by Ellen Wood
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
It is a recognition of this most imperative duty that I want to impress upon you: the vital necessity, the obligations laid upon you, of training your children in their early years; of bringing them up “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” I am at a loss how to accomplish it, for words adequate are wanting: — thoughts crowd the brain, but language to express them fails. What I have said above about our obligations to ourselves, our own self-negligences and shortcomings, was but meant as an introduction: this is the one vital point on which I wish to speak.
It is a matter which concerns us all. Especially those who are young mothers: from that royal lady who will some time share the throne of these realms, to the poor wife who hides herself amid the unwholesome back lanes of this great metropolis, or within the walls of a mud hut on a country plain, and begs for the bread that keeps life in her little ones. It alike concerns them, and all the vast numbers who lie in the social gulf between the two extremes.
It is the most solemn duty assigned us in this world: no other responsibility can rest upon us with equal weight. It is the most fatal neglect, if we do neglect it, that can be conceived, for that neglect may result in the loss of our child’s soul. And then how will our own sin be redeemed? If I can say a little, by divine help, to induce you to take thought for this solemn consideration, I shall be happier in it than in anything I ever wrote.
For a long while the thought has pressed itself upon me that something ought to be done, and might be done, to awaken mothers to their duty in this respect. As a rule (taking the world in its mass), children are not trained at all for God. I fearlessly assert it. Or, at least, the training they get is not worth the name. I am sure that the instances where a child is earnestly and untiringly trained thus all through his earlier years — his infancy, his childhood, his boyhood, his youth — are so rare as to be but as one in ten thousand to those who are not. Mothers love their little ones. They are instinctively anxious to do the best for their welfare in time and in eternity, and no doubt think (many of them at least) they are doing it. Some are: perhaps in a better way than any hint of mine could teach: and for them this little book is not written. It is meant for the others; the great majority who are not; and who perhaps have never once reflected that they ought to do more than they are doing. As the poet, Hood, says:
“And yet it never was in my soul
To play so ill a part
But evil is wrought by want of thought,
As well as want of heart.”
Bear with me while I say somewhat of that which I would say. It is in your interest, my readers, not in my own.
This is a Christian land, and we profess to bring up our children accordingly. How are they trained? That is, how taught to live in this world, so as to attain to life in the next? Very differently. The category may be divided into three general heads:those mothers who truly and really teach their children; those who apparently teach them; and those who do not teach them at all. Of course the middle class largely predominates.
Of the first there is but a small minority — God alone can tell how small; of the last there is a much larger proportion. For though, what with ragged schools, and Bible-women, and city missionaries, and open-air preaching, a kind of slight ordinary knowledge of what is good and what is evil may be picked up by the parents of those miserable little arabs, as we have learnt to call them, whose best home is the streets, a vast many of those parents still lie in the depth of utter heathen ignorance. The first few are not addressed; the last it is here useless to address; therefore we take alone the middle and larger class. And this class, you understand, is called “middle” only in reference to the present question, not as to social standing; for it comprises within it both high and low, rich and poor.
How, as a rule — I would ask you individually — are you training your children? —— you, their mother and natural teacher? In a very proper and Christian manner, you will probably answer: if you are not too indignant, at being asked the question, to answer at all. “They are taught to say their prayers, and to learn their catechism, and (perhaps) repeat some pretty hymns; and they go to church (or chapel) when they are old enough; and (still perhaps) they hear some Bible reading at home on Sundays. That is all very good and right and essential so far as it goes, not to be neglected on any account. But it is (or ought to be) only just the first commencement. The chances are that you let it end there.
A child is too often taught to lisp his prayers like a parrot, understanding them not: attaching no special reverence to them, never having been prepared to pray: the chief aim being to get him to know them by heart. This effected, mamma and nurse say what an apt little child it is; and the little child goes on gabbling the said prayers night and morning, according no meaning to them in his mind. As to the Church catechism, or any other catechism, it is generally taught him when he is by far too young, and is as so many hard phrases to him and harder sense. When he is taken to church, perhaps as early as at three or four years old — for mamma is so proud of her darling that he cannot be seen enough — what is it that is chiefly thought of by the mother? Why, the child’s handsome dress and his pretty hair, and the difficulty of keeping him still to the end of the service. And she, in teaching him his prayers and in carrying him to church, mostly thinks she has done her full duty by him.
