all the air of an unanswerable argument.

But we live in a redeemed world, and one of the meanings which that unfathomable phrase bears is, that it is the duty of those who have the care of childhood to eradicate each vulgar and hateful trait, to plant and foster the precious fruits of that kingdom in the children who have been delivered from the kingdom of nature into the kingdom of grace; that is to say, all children born into this redeemed world. The parent who believes that the possibilities of virtuous training are unlimited will set to work with cheerful confidence, will forego the twaddle about “Nature,” whether as lovely in itself or as an irresistible force, and will perceive that the first function of the parent is that function of discipline which is so cheerfully made over to the schoolmaster.

Now, to begin with, discipline does not mean a birch-rod, nor a corner, nor a slipper, nor bed, nor any such last resort of the feeble. The sooner we cease to believe in merely penal suffering as part of the Divine plan, the sooner will a spasmodic resort to the birch-rod die out in families. We do not say the rod is never useful; we do say it should never be necessary. The fact is, many of us do not believe in education, except as it means the acquirement of a certain amount of knowledge; but education which shall deal curatively and methodically with every flaw in character does not enter into our scheme of things possible. Now, no less than this is what we mean when we say, Education is a Discipline. Where parents fail, the poor soul has one further chance in the discipline of life; but we must remember that, while it is the nature of the child to submit to discipline, it is the nature of the undisciplined man to run his head in passionate wilfulness against the circumstances that are for his training; so that the parent who wilfully chooses to leave his child to be “broken in” by the schoolmaster or by life leaves him to a fight in which all the odds are against him. The physique, the temper, the disposition, the career, the affections, the aspirations of a man are all, more or less, the outcome of the discipline his parents have brought him under, or of the lawlessness they have allowed. What is discipline? Look at the word; there is no hint of punishment in it. A disciple is a follower, and discipline is the state of the follower, the learner, imitator. Mothers and fathers do not well to forget that their children are, by the very order of Nature, their disciples. Now no man sets himself up for a following of disciples who does not wish to indoctrinate these with certain principles, maxims, rules of life. So should the parent have at heart notions of life and duty which he labours without pause to instil into his children.

He who would draw disciples does not trust to force, but to these three things—to the attraction of his doctrine, to the persuasion of his presentation, to the enthusiasm of his disciples; so the parent has teachings of the perfect life which he knows how to present continually with winning force until the children are quickened with such zeal for virtue and holiness as carries them forward with leaps and bounds. Again, the teacher does not indoctrinate his pupils all at once, but here a little and there a little, steady progress on a careful plan; so the parent who would have his child a partaker of the Divine nature has a scheme, an ascending scale of virtues, in which he is diligent to practise his young disciple. He adds to the faith with which the child is so richly dowered virtue, and to virtue, knowledge, and to knowledge, self-control. Having practised his child in self-control, he trains him in patience, and to patience he adds godliness, and to godliness, kindness, and to kindness, love. These, and such as these, wise parents cultivate as systematically and with as definite results as if they were teaching the “three R’s.”

But how? The answer covers so wide a field that we must leave it for another chapter. Only this here—every quality has its defect, every defect has its quality. Examine your child; he has qualities, he is generous; see to it that the lovable little fellow, who would give away his soul, is not also rash, impetuous, self-willed, passionate, “nobody’s enemy but his own.” It rests with parents to make low the high places and exalt the valleys, to make straight paths for the feet of their little son.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CULTURE OF CHARACTER

Part I

“What get I from my father?

Lusty life and vigorous will;

What from my gentle mother?

Cheerful days and poet’s skill,”[6]

says Goethe; for poets, like the rest of us, are born, not made, and get the most of what they are from their parents. But it did not take poet or modern scientist to discover this; people have known it time out of mind. Like father, like child, they said, and were satisfied; for it was not the way in earlier days to thresh out the great facts of life. Not so now; we talk about it and about it; call it heredity, and take it into count in our notions, at any rate, if not in our practice. Nobody writes a biography now without attempting to produce progenitors and early surroundings that shall account for his man or his woman. This fact of heredity is very much before the public, and by-and-by will have its bearing on the loose notions people hold about education. In this sort of way—“Harold is a bright little boy, but he hasn’t the least power of attention.”

“Oh, I know he hasn’t; but then, poor child, he can’t help it! ‘What’s bred in the bone,’ you know; and we are feather-brained on both sides of the house.”

Now the practical educational question of our day is just this, Can he help it? or, Can his parents help it? or, Must the child sit down for life with whatever twist he has inherited? The fact is, many of us, professional teachers, have been taking aim rather beside the mark; we talk as if the development of certain faculties were the chief object of education; and we point to our results, intellectual, moral, æsthetic, physical, with a—“See there, what culture can effect!” But we forget that the child has inborn cravings after all we have given him. Just as the healthy child must have his dinner and his bed, so too does he crave for knowledge, perfection, beauty, power, society; and all he wants is opportunity. Give him opportunities of loving and learning, and he will love and learn, for “’tis his nature to.” Whoever has taken note of the sweet reasonableness, the quick intelligence, the bright imaginings of a child, will think the fuss we make about the right studies for developing these is like asking, How shall we get a hungry man to eat his dinner?

