" And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children."
Copyright, 1876,
BY
MARY A. BUSHNELL.>/p>
JOHN F. TROW & SON,
PRINTERS AND BOOKBINDERS,
205-213 East 12th St.,
NEW YORK.
There has hitherto been no uniform edition of Dr. Bushnell's works. Appearing at wide distances of time, they have taken such shape as suited the occasion; and it has for some time seemed very desirable that they should be brought together in a more permanent and serviceable form. It was Dr. Bushnell's own wish that this should be done; and he has largely revised his books in preparation for this end. It is only to be regretted that it was not reached during his lifetime and under his supervision; but his failing health compelled him to relinquish the task, which his death has left to other hands to complete.
In the present volume we offer to his readers the first of the proposed uniform edition, in which most of his works will be included. The other volumes will follow this as rapidly as possible, not in the original order of their publication, but rather in that cf their relative importance to the public; and it is hoped that the edition, when finished, may prove so compact and attractive in form, as to fulfill the design so long entertained, and satisfy the expectation that has awaited it.
THE subject of this volume is one of the highest, in the order of consequence, both as respects the welfare of religion and of human society. No apology therefore is needed, for the giving to the public of any thing concerning it, which is honestly meant, and thoughtfully prepared.
I should have preferred, on some accounts, to write a proper treatise on the subject—which this volume is not. The shape it has taken will be sufficiently explained, by the facts and considerations, that have been determining causes, in the process of its construction. Thirteen years ago I was drawn, by solicitation from others, into the publication of two discourses, the first two of this volume, under the title Christian Nurture. Afterwards, these were republished with another, the fourth of the present volume, and with other articles variously related, under the same title. These publications have been out of print for some years; for I have preferred the discontinuance of publication, till I might be able to present the subject in a more adequate and complete manner. The present volume is the result.
In preparing it, I could not easily consent to lay aside, or pass
into oblivion, the two discourses above referred to; for, under the fortune that
befel them, they had become a little historical. In this fuller treatment of the
subject therefore, I have allowed them to stand, requiring the additions made, to
I need offer no apology for retaining the old title, in a volume that is virtually new; or for reasserting, with more emphasis and deliberation, after an interval of years, what the years have only established and made firm in my Christian convictions.
H. B.
"Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."—
THERE is then some kind of nurture which is of the Lord, deriving a quality and a power from Him, and communicating the same. Being instituted By Him, it will of necessity have a method and a character peculiar to itself, or rather to Him. It will be the Lord's way of education, having aims appropriate to Him, and, if realized in its full intent, terminating in results impossible to be reached by any merely human method.
What then is the true idea of Christian or divine nurture, as distinguished from that which is not Christian? What is its aim? What its method of working? What its powers and instruments? What its contemplated results? Few questions have greater moment; and it is one of the pleasant signs of the times, that the subject involved is beginning to attract new interest, and excite a spirit of inquiry which heretofore has not prevailed in our churches.
In ordinary cases, the better and more instructive way of handling
this subject, would be to go directly into the practical methods of parental discipline,
and show by what modes of government and instruction we
That the child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being otherwise.
In other words, the aim, effort, and expectation should be, not, as is commonly assumed, that the child is to grow up in sin, to be converted after he comes to a mature age; but that he is to open on the world as one that is spiritually renewed, not remembering the time when he went through a technical experience, but seeming rather to have loved what is good from his earliest years. I do not affirm that every child may, in fact and without exception, be so trained that he certainly will grow up a Christian. The qualifications it may be necessary to add will be given in another place, where they can be stated more intelligibly.
This doctrine is not a novelty, now rashly and for the first time propounded, as some of you may be tempted to suppose. I shall show you, before I have done with the argument, that it is as old as the Christian church, and prevails extensively at the present day in other parts of the world. Neither let your own experience raise a prejudice against it. If you have endeavored to realize the very truth I here affirm, but find that your children do not exhibit the character you have looked for; if they seem to be intractable to religious influences, and sometimes to display an apparent aversion to the very subject of religion itself, you are not of course to conclude that the doctrine I here maintain is untrue or impracticable. You may be unreasonable in your expectations of your children.
Possibly, there may be seeds of holy principle in them, which you do not discover. A child acts out his present feelings, the feelings of the moment, without qualification or disguise. And how, many times, would all you appear, if you were to do the same? Will you expect of them to be better, and more constant and consistent, than yourselves; or will you rather expect them to be children, human children still, living a mixed life, trying out the good and evil of the world, and preparing, as older Christians do, when they have taken a lesson of sorrow and emptiness, to turn again to the true good?
Perhaps they will go through a rough mental struggle, at some
future day, and seem, to others and to themselves, there to have entered on a Christian
life.
But suppose there is really no trace or seed of holy principle in your children, has there been no fault of piety and constancy in your church? no want of Christian sensibility and love to God? no carnal spirit visible to them and to all, and imparting its noxious and poisonous quality to the Christian atmosphere in which they have had their nurture? For it is not for you alone to realize all that is included in the idea of Christian education. It belongs to the church of God, according to the degree of its social power over you and in you and around your children, to bear a part of the responsibility with you.
Then, again, have you nothing to blame in yourselves? no lack
of faithfulness? no indiscretion of manner or of temper? no mistake of duty, which,
with a better and more cultivated piety, you would have been able to avoid? Have
you been so nearly even with your privilege and duty, that you can find no relief
but to lay some charge upon God, or comfort yourselves in the conviction that he
has appointed the failure you deplore? When God marks out a plan of education, or
sets up an aim to direct its efforts, you will see, at once, that he could not base
it on a want of piety in you, or
Besides, you must not assume that we, in this age, are the best Christians that have ever lived, or most likely to produce all the fruits of piety. An assumption so pleasing to our vanity is more easily made than verified, but vanity is the weakest as it is the cheapest of all arguments. We have some good points, in which we compare favorably with other Christians, and Christians of other times, but our style of piety is sadly deficient, in many respects, and that to such a degree that we have little cause for self-congratulation. With all our activity and boldness of movement, there is a certain hardness and rudeness, a want of sensibility to things that do not lie in action, which can not be too much deplored, or too soon rectified. We hold a piety of conquest rather than of love,—a kind of public piety, that is strenuous and fiery on great occasions, but wants the beauty of holiness, wants constancy, singleness of aim, loveliness, purity, richness, blamelessness, and—if I may add another term not so immediately religious, but one that carries, by association, a thousand religious qualities—wants domesticity of character; wants them, I mean, not as compared with the perfect standard of Christ, but as compared with other examples of piety that have been given in former times, and others that are given now.
For some reason, we do not make a Christian atmosphere about us—do
not produce the conviction that we
Thus much it was necessary to say, for the removal of prejudices that are likely to rise up in your minds, and make you inaccessible to the arguments I may offer. Let all such prejudices be removed, or, if this be too much, let them, at least, be suspended till you have heard what I have to advance; for it can not be desired of you to believe any thing more than what is shown you by adequate proofs. Which also it is right to ask that you will receive, in a spirit of conviction, such as becomes our wretched and low attainments, and with a willingness to let God be exalted, though at the expense of some abasement in ourselves. In pursuing the argument, I shall—
I. Collect some considerations which occur to us, viewing the subject on the human side. and then—
II. Show how far and by what methods God has justified, on his part, the doctrine we maintain.
There is then, as the subject appears to us—
1. No absurdity in supposing that children are to grow up in Christ.
On the other hand, if there is no absurdity, there is a very clear moral incongruity
in setting up a contrary supposition, to be the aim of a system of Christian education.
There could not be a worse or more baleful implication given to a child, than that
he is to reject God and all holy principle, till he has come to a mature age. What
authority have you from the Scriptures to tell your child, or, by any sign, to show
him, that you do not expect him truly to love and obey God, till after he has spent
whole years in hatred and wrong? What authority to make him feel that he is the
most unprivileged of all human beings, capable of sin, but incapable of repentance;
old enough to resist all good, but too young to receive any good whatever? It is
reasonable to suppose that you have some express authority for a lesson so manifestly
cruel and hurtful, else you would shudder to give it. I ask you for the chapter
and verse, out of which it is derived. Meantime, wherein would it be less incongruous
for you to teach your child that he is to lie and steal, and go the whole round
of the vices, and then, after he comes to mature age, reform his conduct by the
rules of virtue? Perhaps you do not give your child to expect that he is to grow
up in sin; you only expect that he will yourself. That is scarcely better: for that
which is your expectation, will assuredly be his; and what is more, any attempt
to maintain a discipline at war with your own secret expectations, will only make
a hollow and
But my child is a sinner, you will say; and how can I expect him
to begin a right life, until God gives him a new heart? This is the common way of
speaking, and I state the objection in its own phraseology, that it may recognize
itself. Who then has told you that a child can not have the new heart of which
you speak? Whence do you learn that if you live the life of Christ, before him and
with him, the law of the Spirit of Life may not be such as to include and quicken
him also? And why should it be thought incredible that there should be some really
good principle awakened in the mind of a child? For this is all that is implied
in a Christian state. The Christian is one who has simply begun to love what is
good for its own sake, and why should it be thought impossible for a child to have
this love begotten in him? Take any scheme of depravity you please, there is yet
nothing in it to forbid the possibility that a child should be led, in his first
moral act, to cleave unto what is good and right, any more than in the first of
his twentieth year. He is, in that case, only a child converted to good, leading
a mixed life as all Christians do. The good in him goes into combat with the evil,
and holds a qualified sovereignty. And why may not this internal conflict of goodness
cover the whole life from its dawn, as well as any part of it?
2. It is to be expected that Christian education will radically differ from that which is not Christian. Now, it is the very character and mark of all unchristian education, that it brings up the child for future conversion. No effort is made, save to form a habit of outward virtue, and, if God please to convert the family to something higher and better, after they come to the age of maturity, it is well. Is then Christian education, or the nurture of the Lord, no way different from this? Or is it rather to be supposed that it will have a higher aim and a more sacred character?
And, since it is the distinction of Christian parents, that they
are themselves in the nurture of the Lord, since Christ and the Divine Love, communicated
through him, are become the food of their life, what will they so naturally seek
as to have their children partakers with them, heirs together with them, in the
grace of life? I am well aware of the common impression that Christian education
is sufficiently distinguished by the endeavor
These are questions that I know not how to decide; but the doubt in which they leave us will at least suffice to show that Christian education has, in this view, no such eminent advantages over that which is unchristian, as to raise any broad and dignified distinction between them. We certainly know that much of what is called Christian nurture, only serves to make the subject of religion odious, and that, as nearly as we can discover, in exact proportion to the amount of religious teaching received. And no small share of the difficulty to be overcome afterwards, in the struggle of conversion, is created in just this way.
On the other hand, you will hear, for example, of cases like the
following: A young man, correctly but
Such facts (for the case above given is a fact and not a fancy)
compel us to suspect the value of much that is called Christian education. They
suggest the possibility also that Christian piety should begin in other and milder
forms of exercise, than those which commonly distinguish the conversion of adults;
that Christ himself, by that renewing Spirit who can sanctify from the womb, should
be practically infused into the childish mind; in other words, that the house, having
a domestic Spirit of grace dwelling in it, should become
3. It is a fact that all Christian parents would like to see their
children grow up in piety; and the better Christians they are, the more earnestly
they desire it; and, the more lovely and constant the Christian spirit they manifest,
the more likely it is, in general, that their children will early display the Christian
character. This is current opinion. But why should a Christian parent, the deeper
his piety and the more closely he is drawn to God, be led to desire, the more earnestly,
what, in God's view, is even absurd or impossible? And, if it be generally seen
that the children of such are more likely to become Christians early, what forbids
the hope that, if they were riper still in their piety, living a more single and
Christ-like life, and more cultivated in their views of family nurture, they might
see their children grow up always in piety towards God? Or, if they may not always
see it as clearly as they desire, might they not still be able to implant some holy
principle, which shall be the seed of a Christian character
4. Assuming the corruption of human nature, when should we think it wisest to undertake or expect a remedy? When evil is young and pliant to good, or when it is confirmed by years of sinful habit? And when, in fact, is the human heart found to be so ductile to the motives of religion, as in the simple, ingenuous age of childhood? How easy is it then, as compared with the stubbornness of adult years, to make all wrong seem odious, all good lovely and desirable. If not discouraged by some ill-temper which bruises all the gentle sensibilities, or repelled by some technical view of religious character which puts it beyond his age, how ready is the child to be taken by good, as it were beforehand, and yield his ductile nature to the truth and Spirit of God, and to a fixed prejudice against all that God forbids.
He can not understand, of course, in the earliest stage of childhood,
the philosophy of religion as a renovated experience, and that is not the form of
the first lessons he is to receive. He is not to be told that he must have a new
heart and exercise faith in Christ's atonement. We are to understand, that a right
spirit may be virtually exercised in children, when, as yet, it is not intellectually
received, or as a form of doctrine. Thus, if they are put upon an effort to be good,
connecting the fact that God desires it and will help them in the endeavor, that
is all which, in a very early age, they can receive, and that includes every thing—repentance,
Never is it too early for good to be communicated. Infancy and childhood are the ages most pliant to good. And who can think it necessary that the plastic nature of childhood must first be hardened into stone, and stiffened into enmity towards God and all duty, before it can become a candidate for Christian character! There could not be a more unnecessary mistake, and it is as unnatural and pernicious, I fear, as it is unnecessary.
There are many who assume the radical goodness of human nature,
and the work of Christian education is, in their view, only to educate or educe
the good that is in us. Let no one be disturbed by the suspicion of a coincidence
between what I have here said and such a theory. The natural pravity of man is plainly
asserted in the Scriptures, and, if it were not, the familiar laws of physiology
would require us to believe, what amounts to the same thing. And if neither Scripture
nor physiology taught us the doctrine, if the child was born as clear of natural
prejudice or damage, as Adam before his sin,
The growth of Christian virtue is no vegetable process, no mere
onward development. It involves a struggle with evil, a fall and a rescue. The soul
becomes established in holy virtue, as a free exercise, only as it is passed round
the corner of fall and redemption, ascending thus unto God through a double experience,
in which it ]earns the bitterness of evil and the worth of good, fighting its way
out of one, and achieving the other as a victory. The child, therefore, may as well
begin life under a law of hereditary damage, as to plunge himself into evil by his
own experiment, which he will as naturally do from the simple impulse of curiosity,
or the instinct of knowledge, as from any noxious quality in his mold derived by
descent. For it is not sin which he derives from his parents; at least, not sin
in any sense which imports blame, but only some prejudice to the perfect harmony
of this mold, some kind of pravity or obliquity which inclines him to evil. These
suggestions are offered, not as necessary to be received in every particular, but
simply to show that the scheme of education proposed, is not to be identified with
another, which assumes the radical goodness of human
5. It is implied in all our religious philosophy, that if a child ever does any thing in a right spirit, ever loves any thing because it is good and right, it involves the dawn of a new life. This we can not deny or doubt, without bringing in question our whole scheme of doctrine. Is it then incredible that some really good feeling should be called into exercise in a child? In all the discipline of the house, quickened as it should be by the Spirit of God, is it true that he can never once be brought to submit to parental authority lovingly and because it is right? Must we even hold the absurdity of the scripture counsel—"Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right?" When we speak thus of a love for what is right and good, we must of course discriminate between the mere excitement of a natural sensibility to pleasure in the contemplation of what is good (of which the worst minds are more or less capable,) and a practicable subordination of the soul to its power, a practicable embrace of its law. The child must not only be touched with some gentle emotions toward what is right, but he must love it with a fixed love, love it for the sake of its principle, receive it as a vital and formative power.
Nor is there any age, which offers itself to God's truth and love,
and to that Quickening Spirit whence all good proceeds, with so much of ductile
feeling and susceptibilities so tender. The child is under parental authority too
for the very purpose, it would seem, of having
6. Children have been so trained as never to remember the time
when they began to be religious. Baxter was, at one time, greatly troubled concerning
himself, because he could recollect no time when there was a gracious change in
his character. But he discovered, at length, that "education is as properly a means
of grace as preaching," and thus found the sweeter comfort in his love to God, that
he learned to love him so early. The European churches, generally, regard Christian
piety more as a habit of life, formed under the training of childhood, and less
as a marked spiritual change in experience. In Germany, for example, the church
includes all the people, and it is remarkable that, under a scheme so loose, and
with so much of pernicious error taught in the pulpit, there is yet so much of deep
religious feeling, so much of lovely and simple character, and a savor of Christian
piety so generally prevalent in the community. So true is this, that the
Again, the Moravian Brethren, it is agreed by all, give as ripe and graceful an exhibition of piety, as any body of Christians living on the earth, and it is the radical distinction of their system that it rests its power on Christian education. They make their churches schools of holy nurture to childhood, and expect their children to grow up there, as plants in the house of the Lord. Accordingly it is affirmed that not one in ten of the members of that church, recollects any time when he began to be religious. Is it then incredible that what has been can be? Would it not be wiser and more modest, when facts are against us, to admit that there is certainly some bad error, either in our life, or in our doctrine, or in both, which it becomes us to amend?
Once more, if we narrowly examine the relation of parent and child,
we shall not fail to discover some thing like a law of organic connection, as regards
character, subsisting between them. Such a connection as makes it easy to believe,
and natural to expect, that the faith of the one will be propagated in the other.
Perhaps I should rather say, such a connection as induces the conviction that the
character of one is actually included
The declarations of Scripture, and the laws of physiology, I have
already intimated, compel the belief that a child's nature is somehow depravated
by descent from parents, who are under the corrupting effects of sin. But this,
taken as a question relating to the mere punctum temporis,
or precise point of birth, is not a question of any so grave import as is generally
supposed; for the child, after birth, is still within the matrix of the parental
life, and will be, more or less, for many years. And the parental life will be flowing
into him all that time, just as naturally, and by a law as truly organic, as when
the sap of the trunk flows into a limb. We must not govern our thoughts, in such
a matter, by our eyes; and because the physical separation has taken place, conclude
that no organic relation remains. Even the
At first, the child is held as a mere passive lump in the arms,
and he opens into conscious life, under the soul of the parent streaming into his
eyes and ears, through the manners and tones of the nursery. The kind and degree
of passivity are gradually changed as life advances. A little farther on it is observed
that a smile wakens a smile; any kind of sentiment or passion, playing in the face
of the parent, wakens a responsive sentiment or passion. Irritation irritates, a
frown withers, love expands a look congenial to itself, and why not holy love? Next
the ear is opened to the understanding of words, but what words the child shall
hear, he can not choose, and has as little capacity to select the sentiments that
are poured into his soul. Farther on, the parents begin to govern him by appeals
to will, expressed in commands, and whatever their requirement may be, he can as
little withstand it, as the violet can cool the scorching sun, or the tattered leaf
can tame the hurricane. Next they appoint his school, choose his books, regulate
his company, decide what form of religion, and what religious opinions he shall
be taught, by taking him to a church of their own selection. In all
The tendency of all our modern speculations is to an extreme individualism,
and we carry our doctrines of free will so far as to make little or nothing of organic
laws; not observing that character may be, to a great extent, only the free development
of exercises previously wrought in us, or extended to us, when other wills had us
within their sphere. All the Baptist theories of religion are based in this error.
They assume, as a first truth, that no such thing is possible as an organic connection
of character, an assumption which is plainly refuted by what we see with our eyes,
and, as I shall by and by show, by the declarations of Scripture. We have much to
say also, in common with the Baptists, about the beginning of moral agency, and
we seem to fancy that there is some definite moment when a child becomes a moral
agent, passing out of a condition where he is a moral nullity, and where no moral
agency touches his being. Whereas he is rather to be regarded, at the first, as
lying within the moral agency of the parent, and passing out, by degrees, through
a course
And this is the very idea of Christian education, that it begins
with nurture or cultivation. And the intention is that the Christian life and spirit
of the parents, which are in and by the Spirit of God, shall flow into the mind
of the child, to blend with his incipient and half-formed exercises; that they shall
thus beget their own good within him—their thoughts, opinions, faith, and love,
which are to become a little more, and yet a little more, his own separate exercise,
but still the same in character. The contrary assumption, that virtue must be the
product of separate and absolutely independent choice, is pure assumption. As regards
tle measure of personal merit and demerit, it is doubtless true that every subject
of God is to be responsible only for what is his own. But virtue still is rather
a state of being than an act or series of acts; and, if we look at the causes
which induce or prepare such a state, the will of the person himself may have a
part among these causes more or less important, and it works no absurdity to suppose
that one may be even prepared to such a
All society is organic—the church, the state, the school, the family; and there is a spirit in each of these organisms, peculiar to itself, and more or less hostile, more or less favorable to religious character, and to some extent, at least, sovereign over the individual man. A very great share of the power in what is called a revival of religion, is organic power; nor is it any the less divine on that account. The child is only more within the power of organic laws than we all are. We possess only a mixed individuality all our life long. A pure, separate, individual man, living wholly within, and from himself, is a mere fiction. No such person ever existed, or ever can. I need not say that this view of an organic connection of character subsisting between parent and child, lays a basis for notions of Christian education, far different from those which now prevail, under the cover of a merely fictitious and mischievous individualism.
Perhaps it may be necessary to add, that, in the strong language
I have used concerning the organic connection of character between the parent and
the child, it is not designed to assert a power in the parent to renew the child,
or that the child can be renewed by any agency of the Spirit less immediate, than
that which renews the
Such are some of the considerations that offer themselves, viewing our subject on the human side, or as it appears in the light of human evidence—all concurring to produce the conviction, that it is the only true idea of Christian education, that the child is to grow up in the life of the parent, and be a Christian in principle, from his earliest years.
“Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."—
WE proceed now to inquire—
II. How far God, in the revelation made of his character and will, favors the view of Christian nurture vindicated, in a former discourse, by arguments and evidences of an inferior nature? And—
1. According to all that God has taught us concerning his own dispositions, he desires on his part, that children should grow up in piety, as earnestly as the parent can desire it; nay, as much more earnestly, as he hates sin more intensely, and desires good with less mixture of qualification. Goodness, or the production of goodness, is the supreme end of God, and therefore, we know, on first principles, that he desires to bestow whatsoever spiritual grace is necessary to the moral renovation of childhood, and will do it, unless some collateral reasons in his plan, involving the extension of holy virtue, require him to withhold.
Thus, if nothing were hung upon parental faithfulness and example,
if the child were not used, in some degree or way, as all argument, to hold the
parent to a life of Christian diligence, then the good principle in
Observe, too, that he expressly pledges his Holy Spirit to you,
as one of his first gifts, and, what is more, even commands you to be filled with
the Spirit; and considering the organic relation that subsists, by his own appointment,
between you and your children, how far off is he, in this, from pledging you a mercy
that accrues to their benefit? He appoints you also to be a light to the world,
and, by the grace he pours into your being, prepares you to be; how much more a
light to minds that are fed by simple nurture from your own? And when you consider
how fond he is, if I may so speak, in the blessings he pours on the good, of gathering
their
2. If there be any such thing as Christian nurture, distinguished from that which is not Christian, which is generally admitted, and, by the Scriptures clearly asserted, then is it some kind of nurture which God appoints. Does it then accord with the known character of God, to appoint a scheme of education, the only proper result of which shall be that children are trained up under it in sin? It would not be more absurd to suppose that God has appointed church education, to produce a first crop of sin, and then a crop of holiness. God appoints nothing of which sin, and only sin, is to be the proper and legitimate result, whether for a longer or a shorter time; least of all, a mode of training which is to produce sin. Holy virtue is the aim of every plan God adopts, every means he prescribes, and we have no right to look only for sin, in that which he has appointed as a means of virtue. We can not do it understandingly without great impiety.
3. God does expressly lay it upon us to expect that our children
will grow up in piety, under the parental nurture, and assumes the possibility that
such a result may ordinarily be realized. "Train up a child"—how? for future conversion?—No,
but "in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." If
it be said that this relates only to outward habits of virtue
4. A time is foretold, as our churches generally believe, when
all shall know God, even from the least to the greatest; that is, shall spiritually
know him, or so that there shall be no need of exhorting one another to know him;
for intellectual knowledge is not carried by exhortation. If such a time is ever
to come, then, at least, children are to grow up in Christ. Can it come too soon?
And, if we have the opinion that any such thing is impossible, either we, or those
who come after us, must get rid of it. A principal reason why the great expectations
of the future, that we, in this age, are giving out so confidently, seem only visionary
and idle dreams to many, is that we are perpetually assuming their impossibility
ourselves. Our very theory of religion is, that men are to grow up in evil, and
be dragged into the church of God by conquest. The world is to lie in halves, and
the kingdom of God is to stretch itself side by side with the kingdom of darkness,
making sallies into it, and taking captive those who are
Thus we assume even the absurdity of all our expectations in regard to the possible advancement of human society and the universal prevalence of Christian virtue. And thus we throw an air of extravagance and unreason over all we do. Whereas there is a sober and rational possibility, that human society should be universally pervaded by Christian virtue. The Christian scheme has a scope of intention, and instruments and powers adequate to this: it descends upon the world to claim all souls for its dominion—all men of all climes, all ages from childhood to the grave. It is, indeed, a plan which supposes the existence of sin, and sin will be in the world, and in all hearts in it, as long as the world or human society continues; but the scheme has a breadth of conception, and has powers and provisions embodied in it, which, apart from all promises and predictions, certify us of a day when it will reign in all human hearts, and all that live shall live in Christ. Let us either renounce any such confidence, or show, by a thorough consistency in our religious doctrines, that we hold it deliberately and manfully.
5. We discover in the Scriptures that the organic law, of which
I have spoken, is distinctly recognized, and that character in children is often
regarded as, in some very important sense, derivative from their parents. It is
thus that "sin has passed upon all men." "By the offense of one, judgment came upon
all." Christian faith is also spoken of in a similar way—"The unfeigned
Declarations like those in the eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel,
"the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,"—"the soul that sinneth, it
shall die,"—are hastily applied by many, not to show that the child is to be punished
only for his own sin, which is their true import, but, as if it were the same thing,
to disprove the fact of an organic connection, by which children receive a character
from their parents. Whereas this latter is a truth which we see with our eyes, and
one that is constantly affirmed in the Scriptures, both in respect to bad character
and to good. "God layeth up the iniquity of the wicked for his children,"—"Visiting
the iniquities
Something has undoubtedly been gained to modern theology, as a
human science, by fixing the attention strongly upon the individual man, as a moral
agent, immediately related to God, and responsible only for his own actions; at
the same time there was a truth, an important truth, underlying the old doctrine
of federal headship and original or imputed sin, though strangely misconceived,
which we seem, in our one-sided speculations, to have quite lost sight of. And how
can we ever attain to any right conception of organic duties, until we discover
the reality of organic powers and relations? And how can we hope to set ourselves
in harmony
Last argument, which is drawn from infant or household baptism—a
rite which supposes the fact of an organic connection of character between the parent
and the child; a seal of faith in the parent, applied over to the child, on the
ground of a presumption that his faith is wrapped up in the parent's faith; so that
he is ac counted a believer from the beginning. We must distinguish here between
a fact and a presumption of fact. If you look upon a seed of wheat, it contains,
in itself presumptively, a thousand generations of wheat, though by reason of some
fault in the cultivation, or some speck of diseased matter in itself, it may, in
fact, never repro duce at all. So the Christian parent has, in his character, a
germ, which has power, presumptively, to produce its like in his children, though
by reason of some bad fault in itself, or possibly some outward hindrance in the
Church, or some providence of death, it may fail to do so. Thus it is that infant
baptism becomes an appropriate rite. It sees the child in the parent, counts him
presumptively a believer and a Christian, and, with the parent, baptizes him also.
Furthermore, you will perceive that it must be presumed, either that the child will
grow up a believer, or that he will not. The Baptist presumes that he will not,
and therefore declares the right to be inappropriate. God presumes that he will,
I have no desire to press the passages in which mention is made
of household baptism beyond their true import. When Paul is said to have "baptized
the household of Stephanas," our Baptist friends reply that the text proves nothing,
in respect to infant baptism, because it can not be shown that there were any children
in the household; and some, who practice infant baptism, have conceded the sufficiency
of the objection. But the power of this proof-text does not depend, in the least,
on the fact that there were children in the household of Stephanas, but simply on
the form of the language. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that the argument for
infant baptism is rather strengthened than weakened, by the supposition that there
were, in fact, no infants or children in this household; for a household generally
contains children, and a term so inclusive in its import, could never come into
use, unless it was the practice for baptism to go by households. Under a practice
like that of our Baptist brethren, what preacher would ever be heard to speak, in
this general inclusive way, of having baptized a household? In the case of the jailor,
too, the same reasoning holds. Here, however, our Baptist brethren go farther, endeavoring
to show positively, from the language used, that there were no infants or children
in the household; for
It has been a fashion, with many modern critics, to surrender
both these passages as proofs of infant baptism, and they certainly do not prove
it, in just the way in which many have used them as proof-texts. But if any one
will seek a point of view, whence he may be able to give a natural and easy interpretation
to the language used, or if he will ask, on the simple doctrine of chances, what
chance there was that these two households
But the true idea of these passages, and also of the rite itself,
is seen most evidently in the history of its establishment by Christ, in the third
chapter of John. The Jewish nation regarded other nations as unclean. Hence, when
a Gentile family wished to become Jewish citizens, they were baptized in token of
cleansing. Then they were said to be re-born, or regenerated, so as to be accounted
true descendants of Abraham. We use the term naturalize, that is, to make
natural born, in the same sense. But Christ had come to set up a spiritual kingdom,
the kingdom of heaven; and finding all men aliens, and spiritually unclean, he applies
over the rite of baptism, which was familiar to the Jews, ("art thou a Master in
Israel, and knowest not these things?") giving it a higher sense. "Except a man
be born of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter the kingdom of heaven."
But the Gentile proselyte, according to the custom here described—here is the point
of the argument—came with his family. They were all baptized together, young and
old, all regenerated or naturalized together; and therefore, in the new application
made of the rite to signify spiritual cleansing and regeneration, it is understood,
of course, that children are to come with their parents. To have excluded them would
have been, to
Some have questioned whether proselyte baptism existed at this early age; but of this the third chapter of John is itself conclusive proof; for how else was baptism familiarly known to the Jews as connected with regeneration; that is, civil regeneration? There is always a historic reason for religious rites and for usages of language; and you will find it impossible to suppose that Christ appointed baptism, and set the rite in connection with spiritual regeneration, by any mere accident, or without some historic basis, answering to that which I have just described. In this manner, all his language, in the interview with Nicodemus, becomes natural and easy.
It follows that the children of Christian disciples, being baptized with their parents, as the children of Gentile proselytes were baptized with theirs, would be taken or presumed by the church to be spiritually cleansed, in the same manner. Accordingly, just as the children of Jews were accounted Jews, and not as unclean, when one of the parents was a Jew, so Paul tells us, that in the church of God, the believing party sanctifies the unbelieving, "else were your children unclean, but now are they holy;" showing that the Jewish analogies, in regard to children, were in fact translated, or passed over to the church, and adopted there—a translation that naturally followed. from the reapplication of proselyte baptism.