Do not you, O anxious mother, so teach, so carry your child! Before even he says his first little word of prayer, prepare him for it. Take him upon your knee in your closet and explain to him in easy words, adapted to his young mind, and with whispered, reverent manner, why and to whom he must pray. Talk to him of the good God who made him, his Father above, the great Creator of all things, Who fills the heavens and the earth; Who in his Omniscient Presence is ever at hand, watching over him, seeing what he does, whether he is good or naughty, hearing all he says: Who sends his angels to be about his path and about his bed to take loving care of him lest he should fall into harm. When the child has by gradual lessons realized this, as far as he is capable, and his little wondering eyes are lifted in awe to the sky above, as if he would fain see into the beautiful place beyond it, then cause him to kneel down, and do you kneel by his side and put his little lifted hands together, and do you put yours together, all in silent reverence, and so let him lisp his first words of prayer: “Pray God bless me, and make me good!” Tell him of Jesus Christ the Saviour, who came down to die for the world, because it had sinned so deeply that God could not pardon it, and no one, without that Sacrifice, could have gone to live in Heaven: he who so loves little children that he said, “Suffer them to come unto me,” and who took them in his arms and blessed them. As the child lies down in his bed at night, teach him to say these lines: —
“To-night I lie me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
And in the morning, when he awakes, this other verse: —
“I wake to this, another day;
I pray the Lord to guide my way;
If I should die before I sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
Let him get into the habit of this, so that the repeating of the verses goes, as it were, with his lying down and with his awaking. There have been good and great men, with names known to the world, who have said the lines always, from their infancy up to their old age. Let your child learn to do so. And then, when the hour comes that he is saying them for the last time, and falling into his final sleep, he shall wake up to a glorious immortality. Some pious French mothers teach their children a verse very similar; and as they stand over the cot to listen to the little lisping voice, they never fail to say, “My child, he who says this the morning and the evening, shall never lose the glorious life in Paradise.”
From the first elementary instruction that you daily give your child, g
o on further by gradual degrees as his capacity expands. Never neglect it. Count that day lost in which you have not been able to give it.
And when the proper time arrives to take him to church — of which time you will be the best judge, for children differ widely from one another, but it must not be too early — prepare him for that, in like manner, as you prepared him for his first prayers. Impress upon him fully why he goes there. Not to stare about, and fidget, and whisper; but to realise that God is there, and to try to praise and worship Him. Do not attempt to take him until he comprehends this, and is ready and able to be at least reverent in manner. Never let a slighting word pass your lips before him in reference to sacred things. A child cannot understand as we do, but he may learn in his little mind to hold all connected with true religion in the deepest reverence. Once let him see religion slighted, religious subjects mocked, or religious exercises carped at, and it may make an impression on his pliable young mind that may never be wholly effaced in after life.
This, I say, is only the beginning. And a mother, so beginning, will not be likely to make it the ending. The great mistake made by those others I have spoken of is, that the superficial early instruction, which they give, is both the beginning and the ending. Armed with that superficial armour — the saying the prayers (more or less reverently, as the case may be), the learning the catechism, the attending church on the Sunday morning — a child, boy or girl, is supposed to be fully set-up in religion for life, and may go out safely to his battle with the world. A mother would not willingly do harm to her child and send him on his way unprotected, naked almost as when he was born; but she does it in thoughtlessness. Her own attention has not been called to see the necessity for more precaution, and so she does not give it.
There must arise moments in the life of the most careless and busy man when he feels the need of some refuge to fly to that he cannot find here, some protecting arm to shelter him. Disappointment, despair, trouble, sin; one or the other may so overwhelm his mind that he suddenly feels it might be well if he could find God. But he does not know the way to Him. Unless he has been shown somewhat of its landmarks previously, it is, to him, an utterly unknown road that he must enter upon; and his courage may perhaps fail, and so he turns back from it. But, if he have been taken along that road in his childhood, the path is readily found now, and he will not miss it.
The training must begin with the child’s very earliest years, and continue always. Always unto manhood. Ay, and even after that. As long as he is in his parents’ home, whether he be there continuously or only at intervals, during holiday periods, or what not, the boy (or girl) is under you, his mother, and you must not neglect him. How many mothers there are, most assiduous for their children’s comfort; as comprised in warm clothing, in good food, in recreation, and in health — in all things essential to their welfare in this world — but who give no anxious thought to their welfare in the next! For this life they are nourished, educated; no cost, no trouble is deemed too great to fit their bodies and minds for it, to enhance their success in it: but what care or trouble is bestowed upon their education for the world that has to come after this? In too many cases — I had nearly said in most cases — absolutely none. None, beyond what I have mentioned.
Take a very common case. You may look around you and see many such cases for yourselves; true, sad, pictures. Mrs. X. has a flock of little children; she has abundant means, at least her husband has, and she keeps two or three nurses. But she is so anxious about these children that she makes herself a slave to them. Three parts of her time she spends in the nursery; three parts of the house’s regularity and comfort are destroyed by the exactions of these children. Their dinners are studied; their dresses are costly; they are exhibited as show-children to visitors, indulged, pampered, petted. No cost is spared to make them little ladies and gentlemen; no cost will be spared to train them for the world. But that other and higher training — where is it? Well, you shall judge.