Many a man got his turn for natural science because, as a boy, he lived in the country, and had a chance to observe living things and their ways. Nobody took pains to develop his faculty; all he had was opportunity. If the boy’s mind is crammed with other matters, he has no opportunity, and you may meet men of culture who have lived most of their lives in the country, and don’t know a thrush from a blackbird. I know of a woman who has developed both a metaphysical and a literary turn, because, as a girl of ten, she was allowed to browse on old volumes of the Spectator, the most telling part of her education, she thinks. Again, I watched quite lately an extraordinary educational result of opportunity. A friend, interested in a Working Boys’ Club, undertook to teach a class to model in clay. There was no selection made; the boys were mill-boys, taken as they came in, with no qualifications, except that, as their teacher said, they had not been spoilt—that is, they had not been taught to draw in the ordinary way. She gave them clay, a model, one or two modelling tools, and also, being an artist, the feeling of the object to be copied. After half-a-dozen lessons, the things they produced cannot be called less than works of art; and delightful it was to see the vigour and spirit they worked with, the artistic instinct which caught the sentiment of the object, as the creases made by a little foot which make a child’s shoe a thing to kiss. This lady maintains that she only let out what was in the boys; but she did more, her own art enthusiasm forced out artistic effort. Even taking into account the enthusiasm of the teacher—I wish we might always count on that factor—this remains a fair case to prove our point, which is, give them opportunity and direction, and children will do the greater part of their own education, intellectual, æsthetic, even moral, by reason of the wonderfully balanced desires, powers, and affections which go to make up human nature.

A cheerful doctrine this, which should help to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Outlets for their energies, a little direction, a little control, and then we may sit by with folded hands and see them do it. But, in fact, there are two things to be done: “powers to be developed—where a little of our help goes a long way; and character to be formed”—and here children are as clay in the hands of the potter, absolutely dependent on their parents. Disposition, intellect, genius, come pretty much by nature; but character is an achievement, the one practical achievement possible to us for ourselves and for our children; and all real advance in family or individual is along the lines of character. Our great people are great simply by reason of their force of character. For this, more than for their literary successes, Carlyle and Johnson are great. Boswell’s “Life” is, and perhaps deserves to be, more of a literary success than anything of his master’s; but what figure does he make after all?

Greatness and littleness belong to character, and life would be dull were we all cast in one mould; but how come we to differ? Surely by reason of our inherited qualities. It is hereditary tendencies which result in character. The man who is generous, obstinate, hot-tempered, devout, is so, on the whole, because that strain of character runs in his family. Some progenitor got a bent from his circumstances towards fault or virtue, and that bent will go on repeating itself to the end of the chapter. To save that single quality from the exaggeration which would destroy the balance of qualities we call sanity, two counter-forces are provided: marriage into alien families, and education.

We come round now to the point we started from. If the development of character rather than of faculty is the main work of education, and if people are born, so to speak, ready-made, with all the elements of their after-character in them, certain to be developed by time and circumstances, what is left for education to do?

Very commonly, the vote is, do nothing; though there are three or four ways of arriving at that conclusion.

As, What’s the good? The fathers have eaten sour grapes; the children’s teeth must be set on edge. Tommy is obstinate as a little mule—but what would you have? So is his father. So have been all the Joneses, time out of mind; and Tommy’s obstinacy is taken as a fact, not to be helped nor hindered.

Or, Mary is a butterfly of a child, never constant for five minutes to anything she has in hand. “That child is just like me!” says her mother; “but time will steady her.” Fanny, again, sings herself to sleep with the Sicilian Vesper Hymn (her nurse’s lullaby) before she is able to speak. “It’s strange how an ear for music runs in our family!” is the comment, but no particular pains are taken to develop the talent.

Another child asks odd questions, is inclined to make little jokes about sacred things, to call his father “Tom,” and, generally, to show a want of reverence. His parents are earnest-minded people—think with pain of the loose opinions of Uncle Harry, and decide on a policy of repression. “Do as you’re bid, and make no remarks,” becomes the child’s rule of life, until he finds outlets little suspected at home.

In another case, common thought is much more on a level with the science of the day; there is a tendency to lung-trouble: the doctors undertake to deal with the tendency so long as the habit of delicacy is not set up. The necessary precautions are taken, and there is no reason why the child should not die at a good old age.

Once more;—there are parents who are aware of the advance science has made in education, but doubt the lawfulness of looking to science for aid in the making of character. They see hereditary defects in their children, but set them down as of “the natural fault and corruption of the nature of every man which naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam.” This, they believe, it is not their part to remedy; that is, unless the boy’s fault be of a disturbing kind—a violent temper, for example—when the mother thinks no harm to whip the offending Adam out of him. But so surely as we believe the laws of the spiritual life to have been revealed to us, so, not less, surely, though without the same sanctity, have been revealed the laws by which body, mind, and moral nature flourish or decay. These it behoves us to make ourselves acquainted with; and the Christian parent who is shy of science, and prefers to bring up his children by the light of Nature when that of authoritative revelation fails, does so to his children’s irreparable loss.