Then passing into the early history of the church, we hear Justin Martyr saying: "There are some of us, eighty years old, who were made disciples to Christ in their childhood;" that is, in the age of the apostles, and while they were yet living; for it was now less than eighty years since their death. And in the expression "made disciples," taken in connection with the baptismal formula, "Go disciple all nations, baptizing," &c., we see that he alludes to baptism; for baptism was the rite that introduced the subject into the Christian school as a disciple; and what so natural as that the children of disciples should be disciples with them?
Then again, Ireneus, who lived within one generation of the apostles, gives us the second mention of this rite which appears in history, when he says: "Christ came to save all persons through himself; all, I say, who through him are regenerated unto God: infants and little ones, and children and youth, and the aged." Which phrase, "regenerated unto God," applied to parents and little ones, alludes to baptism: showing that a notion of baptism, as connected with regeneration, coincident with that which we found in the third chapter of John, was then current in the church.
I have been thus full upon the rite of baptism, not because that
is my subject, but because the rite involves, in all its grounds and reasons, the
same view of Christian education which I am seeking to establish. One can not be
thoroughly understood and received without the other. And it is precisely on this
account that we have so great difficulty in sustaining the rite of infant
We have much to say of baptismal regeneration as a great error,
which undoubtedly it is, in the form in which it is held; but it is only a less
hurtful error than some of us hold in denying it. The distinction between our doctrine
of baptismal regeneration, and the ancient Scripture view, is too broad and palpable
to be mistaken. According to the modern church dogma, no faith, in the parents,
is necessary to the effect of the rite. Sponsors, too, are brought in between all
parents and their duty, to assume the very office which belongs only to them. And,
what is worse, the child is said to be actually regenerated by the act of the priest.
According to the more ancient view, or that of the Scriptures, nothing depends upon
the priest or minister, save that he execute the rite in due form. The regeneration
is not actual, but only presumptive, and every thing depends upon the organic law
of character pertaining between the parent and the child, the church and the child,
thus upon duty and holy living and gracious example. The child is too young to choose
the rite for himself, but the parent, having him as it were in his own life, is
allowed the confidence that his own faith and
But there are two objections to this view of Christian nurture, which, if they are not removed, may even suffice to break the force of my argument.
1. A theoretical objection, that it leaves no room for the sovereignty of God, in appointing the moral character of men and families. Thus it is declared that "all are not Israel who are of Israel," and that God, before the children Jacob and Esau had done either good or evil. professed his love to one, and his rejection of the ether. But the wonder is, in this case of Rebecca and her children, that such a mother did not ruin them both. A partial mother, scorning one child, teaching the other to lie and trick his blind father, and extort from a starving brother his birthright honor, can not be said to furnish a very good test of the power of Christian education. But show me the case, where the whole conduct of the parents has been such as it should be to produce the best effects, and where the sovereignty of God has appointed the ruin of the children, whether all, or any one of them. The sovereignty of God has always a relation to means, and we are not authorized to think of it, in any case, as separated from means.
2. An objection from observation—asking why it is, if our doctrine
be true, that many persons, remarkable for their piety, have yet been so unfortunate
in their children? Because, I answer, many persons, remarkable for their piety,
are yet very disagreeable persons, arid that too, by reason of some very marked
defect in their religious character. They display just that spirit, and act in just
that manner, which is likely to make religion odious—the more odious, the more
urgently they commend it. Sometimes they appear well to the world one remove distant
from them, they shine well in
I once took up a book, from a Sabbath-school library, one problem
of which was to teach a child that he wants a new heart. A lovely boy (for it was
a narrative) was called every day to resolve that he would do no wrong that day,
a task which he undertook most cheerfully, at first, and even with a show of delight.
But, before the sun welt down, he was sure to fall into some ill-temper or be overtaken
by some infirmity. Whereupon, the conclusion was immediately sprung upon him that
he "wanted a new heart." We are even amazed that any teacher of ordinary intelligence
should not once have imagined how she herself, or how the holiest Christian living,
would fare under such kind of regimen; how she would discover every day, and probably
some hours before sunset, that she too wanted a new heart? And the practical cruelty
of the experiment is yet more to be deplored, than its want of consideration. Had
the problem been how to discourage
Simply to tell a child, as he just begins to make acquaintance with words, that he "must have a new heart before he can be good," is to inflict a double discouragement. First, he can not guess what this technical phraseology means, and thus he takes up the impression that he can do or think nothing right, till he is able to comprehend what is above his age—why then should he make the endeavor? Secondly, he is told that he must have a new heart before he can be good, not that he may hope to exercise a renewed spirit, in the endeavor to be good—why then attempt what must be worthless, till something previous befalls him? Discouraged thus on every side, his tender soul turns hither and thither, in hopeless despair, and finally he consents to be what he must—a sinner against God, and that only. Well is it, under such a process, wearing down his childish soul into soreness and despair of good, sealing up his nature in silence and cessation as regards all right endeavors, and compelling him to turn his feelings into other channels, where he shall find his good in evil—well is it, I say, if he has not contracted a dislike to the very subject of religion, as inveterate as the subject is impossible.
Many teach in this way, no doubt, with the best intentions imaginable;
their design is only to be faithful, and sometimes they appear even to think that
the more they discourage their children, the better and more faithful they are.
But the mistake, if not cruelly meant, is
Sometimes Christian parents fail of success in the religious training
of their children, because the church counteracts their effort and example. The
church makes a bad atmosphere about the house, and the poison comes in at the doors
and windows. It is rent by divisions, burnt up by fanaticism, frozen by the chill
of a worldly spirit, petrified in a rigid and dead orthodoxy. It makes no element
of genial warmth and love about the child, according to the intention of Christ
ill its appointment, but gives to religion, rather, a forbidding aspect, and thus,
instead of assisting the parent, becomes one of the worst impediments to his success.
What kind of element the world makes about the child is of little consequence; for
here there is no pretence
To sum up all, we conclude, not that every child can certainly be made to grow up in Christian piety—nothing is gained by asserting so much, and perhaps I could not prove it to be true, neither can any one prove the contrary—I merely show that this is the true idea and aim of Christian nurture as a nurture of the Lord. It is presumptively true that such a result can be realized, just as it is presumptively true that a school will forward the pupils in knowledge, though possibly sometimes it may fail to do it. And, without such a presumption, no parent can do his duty and fill his office well, any more than it is possible to make a good school, in the expectation that the scholars will learn something five or ten years hence, and not before.
To give this subject its practical effect, let me urge it—
1. Upon the careful attention of those who neglect, or decline,
offering their children in baptism. Some of you are simply indifferent to this duty,
not seeing what good it can do to baptize a child; others have positive theological
objections to it. With the former class I
It is the prevalence of false views, on this subject, which creates
so great difficulty in sustaining infant baptism in our churches. If children are
to grow up in sin, to be converted when they come to the age of maturity, if this
is tie only aim and expectation of family nurture, there really is no meaning or
dignity whatever in the rite. They are even baptized into sin, and every propriety
of the rite as a seal of faith is violated. And it is the feeling of this impropriety
which
And it would certainly be very singular if Christ Jesus, in a
scheme of mercy for the world, had found no place for infants and little children:
more singular still, if he had given them the place of adults; and worse than singular,
if he had appointed them to years of sin as the necessary preparation for his mercy.
But if you see him counting them one with you, bringing them tenderly into his fold
with you, there to grow up in him, you will not doubt that he has given them a place
exactly and beautifully suited to them. And is it for you to withhold them from
that place? Is it
You rob yourselves too of an influence which is necessary to a
right fulfillment of your duty. Their character, you say, is their own; let them
believe for themselves and be baptized when they will. You have never the same genial
feeling that you would, if you regarded them as morally linked to your character
and
2. What motives are laid upon all Christian parents, by the doctrine
I have established, to make the first article of family discipline a constant and
careful discipline of themselves. I would not undervalue a strong and decided government
in families. No family can be rightly trained without it. But there is a kind of
virtue, my brethren, which is not in the rod—the virtue, I mean, of a truly good
and sanctified life. And a reign of brute force is much more easily maintained,
than a reign whose power is righteousness and love. There are, too, I must warn
you, many who talk much of the rod as the orthodox symbol of parental duty, but
who might really as well be heathens as Christians; who only storm about their house
with heathenish ferocity, who lecture, and threaten, and castigate, and bruise,
This is Christian education, the nurture of the Lord. Ah, how dismal is the contrast of a half-worldly, carnal piety; proposing money as the good thing of life: stimulating, ambition for place and show; provoking ill-nature by petulance and falsehood; praying, to save the rule of family worship; having now and then a religious fit, and, when it is on, weeping and exhorting the family to undo all that the life has taught them to do; and then, when the passions have burnt out their fire, dropping down again to sleep in the embers, only hoping still that the family will sometime be converted! When shall we discover that families ought to be ruined by such training as this? When shall we turn ourselves wholly to God, and looking on our children as one with us and drawing their character from us, make them arguments to duty and constancy-duty and constancy not as a burden, but, since they are enforced by motives so dear, our pleasure and delight? For these ties and duties exist not for the religious good of our children only, but quite as much for our own. And God, who understands us well, has appointed them to keep us in a perpetual frame of love; for so ready is our bad nature to kindle with our good, and burn with it, that what we call our piety, is, otherwise, in constant danger of degenerating into a fiery, censorious, unmerciful and intolerant spirit.
Hence it is that monks have been so prone to persecution. Not
dwelling with children as the objects of affection, having their hearts softened
by no family love, their life identified with no objects that excite
3. It is to be deeply considered, in connection with this view
of family nurture, whether it does not meet many of the deficiencies we deplore
in the Christian character of our times, and the present state of our churches.
We have been expecting to thrive too much by conquest, and too little by growth.
I desire to speak with all caution of what are very unfortunately called revivals
of religion; for, apart from the name, which is modern, and from certain crudities
and excesses that go with it—which name, crudities, and excesses are wholly adventitious
as regards the substantial merits of such scenes—apart from these, I say, there
is abundant reason to believe that God's spiritual economy includes varieties of
exercise, answering, in all important respects, to these visitations of mercy, so
much coveted in our churches. They are needed. A perfectly uniform
But the difficulty is with us that we idolize such scenes, and
make them the whole of our religion. We assume that nothing good is doing, or can
be done at any other time. And what is even worse, we often look upon these scenes,
and desire them, rather as scenes of victory, than of piety. They are the harvest-times
of conversion, and conversion is too nearly every thing with us. In particular we
see no way to gather in disciples, save by means of certain marked experiences,
developed in such scenes, in adult years. Our very children can possibly come to
no good, save in this way. Instrumentalities are invented to compass our object,
that are only mechanical, and the hope of mere present effect is supposed to justify
them. Present
Let us turn now, not away from revivals of religion, certainly
not away from the conviction that God will bring upon the churches tides of spiritual
exercise, and vary his divine culture by times and seasons suited to their advancement;
but let us turn to inquire whether there is not a fund of increase in the very bosom
of the church itself. Let us try if we may not train up our children in the way
that they should go. Simply this, if we can do it, will make the church multiply
her numbers
Then also the piety of the coming age will be deeper, and more
akin to habit than ours, because it began earlier. It will have more of an air of
naturalness, and will be less a work of will. A generation will come forward, who
will have been educated to all good undertakings and enterprises—ardent without
fanaticisinm, powerful without machinery. Not born, so generally, in a storm, and
brought to Christ by an abrupt transition, the latter portion of life will not have
an unequal war to maintain with the beginning, but life will be more nearly one,
and in harmony with itself. Is not this a result to be desired? Could we tell our
American churches, at this moment, what they want, should we not tell them this?
Neither, if God, as many fear,
4. Parents who are not religious in their character. have reason,
in our subject, seriously to consider what effect they are producing, and likely
to produce, in their children. Probably you do not wish them to be irreligious;
few parents have the hardihood or indiscretion to desire that the fear of God, the
salutary restraints of religion, should be removed from their children. Possibly
you exert yourselves, in a degree, to give them religious counsel and instruction.
But, alas! how difficult is it for you to convince them, by words, of the value
of what you practically reject yourselves. Have I not shown you that they are set
in organic connection with you, to draw their spirit, and principles
Do not imagine that you have done corrupting them when they are born. Their character is yet to be born, and, in you, is to have its parentage. Your spirit is to pass into them, by a law of transition that is natural, and well nigh irresistible. And then you are to meet them in a future life, and see how much of blessing or of sorrow they will impute to you—to share their unknown future, and look upon yourselves as father and mother to their destiny. Such thoughts, I know, are difficult for you to meet; difficult because they open real scenes, which you are, one day, to look upon. Loving these your children, as most assuredly you do, can you think that you are fulfilling the office that your love requires? Go home to your Christless house, look upon them all as they gather round you, and ask it of your love faithfully to say, whether it is well between you? And if no other argument can draw you to God, let these dear living arguments come into your soul, and prevail there.
"The daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches
in the wilderness."—
I CITE this comparison for the sake of the comparison itself, and not to make an example of the mothers of Israel represented in it. They are not to be blamed, if, in the terrors of the siege and the wild feverings of starvation, the voice of nature has been stifled in their bosom. Indeed, it is the wonder of the prophet himself that, while the coarse sea-monsters draw out the breast and faithfully nurse their young, the human mother, so much tenderer and more loving, can be so maddened by distress as to become like the ostrich, and forget the cries of her children.
The ostrich, it will be observed, is nature's type of all unmotherhood.
She hatches her young without incubation, depositing her eggs in the sand to be
quickened by the solar heat. Her office as a mother-bird is there ended. When the
young are hatched, they are to go forth untended, or unmothered, save by the general
motherhood of nature itself. Hence the ostrich is called sometimes the "wicked,"
and sometimes the "stupid" bird. Job describes her with a feeling of natural dislike—"Which
leaveth her eggs in the earth,
Now there is no human mother, unless it be in some terrible stress of siege and starvation, when the mind itself is unsettled by the wild instigation of suffering, who will cease from the bodily care and feeding of her children. And yet there are many forms of nurture for the mind and character of children, that are so far resembled to the ostrich nurture, as to be fitly represented under that type. Practices are adopted, opinions accepted, theories of church life and conversion taught, that make a true Christian parentage virtually impossible, and leave the child, in fact, to a kind of nurture in the sands.
What I propose, accordingly, at the present time, is to characterize these modes of ostrich nurture, miscalled Christian, showing what they are, and the real, though doubtless undesigned, cruelty of them.
As a curious illustration of the looseness and the un settled
feeling of the times, in regard to this great subject, it is just now beginning
to be asserted by some,
This kind of nurture supposes, evidently, a faith in human nature
that is total and complete. As the mother ostrich might be supposed to reason, that
her eggs are ostrich's eggs, and must therefore produce genuine ostriches and nothing
else, so it assumes that human children will grow up, left to themselves, into the
most genuine, highest style of human character. Whereas, it is the misery of human
children that, as free beings, answerable for their choices and their character,
The question here at issue does not really need to be discussed,
but it will greatly instruct and impress those parents who allow their minds to
fluctuate in such looseness as quite unsettles the feeling of their obligation,
just to notice the immense distinction between the relationship of human parents
to their offspring, and that of the animals to theirs. It is not given to the animals,
they will perceive, as to men, to pass any results matured by their own experience,
to their posterity. They prepare no inventions, create no institutions for their
offspring; produce no sciences, write no histories, preserve no records, accumulate
no property or wealth that is to be transmitted; even their thoughts they can perpetuate
in no literary treasures. Hence, there is no progress among them, over and above
that small physiological improvement that may pass by the laws of natural propagation.
So far they are all ostriches. All they can de is to follow their instincts,
We find, then, a most solid ground for the obligations of Christian nurture. It is one of the grand distinctions of humanity that it has such a power to pass, and is set in such a duty of passing, its gifts, principles, and virtues, on to the ages that come after. Happily, few will need to be convinced of this; and yet there awe a great many, we shall find, who manage, even under what they regard as truly Christian pretexts, to maintain schemes of nurture so nearly unparental and unnatural, as to have a much closer affinity with the ostrich nurture than they suspect themselves.
We have many, for example, who have taken up notions of liberty,
or free moral agency, in religion, that separate them effectually from the true
sense of their power and privilege in regard to their children. Assuming the unquestionable
first truth that religious
Their blame in such defections from duty is greater than they
know. For God has probably instituted the reproductive order of existence, including
the parental and filial relation, with a special design to mitigate the perils of
free agency. One generation is to be ripe in
Many true Christians, again, fall of, unwittingly, from the humanly
parental modes of nurture, in taking up notions of conversion that are mechanical,
and proper only to the adult age. They make a merit of great persistency and firmness,
in asserting the universal necessity of a new spiritual birth; not perceiving under
what varieties of form that change may be wrought. The soul must be exercised, they
think, in one given way, viz: by a struggle with sin, a conscious self-renunciation,
and a true turning to Christ for mercy, followed by the joy and peace of a new life
in the Spirit. A child, in other words, can be born of God only in the same way
as an adult can be. There is no quickening grace, or new creation of the Spirit,
proper to him as a child. If he dies in infancy, God may, it is true, find some
way, possibly, to save him, but if he stays among the living, he can not be a Christian
till he is older. He is therefore left, in this most tender and beautiful and pliant
age, in a condition most of all unprivileged, and most sadly unhopeful. The necessity
of a great spiritual change is upon him, and yet he is wholly incapable of the change!
What other being has the good Lord and Father of the world left in a condition as
pitiful as this of a human child? Even the most wicked and hardened of men has,
at least, the gate of conversion left open. And yet there are many Christian parents,
living an outwardly decent and fair life, who consent, without difficulty, and with
a kind of consciously orthodox merit, to this very unnatural and truly hard lot
of childhood, and fall into
Meantime, it will be strange, if the parents themselves do not
fall away from all that is necessary to their Christian power, when the conversion
of their children is postponed, in this manner, by the merely adult possibilities
of their gospel. Why should they live so as to gain their children, when their children
are not to be gained? Were they really to live so as to make their house an element
of grace, the atmosphere of their life an element, to all that breathe it, of unworldly
feeling and all godly aspiration, their mechanical doctrine of conversion would
scarcely suffice to keep away the saving mercies of God from their children. Their
children would still be converted even before the permissible time, and burst up
through the poor detentions of their bad doctrine, to cover it with blessed confusion.
But alas! it requires but a very little of genuine, living godliness in the house,
to bring up children for a future conversion! This kind of ostrich nurture can be
cheaply maintained, and with a very small expenditure of piety. To keep the drill
on foot, as a mere legal indoctrination; to phrase a hope or desire of conversion,
in the family prayers; to be exact, stern, stiff in all church practices, requires
no faith; or, living by faith, no sanctification of the life. A busy, worldly, hard-natured
father, a vain, irritable, captious, fashion-loving mother, a house orthodoxly bad
and earthly in all the reigning practices, is yet a
Again there is another and different way in which parents, meaning
to be Christian, fall into the ostrich nurture without being at all aware of it.
They believe in what are called revivals of religion, and have a great opinion of
them as being, in a very special sense, the converting times of the gospel. They
bring up their children, therefore, not for conversion exactly, but, what is less
dogmatic and formal, for the converting times. And this they think is even more
evangelical and spiritual because it is more practical; though, in fact, much looser
and connected, commonly, with even greater defections from parental duty and fidelity.
To bring up a family for revivals of religion requires, alas! about the smallest
possible amount of consistency and Christian assiduity. No matter what opinion may
be held of such times, or of their inherent value and propriety as pertaining to
the genuine economy of the gospel, any one can see that Christian parents may very
easily roll off a great part of their responsibilities, and comfort themselves in
utter vanity and worldliness of life, by just holding it as a principal hope for
their children, that they are to be finally taken up and rescued from sin, by revivals
of religion. As it costs much to be steadily and uniformly spiritual, how agreeable
the hope that gales of the Spirit will come to make amends for their conscious defections.
If they do not maintain the unworldly and heavenly spirit, so as to make it the
Again, there is another form of the unchristian nurture, over
opposite to these just named, which is quite as wide of the true character. I speak
of that lower and merely ethical nurture, which undertakes, with great assiduity
it may be, to form and whittle the age of childhood into character, by a merely
pruning and humanly culturing process. It is a kind of nurture that stops short
of religion; and atones for the conscious defect, by a drill more or less careful
in the moralities. The reason of this defect commonly is that the parents are too
far decayed in piety and too much under the
Children trained in this mere ethical nurture, are inducted into
no way of faith or dependence on God. They are taught to look for no spiritual transformation.
The virtue they practice is to be prayerless virtue. They grow up thus on the roots
of their natural pride and selfishness, bred into the habit of testing their goodness
by their appearances, and their merit by their works. That they should be molded
in this manner to
There is yet another and widely prevalent misconception of childhood
which, to a certain extent, involves Christianity itself in the same unnatural methods
that are adopted by men. I speak here more especially of the assumed fact that Christ
allows no place in the church for such as are only children. Is not the church to
be composed of such as really believe? And what kind of faith can children have
who are not yet arrived at the age of intelligence? Hence there is supposed to be
a kind of necessity that children, up to that period of advancement and personal
maturity when they are
The result of such arguments and inferences is, that children
have no place given them in the church, however modified, to suit the conditions
of their age. Theil parents are called by Christ to live within and they themselves
are left without. There is no church nurture for them proper to their tender years;
they can not be in the church till they are sufficiently grown to believe.
It would seem that the hardness and the monstrous unnaturalness
of such conceptions must revolt the mind of almost any thoughtful person. If the
grace of our salvation took the ingenuous children away from their sinning, unbelieving
parents, and gathered them into the heavenly fold by themselves, we should have
less reason to be shocked by the severity. But instead of this, calling home the
penitent fathers and mothers and carefully folding them in the church of God's protection,
Jesus their shepherd shuts away the lambs, we are told, and forbids them to come
in! The cruelty of such an opinion, or doctrine, is evident, and the cruel effects
it must have, in making even childhood feel itself to be an alien from God's mercies,
are even more so. It has no conception that there can be a Saviour and salvation
for all ages and stages of life; Christ is the Saviour of adults only! No! Christ
is a Saviour bounded by no such narrow and meager theories—a Saviour for infants,
and children, and youth, as truly as for the adult age; gathering them all into
his fold together, there to be kept and nourished together, by gifts appropriate
to their years; even as he himself has shown us so convincingly, by passing through
all ages and stages of life himself, and giving us, in that manner, to see that
he partakes the want and joins himself to the fallen state of each. Having been
a child himself,
I ought perhaps to add, in bringing this argument to a close, that the harsh imputations I may seem to some of you to have indulged, must not be hastily disallowed. Almost all parents are tender, consciously tender of their children. What will not most of you do, to clothe and feed, and educate, and, in all respects, make duo provision for your children? Sacrifices here are nothing. Health, rest, ease, comfort, you gladly renounce for their sake, and some of you would not spare the sacrifice even of your soul to serve them. Are you then to be justly charged with a mode of nurture so unnatural as to be fitly resembled to that of the ostriches? Of what are you more deeply conscious than of your willingness even to die for your children? All your tenderest movings are toward them; all that you plan, or think; or do, is for them. Yes, doubtless, it is even so, as regards their nurture and comfort in this world—all your tenderest cares and studies center here. Of this there is no question, and far be it from me to suggest a doubt of you here.
No, this defection from nature, of which I have been speaking,
relates to a different matter—in quite another field. Doing you full honor as a
careful provider, a most faithful and loving guardian, a disinterested, self-sacrificing
contriver and laborer for your children's good; the question is whether you do not
after all put them off with a mere ostrich nurture in the matter of the soul? whether
you do not let in some one or more of these very misconceptions I have named, tc
control all your modes of conduct and discipline to ward them? Do you never throw
off your own Christian responsibilities for them by allowing, as a pretext, the
fact of their liberty and personal responsibility for themselves? Are you never
let down in the sense of your most sacred obligations, by simply allowing yourself
to think it enough, that your children are brought up for conversion? Do none of
you subside even to, lower point, and bring up your children only for revivals of
religion? Are there none of you that make it your whole care to form your children
by the mere ethical standards, and finish them in the graces of a mere human culture?
Have none of you theories of salvation and of Christ's way respecting it, such as
leave no place for children in the church, however qualified to meet their age?
Little now does it signify that you love your children, or do even slave both body
and mind to get a footing of society and comfort for them in this life—even beavers
and bears will do as much as that. In giving existence to your child you have set
him forth into perils that include his immortality, and
Probably enough there may be some of you that, without being Christians
yourselves, are yet careful to teach your children all the saving truths of religion,
and who thus may take it as undue severity to be charged with only giving your children
this unnatural, ostrich nurture of which I have spoken. But how poor a teacher of
Christ is any one who is not in the light of Christ, and does not know the inward
power 9f his truth, as a gospel of life to the soul. You
I have only to add in the conclusion of this subject—just what
is made plain by it—that there is really no great wonder, in the fact often spoken
of as a subject of wonder, that Christian parents are so frequently disappointed
in their children. Why is it that such correct and apparently Christian people see
their children grow up unaffected by religion, or even hostile to its sacred claims,
falling possibly into a character of vice and complete moral abandonment? The answer
is, alas! too easy. I will not say that, in every case, the result accuses them
of crime; it may be the effect sometimes of their mistaken, or faulty conceptions
of parental duty. But no one, it seems to me, can once distinguish these bad faults
of nurture, and note the very wide prevalence they have in the Christian homes,
without even expecting worse and more fatal results of mischief than actually appear.
Sometimes it seems to be imagined that nothing but some dark hindrance of divine
sovereignty can account for such results. The less we have to say in that strain
the wiser we shall be, and as much less irreverent to God. No, there is reason enough
for all such miscarriages without charging them to God. I could not express myself
as the truth requires, my brethren, if I did not say, that when I observe the wide-spread
delusions of nominally Christian parents, their false aims, their worldly pretexts,
their habitual separation from any living faith in God, in the ends, plans, practices,
and spirit of their administration, I rather wonder that results a great deal worse
do not appear. It would even be a fit
No, my friends, these mistaken modes of nurture ought not to make Christians; they must even falsify their own nature to do it. Let us be just to God, and lay our griefs no longer to his charge. If we can not come into his way in the training of our families, let us not complain that we do not succeed in ways of our own. After all, there is no cheap way of making Christians of our children. Nothing but to practically live for it makes it sure. To be Christians ourselves—ah! there is the difficulty. How can an unchristian, or only non-christian spirit reigning in the house, quicken the spirit of life and holiness in the hearts subjected to its sway? Even if our false modes of nurture are mistakes, who can expect that mistakes will be as good as verities? O, thou, blessed Son of God, advocate and friend of the little ones, rid us of our falsities, and set us in thy own true spirit, that we may fitly discharge these most sacred and tenderest duties!
"The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and
the women knead dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink
offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger."—
IN this lively picture, you have the illustration of a great and momentous truth—the Organic Unity of the Family. If it be an idolatrous family, worshipers of the moon, for example, such is the organic relation of the members, that they are all involved together, and the idol worship is the common act of the house. The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, the women prepare the cakes for an offering, and the queen of heaven receives it, as one that is the joint product of the whole family. The worship is family worship; the god of one is the god of all; the spirit of one, the spirit of all.
And so it is with all family transactions and feelings. They implicate ordinarily the whole circle of the house; young and old, male and female, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. Acting thus together, they take a common character, accept the same delusions, practice the same sins, and ought, I believe, to be sanctified by a common grace.
This most serious truth is one that is exceedingly
My design, at the present time, is to restore, if possible, the conception of one of these organic forms, viz: the family. For though we have gained immense advantages, in a civil, ecclesiastical, and religious point of view, by our modern development of individualism, we have yet run ourselves into many hurtful misapprehensions on all these subjects, which, if they are not rectified, will assuredly bring disastrous consequences. And nowhere consequences more disastrous than in the family, where they are already apparent, though not fully matured; for the very change of view, by which we have cleared individual responsibility, in our discussions of free will, original sin, and kindred subjects, has operated, in another direction, to diminish responsibility, where most especially it needs to be felt; that is, in Christian families.
What then do we mean by the organic unity of the family? It will
be understood, of course, that we do not speak of a physical or vascular connection;
for, after birth, there is no such connection existing, any more than there is between
persons of different families. In so far, however, as a connection of parentage,
or derivation has affected the character, that fact must be included, though it
can not be regarded as a chief element in the unity asserted. Perhaps I shall be
understood with the greatest facility, if I say that the family is such a body,
that a power over character is exerted therein,
In general, then, we find the organic unity of the
Having carefully stated thus what I mean by the organic unity of the family, I next proceed to inquire whether any such unity exists? And here it is worth noticing—
1. That there is nothing in this view which conflicts with the
proper individuality of persons and their separate responsibility. We have gained
immense advantages, in modern times, as regards society, government,
It is remarkable too how often, without knowing it, and, as it
were instinctively, we assume the fact, and act upon it. We do it, for example,
as between nations, where it is not so much the moral life as the national that
constructs the supposed unity. One nation, for instance. has injured or oppressed
another—sought to crush, or actually crushed another by invasion. A century or
more afterwards, the wrong is remembered, and the injured nation takes the field,
still burning for redress. The history of Carthage and Rome gives us an example.
But, suppose it had been said—"This is very absurd in you Carthaginians. The Romans,
who did you the injury, are all dead, and
2. We discover the organic unity of families, in the
Besides, it is well understood that qualities received by training,
and not in themselves natural, do also pass by transmission. It is said,
for example, that the dog used in hunting was originally trained by great care and
effort, and that now almost no training is necessary; for the artificial quality
has become, to a great extent, natural in the stock. We have also a most ominous
example of this fact in the human species. I speak of the Jewish race. The singular
devotion of this race to money and traffic is even a proverb. But their ancestors,
of the ancient times, were not thus distinguished. They were a simple, agricultural
people, remarkable for nothing but their religious opinions, and, in a late period
of the commonwealth, for their fanatical heroism and obstinacy. Whence the change?
History gives the mournful answer, showing them to view, for long ages, as a hated
and down-trodden people, allowed no rights in the soil, shut up within some narrow
and foul precinct in the cities, compelled to subsist by some
Could we enter into the mental habits of those children, who are spoken of in my text, and trace out all the threads of their inward character and disposition, we should doubtless find some color of idolatry in the fiber of their very being. They are not such as they would be, if their parents, of this and remote generations, had been worshipers of the true God. Their talents, dispositions, propensities are different. The idol god is in their faces and their bones, and his stamp is on their spirit. Not in such a sense that the sin of idolatry is in them—that is inconceivable; for no proper sin can pass by transmission—but that they have a vicious, or prejudicial infection from it, a damage accruing from their historical connection and that of their progenitors with it.
