CARE OF THE POWERS:--HOPE.
We have seen what power of Will a child has. But the Will itself is put
in action by Hope and Fear.
What is stronger in an infant than its capacity for Hope and Fear? In
its earliest and most unconscious stages of emotion, how its little
limbs quiver, and its countenance lights up at the prospect of its food!
and how it turns away its face, or wrinkles it up into a cry, at the
sight of a strange countenance, or unusual appearance of dress or place!
And what stronger hint can a parent have than this to look forward to
what this hope and fear may grow to?
This great power of Hope must determine the leading features of the
character of the man or woman; determine them for good or evil according
to the training of the power from this day forward. Shall the man
continue a child, or sink into the brute by his objects of hope
continuing to be what they are now--food or drink? Shall his frame be
always put into commotion by the prospect of pleasant bodily sensations
from eating and drinking, and other animal gratifications? Or, when the
child arrives at hoping for his mother's smile and his father's praise,
shall he stop there, and live for admiration; admiration of his person
and dress, his activity, or his cleverness? Shall the gratification of
his vanity be the chief interest of his life? Or shall it be ambition?
Shall his perpetual hope be of a higher sort of praise--praise from so
large a number as shall give him power over other men, and cause his
name to be known beyond his connexions, and his native place, and his
country and his age? All this is very low and very small; too little for
the requirements of his nature, too little for the peace of his mind and
the happiness of his heart. Shall not rather this faculty of hope be
nourished up into Faith?--faith which includes at once the fulness of
virtuous power and the peace which the world can neither give nor take
away. A being in whom the early faculty of Hope has been matured into a
steady power of Faith is of the highest and happiest order of men,
because the objects of his hope are unchanging and ever-lasting, and
they keep all his best powers in strenuous action and in full health and
strength. When the mother sees her infant in an ecstacy of hope, first
at the food making ready for him, and next at the gay flower within his
reach, and afterwards at the flattery of visitors, she should remember
that here is the faculty which may hereafter lead and sustain him
through days of hunger and nights of watching, or years of toilsome
obscurity, or scenes of the unthinking world's scorn, calm and peaceful
in the furtherance of the truth of God and the welfare of Man. And if
her tender heart shrinks from the anticipation of privation and contempt
such as have too often hitherto attended a life of faith, let her
remember that in the midst of the most prosperous life there can be no
peace but in proportion to the power of faith; and that therefore in
training up this faculty of Hope to its highest exercise she is
providing most substantially for his happiness, be his lot otherwise
what it may.
How is this faculty to be trained?--
First, it must be cherished. Some well-meaning parents repress and even
extinguish it, from the notion that this is the way to teach humility
and self-denial. The consequence is that they break the mainspring of
action in the child's mind, and everything comes to a stand. It is
difficult to weaken the power of hope in a human being, and harder still
to break it down; but when the thing is done, what sadder spectacle can
be seen? Of all moving sights of woe, the most mournful is that of a
hopeless child. A single glance at its listless limbs, its dull eye, its
languid movements, shows the mischief that has been done. The child is
utterly unreliable; a mere burden upon the world. He has no truth, no
love, no industry, no intellectual power in him; and if he has any
conscience, it is the mere remains,--enough to trouble him, without
doing him any good. This is an extreme case, and I trust a rare one. But
cases of repressed hope are much more common than they should be. There
are too many children who are baulked of their mother's sympathy because
she is busy or fretful, or of their father's, because he is stern. Too
many little hearts are made to swell in silence because they cannot get
justice, or to burn under the suspicion that their aspirations are
despised. After this, what can they do? At best, they carry their
confidence elsewhere, and make their chief interests away from home: and
it is too probable that they will give up their plans and aspirations,
and sink down to lower hopes. A boy who aspires to discover the North
Pole, or to write a book which will teach the world something greater
than it ever knew before, will presently sink down to be greedy after
lollypops: and a girl who means to try whether a woman cannot be as good
as Jesus Christ, may presently be discouraged down to the point of
reckoning on Sunday because she is to have a new ribbon on her bonnet.
In the case of every human being, Hope is to be cherished from first to
last; not the hope of the particular thing that the child has set its
mind on, unless the thing itself be good; but the hopeful mood of mind.
The busiest mother can have nothing to do so important as satisfying her
child's heart by a word or look of sympathy: and the most anxious
father can have nothing so grave to occupy him as the peril he puts his
child into by plunging him into undeserved fear and disappointment.
Hope is to be cherished without ceasing. But the objects of hope must
first be varied and then exalted, that the faculty may be led on from
strength to strength, till it is able to fix its aims for itself. To the
hope of good eating and drinking must succeed that of clutching gay
colours, of hearing mother sing, of having play with father when he
comes home; then of having a kitten or a doll to take care of; then of
parents' praise for lessons or other work well done; then of
self-satisfaction for bad habits cured: then there may be a great spring
forward to thoughts of glory;--the glory of being a great sailor, or
magistrate, or author, or martyr: and at length, the hope of doing great
things for the good of mankind, and of becoming a perfect man. As for
times and opportunities of cherishing and exalting hope--every hour is
the right time, and every day affords the opportunity. What is needed,
is that the parents should have the aim fixed in their hearts; and then
their minds, and that of the child, will work towards it as by an
instinct. By natural impulse the mother's hand will bring the gay
flower, and the kitten or the doll before the child's notice, if it
becomes greedy about its food. By natural impulse she will sing its
favourite song, or beg play for it of its father after some little
virtuous effort of the child's; in natural course, all things in human
life, great and small, will present themselves in their heroic aspect to
the minds of the parents, and be thus represented to the mind of the
child, if once the idea of the future man be firmly associated with that
of moral nobleness. If they have in them faith enough steadily to desire
for him this moral nobleness above all things, there can be no fear but
that their aspiration will communicate itself to him; and his faculty of
Hope will ripen into a power of Faith.
