Essay No. 23
Moral and Religious Training
BY
The Rev. Charles Voysey, B.A.
NEARLY all hearts in this Realm are deeply stirred by the old, old question, How shall the moral and religious education of our children be carried on ? If the moral importance of each individual be supreme for the virtue and welfare of the whole community, it is obviously the first of all the duties, both of the State and of the Churches, to seek and find and adopt the best methods by which our children shall be trained up with a deep sense of their own indi¬vidual responsibility.
Now it is manifest that, as matters stand, the grown men and women are the sole agents for the training and education of the children. If all the grown-up people rightly understood and performed this solemn duty, all difficulties would be cleared away. But many among them do not understand their duty, and some even who understand it do not take any pains to perform it. For such as these, a right education becomes necessary. The teachers themselves have yet to be taught what to teach to the children and how to teach it in the best way. It
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reminds one of the old unanswerable question, " Which came first, the egg or the hen ? " We want the children to be well brought up. But how can they be well brought up by parents and teachers who do not know how to do it, or knowing how, yet fail to do so ? Our present dilemma is all due to the ignorance of parents and teachers or to their neglect of known duties. Anyway, the children are not to blame. They are the victims of those who have charge of them. Therefore we must begin by instructing and inspiring the parents and teachers who themselves are suffering from the neglect or ignorance of the parents and teachers before them. And this is clearly the function of Churches and teachers of religion and morals.
I do not see any other way of remedying the moral evils we complain of than by going to the source from which they spring. To cure the evils of Society and of the community is only possible by the true conversion of each individual, the bending of his will to use his Reason, Conscience and Love in all he thinks and says and does, so as to become a blessing to himself, his family, his country, and to the world at large, and thereby fulfil the loving pur¬pose of our Father for which every one of us was born. I think I need not dwell on the patent fact that the duty of training the young to grow up to be a blessing belongs first of all, though not exclusively,
to the parents. On them lies the solemn responsi-
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bility of teaching the first lessons of true virtue and religion. God has given to them the sole right, has conferred on them the immense privilege of absolute authority over their children, with the one plain and definite object of bringing up their children properly, to the best of their power. They have no right to delegate this obligation to others. If parents did but know it, they would shudder at the dreadful harm they inflict upon their children by the neglect of this duty. For the first ten years of a child's life at home, everything of its future welfare depends upon the teaching and training it gets from its parents. And it is scarcely possible to begin too soon. Long before the father's more active duties begin, the mother has to be diligent and sleepless in her efforts to train her infant. Many a good mother will tell you how she has laid the foundation of pious and loving obedience and has laid at least one precious stone of a beautiful character within the first few weeks of a child's life. Even such a tiny babe can be taught both obedience and patience and submission to a loving will by being trained to lie still and awake in its cradle, by cheerful and con¬soling motherly music instead of by angry and im¬patient scolding to check its irritable cry ; by cease¬less endeavour to call forth a loving and responsive smile instead of too often an audible expression of weariness or wrath. No one but a mother, unless the father be tender like her, can possibly know the
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good that may be done or the harm that may be done to a child's character during the earliest months of its life. I have said this not only for the mother's sake and for the babe's, but because it is true that you cannot begin too soon to train a child in the right way, if you only know it.
Passing on to the stage of consciousness and the possession of will, the child will now need a training in the limitation of its desires for pleasures and for having its own way. It is downright cruelty to give a child all it asks or cries for; to deny it nothing that you can give; to let it run hither and thither into all kinds of mischief and danger because you are so silly and so weak as to allow it ; and to shield a child from a breath of disappointment or sorrow is a fatal example of mistaken kindness. You may say out of the depths of your ignorance, "Why should I not let the poor child do as it likes ? the days of dis¬appointment and sorrow will come soon enough, and it is cruel to vex him while he is but a child." But I tell you you are only preparing him for far worse disappointment and misery by not teaching him to bear it patiently now, by not training him to curb his desire for mere enjoyment, and by actually encouraging him in trying to get his own way. Desires for mere pleasure only grow by indulgence, and self-will increases by gratification till it becomes a self-imposed tyranny. You should not wantonly punish your child, but whatever proper discipline
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and corporal chastisement you withhold now, will bear hereafter tenfold more pain and mortification than you can imagine.