Nor, with these familiar laws of physiology before us, is it reasonable
to doubt that, where there is a long line of godly fathers and mothers, kept up
in regular
3. We shall find that there is a law of connection, after birth,
under which power over character is exerted, without any design to do it. For a
considerable time after birth, the child has no capacity of will and choice developed,
and therefore is not a subject of influence, in the common sense of that term. He
is not as yet a complete individual; he has only powers and capacities that prepare
him to be, when they are unfolded. They are in him only as wings and a capacity
to fly are in the egg. Meantime, he is open to impressions from every thing
he sees. His character is forming, under a principle, not of choice, but of nurture.
The spirit of the house is breathed into his nature, day by day. The anger and gentleness,
the fretfulness and patience—the appetites, passions, and manners—all the variant
moods of feeling exhibited round him, pass into him as impressions, and become seeds
of character in him; not because the parents will, but because it must be so, whether
they will or not. They propagate their own evil in the child, not by design, but
under a law of moral infection. Before the children begin to gather wood for the
sacrifice, the spirit of the idol and his faith has been communicated. The airs
and feelings
Now, it is in the twofold manner set forth, under this and the
previous head of my discourse, that our race have fallen, as a race, into moral
corruption and apostasy. In these two methods also, they have been subjected, as
an organic unity, to evil; so that when they come to the age of proper individuality,
the damage received has prepared them to set forth, on a course of blamable and
guilty transgression. The question of original or imputed sin has been much debated
in modern times, and the effort has been to vindicate the personal responsibility
of each individual, as a moral agent. Nor is any thing more clear, on first principles,
than that no man is responsible for any sin but his own. The sin of no person can
be transmitted as a sin, or
I am well aware that those who have advocated, in former times,
the church dogma of original sin, as well as those who adhere to it now, speak only
of a taint
In offering these thoughts, it will be seen that I have not digressed from my subject, but have extended the proof of my doctrine rather, discovering within its scope, the fall of man itself. As a farther proof of the organic unity of the family, I allege—
4. The fact that, in all organic bodies known to us—states, churches, sects, armies—there is a common spirit, by which they are pervaded and distinguished from each other. And we use this word spirit, in such cases, to denote a power interfused, a comprehensive Will actuating the members, regarding also the common body itself, as a larger and more inclusive individual. How different, for example, is the spirit of France from the spirit of England; the spirit of both, from that of the United States; and that, from the spirit of the Spartan or Athenian republic. This national spirit, too, is, as it were, a common power in each, by which the subordinate individual members are assimilated, and made to have a kind of organic character. And so much is there in this, that an Englishman can not make to himself a French character, or any one of us an English character. We can not act the character one of another; for so distant are the feelings, prejudices, and temperaments of each, that they can not even be accurately conceived and reproduced, unless we are actually enveloped in them as an atmosphere.
In the same manner, there is a peculiar spirit in every church
Whether you take the larger divisions, the
Passing then to families, you are not surprised to discover the same thing. This is specially evident where the family is isolated, and does not mingle extensively with the world. You can scarcely open the door, and take a seat in their house, least of all can you go to their table, or spend a night in their hospitality, without being impressed by the fact. And this family spirit will sometimes be exceedingly opposite to the spirit of goodness. Here it is money, money, written on every face; here it is good living; here show; here scandal and detraction. Sometimes the sense of religion and of spiritual things will seem to be nearly lost, or obliterated. Sometimes a positive hatred of God and all good men and principles will constitute the staple of family feeling. Sometimes a dull and sullen contempt of such things will hold the place of open animosity.
It is very true that the family spirit does not always
I do not say, of course, that he will exactly resemble them in character. Were he to receive a contagious disease, he would, doubtless, be differently handled under it, from the person who gave the infection. I only say, that the moral disease of the family he assuredly will take, and that, probably, without even a question, or a cautious feeling started. If some other spirit, from other families, or the church, or the world, do not reach him, the organic spirit of the house will infallibly shape and subordinate his character.
5. We are led to the same conclusions, by considering what may
be called the organic working of a family. The child begins, at length, to
develop his character, in and through his voluntary power. But he is still under
the authority of the parent, and has only a partial control of himself, in the development
of which, he is gradually approaching a complete personality. Now, there is a perpetual
working in the family, by which the wills, both of the parents and the children,
are held in exercise, and which, without any design to affect character on one side,
or conscious consent on the other, is yet fashioning results of a, moral quality,
as it were by the joint industry of the house. And these results are to be taken,
according to our definition, as included in the
The truth here brought to view is graphically set forth in my
text. Whatever working there is in the house, all work together. If the fathers
kindle the fire, and the women knead the cakes, the children will gather the wood,
and the idol worship will set the whole circle of the house in action. The child
being under the law of the parents, they will keep him at work to execute their
plans, or their sins, as the case may be; and, as they will seldom think of what
they do, or require, so he will seldom have any scruple concerning it. The property
gained belongs to the family. They have a common interest, and every prejudice or
animosity felt by the parents, the children are sure to feel even more intensely.
They are all locked together, in one cause—in common cares, hopes, offices, and
duties; for their honor and dishonor, their sustenance, their ambition, all their
objects are common. So they are trained of necessity to a kind of general working,
or co6peration, and, like stones, rolled together in some brook or eddy, they wear
each other into common shapes. If the family subsist by plunder, then the infant
is swaddled as a thief, the child wears a thief's garments, and feeds the growth
of his body on stolen meat; and, in due time, he will have the trade upon him, without
ever knowing that he has taken it lip, or when he took it up. If the father is intemperate,
the
Nor does what I am saying hold, only in cases of extreme viciousness
and depravity. Whatever fire the fathers kindle, the children are always found gathering
the wood—always helping as accessaries and apprentices. If the father reads a newspaper,
or a sporting gazette, on Sunday, the family must help him find it. If he writes
a letter of business on Sunday, he will send his child to the office with the letter.
If the mother is a scandal-monger, she will make her children spies and eaves-droppers.
If she directs her servant to say, at the door, that she is not at home, she will
sometimes be overheard by her child. If she is ambitious that her children should
excel in the display of finery and fashion, they must wear the show and grow up
in the spirit of it. If her house is a den of disorder and filth, they must be at
home in it. Fretfulness and ill-temper in the parents are provocations, and therefore
somewhat more efficacious than commandments, to the same. The proper result will
be a congenial assemblage, in the house, of petulance and ill-nature. The niggardly
parsimony that quarrels with a child, when
Having sufficiently established, as I think, by these illustrations, the organic unity of families, it remains to add some practical thoughts of a more specific nature. And—
1. It becomes a question of great moment, as connected with the
doctrine established, whether it is the
Passing next to the Scriptures, we find such reasonings justified,
as explicitly as we can desire. I am not disposed to press the language of Scripture,
which is popular, to extreme conclusions. But I observe that Christ is called a
second Adam and a last Adam: language, to say the least, that suits the idea of
a proposed union with the race, under its organic laws—as if, entering into the
Christian family, his design were to fill it with a family spirit, which shall controvert
and master the old evil spirit. The declaration corresponds, that, as by one man's
disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made
righteous—language that measures the grace by the mischief, and shows it flowing
in a parallel, but fuller stream. It may not be easy to settle, beyond dispute,
the relation of the old covenant to the new; but there can be no question that the
church, under Abraham. was measured, in some sense, by the organic unity of the
family of Abraham. The covenant was a family covenant, in which God engaged to be
the God of the seed, as of the father. And the seal of the covenant was a seal of
faith, applied to the whole house, as if the continuity of faith were somehow
to be, or somehow might be maintained, in a line that is parallel with the continuity
of sin, in the family. Nor was the result to depend on mere natural generation,
however sanctified, but on the organic causes also, that are involved in family
nurture, after birth. For we are expressly informed, (
2. The theological importance of our doctrine of organic unity,
when brought up to this point, is exhibited in many ways, and especially in the
fact that it gives the only true solution of the Christian church and of baptism
as related to membership. I hardly dare attempt to speak of the "sacramental grace,"
supposed to attend the rite of baptism, under the priestly forms of Christianity;
for I have never been able to give any consistent and dignified meaning to the language,
in which it is set forth. That there is a grace attendant, falling on all the parties
concerned, is quite evident, if they are doing their duty; for no person, whether
laic or priest, can do, or intend what is right, without some spiritual benefit.
But the child is said to be "regenerate, spiritually united to Christ, a new creature
in Christ
In all this, I speak constructively, as reasoning from the doctrine asserted, and as I am able to understand it. Constructive results are never more than partially verified by historic facts; for great truths, blended with the error, qualify and mitigate its effects.
Now the true conception is, that baptism is applied to the child,
on the ground of its organic unity with the parents; imparting and pledging a grace
to sanctify that unity, and make it good in the field of religion. By the supposition,
however, the child still remains within the known laws of character in the house,
to receive. under these, whatever good may reach him; not snatched away by an abrupt,
fantastical,
Thus it will be seen that the doctrine of organic unity I have been asserting, proves its theologic value, as a ready solvent for the rather perplexing difficulties of this difficult subject. Only one difficulty remains, viz, that so few can believe the doctrine.
3. It is evident that the voluntary intention of parents, in regard
to their children, is no measure, either of their merit or their sin. Few parents
are so base, or so lost to natural affection, as really to intend the injury of
their children. However irreligious, or immoral, they more commonly desire a worthy
and correct character for their children, often even a Christian character. But,
in the great and momentous truth now set forth, you perceive it is not what you
intend for your children,
So there are Christians who intend and do many things for their
children, and thus acquit themselves of all blame in regard to their character.
Here, alas! is the perpetual error of Christian parents, so called, that they endeavor
to make up, by direct efforts, for the mischiefs of a loose and neglectful life.
They convince themselves that teaching, lecturing, watch, discipline, things done
with a purpose, are the sum of duty. As if mere affectations and will-works could
cheat the laws of life and character ordained by God! Your character is a stream,
a river, flowing down upon your children hour by hour. What you do here and there
to carry an opposing influence is, at best, only a ripple that you make on the surface
of the stream. It reveals the
4. It seems to be a proper inference from the doctrine I have
exhibited, that Christian parents ought to speak freely to their children, at times,
of their own faults and infirmities. If they are faithful, if they live as Christians,
if the spirit of Christ bears rule in the house, they will yet have faults, and
they ought to make no secret of the fact. The impression should be made, that they
themselves are struggling with infirmities; that they are humbled under a sense
of these infirmities; that there is much in them for God to pardon, much for their
children to overlook, or even to forgive; and that God alone can assist them to
lead themselves and their family up to a better world. Instead of lecturing their
children, always, on their peccadilloes and sins, it would be better, sometimes,
to give a lecture on their own. This, if rightly done, would attract the friendly
sympathy of their children, guard them against the injurious impressions they make
when they trip themselves, and unite
5. It is evident what rule should regulate the society and external
intercourse of children. It is a very great mercy, as I have said, that the children
of a bad or irreligious family are sometimes permitted to be inmates elsewhere;
to go into virtuous and Christian families, where a better spirit reigns. There
they see, perhaps, the genuine demonstrations of order, of purity, and of good affections;
they hear the voice of prayer, they come where the spirit of heaven breathes. It
is a new world, and they are filled with new impressions. So, if a child may go
to a school where order, right principle, virtuous manners, and the love of knowledge
reign, and find a respite there from the shiftlessness, vice, and brutality at home,
how great is the privilege. In this view, a good school is almost the only mercy
that can be extended to the hapless sons and daughters
But I was speaking of the rule to be observed in the society of children. Let every Christian beware how he makes his children inmates in an irreligious family. It will do, sometimes, to allow the children of an irreligious family to be inmates, temporarily, in your own. You may do it for their advantage; and if you can en list the hearts of your children in the merciful intentions you cherish, it may even be a good exercise for them. But it is a very different thing to place your children within the atmosphere of another house. Send them not where the spirit of evil reigns. Understand how plastic their nature is, how easily it receives the contagion of another spirit. You yourselves may have intercourse with ungodly persons; it may be your duty to seek it for their benefit; but you may well be cautious how far you subject your children, especially in early years, to the intercourse of irreligious families
And what shall I say to parents, who are themselves irreligious?
Perhaps you make it your boast that you give your children their liberty; that you
mean to allow them to be just as religious as they please. And is that enough, do
you think, to discharge your duties to them? Is it enough to breathe the spirit
of evil and sin into them and around them every hour, to give them no Christian
counsel, to train them up in a prayerless house, drill them into conformity with
all your
“For she promise is unto you and to your children, and to all
that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call."—
IT is a matter of wonder, with many professed disciples of Jesus
in our time, that if the baptism of children and their qualified introduction into
the church is any genuine part of the Christian economy, there is so little authority
for it, by express mention in the New Testament writings. And yet, over opposite
to this, it is quite as fair a subject of wonder that in Peter's first sermon, on
the day of Pentecost, when addressing only the adult sinners of the assembly, in
terms appropriate to their age, he should yet have given out, as it were unconsciously,
a declaration that can signify nothing but the engagement of Christ, in his new
and more spiritual economy, to identify children with their parents, even as they
had been identified in the coarser provisions of the Old. "To you and to your children,"
says the apostle, and here, covertly as it were to himself, are hid infant baptism,
infant church relations, potentially present but as yet undeveloped, even in what
may be fitly called the seed sermon of the Christian church. This was no time to
be thinking of infants, or children, as related to church polity; probably
And when our Baptist brethren reiterate the formula, "believe
and be baptized," "believe and be baptized," which they assume to be absolutely
conclusive and final on the question of infant baptism because infants can not believe,
they have only to make due allowance for the fact that Christianity must needs make
its chief address, at the outset, to adult persons, and their argument vanishes.
Christianity will of course address itself to the subjects addressed; and, telling
them what they must do to be saved, it will not of course tell them, at
Besides, the formula has another side—"He that believeth not shall be damned." Does it therefore follow, because it is so continually given to adults as the fixed law of salvation—he that believeth shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned—that infants dying in infancy, and too young to believe, must therefore be inevitably damned? No, it will be answered, even by our Baptist brethren themselves; for the language referred to was evidently designed only for adult persons, and is of course to be qualified so as to meet the demands of reason, when we come to the case of child hood. And why not also the language "believe and be baptized?" Say not that the child is not old enough to believe, and therefore can not be baptized. If he is not old enough to believe, how can he better be saved? Is it a greater, and higher, and more difficult thing to be admitted to baptism, than to be admitted to eternal glory?
Now I can most readily admit that
the subject of infant baptism is not as definitely mentioned and formally prescribed
in the New Testament, as we might, without any great extravagance, expect. For many
will never notice how great a thing it is for Christianity
What I propose, then, is to go over some of the incidents of this Pentecostal scene and show you how it will drop out one point after another, as Christianity becomes a fixed institution; which institutional character, again, will, by a necessary law, bring in other elements whereby to shape itself and complete its organization.
First of all, we are delighted
here at the picture given of a new form of society, and a thing so beautiful, so
wonderfully hopeful and peculiar, we are ready to think must be the very essence
of the new institution itself. "And all that believed were together and had all
things common; and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men,
as every man had need. And they, continuing with one accord in the temple and
breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and
singleness of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the
Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved." What a picture, taken
as a mere external description! Saying nothing of internal experiences,
How sad, that a scene so amiable
and lovely could not continue, and that all Christian disciples, to the end of the
world, could not fall into the same delightful picture in their conduct! Just as
sad, I answer, as it is that children can not always be children; for these are
the children of love, acting out the simple instinct of love, and wholly ignorant,
as yet, of the cares, labors, and confused struggles, in which their Christian spirit
is to have its trial. Doubtless we are to regret, as a loss, whatever departure
we may have suffered from the spirit of these first disciples; for the spirit of
Christian life is one and the same, in all diversities of form and conduct. But
it is plain to any one, who will exercise the least consideration, that it was just
as impossible
But we must go deeper into the history and show, by distinct specification, how intensely casual much that belongs to the scene of the Pentecost was even designed to be, and how many things are to be added to give the new gospel a permanently instituted life. We begin with the things casual that were designed to cease.
The
doctrine of the Holy Spirit was here to be inaugurated, as a Divine Force, entered
systematically into the world, to work subjectively in men all the characters
of love and beauty that are shown objectively in the life of Jesus. He is to be,
in other words, a perpetual indwelling Christ in men's hearts. In times more ancient,
good men had been wont to pray for spiritual help in a manner correspondent, but
now the kingdom of Help, that kingdom which is righteousness and peace and joy
in the Holy Ghost, is to be set up as a Christly dispensation. But, at the
beginning, there must be something done before the senses, to waken
Now, the physical incidents of this scene had nothing to
do with its substantial import, save as they were added to suggest the idea of a
Divine Agency. They hold the same mechanical relation, as a vehicle, to the Spirit,
that the human nature of Jesus held to the Divine Word. They are the body, the sensible
show of the Spirit, the smoke by which the fire was revealed. So of the tongues.
They were the sign of a power that was playing the action of the inner man, and
making audible, as it were, the activity within, of a Divine Influence. All these,
like the miraculous gifts so conspicuous in the subsequent history, were manifestations
of the Spirit, given to profit withal; but being only accidents or exponents, were,
of course, to be discontinued, when the doctrine of a spiritual influence from God
was sufficiently developed—discontinued and never restored, unless perhaps in cases
where the sense of the Spirit is so nearly lost as to require a kind of new
development. Accordingly as these fall off, the spiritual influence inaugurated
by such tokens, may be expected, for much the same reasons, to move upon the
Again, it will be found that the preaching of the day of Pentecost, powerful as the sermon of Peter appears to have been upon the assembly at that time, was not such, either in style or substance, as could be continued after the first day or two of the gospel proclamation, and was in fact superseded, in a very short time, by the sturdier methods of argument and instruction. We see this in all the epistles, and as truly in those of Peter as of Paul. The infant churches had scarcely begun to be institutions, before this change was apparent.
And yet we have many, in our own
time, who do not appear to see this, even though the manner of Peter's sermon is
so completely gone by, that one can hardly imagine how it had any power at all.
"See," they say, "how simple it was, how easy of apprehension—nothing but a recitation
of facts—and then what power it had!" As if the telling, over and over, of old news,
announcing again facts that have been known to every reader of the New Testament
from his childhood up, as familiarly as he knows his right hand, could have the
same value and be means to ends for producing the same effects! Most of us have
a better understanding of the subject, perceiving, as clearly as possible, that
while Peter's sermon was good for the occasion, it was good for almost no
occasion since. It was one of the first things, of which there can not, by
Such a kind of preaching will feed the intelligence of the hearers, and raise up
pillars in the churches. And here is the great distinction between the preaching
proper to the scene of the Pentecost, and that of an established Christian congregation.
It is the difference between Peter, giving news to the pilgrims, and Paul offering
some "things hard to be understood," to churches of organized disciples. Such preaching
is required, in an established congregation, as will exert an educating power. And
yet it will, in that way, be a converting power, as efficacious as any other, if
only it is expected to be. When the community is more deeply moved by spiritual
things, it will, of course, vary its tone and its subjects to suit the occasion,
perhaps multiply its efforts; but never as being in a hurry, lest the grace of the
occasion may be capriciously withdrawn, never over-preaching, or preaching out,
as if nothing were to be done by thought in the hearers, but all by the power of
a commotion round them; for it is not the same thing to fall out of dignity and
self-possession as to get rid of sin, neither is a fever or a whirlwind any proper
instrument of sanctification. Mournful proofs have we to the contrary. Better is
it to reserve a power for the ordinary, even when we are in the extraordinary.
It is not wisdom to overwork the harvest, so that we have no strength left for
the bread. Rather let the preacher believe in the Abiding Spirit, and count upon
a kind of perpetual harvest. Let him think to gain many to
There is yet another class of incidents, or demonstrations, in the scene of the Pentecost, which are referable to the fact that these first converts are not at home, and all these must, of course, be modified, or discontinued by their simple return. They are pilgrims at the feasts; Parthians, Medes, Elamites—Jewish emigrants, who have returned from every most distant clime of the world, to enjoy the great festivals of their religion.
Their property, their business, and, more
commonly, their families, are left behind. Many of them are poor persons, wholly
unable to support the expense even of a short stay at Jerusalem. The others can
not, of course, leave them to suffer. So they divide their resources with the poor;
and some, who belong at Jerusalem, are moved by the overflowing love of Christ in
their hearts, to part with their whole property, that they may relieve the necessities
of the brotherhood. Only a few days or weeks are thus spent together. Probably,
within three months, they are, every man, at home in his own house, providing for
his own family, out of the increase of his own industry and property. During
their short stay at Jerusalem, they had nothing to do
Again, these first disciples had not yet
been called to blend their piety with the common cares and duties of life. Quite
likely, they did not, for some time, consider whether they should hereafter have
any thing more to do with these gross and earthly callings. But we, at least, have
learned what they must also have learned very soon, that though we can not live
by bread alone, it is yet difficult to live without bread. We have learned that
the very church of God itself is perpetuated, in part, by industry and production,
that it can not live by expenditure, that we have something therefore to do, besides
breaking bread from house to house; six days to labor, a spectacle of thrift to
present to mankind, as a proof that Christian virtue has its blessings. We must
shine as good citizens, neighbors, parents, friends. Life is no mere camp-meeting
scene; but the greatest of all Christian attainments, we find, is precisely that
which the first disciples had not yet thought of, the learning how to blend the
spiritual and economical or industrial together; to live in the world, and not be
of it; to labor in earthly things, and maintain a conversation in heaven; to unite
thrift with charity, and separate gain from greediness; to use property,
Having glanced, in this manner, at some of the types and conditions of the scene of Pentecost that were, and were inevitably to be, discontinued, let us notice briefly, some of the matters that must also as inevitably be added in the process by which Christianity becomes an institution.
Thus, first of all, as Christ and his evangelists had given the new facts to the world, so it was inevitable that a grand process of thinking or mental elaboration should begin to work out the import or doctrinal interpretation of those facts. In this process, diverse opinions, formulas, sects, controversies, must be developed—consequently new modes of duty.
The simplicity of mere love, displayed, as it was, in the first
scenes of the gospel, could not continue, however desirable it may seem. Men must
think, as well as love, and thought must make its inroads on mere relations of feeling.
And thus a long process of forming and reforming must go on, till the Christ of
the head becomes as catholic as the Christ of the heart. Meantime, all must
stand for the truth, and there must be no countenance given to error. The happy
days of Christian childhood are left far behind, and every church is set in
relations of duty that are partly antagonistic. It must take a form required by
its new necessities. What
Next we pass on to a field where the new creating power of the gospel is displayed yet more distinctly. The first disciples had no thought but to swim in the strange joy they felt, as forgiven of God and filled with the love of Jesus. Of Christianity, as a fixed institution, taking the whole society of man into its bosom, and becoming the school of the race, they had probably, at first, no conception. Passing thence to the modern Christian faith, how great is the change! What a variety of means, instruments and arrangements has it created, maintaining all from age to age, by a sacrifice, compared with which, the casual contributions to poor saints at Jerusalem were far less significant in their effects, and, perhaps, not more to be commended, as proofs of a Christian spirit.
First, a house of worship; and, in order to this, the new spiritual life must become a holder of real estate, and be acknowledged as such in the laws. To make the place worthy of the cause, genius and taste are to be called into exercise, and a new Christian art developed.
To maintain expenses and repairs, and collect and disburse charities, there must be officers created, such as deacons and committees of various kinds, and this requires elections, by-laws, records, and a fully organized institutional state.
Mere forms and sacraments being insufficient, preachers of the word must be carefully trained for the service, and installed therein, to feed the intelligence of the flock, and lead them in the truth. Their official rights and duties must be ascertained, and, correspondently, the rights and duties of the flock-matters all how distant from the scene of the Pentecost!
The times and forms of worship need to be settled; for, whether a liturgy is used or not, no organic action can be maintained without forms of some kind, to serve as laws of concert and rules of order.
Christian music, as a new art, must be created, and the children and youth must be trained therein, so that all may bear their part in the worship, and the worship exercise and inspire a devout feeling in all.
There must be a punctual and
regular attendance somehow established and made obligatory; for the habit of worship
is necessary to its value, as a power over character. Hence there must be a common
responsibility—all must be enlisted. There must be a church spirit, and, in order
to this, a fraternal spirit in the members, verified by mutual sympathy and aid
under the common burdens of life—a kind of service, I will add, which is often
far more beneficent than a community of goods would be; for this latter might be
only a
Nor is the article of dress, in a Christian assembly, too insignificant to be a subject of care. Probably no one had a thought of this in the Pentecostal assembly; but we find the apostles, not long after, giving serious lectures to the disciples upon their dress. Dress and manners, manners and morals, morals and piety, are all connected by an intimate or secret law. A people, therefore, who are careful to appear before God, in a well-chosen, modest, and appropriate dress—one that is neither careless nor ostentatious, one that indicates sobriety, neatness, good sense, and a desire to be approved of God more than to be seen of men—will avoid barbarous improprieties of every sort. Their manner will express reverence to God. What they express, they will be likely to feel; and if they become true disciples of Christ, as there is greater reason to hope, their manner will have a nicer propriety. and their whole demeanor will be more thoughtful, consistent, and lovely.
It may, by and by, become evident that,
in order to maintain the full power of religion, and to gain the neglected youth
or children, and such children as would grow up otherwise in the power of vice,
a parish school must be instituted. as in Scotland, in connection with every
church. And then, at a much later
So far we proceed without difficulty; all these things, though never preached by apostles, must finally come, we perceive, a outgrowths of the Christian church. Pentecostal incidents will disappear, and these will as certainly grow apace in their time.
But the particular point for which I have drawn this sketch has been
purposely left behind. Infant baptism, the relation of the seminal and undeveloped
first period of human existence to Christ and his flock, that which appears only
implicitly in the sermon of Peter, on the day of Pentecost—where is this, and
what is to come, in the way of development, here? There was no reason, or even
room, among the scenes of the Pentecost, for so much as thinking on this subject
of infants and their church relations, and scarcely more for a considerable time
afterward. It could not become a subject of attention, until the church itself
began to settle into forms of order and structural organization; and how soon
that came to pass we do not definitely know. It should therefore be no subject
of wonder that infant baptism
Furthermore, if it came to pass, by a transference of Jewish ideas into Christian spheres, Jewish modes and conditions into the Christian order and economy—just as Peter's Jewish language, when he said, in his Pentecostal speech, "to you and to your children," finally came back to him in its Christian power,—it would make no bold and staring figure any where. If the Christian teachers looked to see all the better mercies of the old economy transferred into the Christian, and exalted there into some higher and more perfect meaning, we ought certainly not to expect any debate, or any thing but a silent, scarcely conscious flow of transition, when infants are taken to be with their parents, in the church, the covenant, the Christian Israel of their faith. And in just this way the defect of any bold declarations on the subject of infant baptism in the writings of the New Testament, and the fact that it appears only in a few historic glimpses, and occasional modes of speech that are subtle implications of the fact, is sufficiently accounted for.
But we are inquiring after the mode in which this rite became an accepted element
of the Christian organization, and a part of the church practice, as we certainly
know that it did at sometime afterward. Peter probably conceived as little what
his language might infer respecting it, as he certainly did, what hidden
Thus instructed, he will baptize his children, and( make his religion a strictly family grace, expecting them to grow up in it; others also consenting with him in the same conclusion, and offering their children to God in the same manner. And, as the result, they will no more be Christians with families, but Christian families—all together in the church of God. In this manner the Pentecost itself, when the seeds that are in it are developed, will almost certainly issue the adult baptism there begun, the baptism of the three thousand, in the common baptism of the house.
And here we have, in small, just what would most naturally take place in the development of Christianity itself. Taken as connected with its own precedent history and preparations, the church could hardly be held back from infant baptism, except by some specific revelation...
"And I baptized also the household of Stephanas."—
WE have traced the conditions under which infant baptism would almost certainly be developed. But we do not leave the question here. We have many and distinct evidences for the rite, which are abundantly decisive; some from the nature of the family state, some from the New Testament, and some from the subsequent history of the church. These I will now undertake to present in the briefest mianner possible. And
1. The organic unity of the family makes a
ground for it, and sets it in terms of rational respect. The child that is born,
is really not born, in the higher sense of that term, till he has breathed a long
time. He does not live in his own will, but is in the will and life of his parents.
To bring him forward into his own will and responsibility is the problem of years.
He is in the matrix still of parental character, where all the graces, faiths, prayers,
promises, of the parents are his also. He lives and breathes in them, and is of
them, almost as truly as they are of themselves. What we call the house, is the
organic life that grows him as a mind or agent, tempers him, works him into his
habits, fashions him as by a precedent
2. It is precisely this great fact of an organic
unity that is taken hold of and consecrated, in the field of religion, by the Abrahamic
and other family covenants. And the whole course of revelation, both in the Old
and New Testament, is tinged by associations, and sprinkled over with expressions
that recognize the religious unity of families, and the inclusion of the children
with the parents All the promises run—"to you and to your children;" for Peter's
language here is only an inspired transfer and reassertion of the Jewish family
ideas at the earliest moment, in the field of Christianity
3. Circumcision comes to our aid, as another and
distinct evidence. For it was given to be "a seal of the righteousness of faith,"
and the application of it, as a seal, to infant children, involves all the precise
difficulties—neither more nor less—that are raised by the deniers of infant
baptism. Let the point here made be accurately understood. The argument is not
that infant baptism was directly substituted for circumcision. Of this there is
no probable evidence. Such a substitution could not have been made without
remark, discussion, oppositions of prejudice, and the raising of contentions
It is very
true, as declared by the apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Romans, that circumcision,
seal of faith as it was, did not always have its meaning fulfilled; "for all are
not Israel that are of Israel." Esau and Edom, his posterity, became, thus, an apostate
race; and this, in a certain sense, by Providential appointment. But the scope of
God's providential purpose, as every intelligent Christian ought to know, does not
correspond with the scope of his grace or the measures of his gifts and promises.
For the Providential plan takes in all the perversities of human action, while the
grace-plan or promise corresponds with the aims and measures of God's paternal goodness.
He means and offers, in other words, more than human perversity will take; gives
a presumption of good, on his part, which he knows that human wrongs will not allow
to be actualized. Then, as his Providential purposes and plan are graduated to what
will actually be, not to what he means, wishes, and promises, it follows that the
facts or issues of his Providential order do not answer to the scope of his gracious
intention. And thus it comes to pass that, while he gives a seal of faith, which
ought to be answered, by a result in which all are Israel that are of Israel, the
fact is different. Had Israel ruled his house as he ought, had Rebekah been an honest
woman, loving both her sons impartially, and seeking the true welfare of both—not
conspiring with one to rob and
4. It appears that Christian baptism was not a rite wholly
new, but a reapplication of proselyte baptism. The custom had been, as the
Gentile was an unclean
5. Christ comes very near to a specific and formal command of infant baptism, when
we put together, side by side, what he says of baptism in the third chapter of John,
and what he says concerning infants elsewhere. There he recognizes baptism as a
token of one's entrance into the kingdom of God; elsewhere he says—suffer little
children to come unto me and forbid them not for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
These terms, "kingdom of God," and "kingdom of heaven," denote, externally, the
church; and the church is also presented under the figure of a school, as here of
a kingdom, in all those cases where becoming "a disciple" or learner is spoken of.