I have said nothing of a hope of reward as among the objects of
childhood. This is because I think rewards and punishments seldom or
never necessary in household education, while they certainly bring great
mischief after them. In some cases of bad habit, and in a very early
stage of education, they may be desirable, here and there; but as a
system, I think rewards and punishments bad. In the case of a very young
child who has fallen into a habit of crying at bedtime, or at any
particular time of day, or in that of a thoughtless, untidy child, where
the object is to impress its memory, or to establish a strong
association with time or place, it may be useful to connect some
expectation of pain or pleasure with particular seasons or acts, so as
to make the infant remember the occasion for self-government, and rouse
its will to do right; but this should be only where the association of
selfish pleasure or pain is likely to die out with the bad habit, and
never where such selfish pleasure or pain can be associated with great
permanent ideas and moral feelings. A careless child may be allowed to
earn a reward for punctuality at meals, and for putting playthings and
dress in their proper place when done with, and for personal neatness,
during a specified time; and perhaps for the diligent learning of
irksome tasks: and there may be some punishment, declared and agreed
upon before hand, and steadily inflicted, for any disagreeable personal
habit, or any other external instance of habitual thoughtlessness. But
the greater moral aims of the parent are too sacred to be mixed up with
the direct personal interests of the child. A child will hardly be nobly
truthful who dreads being whipped for a lie; and benevolence will be
spoiled in its young beginnings, if any pleasure beyond itself is looked
for in its early exercise. A child who has broken a plate, or gone
astray for pleasure when sent on an errand, must want confidence in his
parents, and be more or less cowardly if he denies the offence; and he
will not have more truth or courage on the next occasion for being
whipped now. What he needs is to be made wiser about the blessedness of
truth and the horrors of falsehood, and more brave about the pain of
rebuke: and the whipping will not make him either the one or the other.
I remember being fond of a book in my childhood which yet revolted me
in one part. It told of the children of a great family in France, who
heard of the poverty of a woman about to lie in, and who bought and made
clothes for herself and her infant. Their mother and grandmother made a
sort of festival of the giving of these clothes. The children rode in
procession on asses, carrying their gifts. One tied her bundle with blue
ribbon, and another with pink; and the whole village came out to see,
when they alighted at the poor woman's door. I used to blush with
indignation over this story; indignation on the poor woman's account,
that her pauperism was so exposed; and on that of the children, that
they were not allowed the pure pleasure of helping a neighbour, without
being applauded at home and by a whole village for what it gave them
nothing but satisfaction to do. I am strongly of opinion that when we
duly understand and estimate man, there will be no reward or punishment
at all; that human beings will be so trained as to find their pleasure
and pain in the gratification or the abuse of their own highest
faculties; and that in those days (however far off they may be) there
will be no treadwheels, no hulks, no gibbets; and no prize-giving,
except for feats of skill or activity. And meantime, I feel perfectly
sure that children under home-training may be led to find such
gratification in the exercise of their higher intellectual and moral
faculties, as to feel the abuse of them more painful than any
punishment, and their action more pleasurable than any reward. When we
read of a Christian in the early ages who was brought into the
amphitheatre, and given the choice whether he would declare Jupiter to
be the supreme God, and enjoy life and comfort, or avow himself a
Christian, and be torn to pieces by wild beasts the next minute, we feel
that he _could not_ say he believed Jupiter to be God. Well: convince
any child as fully as this of the truth, and of his absolute need of
fidelity to it, and he can no more endure lapse from it than the
Christian could endure to declare Jupiter to be God. As the inveterate
drunkard must gratify his propensity to drink, at the cost of any amount
of personal and domestic misery; and as the miser must go on adding to
his stores of gold, even though he starves himself into disease and
death, so the upright man must satisfy his conscience through every
extremity; and no penalty can deter the benevolent man from devoting all
he has to give--his money, his time, and his life--to the relief of
suffering. On such as these--the upright and the devoted--every appeal
to their lower faculties is lost; and as for their hope and fear--they
have passed into something higher. With them "perfect love has cast out
fear;" and hope has grown up into Faith; and this faith being to them
"the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,"
it must be more to them than any of the passing pains and pleasures of
life. Exalted as these beings are, they are of the same make as the
infant on its mother's lap: and each is destined to derive his highest
gratification from the exercise of the noblest faculties of his nature.
If parents did but understand and constantly remember this, they would
consider well before they dared to mix up a meaner pleasure and pain
with the greater, while appealing to any of the higher moral faculties
of their children--if indeed they ventured upon reward and punishment at
all.