In a certain Western university the president receives a salary of ten
thousand dollars a year for training young men and young women, while
not many miles distant from that university is a stock-farm the
superintendent of which receives a salary of twelve thousand dollars for
training high-bred colts. That colt-trainer is at hand when the colt is
foaled, and before it rises to its feet has rubbed down its head and put
a halter upon it, so that from birth it shall be accustomed to the
feeling of the halter.
From that time the training of the colt is not suspended for a moment.
If in training it to travel in harness a piece of paper should blow
across the training-course, causing the colt to shy, an assistant holds
the paper on the opposite side of the road, so that the animal shall
have the kink taken out of its nervous system and its tendency to shy
again in the same direction be at once corrected.
The old method was to allow a colt to run wild until two or three years
of age, then "break it in." The result was apt to be either a "cowed"
animal or a nervous horse.
Would that we were manifesting as much wisdom in the religious training
of our children as that horse-trainer. But unfortunately we are pursuing
largely the old method, allowing our children to get full of all sorts
of mental kinks up through those first plastic three or four years, and
then handing them over to the church kindergarten-teacher for one hour a
week, expecting her to straighten out all these aberrations and give
back to the parents a normally religious child.
Many parents seem to assume that the child's brain is lying dormant
during those first few years, when, as a matter of fact, the child's
mind during these years is most receptive, and expanding at a rate never
after equalled. The nervous system is receiving impressions which,
though in after-years the child has no _conscious_ memory of it, are yet
indelibly chiselled there for good or ill.
It is high time that parents and religious teachers took more
cognizance than they do of this fact.
There are other parents who deliberately refuse to give their children
any religious training during this period for fear of "unduly
influencing" them from the religious standpoint. This point of view is
stated, whether seriously or not, in the following quotation from a
recent writer: "I think it is a bad thing to be what is known as
'brought up,' don't you? Why should we--poor, helpless little children,
all soft and resistless--be squeezed and jammed into the iron bands of
parental points of view? Why should we have points of view at all? Why
not for those few divine years when we are still so near God, leave us
just to wonder? We are not given a chance. On our pulpy little minds our
parents carve their opinions, and the mass slowly hardens, and all those
deep, narrow, up-and-down strokes harden with it, and the first thing
the best of us have to do on growing up is to waste precious time
beating at the things, to try to get them out. Surely the child of the
most admirable and wise parents is richer with his own faulty but
original point of view than he would be fitted out with the choicest
selections of maxims and conclusions that he did not have to think out
for himself. I could never be a schoolmistress. I should be afraid to
teach the children. They know more than I do. They know how to be happy,
how to live from day to day, in godlike indifference to what may come
next. And is not trying to be happy the secret we spend our lives trying
to guess? Why, then, should I, by forcing them to look through my stale
eyes, show them, as through a dreadful magnifying-glass, the terrific
possibilities, the cruel explosiveness of what they had been lightly
tossing across the daisies, and thinking they were only toys?"
All of which sounds very pretty, but when simmered down, the wisdom, if
wisdom it be, of a statement like that can be compressed into the old
adage, "Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise." But the point
is that the world has pretty generally come to the conclusion that
bliss is not necessarily the most healthful thing, either for adults or
children. "Soft and resistless!" Precisely, there is the crux. If these
"soft and resistless" minds do not receive good impressions they will
receive bad ones, and it is the part of wisdom to get the good in first.
Where a mind is "to let," some sort of tenant is sure to occupy.