In this latter view or figure, baptism is conceived to be one's enrollment openly
as a disciple; and what is more fit than that children should be learners—brought
in by their parents to be learners with them—of the Christian grace? This, in fact,
was the general significance of faith in those times; they were called believers
who so recognized the truth of Christ's person that they were ready to become learners
under him. And the Baptists themselves act on this same principle, never holding
the necessity that baptism should actually
6. What is said in the New Testament of household baptism,
or the baptizing of households, is positive proof that infants were baptized in
the times of the apostles—baptized, that is, in and because of the supposed faith
of the parents. The fact of such baptism is three times distinctly mentioned; in
the case of "the household of Stephanas," of Lydia "and her household,"
It is often objected that, in all these three cases, for aught that
appears, the households were made up of adult persons, who were baptized because
they all believed. But the chance that this should be true of the only three households
said to be baptized, and that there should be three households, as households were
commonly made up in that time, in which there were no young children or infants,
is not even one in a million, as computed by what is called the doctrine of chances.
Besides, if it was a thing understood that infants were never to be baptized, it
is important to observe that no such way of speaking could ever come into use.
What Baptist could ever be induced, with his view of baptism, to say
inclusively, and without some kind of qualification, that he had baptized the
household of Richard or Mary? We need not stop, in this view, to ask whether
certainly there were infants
7. We have a distinct indication, in what is said of children, where but one of the parents believes. Thus Paul distinctly teaches, "For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband; else were your children unclean, but now are they holy." It is not meant here that the children are actually and inwardly holy persons, but that only having one Christian parent is enough to change their presumptive relations to God; enough to make them Christian children, as distinguished from the children of unbelievers. So strong is the conviction, even. in these apostolic times, of an organic unity sovereign over the faith and the religious affinities of children that, where but one parent believes, that faith carries presumptively the faith of the children with it And upon this grand fact of the religious economy, baptism was, from the first, and properly, applied to the children of them that believe. Hence, too—
8. It was that
the children of believers were familiarly addressed with them as believers; as in
the epistles of Paul to the Ephesians and Colossians. These epistles are formally
inscribed to churches or Christian brotherhoods—"to the saints, which are at Ephesus,
and to the faithful in Christ Jesus"—"to the saints and
9. It is a point of consequence to notice that such as
reject all these and similar evidences from the Scripture, on the ground that
infant baptism can not be rightly practiced, because it is not directly and
specifically appointed in the Scripture, do yet make nothing of their own argument in other
observances familiarly accepted. Why infant baptism was not and should not be required
to have been specifically commanded, I have shown already; how, for example, it
was necessarily developed, as from a point distinctly referred to in Peter's first
sermon, and how the very institution of baptism carried, of necessity, infant baptism
with it, apart from any express mention. In the meantime, it will be found that
the objectors themselves are admitting and practicing, without difficulty, observances
that have comparatively no specific authority at all. At the sacrament of the
Supper, they use leavened bread without scruple, when they know that it was not
used by Christ himself, and was solemnly forbidden at the
Lastly, it remains to glance at the evidences from church history, or the history of times subsequent to the age of the apostles. It has been the mood of Christian learning, in the generation past—for the learned men have moods and phases, not to say fashions, like others in the less thoughtful conditions—to make large concessions in the matter of baptism, both as regards the manner and the subjects. But a reaction is now begun, and it is my fixed conviction that it will not stop, till the encouragement heretofore given to the Baptist opinions is quite taken away.
It has never been questioned, however, that infant baptism,
became the current practice of the church at
Thus it is testified by Justin Martyr, who was probably born before the death of the apostle John—"There are many of us, of both sexes, some sixty and some seventy years old, who were made disciples from their childhood." And the word made disciples is the same that Christ himself used when he said, "Go teach [i.e. disciple] all nations, baptizing," &c.; the same that was currently applied to baptized children afterwards.
Ireneus, born a few years later, writes—"Christ came to redeem all by himself; all who through him are regenerated unto God; infants and little children, and young men, and older persons. Hence, he passed through every age, and for the infants he became an infant, sanctifying infants; among the little children, he became a little child, sanctifying those who belong to this age; and at the same time, presenting them an example of well doing, and obedience; among the young men he became a young man, that he might set them an example, and sanctify them to the Lord." In the phrase, "regenerated to God," which is thus applied to infants, expressly named as distinguished from little children, he refers, it can not be doubted, to baptism; which, being the outward sign of such inward grace, was naturally and very commonly called regeneration. Infants plainly could be regenerated to God in no other sense; and therefore his language can not even be supposed to have any meaning, if this be rejected.
Tertullian follows, urging the delay of baptism, and, in fact, advocating the disuse of infant baptism altogether. But his appeal supposes the current practice of such baptism at the time, and in that way rather augments than diminishes the weight of historic evidence. And the more so that he urges the delay of baptism on grounds that are false and even superstitious, viz.: that baptism carries the forgiveness of sins, and should therefore be postponed to a later period, because the sins committed after baptism must otherwise be cleared by a more purgatorial method.
Origen, who was born near the close of the second century, or about a hundred years after the time of the apostles, testifies—"According to the usage of the church, baptism is given to infants." And again—"The church received an order from the apostles to baptize infants."
Somewhere in these first two centuries, the ancient
writing called the "Shepherd," or the "Shepherd of Hermas," because it purports
to have been written by a teacher of that name, declares the opinion that—"All
infants are in honor with the Lord, and are esteemed first of all—the baptism of
water is necessary to all" Who this Hermas was, and when he lived, is not ascertained,
but he is supposed by many to be the very same person mentioned by Paul,
It is a remarkable evidence, too, that inscriptions are found
on the monuments of children, considered by
It signifies little, therefore, as respects this question, after the authorities cited, that the Bishops of the North African Church, in a council called by Cyprian, about the middle of the third century, decided that baptism should not of course be delayed for eight days, according to the law of circumcision, which many supposed to govern the rite.
So clear, in short, and decided was the authority of infant baptism, that Pelagius, a man of great learning, who had traveled in Britain, France, Italy, Africa Proper, Egypt, and Palestine, declared, in his controversy with Augustine, about the beginning of the fifth century, that "he had never heard of any impious heretic or sectary, who had denied infant baptism." "What," he also asked, "can be so impious as to hinder the baptism of infants?"
Augustine himself also testifies—"The whole church of Christ has constantly held that infants were baptized. Infant baptism the whole church practices. It was not instituted by councils, but was ever in use."
Infant baptism, therefore, is a fact of church history not to be fairly questioned. And accordingly the argument may be summed up thus: beginning at a point previous, we find customs and associations that would almost certainly be issued in such a rite of family religion; in the discourses of Christ and the apostolical writings we find that it actually was; and then we find the facts of church history correspondent. On the whole, while it may be admitted that baptism itself is a little more positively authenticated, it can not be denied that infant baptism is authenticated by all sufficient evidence.
"To the saints and faithful brethren in Christ
which are at Colosse."—
THESE "saints and faithful brethren," it
will be seen, include young children; for the apostle makes a distribution of them
afterwards, in the third chapter of the epistle, addressing the class of wives,
the class of husbands, the class of fathers, the class of servants, the class of
masters, and, among all these, the class of children—"Children obey your parents
in all things; for this is well pleasing unto the Lord." The Epistle to the Ephesians,
too, is inscribed, in the same way—"to the saints which are at Ephesus, and to
the faithful in Christ;" and this, again, makes a like distribution; addressing
the classes of husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children, servants, and masters,
all as being included in the church at Ephesus—"children obey your parents in the
Lord; for this is right. Honor thy father and mother; for this is the first commandment
with promise." Where also it is made clear that he is speaking to quite young children;
for he turns immediately to the fathers, exhorting them to bring up their children
in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
The explanation, then, is not that such children were
believers, in the sense of being converts entered into the fold by an adult
experience, and distinguished from other children not thus converted. When Lydia
speaks of herself as one adjudged to be "faithful," it is probably in this
sense. But when Titus, in ordaining elders, is directed to choose such as have
"faithful children, not accused of riot, or unruly," it would be very singular,
if he was permitted to ordain only such as have all their children thus formally
converted. Paul obviously means that the elders shall be such as are under no scandal
on account of their families; whose children are growing up in the Christian way
and grace; sober, well-behaved, hopefully Christian children. We can see, too, in
the language employed, that Paul includes the Colossian and Ephesian children among
the faithful brethren of the two cities, in this more presumptive or merely anticipative
way. For when he says, "children obey your parents in the Lord," it is not "children
in the Lord," or "children obey in the Lord, your parents," but it is "obey them
who are parents in the Lord;" as if their very parentage itself, in the flesh, were
a parentage also in the Spirit, communicating both a personal and a Christian life.
So, also, when the parents are required to give a nurture in the Lord, we may see
that the children are expected to be grown as saints and faithfuls, and to be
And it was out of such uses that the term "faithful" grew into the peculiar kind of church use, in which it denotes all the supposed members of the Christian body, whether adults, or only baptized children; as, for example, in that very ancient inscription cited by Buonarotti, where the child "two years, one month, and twenty-five days old," is described as lying among his Christian kinsmen—"a faithful among faithfuls." The very language supposes a membership in the church, or among the faithful brethren, by virtue of baptism and mere Christian nurture; such as on the footing of strict individualism, held by our Baptist brethren, could never even be thought of.
What I propose then, at the present time, is a full and careful discussion of this great subject, the church membership of baptized children.
And as it has fallen out, in the extreme individualism of our modern era, that multitudes are unable to conceive it as being any thing less than a kind of absurdity, or self-evident monstrosity, I shall be obliged to show the nature and kind of this membership.
As it is very commonly disrespected on the ground of its practical insignificance, I must also show the reasons why it should exist.
And then, since it is to the same extent, disowned as a rightful part of the true church economy, I must also establish the fact of its existence.
1. I am to show the nature and extent of this membership.
All those classes of Christian disciples who practice infant baptism conceive it, of course, to have a certain common character with adult baptism, and so to create a supposed, or somehow supposable membership in the church. And yet they often have it as a question, suppressed, or openly put without satisfaction —"who is a member of Christ's body, but one who is able to act and choose for himself, and in that manner to believe?" Many preachers, too, quite pass over the fact of any assignable reality in this relationship, publishing a call of salvation that practically ignores it as having any meaning at all; addressing young persons and children who have been baptized, in a way that as steadily and unqualifiedly assumes their unregenerate state, as if they were the children of heathenism. The opposers of infant baptism are bolder and more positive, of course, insisting always on the manifest absurdity of this nondescript, unintelligible, unintelligent membership; which makes a child a church member, not to be a voter nor a subject of discipline; which puts the initiatory rite of faith upon him, when he does not believe any thing, or even know there is anything to believe; creating thus a membership that has no rational meaning and no sound verity, but supposes a faith that does not exist, and constitutes a relationship that brings into no relation.
What then, is this infant membership? what conception
can we take of it, which will justify its Christian
The conception, then, of this membership is, that it is a potentially real one; that it stands, for the present, in the faith of the parents and the promise which is to them and to their children, and that, on this ground, they may well enough be accounted believers, just as they are accounted potentially men and women. Then, as they come forward into maturity, it is to be assumed that they will come forward into faith, being grown in the nurture of faith, and will claim for themselves, the membership, into which they were before inserted.
Nor is this a case which has no analogies, that it should be
held up as a mark of derision. It is generally supposed that our common law has
some basis of common sense. And yet this body of law makes every infant child a
citizen; requiring, as a point of public order, the whole constabulary and even
military force of the state to come to the rescue, or the redress of his wrongs,
when his person is seized or property invaded
In a strongly related sense, it is, that the baptized child is a believer and a member of the church. There is no unreality in the position assigned him; for the futurition of God's promise is in him, and, by a kind of sublime anticipation, he is accepted in God's supernatural economy as a believer; even as the law accepts him, in the economy of society, to be a citizen. He is potentially both, and both is actually to be, in a way of transition so subtle and imperceptible that no one can tell, when he begins to be, either one, or the other.
Nor is it any objection that there might be some difficulty in the
exercise of a regular church discipline over baptized children; or that if this
can not be done, they are really not church members in any sense that ought to
be implied in the terms. Is then a child no citizen, because he is not held
responsible in the law
It was proposed—
II. To show the reasons why this relation of infant membership should exist, or be appointed. And here it is very obvious—
First of all, that, if there is really no place in the church of God for infant children, then it must be said, and formally maintained, that there is none. And what could be worse in its effect on a child's feeling, than to find himself repelled from the brotherhood of God's elect, in that manner. What can the hapless creature think, either of himself or of God, when he is told that he is not old enough to be a Christian, or be owned by the Saviour as a disciple?
Again, it would be most remarkable, if Christianity, organizing a
fold of grace and love, in the world and for it, had yet no place in the fold for children. It spreads its arms to say—"For
God so loved the world,"
Nor, again, is it any breach on their liberty, that children are entered into this qualified membership by their parents. What is it but a being entered into privilege? Is it a hard thing for human parents to enter their child into the lot of wealth and high society, and a station of family dignity, because it does not leave them to acquire the wealth and the position of honor in society, by their own original exertion, unassisted? When the order of the Cincinnati took their sons into the grand society of revolutionary honor with them, was it a breach on the liberty of the children? Or we may take another view of the question. The church of God is a school, and the members are disciples, or learners. Does not every parent choose the school for his children, giving them no choice in the matter, and taking it to be his own unquestionable right? This, too, on the ground that they are to have the benefit of his maturer judgment, and his more competent choice. Where then is the encroachment, when Christian parents baptize their child into the same discipleship with themselves, and set it in the school of Christ? It is only a part of their ordinary charge as parents, for it is given them to have the child in their own character, so to speak, and be themselves discipled with it and for it, (and why not it with them?) in all the honors and hopes of the heavenly kingdom.
Consider again the remarkable and certainly painful fact that,
in the view which excludes infant baptism and the discipleship of children, the
conversion itself of a
It is a matter, too, of great consequence to parents,
as respects their own fidelity in their office, that their children are not put
away, by the Saviour, to hold rank with heathens outside of the fold, but are brought
in with them, to be heirs together with them in the grace of life. What will justify,
or will naturally produce, a more sullen remissness of duty in parents, than to
feel that;, for the present, God has shut away, and is holding away their children,
and that they are never to be disciples
How refreshing the contrast, when the children, given to God in baptism, are accounted members of the church with them, as being included in their faith, and having the seal of it upon them. They look upon it now as their privilege to be parents in the Lord. Their prayers, they understand, are to keep heaven open upon their house. Their aims are to be Christian. Their tastes and manners to be flavored by the Christian hope in which they live. There is to be a quickening element in the atmosphere they make. They will set all things upon a Christian footing for their children's sake; and their children, growing up in such nurture of the Lord, will, how certainly, unfold what their nurture itself has quickened.
It is still another consideration, that the church itself,
having this infant membership in it, will unfold other aims and tempers, and
exert a finer quality of power. It will not be a dry convention of simply grown
up men and women; the men will, some of them, be fathers, the women mothers, and
the children being also included, their tender brotherhood will make an element
of common, consciously felt, gentleness for all.
Such are some of the reasons, briefly and faintly presented, which determine, as I conceive, God's appointment of the great fact of an infant membership in his church. And yet the reasons, taken by themselves, are hardly a sufficient evidence of the fact. They set us in the mood of respect, and even put us in the expectation of it, but they leave the inquiry still upon our hands—
III. Whether the supposed infant membership is a real and true fact? That it is, may be seen from the following proofs:—
1. Those
declarations of Scripture which assert or assume the fact. Thus, when the Saviour
commands—"Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of
such is the kingdom of heaven," it would be very singular if they could not come
in with the disciples, when they may so freely come to the Master himself.
2. The analogy of circumcision. This was given to be the seal of faith, and the
church token, in that manner, of a godly seed. Baptism can certainly be the same, with
as little difficulty, or as little charge of absurdity. True, they were not all
Israel that were of Israel, and so all may not be Israel that are baptized. Enough
that God gives the possibility, in both cases, in giving the rite itself; and then
it is to be seen whether the parents will be parents in the Lord, as it is formally
permitted them to be. Let the true point here be carefully observed; some kind
of presumption must be given by God, in respect to the church position of
3. The church connection of children is virtually
assumed, as we may see, by the apostle Paul, when he teaches that the believing
wife sanctifies the unbelieving husband, and the believing husband the unbelieving
wife—"else were your children unclean, but now are they holy." He refers, in this
matter, it is plain, to the effect of a parental faith, on the church position of
children. He does not, of course, use the term "sanctify," in any spiritual sense,
as affirming the regeneration of character in the children; but he alludes only
to the church ideas of clean and unclean, affirming
4. All the reasons I have given for the
observance of infant baptism, go to establish also the fact of infant membership
in the church. And this holds good, especially of that which discovers the origin
of the rite in proselyte baptism. For as foreigners, becoming proselytes, were baptized
and so made clean, thus to be accounted natural born citizens, so Christ, reapplying
the rite to a spiritual use, makes it the token of that regeneration which enters
the soul into his heavenly kingdom, and gives a divine citizenship there. In which
you may see how my comparison of infant membership in the church, to the well-known
citizenship of infants in the state, is borne out by Christian authority itself.
Their very baptism is the figure of their citizenship; wherein they are shown to
be "fellow-citizens of the saints, and of the household of God." Now it is to be
conceded, as respects all these proofs from the Scripture, that the church membership
of children is not formally asserted in them. According to a certain coarse way
of judging, therefore, they are not as strong as they might be. And yet, in a more
perceptive and really truer mode of judgment, they lack
Over and above these more direct evidences, for the church membership of baptized children, there is still another kind of evidence to be adduced, which has, and very properly should have, much weight. I allude to the opinions of the church and her most qualified teachers, from the apostolic era downward. In one sense, the mere opinions of men regarding such a question are of little consequence. But where they coincide with the known practice of the church from the earliest times downward, and show the practice to be grounded in the same reasons of organic unity and presumptive grace that we are now asserting, they both show that our doctrine is no novelty, and contribute a powerful evidence in support of its original authenticity.
Thus I have cited already in support of infant baptism,
passages from Justin Martyr, Ireneus, Tertullian, Origen, the Shepherd of Hermas,
and others, which not only show the fact of infant baptism, but discover also, in
their phraseology, the same views of church membership that I am now asserting.
This whole view of infant membership, as it stood in the first three centuries
"It
is the idea of infant baptism that Christ, through the divine life which he imparted
to, and revealed in, human nature, sanctified that germ from its earliest development.
The child born in a Christian family was, when all things were as they should be,
to have this advantage over others, that he did not come to Christianity out of
heathenism or the sinful natural life, but from the first dawning of consciousness
unfolded his powers under the imperceptible, preventing influences of a sanctifying,
ennobling religion; that with the earliest germinations of the natural self-conscious
life, another divine principle of life, transforming the nature, should be brought
nigh to him, ere yet the ungodly principle could come into full activity, and the
latter should at once, find here its powerful counterpoise. In such a life, the
new birth was not to constitute a new crisis, beginning at some definable
moment, but it was to begin imperceptibly, and so proceed through the whole
life. Hence baptism, the visible sign of regeneration, was to be given to the
child at the very outset: the child was to be consecrated to the Redeemer from
the very beginning of its life."
A more popular and practical view of Christianity, as seen in the domestic life of families, and one, at the same time, wholly coincident, is given by Cave:—
"Gregory Nazianzen peculiarly commends his mother,
I can not answer for an exact agreement of my doctrine with that of Calvin. It must be sufficient that he recognizes the valid possibility of a regenerate character, existing long before it is formally developed, and the propriety of infant baptism as the initiatory rite of membership. He says:—
"Christ was sanctified from his earliest infancy, that he might sanctify
in himself all his elect But how, it is inquired, are infants regenerated who have
no knowledge either of good or evil? We reply that the work of God is not yet without
existence because it is not
The mercurial mind of Baxter penetrates directly into all the subtleties of the question, asserting the organic unity of children who stand accepted in the covenant of their fathers; showing how regenerate character is to begin, seminally, in the children of them that believe, and get the start of sin by a kind of gracious anticipation; and so that, in this view, nurture and growth are God's way of unfolding grace in the church, as preaching and conversion are his method of grace with them that are without. Which three points are successively asserted in the following passages:—
"Q.—Why then are they baptized who can not covenant?
"A.—As children are made sinners and miserable by the parents,
without any act of their own, so they are delivered out of it by the free grace
of Christ, upon a condition performed by their parents. Else they who are visibly
born in sin and misery should have no certain or visible way of remedy. Nature maketh them, as it were,
parts of their parents, or so near as causeth their sin and misery.
And this nearness supposed, God, by his free grace, hath put it in the power of
the
"Of those baptized in infancy, some do betimes receive the
secret seeds of grace, which, by the blessings of a holy education, is stirring
in them according to their capacity, and working them to God by actual desires,
and working them from all known sill, and entertaining further grace, and
turning them into actual acquaintance with Christ, as soon as they arrive at
full natural capacity, so that they never were actual ungodly persons."
"Ungodly
parents do serve the devil so effectually, in the first impressions on their children's
minds, that it is more than magistrates and ministers and all reforming means can
afterwards do to recover them from that sin to God. Whereas, if you would first
engage their hearts to God by a religious education, piety would then have all those
advantages that sin hath now. (
Our New England fathers,
coming out as they did from a mode of church economy which made Christian piety
itself to be scarcely more than baptism, and passing through great struggles to
settle a scheme of church order that should recognize the strict individuality of
persons, and the essential personality of spiritual regeneration, fell off for a
time, as they naturally might, into a denial of the great underlying principles
and facts on which the membership of baptized children in the church must ever be
rested. In the Cambridge Platform of 1649, they asserted a view of membership, by
which it was to be rigidly confined to such as appear to be renewed persons. Meantime
none were allowed to be qualified as voters in the commonwealth, except in the Hartford
and Providence colonies, who were not members of the church—the same principle
with which
1. That the children of Christian parents, trained in a Christian way, often grow up as spiritually renewed persons, and must indeed be accounted true disciples of Christ, until some evidence conclusive to the contrary is given by their conduct.
"Children of the covenant
have frequently the beginning of grace wrought in them in younger years, as Scripture
and experience show. Instance Joseph, Samuel, David, Solomon, Abijah, Josiah, Daniel,
John Baptist, Timothy. Hence this sort of persons, [baptized
2. That baptism supposes an initial state of piety, or some right beginning, in which the child is prepared unto good, by causes prior to his own will.
"We are to distinguish between faith
and the hopeful beginning of it, the charitable judgment whereof runs upon a great
latitude, and faith in the special exercise of it, unto the visible discovery whereof,
more experienced operations are to be inquired after. The words of Dr. Ames are: 'Children
are not to be admitted to partake of all church privileges, till first increase
of faith do appear, but from those which belong to the beginning of faith
and entrance into the church they are not to be excluded.’”
3. That there is a kind of individualism which runs only to evil; that the church is designed to be an organic, vital, grace-giving power, and thus a nursery of spiritual life to its children.
"The way of the Anabaptists,
to admit none to membership and baptism but adult professors, is the straitest way;
one would think it should be a way of great purity; but experience hath shewed that
it has been an inlet unto great corruption. If we do not keep in the way of a converting,
grace-giving covenant, and keep persons under those church dispensations wherein
grace is given, the church will die of a lingering though not violent death. The
Lord hath not set up churches only that a few old Christians may keep one another warm
Under this
half-way covenant, and probably in part because of it, practical religion fell into
a state of great debility. The churches lost their spirituality, and had well nigh
lost the idea of spiritual life itself; when at length the Great Revival, under
Whitefield and Edwards, inaugurated and brought up to its highest intensity the
new era of individualism—the same overwrought, misapplied scheme of personal experience
in religion, which has continued with some modifications to the present day. It
is a religion that begins explosively, raises high frames, carries little or no
expansion, and after the campaign is over, subsides into a torpor. Considered as
a distinct era, introduced by Edwards, and extended and caricatured by his cotemporaries,
it has one great merit, and one great defect. The merit is that it displaced an
era of dead formality, and brought in the demand of a truly supernatural experience.
The defect is, that it has cast a type of religious individualism, intense beyond
any former example. It makes nothing of the family, and the church, and the organic
powers God has constituted as vehicles of grace. It takes every man as if he had
existed alone; presumes that he is unreconciled to God until he has undergone
Even Edwards himself, fifteen years after the Great Revival, began to be oppressed with sorrowful convictions of some great defect in the matter and mode of it, confessing his doubt whether "the greater part of supposed converts give reason, by their conversation, to suppose that they continue converts;" protesting, also, his special confidence in the fruits of family religion in terms like these—
"Every Christian family ought to be, as it were, a
Dr. Hopkins,
a pupil of Edwards, had probably been turned by suggestions from him, to a consideration
of the importance of family nurture and piety, as connected with the propagation
of religion; and, as if to supply some defect in this direction, he occupied sixty
pages in his System of Divinity, with a careful discussion of the "nature and design
of infant baptism." In this article, he goes even beyond the notion of a presumptive
piety in the children baptized, and says:—"The church receive and look upon them
as holy, and those who shall be saved. So they are as visibly holy, or as really
holy, in their view, as their parents are."
How far his theory of conversion would compel him to isolate the act of God by which the spiritual renovation of a soul is wrought, I will not undertake to decide. Enough, that he asserts an organic connection of character between parents and children, as effectual for good as for evil; nay, that they may as truly, and in the same sense, transmit holiness as they transmit existence. Thus, after asserting, not more clearly or decidedly than I have done, the impossibility that parents should spiritually renew their children, considered as acting by themselves, he says:
"But it does not follow from this, that God has
not so constituted the covenant of grace, that holiness shall
Dr. Witherspoon, a cotemporary of Dr. Hopkins, held opinions on this subject that were in a high degree coincident, though presented in a more popular and less doctrinal shape. He says:—
"I will not
enlarge on some refined remarks of persons as distinguished for learning as piety,
some of whom have supposed that they [children] are capable of receiving impressions
of desire and aversion, and even of moral temper, particularly of love or hatred,
its the first year of their lives. * * * When the gospel comes to a people that
have long sitten in darkness,
From all these citations, which could be multiplied without limit, it will be seen that the children of Christian parents have been looked upon as being heirs of the parental faith, and presumptively included in that faith; and so, either with or without a distinct assertion of the proper church membership of children, such opinions have been held in all ages respecting them, as make the denial of their membership a clear impropriety and even a kind of offense against nature.
It is hardly necessary to add, in closing this subject,
that if children baptized are so far accepted as members of the Christian church,
it must be a great fault and a most hurtful dereliction of duty that nothing is
practically made of this membership, and that really it passes
Baptized children ought to be enrolled by name in the catalogue of each church, as composing a distinct class of candidate, or catechumen-members; and to see that they are held in expectancy, thus, by the church, as presumptively one with them in the faith they profess.
Then, when they come forward to acknowledge their baptism, and assume the covenant in their own choice, they ought not to be received as converts from the world, as if they were heathens coming into the fold, but there should be a distinction preserved, such as makes due account of their previous qualified membership; a form of assumption tendered in place of a confession—something answering to the Lutheran confirmation, passed without a bishop's hands.
Children, as soon as
they are well out of their infancy, ought to be taken also to the stated meetings
of fellowship and prayer, drawn into all the moods of worship, praise, supplication,
reproof, as being rightfully concerned in them, on the score of their membership.
Whenever there are orphan children, that have been baptized, the church ought to look after them, as being members; see, if possible, that they are not neglected, but trained up in a Christian manner; provided, if need be, with a godly fatherhood and motherhood in the church itself; led into the church and out into the world, as disciples beloved according to their years.
Meantime, it
is a matter of prime significance that the Christian father and mother should live
so as to indicate a sense of their privilege and responsibility; even as Abraham
did when he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling
in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. It is one thing
to live for a family of children, as if they were going possibly to be converted,
and a very different to live for them as church members, training them into their
holy profession; one thing to have them about as strangers to the covenant of promise,
and another to have them about as heirs of the same promise, growing up into it,
to fulfill the seal of faith already upon them. One great reason why the children
of Christian parents turn out so badly is, that they are taken to be the world,
and the manner and spirit of the house are brought down to be of the world too,
and partly for their sake. Take them as disciples of Jesus, to be carefully trained
for Him; prepared to no mere
"And did he not make one?
Yet had he the residue of the Spirit. And wherefore one? That he might have a godly
seed."—
THE prophet is enforcing here a strict observance of marriage. And he adverts, in his argument, to the single and sole state of the first human pair, as a standing proof against polygamy, inconstancy, and all similar abuses of the marriage state. God was not spent, he says, in creating a single man, Adam, and a single woman, Eve, but he had such a residue, or overplus of creative energy left, that he could have created millions if he would. Wherefore then did he cease, producing only just one man and woman, and no more? The answer is—That he might have a godly seed. In that lies the reason, he declares, of God's economy in this family institution. We perceive, accordingly,
That God is, from the first, looking for a godly seed; or, what is nowise different, inserting such laws of population that piety itself shall finally over-populate the world.
To be more explicit, there
are two principal modes by which the kingdom of God among men may be, and is to
be extended. One is by the process of conversion. and the other by that of family
propagation; one by gaining
What I propose, at the present time, is to restore, if possible, a juster impression
of this great subject; to show that conversion over to the church is not the only
Nor let any one be repelled from this truth, or set against it, by the prejudice that piety is and must be a matter of individual choice. The same is true of sin. Many of us have no difficulty in saying that mankind are born sinners. They may just as truly and properly be born saints—it requires the self-active power to be just as far developed to commit sin, as it does to choose obedience. This individual capacity of will and choice is one that matures at no particular tick of the clock, but it comes along out of incipiencies, grows by imperceptible increments, and takes on a character, in good or evil, or a mixed character in both, so imperceptibly and gradually, that it seems to be, in some sense, prefashioned by what the birth and nurture have communicated. We may fitly enough call this character a propagated quality—in strictest metaphysical definition, it is not; in sturdiest fact of history, or practical life, it is.
Nor let any one be diverted from the truth I am going to
assert, by imagining that a propagated piety is, of course, a piety without
regeneration, dispensing with what Christ himself declared to be the
indispensable need of every human creature. For aught that appears, regeneration
may, in some initial and profoundly real sense, be the twin element of
propagation itself. The parentage may, in other words, be so thoroughly
Dismissing these, and other like prepossessions, let us go on to examine some of the evidences by which this doctrine of church population is to be substantiated.
