FAMILY RELIGION.
We are living in an age of surprising inventions and marvelous
machinery. As a natural sequence, ours is an age of delegation. The
habit of doing nothing by hand that can be as well done by a machine
begets the desire to seek out new and presumably better methods of
performing every duty appointed to each of us. Fine penmanship is no
longer a necessity for the clerk or business man; skill with her
needle is not demanded of the wife and mother. Our kitchens bristle
with labor-saving implements warranted to reduce the scullion's and
cook's work to a minimum of toil.
An important problem of the day, involving grave results, is founded
upon the fact that, with the countless multiplicity of Teachers' Helps
and Scholars' Friends, International Lesson Papers, Sunday-school
weeklies and quarterlies and the banded leagues of associated youth
whose watchword is "Christ and the Church," the children and young
people of to-day are, as a rule, less familiar with the text of Holy
Writ, with Bible history and the cardinal doctrines which the
Protestant Church holds are founded upon God's revealed Word than were
the children and youth of fifty years ago. Let me say here that I am
personally responsible for this statement and what is to follow it.
Having been a Bible-class teacher and an active worker in religious
and charitable societies for forty years, and numbering as I do
between twenty-five and thirty clergymen among my near kinsmen, I do
not speak idly or ignorantly upon this subject. My appeal for
corroboration of my testimony is to my contemporaries and co-workers.
The superficiality and glitter that are the bane of modern methods of
education in our country have not spared sanctuary ordinances and
family religion. "The church which is in thy house" is an empty form
of speech when applied to a majority of so-called Christian homes.
Early trains and late dinners, succeeded by evening engagements, have
crowded out family prayers, and the pious custom, honored in all ages,
of "grace before meat," is in many houses disregarded, except when a
clergyman is at the table. Then the deferential bend of the host's
head in the direction of the reverend guest is rather a tribute to the
cloth than an acknowledgment of the Divine Giver to whom thanks are
due. In the olden days it was the pupil who studied the Sunday-school
lessons as needfully as he conned the tasks to be prepared for
Monday's schoolroom. The portion of the old Union Question Book
appointed for next Sunday was gone over under the mother's eye, the
references were looked up, the Bible Dictionary and Concordance
consulted. Then a Psalm or part of a chapter in the New Testament was
committed to memory, and four or five questions in the catechism were
added to the sum of knowledge to be inspected by the Sunday-school
teacher and "audited" by the superintendent.
In writing the foregoing paragraph a scene arises before me of my
father's fine gray head and serious face as he sat at the head of the
room, Bible and reference books upon the stand before him; of the
dusky faces of the servants in the background, intent upon the reading
and exposition of the Word as they came from the lips of the master of
the household, who for the hour was also the priest. I hear much,
nowadays, of the "hard lines" that fell to the children of that
generation, in that they were drilled after the manner I have
described, and compelled to attend church twice or three times on
Sunday. I affirm fearlessly that we did not know how badly off we
were, and that the aforesaid "lines" seemed to our unsophisticated
imaginations to be cast to us in pleasant places. The hour devoted
each Sunday evening to the study of next Sunday's lesson was full of
interest, the prayer that preceded it and the two or three hymns with
which the simple service closed, gave it a solemnity that was delight,
not boredom.
"Primitive methods" we call those studies now, and contemn, gravely or
jeeringly, the obsolete practice of "going through" the Bible yearly
by reading a given number of chapters every day. We assume that those
were mechanical contrivances which, at the best, filled the mind with
an undigested mass of Biblical matter and made sacred things trite.
They who censure or sneer take no exception to the story that
Demosthenes translated the works of Thucydides eight times, and also
committed them to memory, that his style might be informed with the
spirit and tone of his favorite exemplar. We cannot do away with the
pregnant truth that the Bible-reading child of 1845 so steeped
imagination and memory in the Holy Word that the wash of years and the
acids of doubt have never robbed him of it. The Psalms and gospels
then learned stay by us yet, responsive to the prick of temptation,
the stroke of sorrow, the sunlight of joy. When strongly moved we
unconsciously fall into Scriptural phraseology. God's promises then
learned are our song in the house of our pilgrimage. We do not
confound patriarchs with prophets, or passages from the epistles with
the Psalms of David.