By the time that your child is grown old enough to talk to on what I call "serious " things, your first duty is to tell him the truth about himself, to explain to him that he is not his body, that he is a living soul, quite invisible, living within his body, and can only be seen by his invisible loving Father, whose real child he is, while his body is only child of his parents. It will be easy to explain that the bodies of you and his mother and himself will all have to die some day, just as every other living thing and person has to die ; but that you and his mother and he will all live on for ever because you are God's children and He will never part with you. Tell him that he would never have been here at all, nor you, nor his mother, unless God had loved you one and all. Tell him that if there were no other proof of God's love to you it is amply proved by His making you what you are and by putting you all together in these sweet relationships ; by giving you some part of His own nature—Reason, Conscience, and Love —each and all specially designed to make you useful, to make you good, to make you happy in yourselves, and to enable you to make each other happy. Tell him that whenever he does what is right and without fear of punishment or hope of reward, our Father is pleased with him, and whenever he does what he
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knows to be wrong or even does right with a wrong motive, God is not pleased. For nothing will please
Him but our being good at heart and trying our best to be good and loving. Teach him day by day to be sensible and not silly ; to try to get all the wisdom and knowledge he can ; to learn to make himself useful; to speak only what is strictly true, to hate and abhor all falsehood, most of all, prevari-
cation or a subtle mixture of truth and falsehood; not to be afraid of any punishment, but only to be
afraid of doing wrong or speaking or feeling
wickedly. Teach him to quell all anger and to shun all kinds of cruelty. Tell him to listen to his
Conscience and remember that to do or feel anything
against his Conscience is sin, is disgraceful and shameful in a child of God. Tell him that he ought
never to excuse his sin by blaming other people or saying that he "could not help it." Most of all tell him about Love, what it is and what it was given to him for, viz. : that he might gladly live and work for others more than for himself.
Oh, ye fathers and mothers, if you could only see for yourselves, if only you could deeply and
clearly understand what true Love is, what it is for,
and what it reveals to us of the Loving God who made us, you would bend all your energies upon this
the divinest part of the teaching and training of your children. Not merely by precept, but by ceaseless example you would try to cultivate the love which
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God has put into their little hearts. Train them to do all their duties for love, to be conscientious for love, to be truthful for love, to be pure and clean for love, to be just as well as kind and gentle for love, to find pleasure in giving up to one another for love, and whenever the peace has been broken by selfishness or strife, to heal all wounds by love, to confess freely every transgression and to try to make amends, to forgive heartily every wrong done —and all for love; remind them that to be loving is the only way to be truly happy themselves, to make them happy in the thought of God, to reconcile them to their hard tasks and irksome duties and self-denials; that to be loving is to confer the sweetest gift we can ever give to enrich the happiness of those around us. Let them be saturated with the spirit of those words, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," and again, "Overcome evil with good "; let them see by your own conduct and character in dealing with your fellow-men and in thinking of them and speaking of them and feeling towards them that your impulse is always love—the love which includes justice and strict discipline as well as kindness and gentleness and forbearance and forgiveness.
And all along, from beginning to end of your training them up in love, you will be teaching and proving to them how deep and strong that Love of God Himself must be who has thus provided for our true welfare and happiness and has given us the un-
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speakable, priceless power of being a blessing to all who come within our reach. If parents did but re¬member and look at with the utmost seriousness what enormous powers for goodness God has actually given to them and to their children, and which, alas ! they have too often suffered to lie dormant ; if they would but look gravely and with adequate sorrow and shame at the sins and miseries of the world—all due to their neglect of these precious gifts of God—they would begin at once to mend themselves and to qualify themselves for the sacred duty of teaching their children true religion and virtue. The world's happiness and welfare are now waiting only for this transcendent change, this true conversion, this new-birth from the death of sin into the life of righteous¬ness. When each individual realises that he is not a mere body, but is a living soul, living bare and naked in the sight of a holy and loving God who is his true Father and Friend, the whole aspect of life and duty will be changed, will be transfigured from the life of a mere animal into the true life of a man—an immortal child of God. When he goes on from that blest awakening to see what God has done for his soul ; what precious gifts of Reason, Conscience, and Love He has poured out upon him, for what benign and holy and blissful purpose these gifts were bestowed, not only upon himself but upon every other soul likewise, his heart will be kindled with a celestial fire of love to his Maker and drawn
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by that love more and more into the paths of wisdom and goodness, and he will grow from strength to strength until he reach the perfect stature of a son of God. Depend upon it, act upon it, live upon it —that the better we love one another the more we shall love God, and the more we love God the more we shall love one another. The man will then see, if he have children, what he ought to teach and how he ought to train them, and that on no other person in the wide world rests the solemn obligation to teach and to train them but himself and their mother. And this true religious training must ALL BE DONE AT HOME AND BY• THEMSELVES by ceaseless good example and by such precepts and punishments as can be readily understood and are thoroughly effective. And when the children have to go to school, they will have been already taught the essentials of true religion and virtue, and all they need further to be taught by the professional teachers, also by example, is to see the exquisite fruits of such teaching and to have the lessons of home repeated in the school and in the playground.
When all our children are taught of the Lord in a natural way by His sons and daughters who are their fathers and mothers, then we may expect the fulfilment of the promise : "Great shall be the peace of thy children." "Now abideth faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is Love."
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