1. I name, as an evidence, the very important fact that in the matter of infant baptism and infant church membership, grounded as they are in the assumption that a believing parentage sanctifies the offspring, God is seen to frame the order of church economy, so as to bring in the law of increase, or family propagation; looking to the populating principle for growth, just as the founder of a new colony, on some foreign shore, would look. He declares that parents are to be parents in the Lord, and children to grow up in the nurture of the Lord. The whole scheme of organic unity in the family and of family grace in the church, is just what it should be, if the design were to propagate religion, not by conversions only, but quite as much, or more, by the populating force embodied in it—just that force which; in all states and communities, is known to be the most majestic and silently creative force in their history.
2. It is a matter of consequence to observe,
that the Abrahamic order and covenant stood upon this footing, formally proposing
and promising to make the father of the faithful a blessing to mankind, by and through
the
3. It is an argument which ought to be convincing, that the universal spread of the
gospel, and the universal reign of Christian truth—that which prophets and
apostles promise, and which we, in these last times, have taken up as our
fondest, most impelling Christian hope—plainly enough never can be compassed by
the process of adult conversions, but must finally be reached, if reached at
all, by the populating forces of a family grace in the church. We expect that,
in that day, all flesh shall see the salvation of God, and that every thing
human will be regenerated by it; that the glory of God will cover the earth like
a baptism of water—even as the waters cover the sea. These are to be the times
of the restitution of all things. God, we believe, will put his laws now in the
mind, and write them on the heart, and "all shall know him from the least to the
greatest." I do not care to press these epithets least and greatest—perhaps there
is no reference to children in them. It would scarcely make the text more
significant if there were; for this universal triumph of the word, in which we
all believe, this imprinting of it on men's hearts, all over the world in such
manner as to make the day of glory—that great
We conceive that Christ will then overspread all souls with
his glory, and that children, filled according to their age and measure with the
divine motions of grace, will be unfolding the heavenly beauty, as they advance
in years, even as the flowers unfold their colors in the sun. These colors no
one sees in the root, and the
4. Consider a very important fact in human
physiology which goes far to explain, or take away the strangeness and seeming
extravagance of the truth I am endeavoring to establish, viz., that qualities of
education, habit, feeling, and character, have a tendency always to grow in, by
long continuance, and become thoroughly inbred in the stock. We meet humble
analogies of this fact in the domestic animals. The operations to which they
are trained, and in which they become naturalized by habit, become
predispositions, in a degree, in their offspring; and they, in their turn, are
as much more easily trained on that account. The next generation are trained
still more easily, till what was first made habitual, finally becomes functional
in the stock, and almost no training is wanted. That which was inculcated by
practice passes into a tendency,
The Jewish race are a
striking and sad proof of the manner in which any given mode of life may, or
rather must, become a functional property in the offspring. The old Jewish stock
of the Scripture times, whatever faults they may have had, certainly were not
marked by any such miserably sordid, usurious, garbage-vending propensity, as
now distinguishes the race. But the cruelties they have suffered under Christian
governments, shut up in the Jews' quarter of the great cities,
Now if it be true that what gets power in any race,
by a habit or a process of culture, tends by a fixed law of nature to become a
propagated quality, and pass by descent as a property inbred in the stock; if in
this way whole races of men are cultivated into properties that are peculiar—off
into a savage character, down into a servile or a mercenary, up into
civilization or a high social state—what is to be the effect of a thoroughly
Christian fatherhood and motherhood, continued for a long time in the successive
generations of a family? What can it be but a general mitigation of the bad
points of the stock, and a more and more completely inbred piety. The children
of such a stock are born, not of the flesh only, or the mere natural life of
their parentage, but they are born, in a sense most emphatic, of the Spirit
also; for this parentage is differed, as we are supposing, age by age, from its
own mere nature in Adam, by the inhabiting grace of a supernatural salvation.
Physiologically speaking, they are tempered by this grace, and it is all the
while tending to become, in
And let no one be offended by this, as if it supposed a
possible in-growth and propagation of piety, by mere natural laws and
conditions. What higher ground of supernaturalism can be taken, than that which
supposes a capacity in the Incarnate Word, and Sanctifying Spirit, to penetrate
our fallen nature, at a point so deep as to cover the whole spread of the fall,
and be a
In such cases, the
faith or piety of a single pair, or possibly of the mother alone, begets a
heavenly mold in the predispositions of the offspring, so that, as it is born of
sin, it is also born of a heavenly grace. If then we suppose the heavenly grace
to have such power, in the long continuing process of ages, as to finally work
the general stock of parentage into its own heavenly mold, far enough to prepare
a sanctified offspring for the world, what higher, grander fact of Christian
supernaturalism could be asserted? Nor is it any thing more of a novelty than to
say, that "where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." The conception is
one that simply fulfills what Baxter, Hopkins, and others, were apparently
struggling after,
Christianity then has a power, as we discover, to prepare a godly seed. It not only takes hold of the world by its converting efficacy, but it has a silent force that is much stronger and more reliable; it moves, by a kind of destiny, in causes back of all the eccentric and casual operations of mere individual choice, preparing, by a gradual growing in of grace, to become the great populating motherhood of the world. In this conviction, we shall be strengthened—
5. By the well known fact, that the populating power of any race, or stock, is increased according to the degree of personal and religious character to which it has attained. Good principles and habits, intellectual culture, domestic virtue, industry, order, law, faith—all these go immediately to enhance the rate and capacity of population. They make a race powerful, not in the mere military sense, but in one that, by century-long reaches of populating force, lives down silently every mere martial competitor. Any people that is physiologically advanced in culture, though it be only in a degree, beyond another which is mingled with it on strictly equal terms, is sure to live down and finally live out its inferior. Nothing can save the inferior race but a ready and pliant assimilation.
The promise to Abraham depended, doubtless, on this fact for its
fulfillment. God was to make his family fruitful, above others, by imparting
Himself to it, and so infusing a higher tone of personal life.
Afterwards little Palestine itself was like a swarm of bees; building great cities, raising great armies, and displaying all the tokens, age upon age, of a great and populous empire. So great was the fruitfulness of the stock, compared with other nations of the time, owing to the higher personality unfolded in them, by their only partial and very crude training, in a monotheistic religion.
And again, at a still later
time, when the nation itself is dismembered, and thousands of the people are
driven off into captivity, we find that when the great king of Persia had given
out an edict of extermination against them, and would like to recall it but can
not, because of the absurd maxim that what the king has decreed must not be
changed, he has only to publish another decree, that they shall have it as their
right to stand for their lives, and that is enough to insure their complete
immunity. "They gathered themselves together in their cities, and throughout all
the provinces, and no man
Or we may take a more modern illustration, drawn from the
comparative history of the Christian and Mohammedan races. The Christian
development begins at an older date, and the Mohammedan at a later. One is a
propagation by moral and religious influences, at least in part; the other a
propagation by military force. Both have religious ideas and aims, but the main
distinction is that one is taken hold of by religion as being a contribution to
the free personal nature of souls; and the other is taken hold of by a religion
whose grip is the strong grip of fate. For a time, this latter spread like a
fire in the forest, propagated by the terrible sword of predestination, and it
even seemed about to override the world. But it by and by began to appear, that
one religion was creating and the other uncreating manhood; one toning up a
great and powerful character, and the other toning down, steeping in lethargy,
the races it began to inspire; till finally we can now see as distinctly as
possible, that one is pouring on great tides of population, creating a great
civilization, and great and powerful nations; the other, falling away into a
feeble, half-depopulated, always decaying state, that augurs final extinction at
no distant period. Now the fact is that these two great religions of the world
had each, in itself, its own law of population from the beginning,
What a lesson also could be derived, in the same manner, from a comparison of the populating forces of the Puritan stock in this country, and of the inferior, superstitious, half Christian stock and nurture of the South American states. And the reason of the difference is that Christianity, having a larger, fuller, more new-creating force in one, gives it a populating force as much superior.
How this advantage accrues, and is, at some future time, to be more impressively revealed than now, it is not difficult to see. Let the children of Christian parents grow up, all, as partakers in their grace, which is the true Christian idea, and the law of family increase they are in, is, by the supposition, so far brought into the church, and made operative there. And then comes in also the additional fact, that there are causes and conditions of increase now operative in the church which exist nowhere else.
Here, for example, there will be a stronger tide of
health than elsewhere. In the world without, multitudes are perishing
continually by vice and extravagance, and, when they do not perish themselves,
they
Wealth, again, will be unfolded more rapidly under the condition of Christian living than elsewhere; and wealth enough to yield a generous supply of the common wants of life, is another cause that favors population. True piety is itself a principle of industry and application to business. It subordinates the love of show and all the tendencies to extravagance. It rules those licentious passions that war with order and economy. It generates a faithful character, which is the basis of credit, as credit, of prosperity. Hence it is that upon the rocky, stubborn soil, under the harsh and frowning skies of our New England, we behold so much of high prosperity, so much of physical well-being, and ornament. And the wealth created is diffused about as evenly as the piety. A true Christian society has mines opened, thus, in its own habits and principles. And the wealth accruing is power in every direction, power in production, enterprise, education, colonization, influence, and consequent popular increase.
There will also be more talent
unfolded in a Christian people, and talent also takes the helm of causes
everywhere. Christian piety is itself a kind of holy development, enlarging
every way the soul's dimensions.
Here, too, are the great truths, and all the
grandest, most fruitful ideas of existence. Here will spring up science,
discovery, invention. The great books will be born here, and the highest,
noblest, most quickening character will here be fashioned. Popular liberties and
the rights of persons will here be asserted. Commerce will go forth hence, to
act the preluding of the Christian love, in the universal fellowship of trade.
And so we see, by this rapid glance along the inventories of Christian society,
that all manner of causes are included in it, that will go to fine the
organization, raise the robustness, swell the volume, multiply the means,
We are not, of course, to suspend our
efforts to convert the heathen nations—we shall never become a thoroughly
regenerate stock, save as we are trained up
Once more, it is a
consideration that will have great weight with all deeply thoughtful persons,
that the vindication of God in sin, suffering, punishment, and all evil
pertaining to the race, probably depends, to a great degree, on just the truth I
am here endeavoring to establish. How constantly is the question raised, why
God, as an infinitely good and gracious Father, should put on foot such a scheme
of existence as this; one that unites such oppressive disadvantages, and is to
be such a losing concern? We begin life, it is said, with constitutions depravated and poisoned, and come thus into choice with predispositions that are
damaged even beforehand. Idolatry, darkness, and guilt, overspread
Having reached this closing point or consummation of the
doctrine of nurture, we are able, I think, to see something of the dignity there
is in it. How trivial, unnatural, weak, and, at the same time, violent, in
comparison, is that overdone scheme of individualism, which knows the race only
as mere units of will and personal action; dissolves even families into monads;
makes no account of organic relations and uses; and expects the world to be
finally subdued by adult conversions, when growing up still, as before, in all
the younger tiers of life, toward a mere convertible state
The church, as being made up of souls that are born of the Spirit, is a new supernatural order thus in humanity; a spiritual nation, we may conceive, that was founded by a colony from the skies. It alights upon our globe as its chartered territory. Can it overspread the whole planet and take possession? We see that it can unfold more of health, wealth, talent, than the present living races of inhabitants. It has within itself a stronger law of population, as well as a mighty power to win over and assimilate the nations. Its people have more truth, beauty, weight of character to exalt their predominance. And, what is more, God is in them by his all-informing, all-energizing Spirit, to be Himself unfolded in their history, and make it powerful. Not to believe that the Heavenly Colony, thus constituted and endowed, will finally overspread and fill the world, is to deny causes their effects, and to quite invert the natural order of strength and weakness. God, too, has testified in regard to this branch of his planting—"They shall inherit the land."
It is very obvious that this general view of Christian nurture and
its effects is one that, becoming really installed in our faith, and the aims of
our piety, would
One principal reason why we are so often deficient in character, or outward beauty, is, that piety begins too late in life, having thus to maintain a perpetual and unequal war with previous habit. If it was not true of Paul, it is yet too generally true, that one born out of due time will be found out of due time, more often than he should be, afterwards—unequal, inconsistent with himself, acting the old man instead of the new. Having the old habit to war with, it is often too strong for him. To make a graceful and complete Christian character, it needs itself to be the habit of existence; not a grape grafted on a bramble. And this, it will be seen, requires a Christian childhood in the subject. Having this, the gracious or supernatural character becomes itself more nearly natural, and possesses the peculiar charm of naturalness, which is necessary to the highest moral beauty.
It results also from our mistaken views of Christian training, that we fall into a notion of religion that is mechanical. We thrust our children out of the covenant first and insist. in spite of it, that they shall grow up in the same spiritual state as if their father and mother were heathens. Then we go out, at least on certain occasions, to convert them back, as if they actually were heathens. Our only idea of increase is of that which accrues by means of a certain abrupt technical experience. Led away thus from all thought of internal growth in the church, efforts to secure conversions take an external character, becoming gospel campaigns. Accretion displaces growth. The church is gathered as a foundling hospital; and lest it should not be such, its own children are reduced to foundlings. Immediate repentance proclaimed, insisted on, and realized in an abrupt change, proper only to those who are indeed aliens and enemies, is the only hope or inlet of the church. We can not understand how the spiritual nation should grow and populate, and become powerful within itself.
Piety becomes inconstant, and
revivals of religion take an exaggerated character from the same causes. If all
Christian success is measured by the count of technical conversions from
without, then it follows that nothing is done when conversions cease to be
counted The harvest closes not with feasting, but with famine Despair cuts off
Christian motive. The tide is spent; let us anchor during the ebb. It is well
indeed to live very piously in the families; still, there is nothing depending
on it. The children will be good subjects
Here too is the greatest impediment to a true missionary spirit. The
habit of conquest runs to dissipation and irregularity. It is as if a nation,
forgetting its own internal resources, were scouring the seas, and trooping up
and down the world, in pursuit of prize-money and plunder, forsaking the loom and
the plow, and all the regular growths of industry. Whereas, if the church were
unfolding the riches of the covenant at her firesides and tables; if the
children were identified with religion from the first, and grew up iin a
Christian love of man, the missionary spirit would not throw itself up in
irregular jets, but would flow as a river. We suffer also greatly and even
produce a somewhat painful evidence of mistake, in our endeavor to be always
operating by an immediate influence of the
"When I call to remembrance the unfeigned
faith that is in thee which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother
Eunice, and I am persuaded that in thee also."—
THIS faith of Timothy, which is but another name for the grace of life in his character, the apostle speaks of here, it will be seen, as a kind of personal hereditament, or heir-loom in the family. He does not mean to say, as I understand him, that it is literally such, or in what sense, and how far, it is such. He only recognizes a godly parentage, doing godly things in him and for him, for one, two, three, or he knows not how many, generations back. He regards his young friend as born of godliness, nurtured and trained by godliness, and indulges a certain pleasant conviction that his present, full developed faith in Jesus, was a seed somehow planted in him by the believing motherhoods of the past, and began to live and grow in him, thus, long before he knew it himself, or others observed it in him. So by a short method, which includes and covers all, the apostle calls it his heir-loom; complimenting his godly motherhood in the figure, and testifying the greater confidence in his piety, that it was so near to being the inborn nobility of his Christian stock.
I use the text, accordingly, not to draw some definite conclusion or truth, from the evidently well understood indefiniteness of the terms of it, but simply to head a discussion of the question, when and where, at what point, and how early, does the office of a genuine nurture begin?
Having settled our conceptions of the scheme, or doctrinal import, of Christian nurture, finding what place it has, and is to have, in the Christian plan, we are come now to a matter farther in advance, and, in one view, more practical, viz: to a consideration of the modes and means, by which the true idea of a godly nurture may be realized in the training of families. And here it becomes our first endeavor to rectify, or expel a whole set of false impressions, that have grown up round the gate of responsibility itself, turning off, and pushing aside all due concern, till the time of greatest facility and advantage is quite gone by. The very common impression is that nothing is to be done for the religious character of children, till they are old enough to form religious judgments, put forth religious choices, take the meaning of the Christian truths, and perceive what is in them as related to the wants of sin, consciously felt and reflected on. There could not be a more sad or, in fact, more desolating mistake, in any matter, either of duty or of privilege. And it is the more wonderful, the closer in appearance to real fatuity, that it holds its ground so firmly, where all the tenderest pressures of affection might be expected to force it aside, and clear the field of its really cruel usurpations.
In discussing the question proposed, I should not properly cover the whole ground of it, and could not really be said to answer it, if I did not—
1. Bring into view the very important, but rather delicate fact,
suggested or distinctly alluded to in the apostle's words, that there is even a
kind of ante-natal nurture which must be taken note of, as having much to do
with the religious preparations or inductive mercies of childhood. We are
physiologically connected and set forth in our beginnings, and it is a matter of
immense consequence to our character, what the connection is. In our birth, we
not only begin to breathe and circulate blood, but it is a question hugely
significant whose the blood may be. For in this we have whole rivers of
predispositions, good or bad, set running in us—as much more powerful to shape
our future than all tuitional and regulative influences that come after, as they
are earlier in their beginning, deeper in their insertion, and more constant in
their operation. It is a great mistake to suppose that men and women, such as
are to be fathers and mothers, are affected only in their souls by religious
experience, and not in their bodies. On mere physiological principles it can not
be true, for the mind must temper the body to its own states and changes.
Living, therefore, in the peace and purity, holding the equilibrium, flowing in
the liberty, reigning in the confidence, of a genuine sanctification, the
subjects of such grace are penetrated bodily, all through, by the work of the
Spirit in their life. Their appetite are more nearly in heaven's order, their
passions more
I might even state the case
more strongly, bringing into the comparison a godly and a vicious parentage.
Take a parentage that has in it all the dyspeptic woes of gluttony and
self-indulgence, one that is stung and maddened by the fiery pains of
intemperance, one that is poisoned and imbruted by the excesses of lust, one
It is somewhat difficult to investigate the facts of this subject, because
of the complexities induced by unpropitious and exceptional marriages. But when
such marriages are reduced by the more general, and finally universal, spread of
Christian piety, and when the pitch of Christian sanctification is raised, as it
will be, by the fuller inspiration from God, breaking into his saints all over
the world, it will be found that children are born as much closer to God, and
with predispositions that waft them as much more certainly into the ways of duty
and piety. It will be as if the faith-power of the past
Here, then, is the real and true beginning of a godly nurture. The child is not to have the sad entail of any sensuality, or excess, or distempered passion upon him. The heritage of love, peace, order, continence and holy courage is to be his. He is not to be morally weakened beforehand, in the womb of folly, by the frivolous, worldly, ambitious expectations of parents-to-be, concentrating all their nonsense in him. His affinities are to be raised by the godly expectations, rather, and prayers that go before; by the steady and good aims of their industry, by the great impulse of their faith, by the brightness of their hope, by the sweet continence of their religiously pure love in Christ. Born, thus, of a parentage that is ordered in all righteousness, and maintains the right use of every thing, especially the right use of nature and marriage, the child will have just so much of heaven's life and order in him beforehand, as have become fixed properties in the type of his parentage; and by this ante-natal nurture, will be set off in a way of noblest advantage, as respects all safety and success, in the grand experiment he has come into the world to make.
Having called your attention to this very important
2. To that which is the common field of inquiry, and here we raise again the question, where and how early does the work of nurture begin? here to set forth and maintain still another answer, which antedates the common impression, about as decidedly as the one just given. The true, and only true answer is, that the nurture of the soul and character is to begin just when the nurture of the body begins. It is first to be infantile nurture—as such, Christian; then to be a child's nurture; then to be a youth's nurture—advancing by imperceptible gradations, if possible, according to the gradations and stages of the growth, or progress toward maturity.
There is, of course, no absolute
classification to be made here, because there are no absolute lines of
distinction. A kind of proximate and partly ideal distinction may be made, and I
make it simply to serve the convenience of my subject—otherwise impossible to be
handled, so as to secure any right practical conviction respecting it. It is the
distinction between the age of impressions and the age of tuitional influences;
or between the age of existence in the will of the parent, and the age of
will and personal choice in the child. If the
Now the very common assumption is that, in what we have called
the age of impressions, there is really nothing done, or to be done, for the
religious character. The lack of all genuine apprehensions, in respect to this
matter, among people otherwise intelligent and awake, is really wonderful; it
amounts even to a kind of
Just contrary to this, I suspect, and I think it can also be shown by sufficient evidence, that more is done to affect, or fix, the moral and religious character of children, before the age of language than after; that the age of impressions, when parents are commonly waiting, in idle security, or trifling away their time in mischievous indiscretions, or giving up their children to the chance of such keeping as nurses and attendants may exercise, is in fact their golden opportunity; when more is likely to be done for their advantage or damage, than in all the instruction and discipline of their minority afterward.
And something like this I think we should augur beforehand,
from the peculiar, full-born intensity of the maternal affection, at the moment
when it first embraces the newly arrived object. It scarcely appears to grow,
never to grow tender and self-sacrificing in its care. It turns itself to its
charge, with a love that is boundless and fathomless, at the first. As if just
then and there, some highest and most sacred office of motherhood
It will be seen at once,
and will readily be taken as a confirmation of the transcendent importance of
what is done, or possible to be done, for children, in their impressional and
plastic age, that whatever is impressed or inserted here, at this early point,
must be profoundly seminal, as regards all the future developments of the
That we may conceive this matter more adequately
and exactly, consider, a moment, that whole contour of dispositions, affections,
tempers, affinities, aspirations, which come into power in a soul after the will
is set fast in a life of duty and devotion. These things, we conceive, follow in
a sense the will, and then become in turn a new element about the will—a new
heart, as we say, prompting to new acts and a continued life of new obedience.
Now what I would affirm is, that just this same contour of dispositions and
affinities may be prepared under, and come after, the will of the parents, when
the child is living in their will, and be ready as a new element, or new heart,
to prompt the child's will, or put it forward in the choice of all duty,
whenever it
This will be yet more probable, if we glance at
some of the particular facts and conditions involved. Thus if we speak of
impressions, or the age of impressions, and of that as an age prior to language,
what kind of religious impressions can be raised in a soul, it may be asked,
when the child is not far enough developed in language to be taught any thing
about God, or Christ, or itself, that belongs to intelligence? And the
sufficient answer must be, that language itself has no meaning till rudimental
impressions are first begotten in the life of experience, to give it a meaning.
Words are useful to propagate meanings, or to farther develop and combine
meanings, but a child would never know the meaning of any word in a language,
just by hearing the sound of it in his ears. He must learn to put the meaning
into it, by having found that meaning in his impressions, and then the word
becomes significant. And it requires a certain wakefulness and capacity of
intelligent apprehension, to receive or take up such impressions. Thus a dog
would never get hold of any religious impression at the family prayers, all his
lifetime: but a child will be fast gathering up, out of his
Observe, again, how very quick the
child's eye is, in the passive age of infancy, to catch impressions, and receive
the meaning of looks, voices, and motions. It peruses all faces, and colors, and
sounds. Every sentiment that looks into its eyes, looks back out of its eyes,
and plays in miniature on its countenance. The tear that steals down the cheek
of a mother's suppressed grief, gathers the little infantile face into a
responsive sob. With a kind of wondering silence, which is next thing to
adoration, it studies the mother in her prayer, and looks up piously with her,
in that exploring watch, that signifies unspoken prayer. If the child is
handled fretfully, scolded, jerked or simply laid aside
It must also greatly affect our judgments on this point, to
observe that, when this first age of impressions is gone by, there is, after
that, no such thing any
I
bring into view accordingly, just here, a consideration that goes farther to
establish the position I am asserting, than any other, and one that is naturally
suggested by the topic just adverted to. We call this first chapter of life the
age of impressions; we speak of the child as being in a sense passive and
plastic, living in the will of the parents, having no will developed for
responsible action. It might be imagined from the use of such terms, that the
infant or very young child has no will at all. But that is not any true
conception. It has no responsible will, because it is not acquainted, as yet,
with those laws and limits and conditions of choice that make it responsible.
Nevertheless it has will, blind will, as strongly developed as any other
faculty, and sometimes even most strongly of all. The manifestations
That he may be this, he is
now given, will and all, as wax, to the wise molding-power of control.
Beginning, then, to lift his will in mutiny, and swell in self-asserting
obstinacy, refusing to go or come, or stand, or withhold in this or that, let
there be no fight begun, or issue made with him, as if it were the true thing
now to break his will, or drive him out of it by mere terrors and pains. This
willfulness, or obstinacy, is not so purely bad, or evil, as it seems. It is
partly his feeling of himself and you, in which he is getting hold of the
conditions of authority, and feeling out his limitations. No, this breaking of a
child's will to which many well-meaning parents set themselves, with such
instant, almost passionate resolution, is the way they take to make him a
coward, or a thief, or a hypocrite, or a mean-spirited and driveling
sycophant-nothing in fact
By a different treatment at the point or crisis just
named, that is by raising an issue to be driven straight through by terror and
storm, one of two results almost equally bad were likely to follow; the child
would either have been quite broken down by fear, the lowest
It only remains to add that we are not to
assume the comparative unimportance of what is done upon a child, in his age of
impressions, because there is really no character of virtue or vice, of blame or
praise, developed in that age. Be it so—it is so by the supposition. But the
power, the root, the seed, is implanted nevertheless, in most cases, of what he
will be. Not in every case, but often, the seed of a regenerate life is
implanted—that which makes the child a Christian in God's view, as certainly as
if he were already out in the testimony and formal profession of his faith. I
was just now speaking of the dreadful power of will or willfulness, some times
manifested even in this first age, that we have called the age of impressions,
and of the ways in which, by one kind of mismanagement or another, the character
may be turned to vices that are as opposite, as the vices of meanness and the
crimes of violence and blood. So it will be found that almost every sort of
mismanagement, or neglect, plants some
By these and many other considerations that might be named,
it is made clear, I think, to any judicious and thoughtful person, that the most
important age of Christian nurture is the first; that which we have called the
age of impressions, just that age, in which the duties and cares of a really
Christian nurture are so commonly postponed, or assumed to have not yet arrived.
I have no scales to measure quantities of effect in this matter of early
training, but I may be allowed to express my solemn conviction, that more, as a
general fact, is done, or lost by neglect of doing, on a child's immortality, in
the first three years of his life, than in all his years of discipline
afterwards. And I name this particular time, or date, that I may not be supposed
to lay the chief stress of duty and care on the latter part of what l have
called the age of impressions; which, as it is a matter somewhat indefinite, may
be taken to cover the space of three or four times this number of years; the
development of language, and of moral ideas being only partially accomplished,
in most cases, for so long a time. Let every Christian father and mother
understand, when
If now I am right in the view I have
been trying to establish, it will readily occur to you that irreparable damage
may be and must often be done by the self-indulgence of those parents, who place
their children
Again, it is very clear that, in this early kind of nurture, faithfully maintained, there is a call for the greatest personal holiness in the parents, and that just those conditions are added, which will make true holiness closest to nature, and most beautifully attractive—saving it from all the repulsive appearances of severity and sanctimony. In this charge and nurture of infant children, nothing is to be done by an artificial, lecturing process; nothing, or little by what can be called government. We are to get our effects chiefly by just being what we ought, and making a right presence of love and life to our children. They are in a plastic age that is receiving its type, not from our words, but from our spirit, and whose character is shaping in the molds of ours. Living under this conviction, we are held to a sound verity and reality in every thing. The defect of our character is not to be made up here, by the sanctity of our words; we must be all that we would have our children feel and receive. Thus, if a man were to be set before a mirror, with the feeling that the exact image of what he is, for the day, is there to be produced and left as a permanent and fixed image forever, to what carefulness, what delicate sincerity of spirit would he be moved. And will he be less moved to the same, when that mirror is the soul of his child?
Inducted, thus, into a
more profoundly real holiness, He shall, at the same time, grow more natural in
it. The family quality of our piety, living itself into our children, will
moisten the dry individualism we suffer, relieve the eccentricities we display,
set purity in the
"For I know him, that he will command his children
and his house hold after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord."—
THE real point of the declaration, here, is not that Abraham will command his children, but that he is such a man, having such qualities or qualifications as to be able to command, certain to command, and train them into an obedient and godly life. The declaration is, you will observe—"For I know him;" not simply and directly—"For I know the fact." Every thing turns on what is in him, as a father and householder—his qualifications, dispositions, principles, and modes of life—and the declaration is, that what he is to do, will certainly come out of what he is. He will certainly produce, or train a godly family, because it is in him, as a man, to do nothing else or less. The subject raised then by the declaration is, not so much family training and government, as it is—
The personal and religious qualifications, or qualifications of character, necessary to success in such family training and government.
There is almost no duty or work, in this world, that does not
require some outfit of qualifications, in order to the doing of it well. We all
understand that some
I know not any thing that better shows the utter incompetency
of mere natural affection as an equipment for the parental office, or that, in a
short way, proves the fixed necessity in it, of some broader competency and
higher qualification, than just to glance at the real cruelties, even commonly
perpetrated, under just those tender, faithful instigations of natural
affection, that we so readily expect to be a kind of infallible protection to
the helplessness of infancy. How often is it a fact, that the fondest parents,
owing to some want of insight, or of patience, or even to some uninstructed,
only half intelligent desire to govern their child, will do it the greatest
wrongs—stinging every day and hour, the little defenseless being, committed to
their love, with the sense of bitter injustice; driving in the ploughshare of
abuse and blame upon its tender feeling, by harsh words and pettish
chastisements, when, in fact, the very thing in the child that annoys them is,
that they themselves have thrown it into a fit of uneasiness and partial
disorder, by their indiscreet feeding; or that in some appearance of
irritability, or insubjection, it has only not the words to speak of its pain,
or explain its innocence. The little child's element of existence becomes, in
this manner, not seldom, an element of bitter wrong, and the sting of wounded
justice grows in, so to speak, poisoning the soul all through, by its immedicable
rancor. The pain of such wrong goes deeper,
Here, then, at just the point where we should, least of all, look for it, viz:
at the point of maternal affection itself, we have displayed, in sadly
convincing evidence, the need and high significance of those better
qualifications of mind and character, by which the training of children becomes
properly Christian, and upon which, as being such, the success of that training
depends. Few persons, I apprehend, have any conception,
Sometimes, for example, it is a fatal mischief, going before on the
child, but probably unknown to the world, that the parents, one or both, or it
may be the mother especially, does not accept the child willingly, but only
submits to the maternal office and charge, as to some hard necessity. This
charge is going to detain her at home, and limit her freedom. Or it will take
her away from the shows and pleasures for which she is living. Or it will burden
her days and nights with cares that weary her self-indulgence. Or she is not
fond of
I might speak of other disqualifications that have a similar character, as implying some disagreement with Providence. But it must suffice to say generally, that there can be no such thing as a genuine Christian nurture that is out of peace with God's Providence—in any respect. On the contrary, it is when that peace is the element of the house, and sweetens every thing in it—pain, sickness, loss, the bitter cup of poverty, every ill of adversity or sting of wrong—then it is, and there, as nowhere else, that children are most sure to grow up into God's beauty, and a blessed and good life. The child that is born to such keeping, and lovingly lapped in the peaceful trust of Providence, is born to a glorious heritage. On the other hand, where the endeavor and life-struggle of the house is, at bottom, a fight with Providence; envious, eager, anxious, out of content, out of rest, full of complaint and railings, it is impossible that any thing Christian should grow in such an element. The disqualification is complete.