If the race is advancing, it is along the lines of character, for each new generation inherits and adds to the best that has gone before it. We should have to-day the very flower and fruit that has been a-preparing through long lines of progenitors. Children have always been lovely, so far back as that day when a little child in the streets of Jerusalem was picked up and set in the midst to show of what sort are the princes in the Kingdom to come:—

“In the Kingdom are the children—

You may read it in their eyes;

All the freedom of the Kingdom

In their careless humour lies.”

And what mother has not bowed before the princely heart of innocence in her own little child? But apart from this, of their glad living in the sunshine of the Divine Countenance, surely our children are “more so” than those of earlier days. Never before was a “Jackanapes” written, or the “Story of a Short Life.” Shakespeare never made a child, nor Scott, hardly Dickens, often as he tried; either we are waking up to what is in them, or the children are indeed advancing in the van of the times, holding in light grasp the gains of the past, the possibilities of the future. It is the age of child-worship; and very lovely are the well-brought-up children of Christian and cultured parents. But, alas! how many of us degrade the thing we love! Think of the multitude of the innocents to be launched on the world, already mutilated, spiritually and morally, at the hands of doting parents.

The duteous father and mother, on the contrary, who discern any lovely family trait in one of their children, set themselves to nourish and cherish it as a gardener the peaches he means to show. We know how “that kiss made me a painter,” that is, warmed into life whatever art faculty the child had. The choicer the plant, the gardener tells us, the greater the pains must he take with the rearing of it: and here is the secret of the loss and waste of some of the most beauteous and lovable natures the world has seen; they have not had the pains taken with their rearing that their delicate, sensitive organisations demanded. Think how Shelley was left to himself! We live in embarrassing days. It is well to cry, “Give us light—more light and fuller;” but what if the new light discover to us a maze of obligations, intricate and tedious?

It is, at first sight, bewildering to perceive that for whatever distinctive quality, moral or intellectual, we discern in the children, special culture is demanded; but, after all, our obligation towards each such quality resolves itself into providing for it these four things: nourishment, exercise, change, and rest.

A child has a great turn for languages (his grandfather was the master of nine); the little fellow “lisps in Latin,” learns his “mensa” from his nurse, knows his declensions before he is five. What line is open to the mother who sees such an endowment in her child? First, let him use it; let him learn his declensions, and whatever else he takes to without the least sign of effort. Probably the Latin case-endings come as easily and pleasantly to his ear as does “See-saw, Margery Daw,” to the ordinary child, though no doubt “Margery Daw” is the wholesomer kind of thing. Let him do just so much as he takes to of his own accord; but never urge, never applaud, never show him off. Next, let words convey ideas as he is able to bear them. Buttercup, primrose, dandelion, magpie, each tells its own tale; daisy is day’s-eye, opening with the sun, and closing when he sets—

“That well by reason it men callen may

The daïsie, or else the eye of day.”

Let him feel that the common words we use without a thought are beautiful, full of story and interest. It is a great thing that the child should get the ideas proper to the qualities inherent in him. An idea fitly put is taken in without effort, and, once in, ideas behave like living creatures—they feed, grow, and multiply. Next, provide him with some one delightful change of thought, that is, with work and ideas altogether apart from his bent for languages. Let him know, with friendly intimacy, every out-of-door object that comes in his way—the red-start, the rose-chaffer, the ways of the caddis-worm, forest trees, field flowers—all natural objects, common and curious, near his home. No other knowledge is so delightful; not natural science, but common acquaintance with natural objects.

Or, again, some one remarks that all our great inventors have in their youth handled material—clay, wood, iron, brass, pigments. Let him work in material. To provide a child with delightful resources on lines opposed to his natural bent is the one way of keeping a quite sane mind in the presence of an absorbing pursuit.

At the same time, change of occupation is not rest: if a man ply a machine, now with his foot, and now with his hand, the foot or the hand rests, but the man does not. A game of romps (better, so far as mere rest goes, than games with laws and competitions), nonsense talk, a fairy tale, or to lie on his back in the sunshine, should rest the child, and of such as these he should have his fill.

This, speaking broadly, is the rationale of the matter:—just as actually as we sew or write through the instrumentality of the hand, so the child learns, thinks, feels, by means of a material organ—the very delicate nervous tissue of the cerebrum. Now this tissue is constantly and rapidly wearing away. The more it is used, whether in the way of mental effort or emotional excitement, the more it wears away. Happily, rapid new growth replaces the waste, wherefore, work and consequent waste of tissue are necessary. But let the waste get ahead of the gain, and lasting mischief happens. Therefore never let the child’s brain-work exceed his chances of reparation, whether such work come in the way of too hard lessons, or of the excitement attending childish dissipations. Another plea for abundant rest:—one thing at a time, and that done well, appears to be Nature’s rule; and his hours of rest and play are the hours of the child’s physical growth—witness the stunted appearance of children who are allowed to live in a whirl of small excitements.