Coleridge put the case in a nutshell when an English deist inveighed
bitterly against the rigid instruction of Christian homes. The deist
said: "Consider the helplessness of a little child. Before it has wisdom
or judgment to decide for itself, it is prejudiced in favour of
Christianity. How selfish is the parent who stamps his religious ideas
into a child's receptive nature, as a moulder stamps the hot iron with
his model! I shall prejudice my children neither for Christianity nor
for Buddhism, nor for Atheism, but allow them to wait for their mature
years. Then they can open the question and decide for themselves." Later
Coleridge led his friend into the garden, and then whimsically
exclaimed: "How selfish is the gardener to ruthlessly stamp his
prejudice in favour of roses, violets and strawberries into a receptive
garden-bed. The time was when in April I pulled up the young weeds,--the
parsley, the thistles,--and planted the garden-beds out with vegetables
and flowers. Now I have decided to permit the garden to go until
September. Then the black clods can choose for themselves between
cockleburrs, currants and strawberries." The deist saw the point.
Another weakness in our system of religious training for children is
manifest at the adolescence-period of the child. We have been in the
habit of allowing the child to consider the Bible-school as his church.
We send him to the Bible-school in his very early years, but make no
demands upon him as far as specific church-attendance is concerned. And
at the kindergarten-period we are probably wise in this; for after the
child has attended kindergarten for an hour, it is too great a tax upon
him to require him to sit through an hour's church-service. But after
the kindergarten-period it seems to me the plain duty of parents to
encourage the child to attend church, though not necessarily for the
entire service; for if the child does not establish a church-going
_habit_ during these plastic years, the probability is that he will
never form it. This partially explains why there is such a leakage
between the Bible-school and the church. When the child gets "too old
for Bible-school," not having formed the church-going habit, he is
stranded
"Between two worlds,
One dead, the other powerless to be born."
And the result is he drifts away from the Church.
In the endeavour to remedy this situation in his own Church it has been
the custom of the writer to have all children from seven to twelve years
of age in the Bible-school, which meets on Sunday morning before church,
attend the morning worship for the first fifteen minutes. During this
time they hear the Call to Worship, the Invocation, the Lord's Prayer,
the Children's Sermon, and the Anthem by the choir. At the close of the
anthem the children file out with their teachers as the adult
congregation rises for the Responsive Lesson. In this way the children
are establishing a church-going habit, with the result that they early
begin to feel that something is wrong on Sunday if they have not been to
church.
A word as to the content of the sermons preached. I believe that a
child's religion ought to be largely of the motor type. That is, it
should be concerned with getting religion into the child's hands and
feet. In other words, it should seek to establish in him a habit of
right-doing. For this reason his religion should be of the most
practical sort, leaving the theory to come later. He should have
sufficient theological pegs to hang his morality on, but he should be
troubled little with dogma. For this reason his religion will probably
have largely to do with the here and now. He cannot be much interested
in an other-worldly religion. The normal child at this period will not
sing with any great enthusiasm "I want to be an angel." For this world
is to him just then a very interesting and fascinating place. He is for
that reason ready also to admire men of action, and is wide open for
the influences of hero-worship. And while he cannot be argued into being
a Christian, for he is not sufficiently awake to logic; and while he
cannot be coerced, for he possesses the dynamic of a locomotive combined
with the resistance of a mule, he can be magnetized into being a
Christian if there is set as his teacher and example a virile, magnetic
man. The boy will open his soul to him as he does his windows to welcome
the breath of May. Such considerations as these have determined the
content of these sermons.
The author makes no claim to originality for much of the material
presented, but he has given a new setting to old truths, a setting which
experience has proved to be interesting to the children of his own
congregation.
It may seem that the wording of some of these sermons is beyond the
grasp of the children for whom it was intended. Two things are to be
noted in this connection. First, a child resents being talked down to.
He soon detects a condescending smile and mock affability in a speaker.
And when he detects these he closes the door of his heart against the
message. Second, it is better to give the child something to grow to,
provided it is not too far beyond his grasp. But here again experience
is the best criterion. The children who have heard these sermons have
enjoyed them, and have carried their substance and lessons home with
them to repeat to older ears.
They are offered to the public, therefore, in the hope that they may
suggest a method, add a little to the scant supply of material for
children's sermons, and serve to interest other children as well.