Another whole class of disqualifications require to be named
by themselves; those I mean which are caused by a bad or false morality in the
parties, at some point where the failure is not suspected, and misses being
They are persons, for example, who make much of principles in their words, and really think that they are governed by principles, when, in fact, they do every thing for some reason of policy, and value their principles, more entirely than they know, for what they are worth in the computations of policy. Contrivance, artifice, or sometimes cunning, is the element of the house. A subtle, inveterate habit of scheming creeps into all the reasons of duty; and duty is done, not for duty's sake, but for the reasons, or prudential benefits to be secured by it. Even the praying of the house takes on a prudential air, much as if it were done for some reason not stated. A stranger in the house, seeing no scandalous wrong, but a fine show of principle, has a certain sense of coldness upon him, which he can not account for. How much of true Christian nurture there may be in such a house, it is not difficult to judge. Here, probably, is going to be one of the cases, where everybody wonders that children brought up so correctly, turn out so badly. It is not understood that such children were brought up to know principles, only as a stunted undergrowth of prudence, and that now the result appears.
Again there is, in
some persons, who appear, in all other respects, to be Christian, a strange
defect of truth or truthfulness. They are not conscious of it. They would take
it as a cruel injustice, were they only to suspect their acquaintances of
holding such an estimate
In the same manner, I could go on
to show a multitude of disqualifications for the office of a genuine Christian
nurture, that are created by a bad or defective morality, in parents who live a
credibly Christian life. They make a great virtue, it may be, of frugality or
economy, and settle every thing into a scale of insupportable parsimony and
meanness. Or, they make a praise of generous living, and run it into a
profligate and spendthrift habit. Or, they make such a virtue of honor and
magnanimity, as to set the opinions and principles of men in deference, above
the principles of
We have still another whole class of disqualifications to speak of, that belong, as vices, to the Christian life itself, and will, as much more certainly, be ruinous in their effects. Some of them would never be thought of as disqualifications for the Christian training of children, and yet they are so, in a degree to even cut off the reasonable hope of success. Probably a great part of the cases of disaster, that occur in the training of Christian families, are referable to these Christian vices, which are commonly not put down as evidences of apostasy, or any radical defect of Christian principle, because they are not supposed to imply a discontinuance of prayers or a fatal subjection to the spirit of this world.
Sanctimony, for example, as we commonly use the term, is one of these vices. It describes what we conlceive to be a saintly, or over-saintly air and manner, when there is a much inferior degree of sanctity in the life. There is no hypocrisy in it, for there is no intention to deceive; but there is a legal, austere, conscientiousness, which keeps on all the solemnities and longitudes of expression, just because there is too little of God's love and joy in the feeling, to play in the smiles of gladness and liberty. Now it is the little child's way, to get his first lessons from the looks and faces round him. And what can be worse, or do more to set him off from all piety, by a fixed aversion, than to have gotten such impressions of it only, as he takes from this always unblessed, tedious, look of sanctimony. What can a poor child do, when the sense of nature and natural life, the smiles, glad voices, and cheerful notes of play, are all overcast and gloomed, or, as it were, forbidden, by that ghostly piety in which it is itself being brought up? And yet the world will wonder immensely at the strange perversity of the child that grows up under such a saintly training, to be known as a person mortally averse to religion! Why, it would be a much greater wonder if he could think of it even with patience I
Bigotry is another of these Christian vices, and yet no one will assume his
infallible capacity, in the matter of Christian training, as confidently as the
bigot. Has he not the truth? is he not opposite, as possible, to all error? has
any man a greater abhorrence of all
The vice of Christian
fanaticism operates, in another and different way, but with a commonly
disastrous effect. The fanatic is a man who mixes false fire with the true, and
burns with a partly diabolical heat. He means to be superlatively Christian, but
it happens that what he gets, above others, is the addition of something to his
passions, which would be more genuine, if it were in his affections. He
scorches, but never melts. He is most impatient of what is ordinary and common,
and does not sufficiently honor the solid works and experiences of that goodness
which is fixed and faithful. This kind of character makes a fiery element for
childish piety to grow in. What can the child become, or learn to be, where every
thing is in this key of excess? It is as if there were a simoon of piety
blowing through the house, and it dries away all gentle longings and
Another Christian vice is created by a censorious habit. Not by that habit of judging and condemning, which takes a pleasure in condemnation itself—that is the vice of a Christless character, not of a Christian—but there is a large class of disciples who think it a kind of duty, and a just acknowledgment of the fact, of human depravity, to be seeing always dark things. They judge evil judgments because they will be more faithful, and will be only doing to others just as they do to themselves. This habit is like a poisonous atmosphere in the house. It kills all springing sentiments of confidence and esteem. That charity which believeth all things, and hopeth all things, appears to be already stifled in it. What shall a child aspire to, when there is no really estimable growth, and good, and beauty, any where?
It is a great vice also, as regards the Christian training of
a family, that there is a habit in the parents of receiving nothing by
authority, and really disowning authority in all matters of religious. God
reigns himself by authority, and because he is God; and parents are to govern by
authority, partly, in the same manner. If the parent is a debater with God in
every thing, saying always No, to God, till he has gotten his proofs, the
Anxiousness is another infirmity, or vice of character, that has always a noxious effect in the training of Christian families. Where there is but a little faith, there is apt to be great anxiousness. And nothing will so dreadfully torment the life of a child, as to be perpetually teased by the anxious words and looks and interferences of this unhappy superintendence. And if the pretext given is a concern for the child's piety, the effect is only so much more disastrous. What can he think of piety, when it has only worried him at every play and every natural pleasure of his life? Just contrary to this feeble, half-believing, half-Christian vice of anxiety, the parental habit should be one of confidence; gladdened always in the faith that God is the child's covenanted keeper, and will never fail to guard the trust that is faithfully committed to his hands, never allow to grow up in sin what parental fidelity is training, by all reasonable diligence, for a godly life.
This enumeration of the moral and religious vices, that spot the
beauty and mar the completeness of character,
It may occur to some of you, as a
discouraging disadvantage, that, where one parent is duly qualified for the
training of the children in piety, the other is not, but is in fact, a real
hindrance to the right and safe proceeding
This,
then, is the conclusion to which we are brought; that qualifications are wanted
for this work as for almost no other, and that where they are really had, if it
be
"Feed me with food convenient
for me, lest I be full and deny thee and say, who is the Lord?"—
A MOST fit subject of prayer! And if the feeding of an adult person, such as Agur, has a connection so intimate with his religious life and character, how much more the feeding and the physical nurture of a child. I use the text, therefore, to introduce, for our present consideration, as a kind of first point, the food or feeding of children, and their physical treatment generally.
It will not be incredible to any thoughtful person, least of all to any
genuinely philosophic person, that the treatment and fare of the body has much
to do with the quality of the soul, or mind—its affinities, passions,
aspirations, tempers; its powers of thought and sentiment, its imaginations, its
moral and religious development. For the body is not only a house to the mind as
other houses are, which we may live in for a time with no perceptible effect on
our character, but it is a house in the sense of being the mind's own organ; its
external life itself, the medium of all its action, the instrument of its
thought and feeling, the inlet also
Hence
that most determined, almost proud, resolve of the apostle, when he declares—"I
will not be brought under the power of any." Under the body? No! he will scorn
that low kind of thraldom. Meats, drinks, appetites—none of these shall have the
mastery in him. He will assert the supreme right of the soul or person, above
the house it lives in; so God's preeminent right in the soul. He will say to
the body—"stay thou down there"—as they that fast do, in fasting; and, what is
more profoundly, more scientifically rational than fasting, when it is practiced
in the real insight of its reasons? It is the soul rising up, in God's name,
to assert herself over the body; over its appetites, passions, tempers, and, if
possible, distempers, And how often the poor, coarse, stupid, sensual, fast-
One must be a very inobservant person, not to have noticed, that all his finest and most God-ward aspirations are smothered under any load of excess, or overindulgence. It is as if the body were calling down all the other powers, even those of poetry, magnanimity, and religion, to help it do the scarcely possible work of digestion. At that point they gather. The sense of beauty is there, and the soul's angel of hope, and the testimony of God's peace, and the music of devotion, and the thrill of sermons, dosing, all together, and soughing in dull dreams round the cargo of poppies in the hold of the body. To raise any fresh sentiment is now impossible. Even prayer itself is mired, and can not struggle out. The news of some best friend's death can only be answered by dry interjections, and forced postures of grief, that will not find their meaning till to-morrow.
And much the same thing holds true, only under a different form, when the body is prematurely diseased and broken, by the excesses of self-indulgence. Its distempers will distemper the mind itself; its pains prick through into the sensibilities, even of the spiritual nature. Out of the pits of the body, dark clouds will steam up into the chambers of the soul, and all the devils of dyspepsia will be hovering in them, to scare away its peace, and choke the godlike possibilities, out of which its better motions should be springing.
So important a thing, for the religious life of the soul, is the feeding of the body. Vast multitudes of disciples have no conception of the fact. Living in a swine's body, regularly over-loaded and oppressed every day of their lives, they wonder that so great difficulties and discouragements rise up to hinder the Christian clearness of their soul. Could they but look into Agur's prayer, and take the meaning—feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, who is the Lord?—they would find a real gospel in it. And making it truly their own, they would dismiss, at once, whole armies of doubts; their faith would get wings to rise; they would rest their soul in an element of power, and peace and sweetness, and would run the way of God's commandments with a wonderful clearness and liberty.
I have spoken, thus briefly, to a fact of adult experience, because it is adult conviction which my subject needs to obtain. To simply look on children from without, and tell what effects will be wrought on their religious tempers and habit by their feeding, and the general nurture of their body, will not carry any depth of conviction by itself; for there is no creature of God less adequately understood, or conceived, than a child. And therefore it is that I appeal to parents, in this manner, requiring them to make some observation of themselves; to notice what becomes of them, and their sentiments, and senses of Christ and of God, when they are down under the burdens of an overloaded, or permanently diseased body.
The principle I am here asserting, as regards the religious import of feeding and bodily nurture, in the case of children, is the same on which the child Daniel and his friends acted, in the choice of their very simple and temperate diet. Whether Daniel had been brought up from his infancy in this manner does not appear. He may have been prompted to this choice, by a purely divine impulse. But whether he came into it by one method or the other, makes little difference; for, in either case, the most important matter is to observe the result, and that such kind of feeding was chosen, or instituted, for the sake of the result that would follow, on perfectly natural principles, viz: to give greater clearness to the religious perceptions and sentiments of the soul. The body grew toward perfect health, because it was burdened and distempered by no excesses. And the soul was just as much more open to God and the sense of unseen things, as the body was more serenely and blissfully well, in its physical condition. In this manner the child's nature grew apace, in the molds of a perfectly evened judgment, and was also wonderfully opened to God and all highest discoveries of his will. In a certain sense, he became a great prophet by his physical nurture—God gave him knowledge, thus, and skill, in all learning and wisdom, and he had understanding in all visions and dreams. His feeding stood with his health, and with all purest affinities and deepest openings toward God.
Let us glance a moment, now, at some of the points
The child is taken, when his
training begins, in a state of naturalness, as respects all the bodily tastes
and tempers, and the endeavor should be to keep him in that key; to let no
stimulation of excess, or delicacy, disturb the simplicity of nature, and no
sensual pleasuring, in the name of food, become a want or expectation of his
appetite. Any artificial appetite begun, is the beginning of distemper, disease,
and a general disturbance of natural proportion. Intemperance! the woes of
intemperate drink I how dismal the story, when it is told; how dreadful the
picture, when we look upon it. From what do the father and mother recoil, with
a greater and more total horror of feeling, than the possibility that their
child is to be a drunkard? Little do they remember that he can be, even before
he has so much as tasted the cup; and that they themselves can make him so,
virtually, without meaning it, even before he has gotten his language!
Nine-tenths .of the intemperate drinking begins, not in grief and destitution,
as we so often hear, but in vicious feeding. Here the scale of order and
simplicity is first broken, and then what shall a distempered or distemperate
life run to, more certainly, than to what is intemperate? False feeding genders
false appetite, and when the soul is burning, all through, in the fires of false
appetite, what is that but a universal uneasiness? and what will this uneasiness
more naturally do, than betake itself to
It is only a larger and more comprehensive mischief of the wrong
feeding of children, that it puts them under the body, teaches them to value
bodily sensations, makes them sensual every way, and sets them
And exactly this it will most certainly be, if first it
becomes the total childhood. We have a way of saying, continually, that children
are creatures of the
This, too, will be rendered yet more probable by reviewing,
briefly, some of the methods by which a
First of all, it will not be a permitted practice, to quiet the child in states of irritation, or stop it in crying, or pacify it in fits of ill-nature, by dainties that please the taste. What is this but a schooling and drawing out of sensation, by making it the reward of just that which is most totally opposite to self-government? It must be a very dull child that will not cry and fret a great deal, when it is so pleasantly rewarded. Trained, in this manner, to play ill-nature for sensation's sake, it will go on rapidly, in the course of double attainment, and will be very soon perfected, in the double character of an ill-natured, morbid, sensualist, and a feigning cheat beside. By what method, or means, can the great themes of God and religion get hold of a soul, that has learned to be governed only by rewards of sensation, paid to affectations of grief and deliberate actings of ill-nature?
Simplicity also, as opposed to luxuries, condiments, and
confections, is a condition of all right feeding for infancy and childhood,
which ought to approve itself to the most ordinary measure of parental
discretion. Of course I do not mean to say that the child is never to have his
holiday feast—that would be to cut him off from another kind of benefit—I only
insist that he is not to have a perpetual holiday, and be stimulated by
continual flavors on his organs, till the beautiful simplicity of his appetite
is gone and nothing pleases longer, but that which is intense
In a wise, physical nurture, it is a matter of great
import also to regulate the times of feeding. For this induces the sense of
order, which is closely allied to a habit of self-government. If the nursing
child is simply stuffed to its last limit, at any and all hours, then it is put
in the way, not of intelligent feeding, which is interspaced by rest, but of
always being filled to its limit. The feeding must, of course, be as much more
frequent in infancy as the demands of a more rapid consumption require, but
there should be times, and a degree of order established, as soon as possible;
otherwise the stuffing method will go on into childhood, and boyhood, and by
that time the bodily habit is in total disorder, carrying the tempers and
general character with it. The breakfast before breakfast, and the dinner before
dinner, and the casual snatching and feeding at all hours between, bring the
child to the table with a scowl upon his face, and a nervous, morbid look of
disgust, which declare, as plainly as possible, that there is nothing good
enough prepared for him; and, quite as plainly, that he is a poor, misgoverned
and spoiled child. He is overtaken by all the woes of sensuality, and yet has
gotten almost none of its pleasures; for he is always kept, by his irregular,
ungoverned feeding, so close up to the line. of possible appetite, that
peevishness and ill-nature are the spice of all his sensations, and his body and
soul are about equally distempered by the morbid irritations and dyspeptic woes
that have come upon them. What a preparation
It should
also be understood in the religious training of children, how great mischiefs
are likely to follow, when much is made of the pleasures of the table. If the
feeding is the great circumstance of the house and the day, if the discourse
turns always on the peculiar relish of this, or the wonderful delicacy of that,
and the main stress of life in general on the bliss of good living, it will not
much avail, that the parents have a certain wish to see their children grow up
in religion. A stranger falling into such a family, will be amazed to find how
pervasive and spirit-like this most unethereal, undiffusive kind of bliss may
be. The smack of appetite will seem to be in the atmosphere of the house. It
will be as if the gastric nerve of the family were become the whole brain. A
certain coarseness of feeling and character will appear in every thing. The
grain will be coarse, both of body and soul; and the general expression of
manners, faces, and voices, will be such as indicates a reduction of grade, in
all the finer impulses of society, intelligence, and duty. The family affections
themselves will seem to have fallen back, to make room for the valued bliss of
the appetites. No matter how much of prayer and regular church-going there may
be in such a family, the child brought up in it has a most sad fortune to bear,
in the savoring habit to which it trains him. Nor is it only in some high
conditioned family, where wealth is steeping itself in
It is a much greater point, in this connection, than is
commonly supposed, that children should be trained to good manners in their
eating. Good manners are a kind of self-government which operates continually to
keep the body under, and hold the sensualizing tendency of food in check.
Animals have no manners, and the higher gift of manners is allowed to man, to
keep him from the coarseness and lowness to which his animal nature would
otherwise run. In this view, good manners are even a sort of first-stage
religion, for the reduction of the body. If the child is practiced carefully, at
his food, in deferring to superiors and seniors; in the restraint of haste, or
greediness; in the proprieties of positions, and the handsome uses of tools; in
the limitation of his feeding by his wants, and a good-natured submission to
restriction when restriction is needed for his good; he will not grow sensual in
that manner, but his mind will be all the while getting sovereignty
There is great importance also, for a similar reason, in the
observance of a Christian blessing, or giving of thanks at the table. The mere
form, taken only as a constantly recurring acknowledgment of God and the
obligations of gratitude, laid on the family by his goodness, is a matter of
inestimable value. The bare recollection of a higher nature and the higher
meaning of life, coupled uniformly thus with the order of the table, qualifies
the lower sensations, and raises them to a kind of spiritual dignity It is even
a pitiful figure, in this view, which the great Franklin makes, when, with so
little show of philosophy, saying nothing of Christian reverence, he recites, in
a manner of evident pleasure, the wit of his boyhood: asking his father, at the
packing of his barrel of meat, why he did not say grace over the whole barrel at
once, and save the necessity of so many repetitions? These repetitions are the
very things most wanted. They compose the liturgy of the table, and have their
value, not in the quantities of meat they season, but in the seasoning of the
partakers themselves, by so many reiterations of their, at least, formal homage
and gratitude. At the same time there should be much care taken to make these
blessings of the table more than a form; to connect a real and felt meaning with
them, and make them the expression of a living and true
Much also may be done for children, by associating subjects, and sentiments, and plans of practical charity, with the blessings and pleasures of the table. To do this requires no very ingenious methods, or deeply studied plans. It will be done almost, of course, if the parents themselves are, at all, given to such things; for, in such a case, they can hardly fail to speak of the children of the poor, and the bitter pains and pinings of their unsatisfied hunger. If the appetites of children are eager and easily turned to a habit of sensuality, their sympathies also are quick, and their compassions wonderfully tender. Let these last be called into play, and kept in play, as they may be always by a few simple words of charity, and proposed acts of bounty to the children of want, and the former, the appetites, will become incentives even habitually, to what is noblest in feeling and remotest from a properly sensual character. The body itself becomes the interpreter, in such a case, of want, and offers itself dutifully to mercy, to be used as its organ.
Such are a few of the suggestions that require to be
noted and observed, in the right feeding of children Others will occur to you
daily, as your work goes on, if only you are really awake to the transcendent
importance of the subject. Let it never be assumed, for one moment, that you are
now doing nothing and can be doing nothing for your children, because you are
only feeding their bodies. A very considerable part of your parental charge lies
just here; in giving your children such a nurture in the body, as makes them
superior to the body; subordinates the passions, and evens the tempers of the
body; prepares them to a state of robust and massive healthiness; gives them
clearer heads, and nobler sentiments of truth; preparing them, in that manner,
to be good scholars, to have their affectional nature opened wide by a general
love, to have their perceptive feeling quickened to all highest forms of beauty
and good, and so to have them ready, more and more ready, for a state of
eternally unsealed affinity with God. There is not any thing, in the highest
ranges of their spiritual and religious nature, that will not be somehow
affected, and powerfully too, by the feeding of their bodies. Even their
conscience itself, which is God's own organ or throne, so to speak, in their
nature—the most self-asserting and, as we should say, most indestructible of all
their powers—can be made to ring out clear and true, like a bell in the night,
or it can be stifled and choked, so as scarcely to be audible—all by the mere
feeding of the body. So there is a feeding that makes a manly life, and a
feeding that makes a mean, weak,
To complete this view of the bodily nurture and keeping, something ought also to be said of personal neatness, and also of dress, in both of which the bodily habit is concerned, though in a more external and less decisive way.
As regards the matter of personal neatness, I
will only suggest the very close relationship of association between it, as a
habit, and the spiritual habit of the soul in religion. In this holy endeavor of
grace, or religion, the soul aspires to be clean. Conscious of great defilement
in sin, it hears a call to come and be made white, even as the snow. It begins
with the
There is also this very peculiar excellence in neatness, that it is not ambitious, not for show, but more for what it is in itself—an honest kind of benefit, or good, that brings along no bad or false motive with it. Hence there is no temptation in the practice. Honor and ornament and grace of poverty, as it often is, it is only the more truly such, that it simply fulfills and perpetuates a fixed necessity, looking after no reward, save what it is to itself. Formed to such a habit, and scarcely conscious of it, the children grow into a kind of pure simplicity in good, which is itself one of the finest symbols and surest outward preparations of the religious life and character.
The subject of dress, taken as related to religious character in youth, is one of transcendent importance, but as I am treating mostly of what is to be lone for children, in the few first years of their training, I shall dismiss the subject with only a few suggestions, such as my particular purpose appears to require.
There is this very singular and striking contrast between animals and men, that
they are born dressed, and these to be dressed; while yet the fact of a dress is
equally necessary to both. The object of the distinction appears to be, to
allow, in the latter case, a certain liberty of form and appearance, even as
there is given a grand central liberty of life and character within. It allows
us to choose what shall be added to finish out our form, or appearing; and it
is a singular fact, in this connection, that we always take our dress to be, in
some sense, ourselves; just as if it grew out
Hence the dreadful mischief done to a child, by what may be
called the dolling of it; that is, by dressing, or over-dressing it, just to
please, or amuse, or, what is really more true, to tickle a certain weak and
foolish pride in the parents. What meantime has become of that most tender and
godly concern, which belongs to the Christian charge put upon them, in the gift
of this same
child? It takes whole months, how often, to get the child's looks and dress into
such trim that it can be offered by them for baptism, making the desired impression;
And then, afterwards, the dressing goes on still, in faithful keeping with its sad beginning. In a few days this same child appears, marching the streets, in the figure of a little gentleman with a cane; or if it be a daughter, hung with necklaces and chains, and set off with as much of finery as can well be supported—visibly conscious, in either case, of the fine show being made; even!. the foolish parents, it might fitly despise, were just now admiring their doll at home, and praising to itself the pretty figure it made!
Is this now the dress of a Christian child? is this such a dress as a properly Christian nurture prescribes? What is this child training for, but simply to be a fop, or fashionist, or fool? This taste for show, and finery, and flattery—what is it but the beginning of all irreligion? and what will the after life be, but the continuance of this beginning?
Just contrary to this, whoever
will bring up a child for God, must put him, at the very first, into God's modes
and measures. The real question of dress, is what shall be put upon this child,
to make it feel most like a Christian—what will give him the finest feeling
with the least of show and vanity? What will leave him in a state most natural.
and simple, and farthest from affectation? What will be most like to the
"Fathers provoke not your children to
anger, lest they be discouraged."—
DISCOURAGED, the apostle means, in good; that is, in worthy purposes and pious endeavors. Nothing will more certainly put a child in a discouraged feeling, than to be angered by a parent's ill-nature and abuse. The anger is, most certainly, far enough from being itself a state of discouragement; but anger is a passion that can not hold long and the after state into which it subsides, in the case of inferiors and dependants, is commonly a giving up to the bad, a passionless and low desperation, that is equivalent to a general surrender of all high aims and aspirations.
In this view, it would not be altogether amiss, and certainly no improper use of the apostle's words, if I were to offer under them a lecture to parents, on the provoking ways of treatment and government. But I have chosen them for a different purpose, and one that is more inclusive, viz: to introduce and give sanction to a discourse on—
The discouragement of piety in children; the ways in which it is discouraged, and the great care necessary to avoid a mistake so injurious.
I speak here, of course, to parents who really desire the spiritual welfare of their children. Nothing is farther off from their design, than to push their children away from Christ into a state of alienated and discouraged feeling. And yet they do it, very often, by faults of management not suspected, and never afterwards discovered; unless, possibly, after the injury is done, when it can no longer be repaired.
It becomes, in this view, a very serious and practically important question, how, or by what methods, Christian parents, unawares to themselves and contrary to their really good intentions, discourage piety in their children? Let us see if we can partially answer the question.
We begin, then, where the apostle begins with his remonstrance. His
language is particularly addressed to fathers; for he seems to have in view the
case of children, who are in the more advanced stages of childhood, or in what
we call the period of youth. And yet the language is equally applicable to the
case of mothers and very little children. It might not be wholly amiss for a
half-grown lad, or youth, who has violated his father's feelings, by some really
base act of crime, or disobedience, to see, by the smoke of his indignant
passion, how deeply his right sensibility is revolted. That will never
discourage him in any thing good. It might even rouse his moral nature, when
nothing less violent would suffice. The father will really discourage good in
his son, only when he stings him with a sense of injustice, and keeps him in a
wounded feeling,
Children are also discouraged and hardened to
good by too much of prohibition. There is a monotony of continuous, ever
sounding, prohibition, which is really awful. It does not stop with ten
commandments, like
Again, it is a great discouragement to piety in children, when
they are governed in a hard, unfeeling, way or in a manner of force and
overbearing absolutism
Another and even more common way of
discouraging children ill matters of piety is by an over-exacting manner, or by
an extreme difficulty of being pleased. Children love approbation, and are
specially disappointed, when they fail of it in their meritorious endeavors.
Their chagrin is nevermore complete, in fact, than when, having set themselves
to any purpose of well-doing, they are still repulsed by a manner of
fault-finding at the end, and blamed on account of some trivial defect which
they did not know, and would really have tried to avoid. Some parents appear to
think it a matter of true faithfulness, that they be not too easily pleased,
lest their children should take up loose impressions of the strictness of duty.
They do not consider how they would fare themselves, if God were to make a point
of treating them in the same manner. His manner with them is exactly opposite.
He perceives that he will only repel them, by making it a matter of difficulty
to please him, and that he could never draw them on, if he did not yield them
his smile under great faults and shortcomings, and did not give them the
testimony that they please him, when they are a great way off from his own scale
of perfection. In all which we may readily see how great discouragement is put
upon children, in all their good attempts, when their parents will not allow
themselves to be pleased with any thing they do. Possibly they are withheld by
scruples of orthodoxy. If so, the mischief is only the greater. What can win a
child to the
Closely akin to this, is the fault of
holding displeasure too long, and yielding it with too great difficulty. It is
right that children, doing wrong, should encounter some kind of treatment that
indicates displeasure. But the displeasure should not take the manner of a
grudge, and hold on after the wrong is visibly felt and repented of. On the contrary, there should even be a hastening toward the child, in glad
recognitions and cordial greetings, when the tokens only of relenting begin to
appear; even as the prodigal's father is represented, in the parable, as
discovering him, in his return, when he is yet a great way off, and advancing to
meet and embrace him. By this tender figure God is shown us, and the holy
generosity of his fatherhood is represented. We see that he is only the more
ready to be pleased, because of his magnanimity; holding no resentments, putting
off the feeling of offense at the earliest moment, and the cheapest possible
rate. Nay, He will even take our good by anticipation; accepting us for what we
ask, before he can accept us for what we are. Well is it for those parents who
think it incumbent on them, to hold their displeasure till the culprit is
sufficiently scathed by it, if they do not hold it just a little too long;
turning, thus, even his repentance into a sullen aversion, and setting it in his
feeling, that there
And here let me speak of the
very great danger, after a time of discipline, that the parent may hold his
displeasure too long; as he certainly will, if there is any ugly feeling, or
wicked, natural resentment in him. Thus Jean Paul beautifully says:—"A
punishment is scarcely of such importance to a child as the succeeding quarter
of an hour, and the transition to forgiveness. After the storm, the seed finds
the soil warm and softened; the terror and hatred of the punishment are now
past, which before resisted and struggled against the word, and gentle
instruction finds its way, and brings healing with it, as honey assuages the
sting of bees, and oil the pain of a wound. In this hour we can say much, if
we use the utmost gentleness of voice, and by the manifestation of our own
pain, soothe that of the child. But every continuance of wintry anger is
poisonous. Mothers easily fall into this prolongation of punishment. This
continuance of anger; this would-be punishment of pretending a diminution of
love, either fails to be comprehended by the child, because he is wholly
immersed in the present and so misses its effect, or else he becomes satisfied
with a deprivation of the signs of love, and learns to do without it; or else he
is embittered by the continuance of punishment for a sin which he has already
buried. Through this prolongation of harshness, we lose that beautiful and
touching
Hasty and false accusations again are a
great discouragement to piety in children. Their good feeling, or intention,
appears to be rated low by their parents, when they are put under the ban of
dishonor, by false and groundless imputations; and they are very likely, as the
next thing, to show that they are no better than they were taken to be. On this
account, a wise parent will be religiously careful of all volunteer and random
charges of blame, lest he may discourage fatally all pious or ingenuous
aspirations by them; for to batter self-respect, or insult the sense of
character, thus gratuitously, is the surest way possible to break every natural
charm of virtue and religion. The effect is scarcely better where acknowledged
faults are exaggerated, and set off in colors of derision. It will do for a
parent to be just, severely just; for, by that means, he will best impress the
sacred severity of principle. God is just in all his charges and reproofs; but
there is no manner of excess or spirit of exaggeration in them. And exactly this
it is which makes his kindness so beautiful, so inspiring to our courage, so
attractive to our love. But harsh justice, exaggerated justice, is injustice.
When a child, therefore, is persecuted by railing words, cauterized by satire,
blamed without reason or measure for faults not easily corrected, the severity
is really unprincipled as well as unfriendly, and is only the more dreadfully
mischievous, that it takes on airs of piety,
We bring into view a different class of discouraging causes,
when we speak of that anxiousness, or always miserable concern, for children, by
which some parents keep them in a continual torment of suppression. We have
really no right to allow a properly anxious feeling any where. Anxiety is a word
of unbelief, or unreasoning dread. Full faith in God puts it at rest; any solid
conviction of necessity and right is chloroform to the pain of it. And we have
the less right to be anxious, that it is a feeling which destroys the comfort of
others whenever and wheresoever it appears. Only to be in a room with an anxious
person, though a stranger, is enough to make one positively unhappy; for the manner, the nervous unsteadiness, and worry, and shift, are so irresistibly
expressive, that no effort of silence, or suppression, is able to conceal the
torment. To go a journey thus with an anxious person, is about the worst kind of
pilgrimage. What then is the woe put upon a hapless little one or child, who is
shut up day by day and year by year, to the always fearing look and deprecating
Again, it will be found that piety is very commonly discouraged in
children, by giving them tests of character that are inappropriate to their age.