They say their prayers like little parrots to mamma or servant, as may be convenient, gabbling the words over in a morning in eagerness to escape to breakfast and the pleasures of the new day, droning through them at night in sleepiness. The elder ones are taken to church on Sunday morning, the girls dressed out like puppets at a dolls’ show, the boys in the most fashionable of little boys’ costumes. If they possess any particular idea connected with church, it is as being a place for exhibiting flounces and feathers, silk-velvet knickerbockers and silver shoe-buckles. There is never a holy word read to them at home, or a pious exhortation given; the religion inculcated, such as it is, begins and ends with the prayers and the church. How will these children, think you, be armed to fight against the temptations of life? Will they find the way to heaven in later years, when they are not put into its way in these their earlier ones? It is a solemn question.
The point of this is, that Mrs. X. believes herself to be a most exemplary mother, quite a pattern to some of her neighbours. For she does not gad abroad in the world and leave her children nearly entirely to servants, as they do; she is about them always. But, with all her bustle and activity, Mrs. X. misses the one thing needful. If she would but devote only a little tithe of her daily time, but a few minutes, to putting her children in the right road, it would be well — well — for her and for them. She wears herself out with cares and frivolities for their welfare in another way; she forgets this.
From some cause or other, it mostly is forgotten. Some mothers are lost in the whirl of society: they have no space, save for dressing, gaiety, visitors, and visiting; others have too much to do for their children, in regard to their temporal wants, either of choice (as above) or of necessity; others are idle and indifferent; others are absorbed in the one fierce struggle to earn the daily bread. No matter what the preventing cause may be, a very large proportion of our children, the little bees, now, as I write this, living and buzzing in the busy hive around us, receive none of that particular, special training that will stand them in good need in after life. I firmly believe that if the training were made the rule, instead of the exception, society would present a widely different aspect from what it presents now. The spread of artificiality, of social sins, of frivolity, of pretentious show — the lust of the eye and the pride of life — and above all the spread of infidelity, is, each one, on the increase amid us, and will continue to be. We can expect nothing better when our children are not trained against it.
“Train up a child in the way he should go.”
I would that this injunction were engraven on the heart of every one of you who may be a mother! Has it ever occurred to you to remember what a charge of responsibility is laid upon you by God when he gives you a child? The child is yours; yours to tend, to mould, to educate; and, rely upon it, he will be very much what you make him. According to the seed you implant in his little pliable heart, so will the fruit be.
The laws of nature teach us this. Sow good grain in the earth, and good grain will spring from it; flowers will come up flowers if we plant them, yielding in return their beauty and their perfume. But — if we plant noxious and poisonous plants, they can but come up such: if we plant nothing, but let the ground run to waste, there will be a desert of bare earth, or a crop of ugly weeds. Jesus Christ himself asks us whether we can grow grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles.
In every other respect, a child is specially trained. He is taught to ride, to dance, to read, to write. He would never learn to read and write of himself. A child can thump upon the keys of a piano with his fingers, but he cannot play on it and bring out its harmony unless he learns how to play. Look at the process of his education — how that goes on, step by step, from teacher to teacher.
How much patient instruction, and through how many years and degrees is that instruction necessary, before he is deemed fit to go out and take his part in life! Try and think of any calling — any business, trade, profession — which does not require special training-up to, and much practice, before it can be exe
rcised. I know of none. Aprentice artisan takes seven years to learn his craft; a doctor must go through his books and his lectures and his hospitals, stage by stage; a statesman must begin at the foot of the political ladder, to acquire the experience necessary to work his way to the top. Nothing can be acquired without going through some special training for it; without work, practice, labour. Say to a young man who has never learnt Greek, “Read me that chapter from the Greek Testament.” He cannot do it. But another, standing by, a good Greek scholar, will read it off-hand. Put a landsman to navigate a ship to the opposite side of the world: where would he and the ship soon be? But a practised sailor will take her out and home in safety.
Even so. There is only one thing that we do not train our children for — and that is Heaven. Most carefully and anxiously do we educate them for this world, and it is quite right that we should; but not at all for the next. We cultivate, as it is our bounden duty to do, the intellect and the physical powers, and the mental capacities; but we let alone the soul. That is left (save perhaps for some little elementary instruction) to run along of itself, to take its own chance. And yet — Heaven is to be our final home, and to learn how to get to it the one thing needful. You know Who said it.
Not for a moment, as you perceive, would I imply that that other education is not essential. It is essential, and in the highest degree. We are placed in the world to work; our talents were bestowed upon us to cultivate and use to the uttermost. The mischief lies in our forgetting that another world has to be also prepared for. And it is so easy to forget, seemingly as almost without sin, amid the noise and strife and social obligations of life. But that other world, remember, will be our eternal home; this one is but the short journey to it.