A word more as to the necessity of change of thought for the child who has a distinct bent. The brain tissue not only wastes with work, but, so to speak, wastes locally. We all know how done up we are after giving our minds for a few hours or days to any one subject, whether anxious or joyous: we are glad at last to escape from the engrossing thought, and find it a weariness when it returns upon us. It would appear that, set up the continuous working of certain ideas, and a certain tract of the brain substance is, as it were, worn out and weakened with the constant traffic in these ideas. And this is of more consequence when the ideas are moral than when they are merely intellectual. Hamlet’s thoughts play continuously round a few distressing facts; he becomes morbid, not entirely sane; in a word, he is eccentric. Now, possibly, eccentricity is a danger against which the parents of well-descended children must be on the watch. These are born with strong tendencies to certain qualities and ways of thinking. Their bringing up tends to accentuate their qualities; the balance between these and other qualities is lost, and they become eccentric persons. Mr. Matthew Arnold writes down the life and the work of a great poet as ineffectual; and this is, often enough, the verdict passed upon the eccentric. Whatever force of genius and of character, whatever lovely moral traits they may have, the world will not take them as guides for good, unless they do as others do in things lawful and expedient; and truly there is a broad margin for originality in declining to hunt with the hounds in things neither lawful nor expedient.

Now, practically, what is the mother’s course who notices in her most promising child little traits of oddity? He does not care much for games, does not get on well with the rest, has some little den of his own where he ruminates. Poor little fellow! he wants a confidante badly; most likely he has tried nurse and brothers and sisters, to no purpose. If this go on, he will grow up with the idea that nobody wants him, nobody understands him, will take his slice of life and eat it (with a snarl) all by himself. But if his mother have tact enough to get at him, she will preserve for the world one of its saving characters. Depend upon it there is something at work in the child—genius, humanity, poetry, ambition, pride of family. It is that he wants outlet and exercise for an inherited trait almost too big for his childish soul. Rosa Bonheur was observed to be a restless child whose little shoes of life were a misfit: lessons did not please her, and play did not please her; and her artist father hit on the notion of soothing the child’s divine discontent by—apprenticing her to a needlewoman! Happily she broke her bonds, and we have her pictures. In the case of pride of birth, it is well that the child should be brought face to face and heart to heart with the “great humility” of our Pattern. But that being done, this sense of family distinction is a wonderful lever to raise the little world of the child’s nature. Noblesse oblige. He must needs add honour and not dishonour to a distinguished family. I know of a little boy who bears two distinguished family names—Browning-Newton, let us say. He goes to a preparatory school, where it is the custom to put the names of defaulters on the blackboard. By-and-by, his little brother went to school too, and the bigger boy’s exordium was:—“We’ll never let two such names as ours be stuck up on the blackboard!”

Amongst the immediate causes of eccentricity is the dreariness of daily living, the sense of which falls upon us all at times, and often with deadly weight upon the more finely strung and highly gifted. “Oh, dear! I wish I was in Jupiter!” sighed a small urchin who had already used up this planet. It rests with the parents to see that the dreariness of a motiveless life does not settle, sooner or later, on any one of their children. We are made with a yearning for the “fearful joy” of passion; and if this do not come to us in lawful ways, we look for it in eccentric, or worse, in illegitimate courses. The mother, to whom her child is as an open book, must find a vent for the restless working of his nature—the more apt to be troubled by—

“The burden of the mystery,

The heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world”—

the more finely he is himself organised. Fill him with the enthusiasm of humanity. Whatever gifts he has, let them be cultivated as “gifts for men.” “The thing best worth living for is to be of use,” was well said lately by a thinker who has left us. The child into whose notion of life that idea is fitted will not grow up to find time heavy on his hands. The life blessed with an enthusiasm will not be dull; but a weight must go into the opposite scale to balance even the noblest enthusiasm. As we have said, open for him some door of natural science, some way of mechanical skill; in a word, give the child an absorbing pursuit and a fascinating hobby, and you need not fear eccentric or unworthy developments. It seems well to dwell at length on this subject of eccentricity, because the world loses a great deal by its splendid failures, the beautiful human beings who through one sort of eccentricity or another become ineffectual for the raising of the rest of us.

FOOTNOTES:

[6]

“Vom Vater hab’ ich die Statur,

Des Lebens ernstes Führen;

Vom Mütterchen die Frohnatur,

Und Lust zu fabuliren.”

CHAPTER IX

THE CULTURE OF CHARACTER

Part II

Suppose the parent see that the formation of character is the ultimate object of education; see, too, that character is, in the rough, the inherited tendencies of the child, modified by his surroundings, but that character may be debased or ennobled by education; that it is the parents’ part to distinguish the first faint budding of family traits—to greet every fine trait as the highest sort of family possession to be nourished and tended with care; to keep up at the same time the balance of qualities by bringing forward that which is of little account—the more so when they must deliver their child from eccentricity, pitfall to the original and forceful nature;—suppose they have taken all this into the rôle of their duties, there yet remains much for parents to do.