There is an immense cruelty put upon children here, by parents who have really
no design but simply to be faithful. Their child, for example, loses his temper
in some matter in which he is crossed; and the conclusion is forthwith sprung
upon him that he has a bad heart, and is certainly no Christian child. Whereupon
he ceases to pray; or, if he is put to it as a form, does it with an averted and
reluctant feeling, as if the wrong were conclusive against his prayers. It is
only necessary to ask how the father, how the mother would themselves fare,
tested by the same rule? If irritation, passion, any loss of temper, is
conclusive against the little being who has scarcely begun to be practiced in
self-government,
I must also speak of another and more general mode of discouragement, in
what may be called the holding back, or holding aloof system, by which children
are denied an early recognition of their membership in the church, and an
admission to the Lord's table. I have spoken of this membership already, in
another place, and shall also speak, hereafter, of the supper in its more
positive uses. What I now refer to, more especially, is the negatively bad or
discouraging effect thrown upon their piety, by these methods of detention, or
exclusion. The child giving evidence, however beautiful, of his piety, is still
kept back from the fellowship and table of Christ, for the simple defect of
years. As if years were one of the Scripture evidences of grace. Sometimes the
difficulty is that he can speak of no experience, or change, such as we call
conversion; and sometimes, if he can, that he is yet too young to be confided
in. And so it turns out, after all that is said of the membership initiated in
baptism, that nothing is practically made of it, or allowed to be made of it.
The membership it creates is only a disjunctive conjunction; words for a show,
answered by no conditions or consequences of fact. The poor child still is
virtually counted or assumed to be an alien, required to be converted in just
the same fashion as all heathens are, and to show the fact by the same kind of
evidences. The little, saintly daughter, for example, of a venerable
Presbyterian minister, aching for a place at the Lord's
The chilling, desolating effect of this very unnatural and cruel practice, will be understood without difficulty. No plan could be devised for the discouragement of piety in children, that would be more certain of its object. They are only mocked and tantalized by their baptism itself. They are thrust away and kept aloof from the communion of Christ, for reasons that make it impossible for them to be reliably Christian. And so their courage is broken down, and all their religious longings are crippled, just when they most want grace and sympathy to draw them on.
The remedy is plain. In the
first place, there ought to be some exercise or service in every church, to
which the baptized children may be called, in common with the adult members,
there to be recognized in a begun relationship. They should be formally
addressed and prayed with. But the chief exercise, in which they can as heartily
partake as any, should be the singing
In the next place, there should be some arrangement, in which it is understood that children, piously disposed, though not confirmed or accepted formally as members on their own account, may be allowed, either on consultation with the pastor or without, to come to the Lord's table for the time, on the score of their initial membership in baptism, and their hopefully gracious character. In this manner, some confidence will be shown that they are going to claim their place, in full church relations, as soon as they are better matured in character and evidences; and this kind of confidence will have great power with them, to encourage and support their struggles, and help them forward into an established Christian life.
And then, once more, no child should ever be kept back from a complete and
formal, or formally professed, membership in the body of Christ, simply because
of his age. Some children will give more reliable evidence of Christian
character at seven years of age than others at fourteen. Were every thing as it
should be, and as the most genuine ideas of baptism and Christian nurture
suppose, nearly all the subjects would be found
While the church cooperates, in this manner, cherishing the baptized children as her own, it is understood, of course, that parents are to be engaged in putting forward their children and preparing them to bear the Christian profession. They are not to assume that the matter of true prudence here is all on one side, the side of detention; as if there were nothing to be sure of, but that their children do not get on too fast. If that were all, it were the easiest thing in the world to settle every question, by the argument of delay; which negative grace, alas! is about the only kind of function some parents are equal to. No, this grip of detention is not any so easy and safe kind of duty. It may put the child by his time for life. It may fatally discourage all his beginnings of godliness, and may so far choke his growth in good that he will never be recovered.
The matters which I have gathered up in this discourse, it is not to
be denied, my brethren, make a melancholy picture. When we discover in how many
ways even Christian parents themselves discourage the piety of their children,
it ceases to be any wonder that they so often turn out badly, and come to a sad
figure in their life. There are very few children brought up in Christian
families, who do not, at some time, show a particular openness and tenderness to
the calls of religion. These flowering times of piety, ought to be all
Here, too, is the solution of, alas! how many cases, where Christian parents speak, with great sadness, of a time when this or that child, now utterly submerged under the world, or the world's vices, was greatly exercised in matters of religion, fond of prayer, wanting even to be admitted to Christ's table. How many children have been discouraged, kept back, with just the same effect! Treated as if their piety was impossible, how could it become a fact? O, if they had been wisely and skillfully encouraged, assisted, led along, how different probably the state and character in which they would now be found!
A heavy shade is here thrown, too,
upon all those sorrowful regrets in which Christian parents bewail what they
call the mystery of their lot, in having children grown up to a prayerless and
godless maturity. Alas! it is too easy, in most cases, to account for this
"One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity."—
TO BE a Christian bishop,
whether in a clergy of one order or of three, is to be set in a high office,
demanding high qualifications. What may be taken as qualifications, the apostle
is here specifying; and among the rest, he names the character evinced by
maintaining a good and sound government in the house. "For if a man know not how
to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?" A very
singular test, in one view, for a Christian bishop; one that passes by the
matter of learning and eloquence, and church reputation, laying hold, instead,
of a gift in which some very ordinary men, and not a few ordinary women, excel.
And with good reason; for, in fact, how very much alike, in the elements of
merit and success, are all that purchase to themselves a good degree, in
whatever rank, or sphere—alike in fidelity, order, patience, steadiness,
attention, application to the charge that is given them. Nay, when the apostle
drops in thoughtfully what he takes to be the same thing in effect, as ruling
one's house well, viz: "the having his children in subjection with all gravity,"
the words themselves,
Family Government, then, is the subject here suggested for discussion. And we naturally endeavor—
I To ascertain what is the true conception of family government.
Of
course it is to be government; about that there ought to be no hesitation. It is
not to be a mere nursing, or dressing, or provisioning agency; not to be an
exhorting, advising, consulting relationship; not to be a lavishing of devotion,
or parental self-sacrifice; but the radical constitutive idea, that in which it
becomes family government, is that it governs, uses authority, maintains law and
rules, by a binding and loosing power, over the moral nature of the child.
Parents, it would sometimes appear, fall into a practical ambiguity here—as if
the governing power were a kind of severity, or harsh assumption; not perceiving
that, by common consent, we speak of an ungoverned family as the synonym of a
disorderly, wretched, and dishonored, if not ruined, family. There is no greater
cruelty, in fact, than this same false tenderness, which is the bane of so many
families. There is a kind of cruelty indeed, which is exactly opposite, and
misses the idea of government on the other side, viz: that brutish manner of
despotic will and violence, which makes no appeal to the moral nature at all,
driving straight by, upon the
But when we have reached this point, that family government is to govern, we shall find that multitudes of parents who assume the Christian name, have yet no practical sense of the intensely religious character of the house, or the domestic and family state. They go into their office loosely, and without any conception, for the most part, of what their authority means. This, I will now undertake to show, drawing out especially the points in which they most commonly seem to fall below the real sense of their office, in the opinions they hold concerning it.
First
of all, their family government is never conceived, in its true nature, except
when it is regarded as a vicegerent authority, set up by God, and ruling in his
place. Instead of creating us outright, God has seen fit to give us existence
under laws of reproduction; having it for his object, in the family order and
relationship, to set us forth, under a kind of experience in the small, and in
terms of sense, that faithfully typify our wider relationship to Him, the
eternal Father and invisible Ruler of the worlds. We are infants too, men and
women in the small, that we may be as flexible in our will as possible. Our
parents, if they are godly themselves, as by the supposition they will be, are
to
Again, it is another point, very commonly overlooked,
or forgotten, that parental government is genuine, only as it bears rule for the
same ends that God Himself pursues, in the religious order of the world. True
family government will be just as religious as His, neither more nor less. It
will have exactly the same ends and no other. Just here, accordingly, is the
main root of mischief and failure in the government of Christian families. The
parents are not Christian enough to think of bearing rule for strictly Christian
ends. They drop into a careless, irresponsible way, and rule for any thing that
happens to chime with their own feeling or convenience. They want their children
to shine, or be honorable, or rich, or brave, or fashionable; so to serve
themselves in them, or their pride, or their mere natural fondness. They bring
in, thus, bad motives to corrupt all government, and even to corrupt themselves.
If they have some care of piety in their government, it is a kind of amphibious
care, sometimes in one element and sometimes in another. They are never truly
and heartily in God's ends. And the result is that what they do in the name of
religion, or to inculcate religion, shows their want of appetite, and has really
no effect but to make both God's authority and theirs irksome.
Closely related is the conviction to be firmly held, that
family discipline, rightly administered, is to secure, and may secure, a style
of obedience in the child that amounts to a real piety. If we speak of
conversion, family government should be a converting ordinance, as truly as
preaching. For observe and make due account of this single fact, that when a
child is brought to do any one thing from a truly right motive, and in a
genuinely right spirit, there is implied in that kind of obedience, the
acceptance of all best and holiest principle. I do not mean, of course, that
children are to be made Christians by the rod, or by any summary process of
requirement. There is no such short method of compulsory piety here, as some are
reported to have held, or put in exercise. But it is not absurd to expect and
aim to realize in the family, a genuine spirit of obedience; obedience, that is,
front the principle that God enthrones, and which underlies all piety—just what
the apostle means, if I understand him rightly, by having children "in
subjection with all gravity." In the phrase "all gravity," he is looking at a
kind of obedience that touches the deepest notes
Having so far indicated what is the true idea of family government as a Divine institution, let us next inquire—
II. By what methods it will best fulfill its gracious tnd beneficent purposes?
It is hardly necessary to say that the vicegerent office to
be maintained, and the gracious ends to be secured, make it indispensable that
parents should them;3elves be living in the Spirit, and be so tempered by their
faithful walk, as to have the Christly character on them. Nothing but this will
so lift their aims, quiet their passions, steady their measures and proceedings,
as to give them that personal authority which is requisite. For this authority
of which I speak supposes much—so much of grace and piety, that God is expressed
in the life; so much as to even it in all principle, fasten it in all moderation
of truth and justice, gladden it in heaven's liberty and peace, and, above all,
clear it of sanctimony; for if any thing will drive a poor child mad with
disgust of religion, it is to be tormented day and night with the drawlings and
mock solemnities of a merely sanctimonious piety. Children love the realities,
and are worried by all shams of character. If then parents can not be deep
enough in religion to live it naturally, and have it as an element of gladness,
clear of all sanctimony, it is doubtful whether they might not better be even
farther off from the semblance of it than they pretend to be. Of this one thing
they may be sure, that they get no addition of personal authority by any thing
put on; or by any prescribed longitudes of expression. The most profoundly real
thing in the world is this matter of personal authority. Jesus had it as no
other ever had,
There is also another
precondition of authority in parents closely related to this; I mean that they
be so far entered into the Christian order of marriage, as to fulfill gracefully
what belongs to the relation in which they are set, and show them to the
children as doing fit honor to each other. By a defect just here, all authority
in the house is blasted. Thus Dr. Tiersch, in his excellent little treatise on
the Christian Family Life, says:—"A wife can not weaken the authority of the
father without undermining her own, for her authority rests upon his, and if
that of the mother is subordinated to that of the father, yet it is but one
authority, which can not be weakened in either of the two who bear it, without
injury to both. The mother, therefore, must consider it a matter of family
decorum which is not to be broken, never even in little matters to contradict
the father in the presence of the children, except with the reservation of a
modest admission of his right of decision, and that in cases which admit of no
delay. But just as much is it the duty of the husband to leave the authority of
his wife unassailed in the presence of other members of the household; and when
he is obliged to overrule her objections, to do it in a tender and kindly form
If he turns to her with roughness and harshness from jealousy of his place of
rule, it is not only the heart of his wife which is estranged from him; with the
Again it is
of the highest importance in family government, that parents understand how
early it begins—how easily, in fact, the great question of rule and obedience
may be settled, or well-nigh settled, before the time of verbal order and
commandment arrives. Thus there is what may be fitly called a Christian handling
for the infant state, that makes a most solid beginning of government. It is the
even handling of repose and gentle affection, which lays a child down to its
sleep so firmly, that it goes to sleep as in duty bound; which teaches it to
feed when food is wanted, not when it can be somehow made uneasy, or the mother
is uneasy for it; which refuses to wear out the night in laborious caresses and coaxings, that only reward the cries they endeavor to compose; which places the
child so firmly, makes so little of the protests of caprice in it, wears a look
so gentle and loving, and goes on with such evenness of system, that the child
feels itself to be, all the while, in another will, and that a good will;
consenting thus, by habit and quietly, to be lapped in authority, lust as it
consents to breathe, in the lap of nature and her atmospheric laws. And so it
becomes a thoroughly
We come now to the age of language, or the age when words begin to be used to express requirement and authority. Indeed this will be done, assisted by tones and signs of manner, even before the child itself is able to speak.
And here it is to be noted that much depends upon the tone of command, or the kinds of emphasis employed. It is a great mistake to suppose that what will make a child stare, or tremble, impresses more authority. The violent emphasis, the hard, stormy voice, the menacing air, only weakens authority; it commands a good thing as if it were only a bad, and fit to be no way impressed, save by some stress of assumption. Let the command be always given quietly, as if it had some right in itself, and could utter itself to the conscience by some emphasis of its own. Is it not well understood that a bawling and violent teamster has no real government of his team? Is it not practically seen that a skillful commander of one of those huge floating cities, moved by steam on our American waters, manages and works every motion by the waving of a hand, or by signs that pass in silence; issuing no order at all, save in the gentlest undertone of voice? So when there is, or is to be, a real order and law in the house, it will come of no hard and boisterous, or fretful and termagant way of commandment. Gentleness will speak the word of firmness, and firmness will be clothed in the airs of true gentleness.
Nor let any one think that such kind of authority is going to
be disrespected, or disregarded, because it moves no fright or fear in the
subjects. That will depend on the fidelity of the parent to what he has
commanded. How many do we see, who fairly rave in authority, and keep the
tempest up from morning to night, who never stop to see whether any thing they
Nay, I will go farther; there is a certain use in having a child, in the first stages of government, feel the pressure of law as a restriction. For, as the law of God is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, so there is a like relation between law and liberty in the training of the house. It is by a certain friction, if I may so speak, on the moral nature, a certain pressure of control, not always welcome, that the sense of law gets hold of us. Observances that we do not like, prepare us to a kind of obedience, further on, that is free—that welcomes the same command because it is good, the same authority because it is wholesome and right. And so it comes to pass that a son, grown almost to manhood, will gladly serve the house, and yield to his parents a kind of homage that even anticipates their wishes, just because he has learned to be in subjection, with all gravity, under restrictions that were once a sore limit on his patience.
At the same time it should never be forgotten, in this due
assertion of authority and restrictive law, that there is a great difference
between the imperative and
Another qualification here
to be observed, belongs to what may be called the emancipation of the child. A
wise parent understands that his government is to be crowned by an act of
emancipation; and it is a great problem, to accomplish that emancipation
gracefully. Pure authority, up to the last limit of minority, then a total,
instantaneous self-possession, makes an awkward transition. A young eagle kept
in the nest and brooded over till his beak and talons are. full-grown, then
pitched out of it and required to take care of himself, will most certainly be
dashed upon the ground. The emancipating process, in order to be well finished,
should begin early, and should pass imperceptibly,
Is it necessary to add that a parent who governs at the point of authority will not, of course, allow himself to be known only as a bundle of commandments? In order to have authority, he must have life, sympathy, feeling unbent in play. He must connect a gospel with his law, and so instead of being a law over the house, he must undertake to be a law written in the heart; winning love as commanding out of love, consummating obedience, by the glad and joyous element in which he bathes the playful homage and trust of his children.
As to the motives addressed by
family government
There is, then, to be such a thing as penalty, or punishment,
in the government of the house. And here again is a place where large
consideration is requisite.
Punishments should be severe enough to serve their purpose;
and gentle enough to show, if possible, a tenderness that is averse from the
infliction. There is no abuse more shocking, than when they are administered
There is great importance in the closing of a penal
discipline. Thus it should be a law never to cease from the discipline begun,
whatever it be, till the chill is seen to be in a feeling that justifies the
discipline. He is never to be let go, or sent away, sulking, in a look of
willfulness unsubdued. Indeed, he should even be required
In order to realize this Christian issue of discipline, it is sometimes recommended that the child should be first prayed with, and made conscious, in that manner, of his own wrong, as before God, and of the truly religious intentions by which the parent is actuated. No rule of this kind can be safely given; for there is great danger that the child will begin to associate prayer and religion with his pains of discipline; than which nothing could be more hurtful. It would be far better, in most cases, if the prayer were to follow, coming in to express and gladden his already glad repentances.
There are many things remaining still to be said, in order to a complete view of the subject; but there are two simple cautions that must not be omitted, and with these I close—
1. Observe that great care is needed in the processes
2. Have it as a caution that, in holding a
magisterial relation, asserting and maintaining law, discovering and redressing
wrong, you are never, as parents, to lose out the parental; never to check the
demonstrations of your love; never to cease from the intercourse of play. If you
assert the law, as you must, then you must have your gospel to go with it; your
pardons judiciously dispensed, your Christian sympathies flowing out in modes of
Christian concern, your whole administration tempered by tenderness. Above all,
see that your patience is not easily broken, or exhausted. If your authority is
not established in a day, you have small reason, in that fact, to be fretted, or
discouraged
"And the streets of the city shall
be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof."—
HAPPY days are these that figure in the prophet's vision. The people of the city are accustomed to scenes that are widely different, and give a peculiar zest to his picture. In the times of pestilence, in the horrors of the siege, in the sweeping out of captivity, what silence of desolation have they seen—the silence of ghastly death, the silence of gaunt famine, the silence of emptiness and depopulated life. It shall no more be so; the city shall be God's mountain, sheltered under his care, exempt from all the past desolations of pestilence and war—peaceful, populous, secure, and strong. All which is shown by two simple touches that make out the complete picture—"There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls, playing in the streets thereof."
We can see, too, for ourselves that the prophet's feeling goes
into his picture; and that he has a natural delight in it himself. He sees the
venerable crones
I draw it, accordingly, from this beautiful touch of the prophet's picture, that religion loves too much the plays and pleasures of childhood, to limit or suppress them by any kind of needless austerity.
Having set the young of all the animal races a playing, and made their beginning an age of frisking life and joyous gambol, it would be singular if God had made the young of humanity an exception; or if, having put the same sportive instinct in their make, he should restrict them always to a carefully practical and sober mood. What indeed does he permit us to see, in the universal mirth-time which is given to be the beginning of every creature's life, but that He takes a certain pleasure in their exuberant life, and regards their gambols with a fatherly satisfaction? What, too, shall we judge, but that as all instincts are inserted for that to which they tend, so this instinct of play in children is itself an appointment of play?
Besides, there is a very sublime
reason for the play-state of childhood which respects the moral and religious
well-being of manhood, and makes it important that we should have our first
chapter of life in this key. Play is the symbol and interpreter of liberty,
that is, Christian
Holding this conception of the uses, and the very great
importance of play, as a natural interpreter of what is highest and last in the
grand problem of our life itself, we are led, on sober and even religious conviction, to hold in high estimation
the age of play. As play is the forerunner of religion. so religion is to be
On the same principle, it has an excellent effect to
make much of the birthdays of children, because it shows them, little and
dependent as they are, to be held in so much greater estimation in the house. When
they have each their own day, when that day is so remembered and observed as to
indicate a real and felt interest in it by all, then the home in which they are
so
On the same principle, too, public days and festivals, those of the school, those of the state, and those of religion, are to be looked upon with favor, as times in which they are to be gladdened by the shows, and plays, and simple pleasures appropriate to the occasions; care being only taken to put them in no connection with vice, or any possible excess. Let them see what is to be seen, enjoy what is to be enjoyed, and shun with just so much greater sensibility whatever is loose, or wild, or wicked.
Religious festivals have a peculiar value to children; such I mean as
the festivals of Thanksgiving and Christmas—one a festival of thanks for the
benefits of Providence, the other for the benefits of that supernatural
providence which has given the world a Saviour and a salvation. Both are
religious, and, in that fact, have their value; for nothing will go farther to
remove the annoyance of a continual, unsparing, dry restraint upon the soul of
childhood, and produce a feeling, as respects religion, of its really genial
character, than to have it bring its festive and joyously commemorative days.
One of the great difficulties in a properly religious nurture is, that religion
has to open its approaches to the soul, and make its beginnings in the shape of
law; to say God requires of you this, forbids you in that, makes it your life to
be set in all ways of obedience. It takes on thus a guise of constraint, and so
far wears a repulsive look; but if it can show how genial it
Happily there is now such an abundance of games and
plays prepared for the entertainment of children, that there is no need of
allowing them in any that stand associated with vice. Those plays are generally
to be most favored that are to be had only in the open air, and in forms of
exercise that give sprightliness and robustness to the body. At the same time,
there needs to be a preparation of devices for the entertainment of children
indoors in the evening; for the prophet did not give it as a picture of the
happy days of Jerusalem, that the streets of the city should be full of boys and
girls playing
Meantime some care must be exercised, that the religious life itself be never set in an attitude of repugnance to the plays of childhood. There must be no attempt to raise a conscience against play. Any such religion will certainly go to the wall; any such conscience will be certainly trampled, and things innocent will be done as if they were crimes; done with a guilty feeling; done with as bad effects every way, on the character, as if they were really the worst things. Nothing is more cruel than to throw a child into the attitude of conflict with God and his conscience, by raising a false conscience against that which both God and nature approve. It is nothing less than making a gratuitous loss of religion, required by no terms of reason, justified by no principle, even of Christian sacrifice itself.
Suppose,
for example, that a child has begun to show many pleasant evidences of love to
God and all good things, but that he is eager still in play, or sometimes gets
quite wild in the excitement of it. If, at such a time, it is sprung upon him,
as a conclusion, that he
Thus far we speak for the side of play, showing how far off it
is from the purpose of religion to take away, or suppress, the innocent plays of
childhood; how ready it is, on the other hand, to foster them and give them
sympathy. But it is not the whole of life, even to a child, to be indulged in
play. There is such a thing as order, no less than such a thing as liberty; and
the process of adjustment between these two contending powers, begins at a very
early date. Under the law of
Here,
then, begins a process of training into moral order, which, without wishing to
be any restriction upon play, is yet of necessity such a restriction. The child
is required to conform his conduct, including his
In the same manner it will be laid upon him to be at his place in the school, to be punctual to his times, to miss no lesson, to hold his mind to his studies by close, unfaltering application, even though it cost him a loss of just that liberty in play that he would most like, and take it as the very bliss of his good fortune to have. Restricted thus by the order of the school, he will only enjoy his play-times the more, and finally will come to the enjoyment of study itself for its own sake.
And so it will be
in religion. There must, of course, be in it, what may be called restrictions
upon children. All law is felt as restriction at the first, but it will not be
that God makes war on their innocent plays; they only need as much to be
established in right conduct, well-doing, and piety, as to have their indulgence
in such
The
suggestions and distinctions thus far advanced, have, it will now be seen,
another kind of use and importance, when taken as preparatives for the
settlement of a great practical question, viz: how to use the Christian Sabbath,
or Sunday. so as to best honor the day in its true import, and best secure the
ends of Christian nurture. The question is one that relates to a whole
The main question, here, is how much, or little, of restriction is to be laid upon children in the due observance of the day? And the tendency is, it will be observed, to one or the other of two opposite extremes—that of undue severity, or that of unchristian looseness—and this, for two distinct sets of reasons. Sometimes for the reason of self-indulgence, or indolence in the parents; and sometimes for the reason of insufficient views of the day, as it stands in the Scripture, or in the judgments to be held of its uses. Thus it will be noted—
1. That, where parents are too indolent for any kind
of painstaking in their families, they will contrive to case the burdens of
their duty by one or the other of
2. To the inquiry what is the true conception of our Lord's day, or Sunday? What, according to the Scripture, and to all sound judgment of the day, as related to the Christian training of families, and to the general welfare of society, is the mode and amount of restriction imposed by it? I think it will be found, in giving a right answer to this question, that the true use of the day lies between two errors, or extremes, that stand over against each other; one that makes a virtually Jewish day of it, and an opposite that, with undue haste, quite sweeps it away. Neither is the mode of scripture, and the two are about equally weak, as regards their philosophic grounds and reasons.
According to the Scripture, God ordained a
religious day, called a Sabbath, at the very morning of the creation. This was
the day that Moses found already existing and only re-enacted in the ten tables
of the moral law, as he did the statutes against lying and murder.
In this view, it can not be repealed any more than the statute against
theft, or false witness. It is not a Jewish day, in any proper sense of the
term, but a day of humanity, a world's-creation day; type also and ground of the
new-creation day of the Lord. Moses went on, it is true, after the delivery of
the decalogue, and ordained laws civil, and police regulations, by which the
Sabbath was to be observed and enforced, and it was these that gave a Jewish
character to their Sabbath. And, so far, no farther, it was that the Sabbath was
repealed, in becoming a Lord's day. When Paul complains to the Colossians, that
they "observe new moons and Sabbaths," and boldly rebukes the Galatians, that
they "turn again to the beggarly elements desiring to be in bondage," and
"observe days, and months, and times, and years," he does not mean to call
the seventh
There is, then, no pretext of authority in the
Scripture for making the Lord's day, or Sunday, a Jewish day to children. And
those parents who make it a point of fidelity to lay it on their children,
according to the strict police regulations of the Jewish code, would be much
more orthodox, if they went farther back, and took up conceptions of the day
some thousands of years older. When they assume that every thing which can be
called play in a very young child is wrong, or an offense against religion, they
try, in fact, to make Galatians of their children; incurring a much harsher,
Christian rebuke, than if they only turned to the beggarly elements themselves,
and laid their own souls under the bondage. What can a poor child do, that is
cut off thus, for a whole twenty-four hours, from any right to vent his
exuberant feeling—impounded, strictly, in the house and shut up to catechism; or
taken to church, there to fold his hands and sit out the long solemnities of the
worship, and what to him is the mysterious lingo
But there
comes in, here, a grand scripture reason for some sort of restriction, viz: that
restriction is the necessary first stage of spiritual training every where.
Instead of rushing into the conclusion, therefore, as many parents do, that all
religious observances which create a feeling of restraint, or become at all
irksome to children, are of course hurtful, and raise a prejudice in their minds
against religion, the Scripture boldly asserts the fact that all law begins to
be felt as a bondage. Law and gospel have a natural relationship, and they are
bound together every where, by a firm interior necessity. It is so in the
family, in the school, and in religion. The law state is always felt to be a
bondage, and the restriction is irksome. By and by, the goodness of the law, and
of them by whom it is administered, is fully discovered, and the obedience that
began as restriction merges in liberty. The parents are obeyed with such care,
as anticipates even their wishes; the lesson, that was a task, is succeeded by
that free application which sacrifices even health and life to the eagerness of
study; and so the law of God, that was originally felt only in the friction,
rubbed in by that friction, is finally melted into the heart by the cross of
Jesus,
The flash judgments,
therefore, of many, in respect to the observance of Sunday, are not to be
hastily accepted. We are not to read the prophet, as if promising that the
streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls, on the Lord's holy day,
playing in the streets thereof; or as if that kind of license were necessary to
clear the irksomeness of an oppressive observance; or
The true principle of Sunday observance, then, appears
And the devices that may be used are endless. The natural history of Palestine, the rivers, lakes, mountains, every city, every plain, will be easily associated in the child's memory, with the events and characters, and religious transactions of the sacred history; so with lessons of duty and sentiments of piety. For such uses, an embossed map of the Holy Land would be invaluable in a family of young children. Here are marked the sites of towns and cities, and the face of the ground is given on which they stood, or stand. Here was the locality of a battle, on this mountain or slope, or in this plain, or by this river. Here dwelt some patriarch, or prophet, or ministering woman. Looking over these ranges of mountain, through these valleys, and across these lakes and plains, questions of locality, geography, prospect, transaction, miracle, travel, can be raised with endless variety, such as will sharpen the intellectual curiosity, and the sense of religion together. The whole country may be daguerreotyped in this manner on the child's mind, and a tenfold interest excited in every event, whether of the Old or New Testament history.
The day itself also will be raising fruitful topics of inquiry. The topics of public preaching, especially those which relate to Christ—Christ the child, Christ the friend, brother, bread, way, reconciling grace—will raise interesting questions in the child's mind, and he will be delighted if the parent can make out a good and lively child's version of them.
Hearing much too of the church, and the communion
Perhaps too he will have witnessed the sacraments, the holy supper, and baptism as administered to infants, and he will be asking, probably, for some explanation of these. And nothing can have a more benign effect on a child's religious feeling than to be trained to a genuine faith in sacraments. But, in order to this, they must be sacraments; that is, observances appointed by God, as the occasions of a special faith in the special visitations and powers he engages to bestow on the receivers.
We lave become even a little jealous of sacraments. Our recoil from
the extravagances of priestly magic has been carried too far. We keep them on
foot, but we can scarcely be said to have faith in them, or to use them. The
very attitude of mind they require is what
The supper then is to be a sacrament and no merely monumental affair, as if it were a coming to the tomb of Jesus to read his inscription; but it is to be an occasion where he is to be discerned, manifested as discerned, in his most real, only real, presence; dispensing himself and his reconciling peace to the soul. Explained thus to the child, in a manner adapted to his understanding, it is also to be added—"this is for you, and Christ is waiting to receive you and bless you in it, whenever you can ask it truly believing that he will, according to the faith to which you were pledged in your baptism." I see no objection whatever to his being taken to the supper casually, whenever his childish piety really and seriously desires it; unless some opposing scruples in the church, or the minister, should make it unadvisible. Christ, I am sure, would say—"Suffer the child and forbid him not."
The sacrament of baptism, which he will often see
dispensed to infants—and they ought always to be presented in a public way, or
in the open church, for that
Now all these
subjects of the Sunday conversation—
But continue thou in the things which
thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned
them.—
THIS exhortation of the apostle to his young friend
Timothy, is the more remarkable that it relates to his training in the Old
Testament scriptures, which were the only sacred writings known at the time of
his childhood—"And that, from a child, thou hast known the Holy Scriptures,
which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in
Christ Jesus." His father was a Greek, (
The Christian teaching of children.
And I can not do better than to notice, in the beginning, three points which stand upon the face of the apostle's exhortation.
