The strength and membership of the Christian Church are great, but they
are not what they should be. After all, the Church is only a
comparatively small fraction of the sum total of human society. The
plans of Jesus will not have been realized and the Kingdom of God will
not have become an actual fact until the Church and the race are one.
The Church is growing, but one of the evidences why there remains a
great deal of ground to be possessed by the Kingdom is to be found in
the fact that the race is growing more rapidly than the Church is. It
is possible for an institution to be growing and yet losing ground if
its problems are growing more rapidly than its power to meet them.
Viewed alone, the reports on Church membership for any single year look
somewhat encouraging. When one reflects, however, upon the growth of the
race and the encroachments of paganism, the encouragement is diminished.
The Church is supposed to represent a leavening force. It is quite proper
to consider its mission in that light. A leavening force, however, must
not remain such. Its work is to leaven the whole lump.
A degree of failure is involved somewhere in the question. Otherwise, the
mission of Christianity would have been achieved before this time. The
difficulty is not in the matter of learning, for Christian leaders were
never so well trained for their work as now. It does not relate to wealth,
for it has been a long while since the Church could truly protest its
poverty of silver and gold. It is not even in the matter of service, for
there were never so many people working in the Kingdom as now.
=The Vital Point=
The trouble does not lie in our failure to work, though it does lie in our
failure to work to the best advantage. We have toiled with the problems,
but we have not yet unitedly attacked it at the vital point.
That point is childhood.
This word of warning does not seem to be needed by the Roman Catholic
branch of Christendom, for that church grows rapidly. The reason for the
following it has does not lie in the quality of its preaching, for it does
not emphasize the sermon. It is not to be found in its form of worship,
for that is in a strange tongue and according to antiquated formulae. The
secret most largely lies in the persistent nurture of children in the
faith of their fathers.
In this regard Protestantism is lacking. We have cultivated too little
conviction on the question of a child’s relation to the Church and the
Christian faith. We have kept our minds free and easy on the question,
until a situation has arisen to remind us that the real fruit which we
desire for the Kingdom comes not as the result of indifference but of
intense effort.
Even a democratic conception may be carried to such an extreme that it
counts for nothing. While Bolshevism and Anarchy have been tolerated under
the protection of the State, they have also been fostered about the very
firesides of many homes. We have tried to place Protestantism upon a
democratic basis, but we must not forget that the principle of democracy
does not diminish the necessity for conviction and fidelity. The disregard
of obligation is not freedom.
The mistaken notion that there is no place for religion in the child
mind is already bringing forth its pitiful harvest. Its fruit is a
generation of younger people dwelling largely apart from the Church, more
vitally concerned with other than religious questions, and living for
ideals which are chiefly moulded by the standards of the present world.
Whatever the Church has meant in the progress of the race, and many
thoughtful people believe that has been much, it will not be able to
permanently maintain itself and its work unless this situation is
reversed. It will not normally be able to realize upon the product of any
home in which no definite emphasis has been laid upon the things for which
it stands. We can hardly expect sustained support for the one institution
dedicated to the saving of men in both this world and the world to come,
unless each generation accepts the responsibility of teaching the next a
wholesome love for and a genuine devotion to its teaching and
its activity.
One cannot say that the parents of today are not concerned about their
children. In most ways children were never so well cared for. In this
particular thing, however, there is a distressing neglect. This is not
true because parents mean to neglect any vital thing, nor is it true
because they are antagonistic to this necessity. It is true because many
fail to see that it is a necessity for childhood. People simply blind
themselves to the fact that spiritual growth requires food as imperatively
as does physical development.
In some cases, perhaps, it is the result of simple neglect. People are
busy about so many things in these days that it does not always seem easy
to give their children training in all the points requiring it. Some
assume that the matter of religious training may properly be left to the
church and the Sunday School.
=The Necessity for Religious Nurture in the Home=
Religious nurture is, however, a matter which requires the cooperation of
the home. Some phases of it cannot be so successfully promoted anywhere
else as there. Pastors and Sunday School teachers have a part to play in
the religious education of the young, but certain great life lessons can
never issue from any other source quite so appropriately as from the
loved lips of fathers or mothers.
Nothing can be more groundless than the notion that a child should not be
influenced religiously until he is old enough to settle such questions for
himself. Ultimately he will settle them, but his decision will be largely
the result of early training. Home teaching and influence affect every
decision one makes through life.
One might as well refuse to feed a child until he could declare his own
choice of food as to starve his religious nature until he could choose its
satisfaction in his own way. Certain fundamental necessities are too
constant and imperative to justify waiting. A life must be fed or it must
perish, and this principle holds as true with childhood as it does with
age. Indeed the necessities of a growing life are only the more acute.
Occasionally parents will insist that their failure to bring their
children up in the ways of the Church is the result of their own rearing.
They declare that it is a reaction against the strictness with which they
were sent to Church in their own childhood. First, this is a calumny
against good parents who tried to lay in the lives of their children the
foundations of happiness and success. Second, it looks to the spiritual
starvation of the younger generation, the decadence of a fundamental
instinct, and the strangling of a necessary social institution. They
probably owe much of their success to the thing for which they unjustly
blame their parents. Whoever is not physically equal to an hour or two in
the sanctuary is hardly a fit candidate for the world’s responsibilities.
We should assume a universal Church. By this I mean that we should assume
that every child is born into the church, to be reared in its ways and
teachings, and to be included among its numbers until he wilfully forsakes
it. In other words, we should throw the chances on the right side instead
of the wrong one as we have been doing. It is well enough to save lost
sheep, but it is better to keep them from being lost. The religious
experience will take care of itself if the religious life is
properly nurtured.
Children are born for the kingdom of better things. Their Maker meant us
to keep them true to it. He will care for their regeneration, if we will
keep them in line for it by protecting them from blighting influences.