We are open to what the French call the defects of our qualities; and as ill weeds grow apace, the defects of a fine character may well choke out the graces. A little maiden loves with the passion and devotion of a woman, but she is exacting of return, and jealous of intrusion, even with her mother. A boy is ambitious; he will be leader in the nursery, and his lead is wholesome for the rest; but there is the pugnacious little brother who will not “follow my leader,” and the two can hardly live in the same rooms. The able boy is a tyrant when his will is crossed. There is the timid, affectionate little maid who will even tell a fib to shield her sister; and there is the high-spirited girl who never lies, but who does, now and then, bully; and so on, without end. What is the parents’ part here? To magnify the quality; make the child feel that he or she has a virtue to guard—a family possession, and, at the same time, a gift from above. A little simple reasonable teaching may help. But let us beware of much talk. “Have you quite finished, mother?” said a bright little girl of five in the most polite way in the world. She had listened long to her mother’s sermonising, and had many things on hand. A wise word here and there may be of use, but much more may be done by carefully hindering each “defect of its quality” from coming into play. Give the ill weeds no room to grow. Then, again, the defect may often be reclaimed and turned back to feed the quality itself. The ambitious boy’s love of power may be worked into a desire to win by love his restive little brother. The passion of the loving girl may be made to include all whom her mother loves.

There is another aspect of the subject of heredity and the duties it entails. As the child of long lineage may well inherit much of what was best in his ancestors—fine physique, clear intellect, high moral worth—so also he has his risks. As some one puts it, not all the women have been brave, nor all the men chaste. We know how the tendency to certain forms of disease runs in families. Temper and temperament, moral and physical nature alike, may come down with a taint. An unhappy child may, by some odd freak of nature, appear to have left out the good and taken into him only the unworthy. What can the parents do in such a case? They may not reform him—perhaps that is beyond human skill and care, once he has become all that is possible to his nature—but transform him, so that the being he was calculated to become never develops at all; but another being comes to light blest with every grace of which he had only the defect. This brings us to a beneficent law of nature, which underlies the whole subject of early training, and especially so this case of the child whose mother must bring him forth a second time into a life of beauty and harmony. To put it in an old form of words—the words of Thomas à Kempis—what seems to me the fundamental law of education is no more than this: “Habit is driven out by habit.” People have always known that “Use is second nature,” but the reason why, and the scope of the saying, these are discoveries of recent days.

A child has an odious custom, so constant, that it is his quality, will be his character if you let him alone; he is spiteful, he is sly, he is sullen. No one is to blame for it; it was born in him. What are you to do with such inveterate habit of nature? Just this; treat it as a bad habit, and set up the opposite good habit. Henry is more than mischievous; he is a malicious little boy. There are always tears in the nursery, because, with “pinches, nips, and bobs,” he is making some child wretched. Even his pets are not safe; he has done his canary to death by poking at it with a stick through the bars of its cage; howls from his dog, screeches from his cat, betray him in some vicious trick. He makes fearful faces at his timid little sister; sets traps with string for the housemaid with her water-cans to fall over; there is no end to the malicious tricks, beyond the mere savagery of untrained boyhood, which come to his mother’s ear. What is to be done? “Oh, he will grow out of it!” say the more hopeful who pin their faith to time. But many an experienced mother will say, “You can’t cure him; what is in will out, and he will be a pest to society all his life.” Yet the child may be cured in a month if the mother will set herself to the task with both hands and set purpose; at any rate, the cure may be well begun, and that is half done.

Let the month of treatment be a deliciously happy month to him, he living all the time in the sunshine of his mother’s smile. Let him not be left to himself to meditate or carry out ugly pranks. Let him feel himself always under a watchful, loving, and approving eye. Keep him happily occupied, well amused. All this, to break the old custom which is assuredly broken when a certain length of time goes by without its repetition. But one habit drives out another. Lay new lines in the old place. Open avenues of kindness for him. Let him enjoy, daily, hourly, the pleasure of pleasing. Get him into the way of making little plots for the pleasure of the rest—a plaything of his contriving, a dish of strawberries of his gathering, shadow rabbits to amuse the baby; take him on kind errands to poor neighbours, carrying and giving of his own. For a whole month the child’s whole heart is flowing out in deeds and schemes and thoughts of loving-kindness, and the ingenuity which spent itself in malicious tricks becomes an acquisition to his family when his devices are benevolent. Yes; but where is his mother to get time in these encroaching days to put Henry under special treatment? She has other children and other duties, and simply cannot give herself up for a month or a week to one child. If the boy were ill, in danger, would she find time for him then? Would not other duties go to the wall, and leave her little son, for the time, her chief object in life? Now here is a point all parents are not enough awake to—that mental and moral ailments require prompt, purposeful, curative treatment, to which the parents must devote themselves for a short time, just as they would to a sick child. Neither punishing him nor letting him alone—the two lines of treatment most in favour—ever cured a child of any moral evil. If parents recognised the efficacy and the immediate effect of treatment, they would never allow the spread of ill weeds. For let this be borne in mind, whatever ugly quality disfigures the child, he is but as a garden overgrown with weeds, the more prolific the weeds, the more fertile the soil; he has within him every possibility of beauty of life and character. Get rid of the weeds and foster the flowers. It is hardly too much to say that most of the failures in life or character made by man or woman are due to the happy-go-lucky philosophy of the parents. They say, “The child is so young; he does not know any better; but all that will come right as he grows up.” Now, a fault of character left to itself can do no other than strengthen.