1. The very great importance of this teaching, when rightly dispensed. It is not indeed the first duty of the parent, for other duties go before, as we have already seen, preceding even the use of language. Neither is it, as a great many parents appear to assume, a matter in which their religious duties to their children are principally summed up. It is not every thing to teach, or verbally instruct their children, least of all to indoctrinate them in the formulas and theoretic principles of the faith. But how very great importance must there be in the teaching, when an apostle, setting his young friend in charge as a preacher of the gospel, bids him continue still in the teachings of his godly mother, and even to remember them for her sake. The New Testament preacher is exhorted still to be an Old Testament son, and is sent forth, in the power of the ancient Scripture, even after Christ has come. And just so it will ever be true of the ripest and tallest of God's saints, who were trained by His truth in their childhood, that however deep in their intelligence or high in spiritual attainments they have grown to be, the motherly and fatherly word is working in them still; and is, in fact, the core of all spiritual understanding in their character.
2. It is to be noted that the teaching of Timothy's mother was scriptural—"And that, from a child, thou hast known the Holy Scriptures." They had, as far as we have been able to learn, no catechisms in that day. The ten commandments and certain selected Psalms, were probably the scriptures in which they were most. exercised, and which probably Timothy had "learned," in the sense of having them stored in his memory. And there is this very great advantage in the scriptural teaching, or training, that it fills the mind with the word and light of the Spirit, and not with any mere wisdoms of opinion. And there is the less reason, now, for going out of the divine word to get lessons for the teaching of children, that our scripture roll is enlarged by the addition of the words and history of Christ himself. In a right use of the Scripture, thus amplified by the gospel, there is no end to the subjects of interest that may be raised. The words are simple, the facts are vital, the varieties of locality, dialogue, incident, character, and topic, endless.
I do
not undertake to say that nothing shall be taught which is not in the words of
the Scripture. But it must be obvious that very small children are more likely
to be worried and drummed into apathy by dogmatic catechisms, than to get any
profit from them. If exercised in them at all, it should be at a later period,
when their intelligence is considerably advanced; that they may, at least, get
some shadow of meaning in them, to repay the labor of committing them to memory.
It is generally supposed, in the arguments urged for a training
I am principally concerned here with the case of very young children, not with such as are farther advanced in age, or intelligence; and there is no room for doubt, in their case, whatever may be decided in respect to others, that the teaching of Timothy's mother, the scripture teaching, is to be preferred. The memorizing of the ten commandments and the Lord's prayer, followed by the Apostle's creed and the simplest Christian hymns, connected with scripture readings, conversations, and discussions, will compose a body of teaching specially adapted to a child, and most likely to make him wise unto salvation.
3. It is to be noted that the most genuine teaching, or only genuine teaching, will be that which interprets the truth to the child's
feeling by living example, and makes him love the truth afterwards for the
teacher's sake. It is a great thing for a child, in all the after life, to "know
of whom" he learned these things, and to see a godly father, or a faithful
mother, in them. No truth is really taught by words, or interpreted by
intellectual and logical methods; truth must be lived into meaning, before it
can be truly known. Examples are the only sufficient commentaries; living
epistles the only fit expounders of written epistles. When the truly Christian
father and mother teach as being taught of God, when their prayers go into their
lives and their lives into their doctrine, when their goodness melts into the
memory, and heaven, too, breathes into the associated thoughts and sentiments to
make a kind of blessed memory for all they teach, then we see the beautiful
office they are in, fulfilled. In this manner, Timothy was supposed to have a
complete set of recollections from his mother woven into his very feeling of the
truth itself It was more true because it had been taught him by her. There was
even a sense of her loving personality in it, by which it always had been, and
was always to be, endeared. On the other hand, it will always be found that
every kind of teaching in religion, which adds no personal interest, or
attraction to the truth, sheds no light upon it from a good and beautiful life,
is nearly or quite worthless.. And here is the privilege of a genuinely
Christian father
But these are general considerations, which it is sufficient to have suggested without further dwelling upon them. There are yet a great many subordinate and particular points, of a more promiscuous character, to which also I must call your attention. And I deem it here a matter of consequence to make out, first of all, a somewhat extended roll of things, which are not to be taught; for so many things are taught which are not true for any body, and so many which are only theologically true for minds in full maturity—to all others meaningless and repulsive—that many a child is fatally stumbled in religion, just because of his teaching.
First of all, then, children are not to be taught
that they were regenerated in their baptism. That will only convert the rite
into a superstition, and put the child in a totally false position, where he
will rest his Christian title on a mere outward transaction already past, and
what is even worse, on a function of priestly magic. Furthermore, if the child
should turn out, when he is fully grown, to be a totally reckless and profane
person, having no pretense, or even semblance of religious character, it will
now be discovered to him that his regeneration meant nothing, had no practical
effect or value, and since there is no second baptismal regeneration,
As little are young children to be taught that they are of
course unregenerated. This, with many, is even a fixed point of orthodoxy, and
of course they have no doubt of it. They put their children on the precise
footing of heathens, and take it for granted that they are to be converted in
the same manner. But they ought not to be in the same condition as heathens.
Brought up in their society, under their example, baptized into their faith and
upon the ground of it, and bosomed in their prayers, there ought to be seeds of
gracious character already planted in them; so that no conversion is necessary,
but only the development of a new life already begun Why should the parents cast
Again, you are not to teach your children that they need, of course, to be regenerated, because they fail in obedience, show bad tempers, and display manifold other faults. Have you no faults yourselves? Do you then spring it as a conclusion against yourselves, that you are unregenerate persons, or do you take hold of God's help, with new earnestness and confidence, that you may get strength to overcome your faults and be clear of them? Shortcomings, faults, casual disinclinations of feeling, are bad signs, such as ought to waken distrust, but they are not, of course, conclusive evidences.
As little are you to teach them that they are certainly unregenerate, or without piety, because they are light in many of their demonstrations, full of play, abounding in frolicsome gayeties. Which is worse and farthest from God, these innocent exuberances of life, or the covetous, overcaring overworking, enviously plotting, sobriety of their parents?
Again you are never to teach your very young children that
they are too young to be good, or to be really Christian. Never allow them to
see that you expect them to be pious only at some future day, when they are
older. What you despair of, or assume to be no possibility for them, they
certainly will not attempt and the discouragement of good, thus thrown upon
them, may be even fatal to their future character. Draw them rather into your
own exercises, taking always for granted,
Again, do not teach
them that they can never pray, or do any thing acceptable to God, till after
they are converted or regenerated. This, with many, is a great point of
orthodoxy, and I would not speak of it with severity, because it is a very
natural mistake and yet it is one of the most hurtful delusions, short of real
infidelity, that can be put into language. It is not only not true for children,
but it is not true for any body, and is, in fact, a kind of barricade before the
heavenly gate for every body, still outside. It is very true that no one can
pray, or do any thing acceptably, to God, as being and remaining unconverted,
unregenerated; but that is a very different thing from showing that no one can
pray, or do any thing acceptably till after they are converted, or regenerated.
The difference is just as wide as between all good possibility and none
whatever. God is ready to hear every child's prayer, every man's prayer, calls
him to come and be heard for all he wants, only let him pray as coming to be
converted, or born of the Spirit, in his prayer. If the prayers of the wicked
are an abomination, as they certainly are, let them come to cease being wicked,
and be made right with God. Can not a wicked man become right? and at what time
and
The mistake of teaching is scarcely less fatal, when the child is put to the doing of good works, and the making up of a character in the self-regulating way. That kind of duty is so legal and painful, and the poor child will be so often floored by his failures in it, that he will not continue long. A kind of despair will come upon him in a short time, and religion itself will take on a hard impossible look, that is even repulsive. Nothing will draw the child onward in ways of piety, but the sense of forgivenesses, helps, felt sympathies of grace and love. Salvation by faith, is the only kind of religion that a child can support. If there is no ladder to heaven but a ladder of will-works and observances, he will not be climbing it long. Where Luther fell off and lay groaning infant steps will not persist.
It is a great mistake, too, and a great Christian wrong. under
salvation by faith, to be always showing children what a hard, dry service the
Christian life must be. A great many parents do this unthinkingly, because it is
just so to them. Where there is a real living faith. and children believe most
easily, cheerfulness, brightness,
These, now, are some
of the things which are not to be taught, but carefully avoided in the training
of children. There are a great many other things which are not to be taught, for
the reason that they can not be sufficiently apprehended, and will only confound
the understanding instead of giving it light. These are to be taught, not
formally or theologically, but implicitly, in a kind of child's version, which
the confessions commonly do not give. Thus depravity in Adam, the fall of the
race, the atonement by Christ in any view that makes it a ground of forgiveness,
regeneration itself as a metaphysically defined change in character—none of these
can be taught as a doctrine for young children. And yet they can all be taught
implicitly. Thus we may represent to children that we are all sinners, and that
God is displeased with us whenever we do or think what is wrong; that we want a
better auld a clean heart, so that we shall love to do what is right, and that
Christ came down into the world to give it to us; that when we feel sorry for
wrong he loves to forgive us, and that when we feel weak and are much
While the whole teaching centers at this point, the mind of the child will not be wearied, of course, by a continual reiteration of the same very simple matter, but it will be led about, into free ranges and excursions, among the facts and very dramatic incidents of the Scripture history. Little debates will be raised about duties in common matters; characters will be held up for approbation, or to be condemned. The matters of creation, from the sky downward, will come into notice, and be used to show God's wisdom and greatness. And so there will be a rotary movement of inquiry and teaching, all round the great central point of being good, and the readiness of Christ to help us in it.
Due
care will be taken also not to thrust religious subjects on the child, when he
is excited by other things, in a manner to make it unwelcome. His times of
thought and appetite must be watched. Play with
Children often break upon their parents with very tough
questions, and questions that wear a considerable looking towards infidelity. It
requires, in fact, but a simple child to ask questions that no philosopher can
answer. Parents are not to be hurried or flurried in such cases, and make up
extempore answers that are only meant to confuse the child, and consciously have
no real verity. It is equally bad, if the child is scolded for his freedom; for
what respect can he have for the truth, when he may not so much as question
where it is? Still worse, if the child's question is taken for an evidence of
his superlative smartness, and repeated with evident pride in his hearing. In
all such cases, a quiet answer should be given to the child's question where it
can easily be done, and where it can not, some delay should be taken; wherein it
will be confessed that not even his parents know every thing. Or, sometimes, if
the question is one that plainly can not be answered by any body, occasion
should be taken to show the child how little we know, and how many things God
knows which are too deep for us—how reverently, therefore, we are to submit our
mind to his, and let him teach us when he will, what is true. It is a very great
thing for a child, to have had the busy infidel lurking in his questions, early
instructed in regard to the necessary limits of knowledge, and accustomed to a
Observe also, at just this point, the immense advantage that a Christian parent
has in Jesus Christ, as regards the religious teaching of his children. I speak
here of the fact that all truth finds in him the concrete form Truth is not less
really incarnate in him, than God. Indeed he testifies, himself, that he is the
truth. And he is so, not merely in the sense that he parabolizes the truth, and
gets it thus into human conditions or analogies, but that his own person also
and life are the eternal form of truth; that he lives it, acts it forth, groans
it in his Gethsemane, sheds it from his veins in the bleeding of his cross. You
may take your children along therefore, through his childhood, into his
ministries of healing, on to his death-scene itself, and it will be as if you
led them through a gallery, where all divinest, most life-giving truth is
pictured. No abstractions will be wanted, no difficult reaches of comprehension
required; you have nothing to do but to show them Jesus as he is, and the Great
Teaching will be in them—all that is needed as the vital bread of their
intelligence, and heart, and character. The blessed child's doctrine of the
world is Christ. Have it then as your privilege to be always unfolding your
child's understanding, and spiritual nature, by that which will be life and
healing to both; even Jesus Christ, the Word of the Father's glory. Converse
much of him and about him, make him familiar, and it will be strange if you do
not find that both your
And of this you will be the more certain if you teach Christ not by words only, but by so living as to make your own life the interpreter of his. There is no feebler and more unpractical conception, than that children are faithfully taught, when they are abundantly lectured. If you will put in Christ, you must put him on. There is no such gospel for them, as that which flavors your own conduct, and fills your personal atmosphere with the Christly aroma.
At the same time it should be the constant endeavor with children, to make the subject of religion an open subject, and keep it so, never to be otherwise. Nothing is wider of dignity, or more mischievous in its effects, than the remarkable shyness of religious conversation in most Christian families. It argues either some great neglect of the parents, in which they have let the subject fall out of range as a subject not to be named, or else it shows that, in trying to make it an open subject, so much of cant or untimely exhortation has been mixed with it, as to make it unwelcome. Rightly conceived, there is no subject of so great interest and such inexhaustible freshness, as that which pertains to the soul and the future life. Good conversation, too, upon it, in the house, is better than sermons. Why then should a Christian family, where every other subject is welcome, taboo this, requiring it to pass in silence, as if it were in fact the forbidden fruit of their intelligence?
But I must speak, in closing, of what appears to be a somewhat general misconception, as respects the aim of Christian teaching in the case of very young children. According to the view I am here maintaining, it is not their conversion, in the sense commonly given to that term. That is a notion which belongs to the scheme that makes nothing of baptism and the organic unity of the house; that looks upon the children as being heathens, or aliens, requiring, of course, to be converted. But according to the scheme here presented, they are not heathens, or aliens; but they are in and of the household of faith, and their growing up is to be in the same. Parents therefore, in the religious teaching of their children, are not to have it as a point of fidelity to press them into some crisis of high experience, called conversion. Their teaching is to be that which feeds a growth, not that which stirs a revolution. It is to be nurture, presuming on a grace already and always given, and, for just that reason, jealously careful to raise no thought of some high climax to be passed. For precisely here is the special advantage of a true sacramental nurture in the promise, that it does not put the child on passing a crisis, where he is thrown out of balance not unlikely, and becomes artificially conscious of himself, but it leaves him to be always increasing his faith, and reaching forward, in the simplest and most dutiful manner, to become what God in helping him to be. On this point Dr. Tiersch says, with very great insight, both of the gospel and of children—
"It is certainly not difficult to bring a child into a
condition of emotion and anxiety, by representations of natural corruption, of
the judgment, and of the influence of the enemy; and to fill him with doubts of
his own salvation, thereby moving him to any thing that may be desired. It is
possible that by these means, deep experiences of the communion of the soul have
been brought to light. But these are consequences that should rather be objects
of our fear than of our rejoicing. For here comes in the worst of all dangers,
the early wasting of such impressions and experiences, and a creeping in of
untruth, whilst the power vanishes and the forms of speech remain. For both the
most delicate and the most solemn experiences become, after this method, objects
of continual reflection and conversation, under which, at last, solemn
earnestness, as well as all delicacy, is destroyed, and there remains either a
continual self-deception, with the semblance of the reality of godliness, or a
gnawing consciousness of an increasing untruthfulness, and of an inner
unfruitfulness beneath a mass of phrases."
It is a delicate matter for children
to navigate in this rough sea of conversional tossings, where the stormy wind
lifteth up the waves, and they go up to the heaven, and go down again to the
depth, and their soul is melted because of trouble. There is, for the little
ones, a more quiet way of induction. Show them how to be good, and then, when
they fail, how God will help them if they ask him and trust in him for help.
What is wanted is, to train them by a corresponding gentleness, and keep them in
the molds of the Spirit. No spiritual tornado is wanted that will finish up the
parental duties in a day; but there is to be a most tender and wise attention,
watching always for them, and, at every turn or stage of advance, contributing
what is wanted; enjoying their bright and happy times of goodness and peace with
them, helping their weak times, drawing them out of their discouragements, and
smoothing away their moods of recoil and bitterness; contriving always to supply
the kind of power that is wanted, at the time when it is wanted. Very young
children religiously educated, it will be remembered by almost every grown up
person, have many times of great religious tenderness, when they are drawn apart
in thoughtfulness and prayer. The effort should be to make these little, silent pentecosts
and gentle openings God-ward scaling-times of the Spirit, and have the family
always in such keeping, as to be a congenial element for such times; and to
suffer no possible hindrance, or opposing
"And it shall come to pass in that day, I will hear, saith
the Lord, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth and the earth
shall hear the corn, and the wine, and the oil, and they shall hear Jezreel."—
BY this very elaborate and poetically ingenious figure,
the prophet appears to be giving a contrived representation of the fact, that
when God brings in the promised day of his universal reign in the earth, there
will be a grand convergency of causes to prepare it, and, like so many
concurrent prayers, to make common suit for it before Him. Thus he figures the
world as being the beautiful valley called Jezreel, which is the garden, so to
speak, of the land. And it is to be as when the people of Jezreel get their
harvest, by having every thing in a train of concurrent agency to prepare it—they
make petition by their careful tillage to the corn, the grapes, and olives, that
they will grow apace; these, in turn, make suit to the earth to give them
nutriment; this again hears them, and lifts its petition to the heavens, asking
rain and dew; whereupon, last of all, the heavens hand up the prayers to God, to
furnish them water, and let them shed it down; which petition he graciously
hears, and the harvest follows. So he conceives it will be, as the harvest of
the world
All prayer being under this general condition, family prayer will be of course; and of this I now propose to speak. I choose to handle the subject in this form, in the conviction that the prayers of families are so often defeated by the want of any such concert in the aims, plans, tempers, works, and aspirations of the house, as is necessary to a common suit before God; in other words, because the prayers, commonly so called, are defeated by the suit of so many causes contrary to them.
We sometimes use the terms family worship and family prayers, without any reference at all to their spiritual acceptance with God, or to any gifts and benefits to be bestowed, in the way of answer to such prayers. We speak of the worship, or the prayers, as a kind of morning observance; a religious formality that is to have its value, under the laws of drill and habitual repetition; good therefore, in that sense, to be kept a going, and not expected to be good on the high ground of faith and living intercourse with God. That it is to be the opening of heaven and the keeping of it open to the family, under the conditions of prevailing prayer, is either not commonly supposed, or not made a point of practical endeavor. The benefits thought of are to be such as will come of mere observance itself, and the religious reverence impressed by it.
Now that some such kind of benefit may be expected to follow,
I am not about to question. Any such external observance, kept up in the family,
must probably beget a deeper sense of religion, and prepare all the members to a
readier admission of the great principles of faith, and spiritual devotion to
God. And in that view, the observance of family worship is a matter of such
consequence in a family, that the parent, who confessedly is not a Christian
person, ought still to feel it incumbent on him to maintain that observance. And
if such were the persons with whom I am dealing in this discussion, I should
urge it upon them, as a matter indispensable, and never to be omitted. But my
subject is different. I am addressing Christian parents, on
But they greatly
mistake, in this kind of judgment, by mistaking first, in their conception of
what is necessary to the prevalent effect of the family prayers, and the always
open state of the house towards God. No rhapsodies are wanted, or flights of
feeling, or heavings of passional intercession, as many are wont to assume, but
simply that there should be a sober, calculated harmony between all the plans
and appointments of life
I. To the manner in which prayers, of all kinds, get their
answer from God. Two things are wanted, as conditions previous to the favoring
answer. First, that the matter requested should agree with God's beneficent
aims, or the ends of good to which his plans are built. Secondly, that the
prayer should agree with as many other prayers, and as many other circles of
causes as possible; for God is working always toward the largest harmony, and
will not favor, therefore, the prayers of words, when every thing else in the
life is demanding something else, but will rather have respect to what has the
widest reach of things and persons making suit with it. It is at this latter
point that prayers most commonly fail, viz: that they are solitary and contrary,
having nothing put in agreement with them; as if some one person should be
praying for fair weather when every body else wants rain, and the gaping earth,
and thirsty animals, and withering trees, are all asking for it together. Or a
man, we may conceive, prays for holiness, getting off his knees to go and
defraud his neighbor; or that he may be prospered in some plan that requires
industry, and, by indolence and inattention, leaves all the causes of nature
making suit against him.
See how it is, for example, in the great realm of nature. The first thing here to be discovered is that every thing requires every thing; or, if we take the figure of prayer, that all events make suit for all. Omit any one, and there would be a shock of discord felt in the whole frame work. As regards the interior principle of causes, we know nothing; we only see them all playing into all, and all demanding all, and then, all together, making suit for a certain general future, somehow accordant with them and their harmonies. Thus it will be seen to hold, even scientifically, in the grand astronomic system of worlds, that all the innumerable parts have a perfect concurrence, demanding exactly every thing that comes to pass, in the motions, changes of position, perturbations of parts, and processions of the whole. The principle, every thing for every thing and all together one, is so exact, that every atom and tiniest insect feels the touch, in fact, of every heaviest, highest, and remotest orb, and every such orb a respectiveness of action reaching downward, after every such minim of matter and life.
Such is
nature, and it would be exactly so, were it not for sin, in the supernatural
order, viz: in the wants, and works, and prayers, and heavenly gifts of God's
spiritual empire. Sin harmonizes with nothing.
Thus it will be found that the Bible history shows a grand convergency of all the matters included in it, and that a mysterious concert weaves all its facts together, and keeps them working toward the same result. The ritual of Moses, and the forty years' march, and all the captivities and dispersions of the people, and the dispersions of the Greek and Roman languages, and all the philosophic exhaustions, and all the crumblings of the false religions, and all the great wars of the Romans, and all the fortunes of empire determined by those wars, and then the universal pacification of the world—by all these vast concurrences the world is made ready, and set waiting for Christ to be born. The students of history, looking over this field, are astonished by the vastness of the preparation, and it is to them, as if they heard all these world-wide powers voiced in prayer together for the coming of Jesus. Just here, then was the time for him to come. And thus, in fact, he came, in the exact fullness of time, when the largest harmony was asking for him.
In the same way, it will be seen, descending to a lower field, that every conversion to God takes place when some largest harmony demands it. Not always, or commonly, when some friend, or wife, or good mother, prays it, wholly alone, but when others join them, or when, at least, there is a large concurrence of providences and causes, making the same suit, and joining in the general conspiracy of reasons. And so much is there in this, that the subject himself will almost always feel a conviction of some wonderful conjunction of means, and conditions, and prayers, just then brought together, to accomplish the otherwise difficult or impossible result.
Other illustrations, without
limit, could be cited from the processes of God's spiritual administration; for
it is always working toward the largest harmony. But we come directly to the
matter of prayer itself And here we meet the promise, first of all, that—"if we
ask any thing according to his will he heareth us;" for the design is here to
draw the petitioner into the most intimate acquaintance, and bring him into the
most exact conformity with, God's purposes and ends. And probably the whole
economy of prayer, or giving gifts to prayer, which might as well be given
otherwise without prayer, is meant to promote this agreement of the petitioners
with God. Next we have that peculiar phrasing of the doctrine of prayer, by
Christ, when he says—"If two of you shall agree, on earth, as touching any
thing, that they shall ask, it shall be done for them;" where the intent of the
doctrine is to bring the
Under this great law,
therefore, prayer, as a matter of fact, has been getting and will always be
getting more strength by the larger harmonies it embodies. Noah prayed alone for
his very ungodly times, and could not be heard—the blood of Abel was crying to
God for justice over against him, and so were all the crimes of violence and
murder in his own most bloody and cruel
Not to extend these illustrations farther, we may safely put it down as a conclusion, that prayer wants the largest possible harmony praying with it; or what is the same, as many reasons, and causes, and wants, and conditions, and persons, as possible, chiming in the suit of it; so that God may answer it for harmony's sake, and not against harmony. It may seem that I have led you a long way to reach this conclusion, especially when my subject is family prayer. But we shall now be able—
II. To dispatch that
particular subject as much more briefly; and besides, I have been able to hit
upon no other method, which promised to unfold the real conditions
The great infirmity of family prayers, or of what is sometimes called family religion, is that it stands alone in the house, and has nothing put in agreement with it. Whereas, if it is to have any honest reality, as many things as possible should be soberly and deliberately put in agreement with it; for indeed it is a first point of religion itself, that by its very nature, it rules presidingly over every thing desired, done, thought, planned for, and prayed for, in the life. It is never to finish itself up by words, or word-supplications, or even by sacraments; but the whole custom of life and character must be in it and of it, by a total consent of the man. And more depends on this, a hundred times, than upon any occasional fervors, or passional flights, or agonizings. The grand defect will, in almost all cases, be, in what is more deliberate, viz: in the want of any downright, honest, casting of the family in the type of religion, as if that were truly accepted as the first thing.
See just what is wanted, by what is so very
commonly not found. First of all, the mere observance kind of piety, that which
prays in the family to keep up a reverent show, or acknowledgment of religion,
is not enough. It leaves every thing else in the life to be an open space for
covetousness, and all the gay lustings of worldly vanity. It even leaves out
prayer; for the saying prayers is, in no sense, really the same thing
In the next place, what is prayed for in the house by the father, is, how
commonly, not prayed for by the mother in her family tastes and tempers, and is
even prayed against, in fact, by all the instigations of appearance, and pride,
and show, which are raised by her motherly studies and cares. And this, too, not
seldom, when her prayers themselves are burdened with much feeling, and bear the
appearances of much earnest longing for the piety of her children. Her prayers
sound well in the wording, and she verily thinks that she means what she asks
for; but the notions of standing she is putting in the head of her son, or the
dress she is just now getting up for her daughter, pray, a hundred
It is a matter of the greatest importance, too, as regards
the successful training of children, that they should be inducted into ways and
habits of prayer themselves, as very frequently they are not. Sometimes even
Christian mothers, who pray much for their children, never lead them into the
practice of prayer for themselves. They are kept from so doing, by the supposed
orthodox belief, first, that their children are of course in the gall of
bitterness, and secondly, that such can offer no prayer, which is not an
abomination to the Lord; in both which conclusions they are, in fact, neither
orthodox nor Christian, and what to the children, at least, is even worse than
that, consent to let them grow up in no personal habit of religion. How then can
they be reached by the prayers of the house, when they are deliberately put
outside of the possibility, even of beginning to pray for themselves? Sometimes
they are taught to pray only in the sense of saying prayers, or repeating some
little formula appropriate to their age. And there is nothing ill in this, if
they only do it occasionally. But the much better method, in general, is for the
mother to word a simple prayer for them herself, and let them follow after in
the repetition of it, sentence by sentence. The prayer in this case, will have
respect to the particular matters of the day; what has been seen, felt, enjoyed,
wanted, suffered, and needs to be forgiven. Very soon the child himself,
practiced in
But this again, depends on yet another fact, where commonly
the defect is manifold greater than it is in the
Here then, my brethren, is the great lesson of family
religion; it is that religion, being the supreme end and law of life, is to have
every thing put in the largest possible harmony with it. And this is to be done
by no superlative fervors, or heats of piety and prayer, but by the sober,
honest, practical arrangement of life and its plans. Thus, if your children are
to grow up into Christ, that is to be made their prayer, and the prayer of both
the parents, and the prayer of all the buildings, migrations, plans, toils,
trades, and pleasures of the house. All these are to pray, in sober earnest,
that the children, as the practically best thing possible, and most to be
desired, may be Christian in their life. There is no difficulty in forming a
whole family to God, when there is grace enough in the parents to make that
really the object, and set every thing in the largest harmony with it. The only
difficulty is in doing it, when the prayers and the family religion are one side
of every thing else, in a department by themselves, and the whole body of life's
practical works and ends is operating directly against the result desired and
prayed for. Prayer, in a certain proper view of it, is only one of the great
causes of the world, and all the causes, natural as well as supernatural, are,
in a certain broad sense, prayers. What is wanted, therefore, is to put all the
causes, all the prayers, into a common strain of endeavor, reaching after a
common good, in God and his friendship. The religious affinities of the house
then
Let us stop here now, in our closing, and contemplate the dignity and power of a
genuine family religion, thus maintained. Consistency and solid reality, we have
seen, are its great distinction—the whole ordering of the house is worshipful,
and faithfully chimes with the prayers. The very table is sanctified with, as
well as by, the blessing invoked upon it; so that when the house are feeding
animal enjoyments, and, so far, saying that they are animals, they do not become
such. Their sensuality is kept under by a divine spirituality above it. It is
not so much their bodies as their souls that are fed. By their holy charities
and prayers, the family property is also sanctified, and all the industries by
which it is obtained. The training of the house does not end in money, the
conversation is not about money, the plans are not plans turning on the supreme
good of money, the only losses dreaded or shunned are
The family is thus exalted, every way, by the
family religion; because there is such reality and all-diffusive harmony in the
scope of it. In the prayers of the day it recalls, in one way or another and
with filial reverence, the ancestors that have gone before, and looks hopefully
on to the great reunion of the future. Its births are so many arrivals, or
presentations, at the gate of eternity; its baptisms and baptismal namings are
titles recorded in
What
scene of family dignity is more to be admired? The highest splendors of wealth
and show, have but a feeble glow-worm look in the comparison—a pale, faint
glimmer of light, a phosphorescent halo, enveloping what is only a worm. Even
the poor laboring man, thanking God, at his table, for the food he earned by the
toil of yesterday, singing still, each morning, in his family hymn, of the
glorious rest at hand, moving on thitherward with his children, by single day's
journeys of prayer and praise, teaching them, even as the eagles do their young,
to spread their wings with him and rise—this man, I say, is the prince of God
in his house,
The beauty of such family scenes has not escaped the notice of poetry
itself, or even of mere worldly observation. But we must not, for a moment,
forget that the charm of all such family pictures depends on that sound reality
of worship, which puts every thing in the house in keeping with the prayers, and
carries back the meaning of the prayers into every thing in the house. A
flourish of prayer in the morning, followed by all flourishings of vanity and
prosperous selfishness, for the rest of the day, will not answer. We look in
upon the Christian family, where every thing is on a footing of religion, and we
see them around their own quiet hearth and table, away from the great public
world and its strifes, with a priest of their own to lead them. They are knit
together in ties of love that make them one; even as they are fed and clothed
out of the same fund, interested in the same possessions, partakers in the same
successes and losses, suffering together in the same sorrows, animated each by
hopes that respect the future benefit of all. Into such a circle and scene it is
that religion comes, each day, to obtain a grace of well-doing for the day. And
it comes not by itself, as in the public assembly, not in a manner that is one
side of life and its common affairs. There is no pretense, no show, no toilet
practice going before, no reference of thought to fashion, or dress, or
appearance. It leads in the day, as the dawn leads in the morning. It blends a
heavenly gratitude with the joys of the table; it breathes a
This training, in short, of a genuine, practically all-embracing, all-imbuing family religion, makes the families so many little churches, only they are as much better, in many points, as they are more private, closer to the life of infancy, and more completely blended with the common affairs of life. Here it is that chastity, modesty, temperance, industry, truth—all the virtues that give beauty, and worth, and majesty, to character, get their root. Here it is, above all, that they who are born into life, are led up, in their gracious training, to knit the green tendrils of existence to God. And so, in all the future scenes of duty, and wrong, and grief; through which they are to pass, it will be found that they were furnished here, with supplies of grace, and armed with shields of confidence from God, to meet every encounter, bear every burden, and maintain every kind of well doing, till the victory of life is won.
Holding, now, this conviction, as Christian parents, of the
importance of a true family religion, allow yourselves
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