I am continually confronted by illustrations of the truth that the
"contract system" prevails in religious teaching as extensively as in
the manufacture of garments and food and furniture, and that the
results in all cases are the same. Machine work cannot compare in
neatness and durability with hand-made goods. The complaint, "I cannot
get my Bible class to study the lessons," is almost universal. I have
known large classes of adults to be made up with the express proviso
that none of the members should be expected to prepare the lesson.
Their appearance in the classroom at the stated hour fulfills their
part of the compact. In thus presenting themselves they "press the
button." The teacher does the rest. The mother, taking her afternoon
siesta, or reading her Sunday novel at home, rarely knows the subject
of the Bible lesson, much less what the teacher's treatment of it is.
I do not mention the pastor purposely. Except when he sees them in the
Sunday-school, the faces of the children belonging (by courtesy) to
his cure of souls are seldom beheld by him. The Sunday-school
originally intended for the neglected children of the illiterate poor,
has come to be the chief instrumentality upon which well-to-do church
members depend for the spiritual upbuilding of those who are to form
the church of the future. If one is tempted to challenge the
assertion, let him compare the number of children (not infants)
enrolled in our Sunday-schools with those who habitually attend upon
divine service. The absence of the sunny, restless polls from the rows
of worshipers in the pews, the troops of boys and girls who wend
their way homeward at the conclusion of the Sunday-school exercises
are accounted for by so-called humane apologists by the plea that two
services in one day are burdensome to the little folk. And mothers
"enjoy the service far more when they are not disturbed by fidgety or
drowsy children." "Then, too, much of the sermon is unintelligible to
them. Why torture them by a mere form?"
An old-fashioned clergyman--a visitor to a city church which I chanced
to attend last winter--prefaced his sermon, "as was his custom at
home," he said, by "a five-minute talk to the lambs of the fold." In
the congregation of at least 800 souls there were exactly three
"lambs" under fifteen years of age. It was impossible for the most
reverent of his hearers to help thinking of the solitary parishioner
who composed his pastor's congregation upon a stormy day, and objected
to the sermon dutifully delivered by the minister "as good, but too
personal."
It is as impossible for the thoughtful student of the signs of the
times to avoid the conclusion that the growing disposition of the
young to deny the authority of the church and to supersede her stated
ordinances by organizations established and run by themselves may be
the legitimate fruit of the prominence given by their parents to what
should be the nursery of the church over the church itself. It would
be strange if, after witnessing for fourteen or fifteen years such
open and systematic disrespect of the gates of Zion, they were to
develop veneration for her worship and devout appreciation of the
mystic truth that this is the place where God's honor dwells.
If--and the "if" is broad and deep and long--the little ones are
faithfully trained by the parents in the nurture and admonition of the
Lord (dear, quaint old phraseology, fine, subtle and pervasive as
lavender scent!), if sacred songs and Bible stories and tender talk of
the Saviour's love and the beautiful life of which this may be made a
type and a foretaste, keep in the minds of the little ones at home the
sanctity and sweetness of the day of days, there is a shadow of excuse
for the failure to make room for them in the family pew. Even then the
tree will grow as the twig is inclined.
The mother whose knee is the baby's first altar, who gathers about her
for confession, for counsel and for prayer sons and daughters who
will, in older and sterner years, call her blessed for the holy
teachings of their childhood, will teach them to find, with her, the
tabernacles of the Lord of Hosts "amiable," _i.e._, worthy of all love
and fidelity. The chrism of motherhood consecrates a woman as a
priestess. Neither convenience nor custom can release her from the
office. Let not another take her crown.