An objection may be raised to this counsel of short and determined curative treatment. The good results do not last, it is said; a week or two of neglect, and you lose the ground gained: Henry is as likely as ever to grow up of the “tiger” order, a Steerforth or a Grandcourt. Here science comes to help us to cheerful certainty.

There is no more interesting subject of inquiry open just now than that of the interaction between the thoughts of the mind and the configuration of the brain. The fair conclusion appears to be that each is greatly the cause of the other; that the character of the persistent thoughts actually shapes the cerebrum, while on the configuration of this organ depends in turn the manner of thoughts we think. Now, thought is, for the most part, automatic. We think, without intention or effort, as we have been accustomed to think, just as we walk or write without any conscious arrangement of muscles. Mozart could write an overture, laughing all the time at the little jokes his wife made to keep him awake; to be sure he had thought it out before, and there it was, ready to be written; but he did not consciously try for these musical thoughts, they simply came to him in proper succession. Coleridge thought “Kubla Khan” in his sleep, and wrote it when he awoke; and, indeed, he might as well have been asleep all the time for all he had to do with the production of most of his thoughts.

“Over the buttons she falls asleep,

And stitches them on in a dream,”—

is very possible and likely. For one thing which we consciously set ourselves to think about, a thousand words and acts come from us every day of their own accord; we don’t think of them at all. But all the same, only a poet or a musician could thus give forth poetry or music, and it is the words and acts which come from us without conscious thought which afford the true measure of what we are. Perhaps this is why such serious weight is attached to our every “idle word”—words spoken without intention or volition.

We are getting, by degrees, to Henry and his bad habits. Somehow or other, the nervous tissue of the cerebrum “grows to” the thoughts that are allowed free course in the mind. How, Science hardly ventures to guess as yet; but, for the sake of illustration, let us imagine that certain thoughts of the mind run to and fro in the nervous substance of the cerebrum until they have made a way there: busy traffic in the same order of thoughts will always be kept up, for there is the easy way for them to run in. Now, take the child with an inherited tendency to a resentful temper: he has begun to think resentful thoughts: finds them easy and gratifying; he goes on; evermore the ugly traffic becomes more easy and natural, and resentfulness is rapidly becoming himself, that trait in his character which people couple with his name.

But one custom overcomes another. The watchful mother sets up new tracks in other directions; and she sees to it, that while she is leading new thoughts through the new way, the old, deeply worn “way of thinking” is quite disused. Now, the cerebrum is in a state of rapid waste and rapid growth. The new growth takes shape from the new thoughts: the old is lost in the steady waste, and the child is reformed, physically as well as morally and mentally. That the nervous tissue of the cerebrum should be thus the instrument of the mind need not surprise us when we think how the muscles and joints of the tumbler, the vocal organs of the singer, the finger-ends of the watchmaker, the palate of the tea-taster, grow to the uses they are steadily put to; and, much more, both in the case of brain and of bodily organs, grow to the uses they are earliest put to.

This meets in a wonderful way the case of the parent who sets himself to cure a moral failing. He sets up the course of new thoughts, and hinders those of the past, until the new thoughts shall have become automatic and run of their own accord. All the time a sort of disintegration is going on in the place that held the disused thoughts; and here is the parent’s advantage. If the boy return (as, from inherited tendency, he still may do) to his old habits of thought, behold there is no more place for them in his physical being; to make a new place is a work of time, and in this work the parent can overtake and hinder him without much effort.

Here, indeed, more than anywhere, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour but in vain that build it;” but surely intelligent co-operation in this divine work is our bounden duty and service. The training of the will, the instruction of the conscience, and, so far as it lies with us, the development of the divine life in the child, are carried on simultaneously with this training in the habits of a good life; and these last will carry the child safely over the season of infirm will, immature conscience, until he is able to take, under direction from above, the conduct of his life, the moulding of his character into his own hands. It is a comfort to believe that there is even a material register of our educational labours being made in the very substance of the child’s brain; and, certainly, here we have a note of warning as to the danger of letting ill ways alone in the hope that all will come right by-and-by.

Some parents may consider all this as heavy hearing; that even to “think on these things” is enough to take the joy and spontaneousness out of their sweet relationship; and that, after all, parents’ love and the grace of God should be sufficient for the bringing up of children. No one can feel on this subject more sincere humility than those who have not the honour to be parents; the insight and love with which parents—mothers most so—are blest, is a divine gift which fills lookers-on with reverence, even in many a cottage home; but we have only to observe how many fond parents make foolish children to be assured that something more is wanted. There are appointed ways, not always the old paths, but new ones, opened up step by step as we go. The labour of the mother who sets herself to understand her work is not increased, but infinitely lightened; and as for life being made heavy with the thought of these things, once make them our own, and we act upon them as naturally as upon such knowledge—scientific also—as, loose your hold of a cup—and it falls. A little painstaking thought and effort in the first place, and all comes easy.

