Every normal child is born with certain tendencies and propensities in
which either the good or the evil of past generations preponderates. If it
is the good, there must be some agency to call forth, develop, and
strengthen it; if, on the other hand, it is the evil, there is all the
more need why some influence should be brought to bear to check the evil
and inculcate the good. Upon three great institutions devolves this
momentous responsibility. They are the home, the school, and the Church.
Each must help the other two, and no one is complete without the
co-operation of the others. Of the three, the home will perhaps come
nearest to completeness within itself. The sooner these three agencies,
which in the final analysis have a common purpose, come to understand each
other and co-operate with each other, the better it will be for the child.
For the responsibility of no one of the three ends with this life. The
Church is not the only one that builds for eternity, nor should the other
two be the only two that build for time, but all may well unite in
building for both time and eternity, and the aim of each should be the
perfection of personality.
Three forces of equal power, pulling each in a different direction, must
either offset the influence of each other and result in stationary
failure, or force each other to aimless wandering. Besides all this, the
strain is uncomfortably intense for the object upon which the pull is
exerted. The child who has had these influences pulling him about in
different or totally opposite directions all his life is an object
deserving of pity, and if in his case life becomes a failure, the wonder
will only be why the failure was not more complete. But when these forces
unite in a common purpose, and their purpose should be a common one, the
child can only blame himself if he does not attain some very definite
goal. And when that common purpose is a good one, that goal can not choose
but be a worthy one.
A great many parents are wondering these days why their children did not
grow up to be good. If their children are spiritually delinquent, they
blame the Church, regardless of what the home example or precept has been.
If the children use bad grammar or do not exercise good judgment, the
blame falls upon the school, regardless of the standards of those with
whom those children have spent the days of their mental unfolding.
Sometimes it is more than the Church can do to merely offset the evil done
at home, without ever reaching the aggressive side of development.
Sometimes it is more than lies within the ability of the school to rescue
the child from the misconceptions and errors of everyday life and speech,
without arriving at the constructive point at all. God has committed to
the home the arduous but sacred task of guiding the first faltering steps
of the little ones into the ways of righteousness and truth. The first is
out of the reach of the Church’s ability; the second is a part in
education that the school can never play. Neither the school nor the
Church is an orphans’ home for the purpose of taking the responsibility
of raising people’s children from the shoulders of those to whom it
belongs. They can only do their work upon the chief cornerstone of home
instruction, guidance, and discipline. Better children’s meetings can be
held at mother’s knee than anywhere else in the world, and it is wrong to
deny to maturity the golden memories of such a childhood. The business of
the Church is spiritual ministration, and it ought not to need to be
anything more. Spiritual ministration, however, is a broad term, and it
ought never to be allowed to center in earthly things. The home, then,
ought to be the first school, and it must lay proper foundation for the
work of the Church, for never will teachings be better learned nor longer
remembered than those received in its quiet precincts.
In this day, the school has been narrowed down in the scope of its work to
mere mental discipline. And yet the schools from whose halls the world’s
greatest minds have come, have not been mere knowledge machines. Our
schools claim to teach literature, and yet their curricula ignore the
greatest piece of literature ever written. In some States the law goes so
far as to forbid the reading of the Bible in the public schools on the
ground that it might engender sectarianism. The Bible is not a sectarian
book, nor does the teaching of it need to be sectarian. There is scarcely
a truly great life that is not a standing witness to the fact that
education is not complete without a knowledge of the Bible, at least as
literature and history. And yet pedagogical fads and public customs deny
public school students the benefit of the study of it. Public school
students are taught the pagan religions. They are taught the mythology of
Greece and Rome, but the living and vital religion, to which even the
school owes its being, is ignored for the petty fear of sectarianism. A
man’s education can not be measured by what he has committed to memory,
but by what he has learned by heart. Education is no more what one knows
than what he is. The school needs to train the mind, but it can not afford
to ignore the necessity of a right culture of the heart.
But it is scarcely a greater mistake for the school to hold itself
strictly to mental training to the exclusion of everything pertaining to
religion, than it is for the Church to hold itself strictly to religious
work to the exclusion of educative effort. In physical science, radiant
light and heat are exactly the same thing manifested to different avenues
of sense perception. Who knows but that in the spiritual realm, the light
of truer wisdom and the warmth of Christian experience are one and the
same thing, except that, in the one case, it is perceived through the mind
and, in the other, through the heart? Upon the Church devolves the
responsibility of lifting the thought of the community to whose needs it
ministers to the highest, purest, and best possible plane. In this
measure, it needs to be an educative influence. It will be able to reach
some minds through the heart, and it will be able to reach some hearts
through the mind, and in both cases it will be lifting men to God, who is
both love and light. What does it matter if the preacher does lecture once
in a while? The Old Book will always supply food for the profoundest
thought. We not only need our hearts comforted, however important that may
be, but if we expect to understand God’s message and plan, we will have to
think, also. Jesus was a Scholar and will baffle the scholarship of this
world for many years yet to come. Let the Church not ignore the
educational side of Christianity.
And so these three agencies can not encroach on each others’ territory,
for they have a common work to do if they are true to their trust. Let the
home give the first lessons, and all through the changing years let it be
both an educative and religious influence. Let the school be solicitous of
both the unfolding mind and the craving heart. Let the Church minister to
spiritual needs and not forget that the true education of the heart does
not despise the education of the mind. Then shall the child have it said
of him, as it was said of that Child of the long ago, “And He advanced in
wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and man.”