CHAPTER X

BIBLE LESSONS

“The history of England is now reduced to a game at cards,—the problems of mathematics to puzzles and riddles.... There wants but one step further, and the Creed and Ten Commandments may be taught in the same manner, without the necessity of the grave face, deliberate tone of recital, and devout attention hitherto exacted from the well-governed childhood of this realm.”—Waverley.

That parents should make over the religious education of their children to a Sunday-school is, no doubt, as indefensible as if they sent them for their meals to a table maintained by the public bounty. We “at home” plead “not guilty” to this particular count. Our Sunday-schools are used by those toil-worn and little-learned parents who are willing to accept at the hands of the more leisured classes this service of the religious teaching of their children. That is, the Sunday-school is, at present, a necessary evil, an acknowledgment that there are parents so hard pressed that they are unable for their first duty. Here we have the theory of the Sunday-school—the parents who can, teach their children at home on Sunday, and substitutes step in to act for those who can not. It is upon this delightful theory of the Sunday-school that a clergyman[7] at the Antipodes has taken action. Never does it appear to occur to him that the members of the upper and middle classes do not need to be definitely and regularly instructed in religion—“from a child.” His contention is, only, that such children should not be taught at Sunday-school, but at home, and by their parents; and the main object of his parochial “Parents’ Union” is to help parents in this work. These are some of the rules:—

1. The object of the Union shall be to unite, strengthen, and assist fathers and mothers in the discharge of their parental duties.

2. Members shall be pledged, by the fact of their joining, to supervise the education of their own children, and to urge the responsibility of the parental relationship upon other parents.

3. Lesson sketches shall be furnished monthly to each family in connection with the Union.

4. Members shall bring their children to the monthly catechising, and sit with them, &c., &c.

Probably the “lesson-sketches” are to secure that the children do just such Bible-lessons at home with their parents on Sunday as they have hitherto done at the Sunday-school with teachers.

It seems to be contemplated that parents of every class will undertake their proper duties in this matter, and that the Sunday-school may be allowed to drop, the clergyman undertaking instead to ascertain, by means of catechising, that certain work is done month by month.

The scheme seems full of promise. Nothing should do more to strengthen the bonds of family life than that the children should learn religion at the lips of their parents; and, to grow up in a church which takes constant heed of you from baptism or infancy, until, we will not say confirmation, but through manhood and womanhood, until the end, should give the right tone to corporate life.

No doubt we have parishes, and even whole denominations, in which the young people are taken hold of from first to last; but then it is by clergy, teachers, class leaders, and so on; and all parents do not regard it as an unmixed blessing that the most serious part of their children’s training should be undertaken by outsiders. The thing that seems most worthy of imitation in this Australian movement is, that parents themselves are recognised as the fit instructors of their children in the best things, and that they are led to acknowledge some responsibility to the Church with regard to the instruction they give.

But do we manage these things so well “at home” that we have no occasion to look about us for hints? It may be in the memories of some of us, that in May 1889, a Committee of the House of Laymen for the Province of Canterbury was appointed to examine into the religious education of the upper and middle classes.[8] The committee considered that they might obtain a good basis for their investigations by examining into the religious knowledge of boys entering school. They sent a paper of inquiries to sixty-two head-masters, most of whom sent replies; and from these replies the committee were led to conclude that, “for the most part, the standard of religious education attained by boys before going to school is far below what might be hoped or expected; and that even this standard, thus ascertained to be far too low, is deteriorating; and further, that the chief cause of deterioration is considered to be the want of home-teaching and religion.”

Here is matter of grave consideration for us all—for, though the investigation was conducted by Churchmen, it naturally covered boys of various denominations attending public and middle-class schools; the distinctive character of the religious education was the subject of separate inquiry. No doubt there are many beautiful exceptions—families brought up in quiet homes in the nurture and admonition of the Lord; but if it is, as some of us fear, a fact that there is a tendency among parents of the middle and upper classes to let the religious education of their children take care of itself, it is worth while to ask, What is the reason? and, What is the remedy? Many reasons are assigned for this alleged failure in parental duty—social claims, the restive temper of the young people and their impatience of religious teaching, and much else. But these reasons are inadequate. Parents are, on the whole, very much alive to their responsibilities; perhaps there has never been a generation more earnest and conscientious than the young parents of these days. All the same, these thoughtful young parents do not lay themselves out to teach their children religion, before all things.

The fact is, our religious life has suffered, and by-and-by our national character will suffer, for the discredit thrown upon the Bible by adverse critics. We rightly regard the Bible as the entire collection of our Sacred Books. We have absolutely nothing to teach but what we find written therein. But we no longer go to the Bible with the old confidence: our religion is fading into a sentiment, not easy to impart; we wait until the young people shall conceive it for themselves. Meantime, we give them such æsthetic culture as should tend to develop those needs of the soul that find their satisfaction in worship. The whole superstructure of “liberal” religious thought is miserably shaky, and no wonder there is some shrinking from exposing it to the Ithuriel’s spear of the definite and searching young mind. For we love this flimsy habitation we have builded. It bears a shadowy resemblance to the old home of our souls, and we cling to it with a tender sentiment which the younger generation might not understand.

Are we then unhoused? Undoubtedly we are upon one assumption—that assumption which it takes a brilliant novelist to put forth in its naked asperity—“Miracles do not happen.” The educated mind is more essentially logical than we are apt to suppose. Remove the keystone of miracle and the arch tumbles about our ears. The ostentatious veneration for the Person of Christ, as separated from the “mythical” miraculous element, is, alas! no more than a spurious sentiment toward a self-evolved conception. Eliminate the “miraculous” and the whole fabric of Christianity disappears; and not only so, what have we to do with that older revelation of “the Lord, the Lord, a God full of compassion and gracious”? Do we say, Nay, we keep this; here is no miracle; and, of Christ, have we not the inimitable Sermon on the Mount—sufficient claim on our allegiance? No, we have not; therein are we taught to pray, to consider the lilies of the field and the fowls of the air, and to remember that the very hairs of our head are all numbered. Here we have the doctrine of the personal dealing, the particular providence of God, which is of the very essence of miracle. If “miracles do not happen,” it is folly and presumption to expect in providence and invite in prayer the faintest disturbance of that course of events which is fixed by inevitable law. The educated mind is severely logical, though an effort of the will may keep us from following out our conclusions to the bitter end. What have we left? A God who, of necessity, can have no personal dealings with you or me, for such dealings would be of the nature of a miracle: a God, prayer to whom, in the face of such certainty, becomes blasphemous. How dare we approach the Highest with requests which, in the nature of things (as we conceive), it is impossible He should grant?

We cannot pray, and we cannot trust, may be; yet we are not utterly godless; we can admire, adore, worship, in uttermost humility. But how? What shall we adore? The Divine Being can be known to us only through His attributes; He is a God of love and a God of justice; full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. But these are attributes which can only be conceived of as in action, from Person to person. How be gracious and merciful unless to a being in need of grace and mercy? Grant that grace and mercy may modify the slightest circumstance in a man’s existence, spiritual or temporal, and you grant the whole question of “miracles”—that is, that it is possible to God to act otherwise than through such inevitable laws as we are able to recognise. Refuse to concede “the miraculous element,” and the Shepherd of Israel has departed from our midst; we are left orphaned in a world undone.

Such and so great are the issues of that question of “miracle” with which we are fond of dallying, with a smile here and a shrug there, and a special sneer for that story of the swine that ran violently down a steep place, because we know so much about the dim thoughts of the brute creation—living under our eyes, indeed, but curiously out of our ken. Grant the possibility of miracles, that is, of the voluntary action of a Personal God, and who will venture to assign limits of less or more?

How long halt we betwixt two opinions?—to the law and to the testimony. Let us boldly accept the alternative which Hume proposes, however superciliously. Let it be, that, “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” Even so. We believe that Christ rose again the third day and ascended into heaven; or we credit the far more miraculous hypothesis that “there is no God”; or, anyway, the God of revelation, in His adorable Personality, has ceased to be for us. There is no middle way. Natural law, as we understand it, has nothing to do with these issues; not that the Supreme abrogates His laws, but that our knowledge of “natural law” is so agonisingly limited and superficial, that we are incompetent to decide whether a break in the narrow circle, within which our knowledge is hemmed, is or is not an opening into a wider circle, where what appears to us as an extraordinary exception does but exemplify the general rule.

We would not undervalue the solid fruits of Biblical criticism, even the most adverse. This should be a great gain in the spiritual life—that, henceforth, a miracle is accredited, not merely by the fact that it is recorded in the sacred history, but by its essential fitness with the Divine Character; just as, if we may reverently compare human things with divine, we say of a friend, “Oh, he would never do that!” or, “That is just like him.” Tried by this test, how unostentatious, simple, meekly serviceable are the miracles of Christ; how utterly divine it is

“To have all power, and be as having none!”

The mind which is saturated with the Gospel story in all its sweet reasonableness, which has absorbed the more confused and broken rays wherein the Light of the World is manifested in Old Testament story, will perhaps be the least tempted to the disloyalty of “honest doubt;”—for disloyalty to the most close and sacred of all relationships it is, though we must freely concede that such doubt is the infirmity of noble minds. Believing that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, that the man is established in the Christian faith according as the child has been instructed, the question of questions for us is, how to secure that the children shall be well grounded in the Scriptures by their parents, and shall pursue the study with intelligence, reverence, and delight.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The Rev. E. Jackson, sometime of Sydney.

[8] See “Report of the Committee of the House of Laymen for the Province of Canterbury on the Duty of the Church with regard to the Religious Education of the Upper and Middle Classes.”—Nat. Soc. Depository, Westminster.