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RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY
by
HENRY F. COPE
General Secretary of the Religious Education Association
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois
Copyright 1915 by
The University of Chicago
All Rights Reserved
Published April 1915
Second Impression September 1915
Third Impression March 1916
Fourth Impression June 1917
Fifth Impression August 1920
Sixth Impression July 1922
Seventh Impression September 1922
Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois
The Baker and Taylor Company
New York
The Cambridge University Press
London
The Maruzen-Kabushiki-Kaisha
Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Sendai
The Mission Book Company
Shanghai
PREFACE
In the work of religious education, with which the present series of
books is concerned, the life of the family rightly occupies a central
place. The church has always realized its duty to exhort parents to
bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, but
very little has ever been done to enable parents to study systematically
and scientifically the problem of religious education in the family.
Today parents' classes are being formed in many churches; Christian
Associations, women's clubs, and institutes are studying the subject;
individual parents are becoming more and more interested in the rational
performance of their high duties. And there is a general desire for
guidance. As the full bibliography at the end of this volume and the
references in connection with each chapter indicate, there is available
a very large literature dealing with the various elements of the
problem. But a guidebook to organize all this material and to stimulate
independent thought and endeavor is desirable.
To afford this guidance the present volume has been prepared. It is
equally adapted for the thoughtful study of the father and mother who
are seeking help in the moral and religious development of their own
family, and for classes in churches, institutes, and neighborhoods,
where the important problems of the family are to be studied and
discussed. It would be well to begin the use of the book by reading the
suggestions for class work at the end of the volume.
With a confident hope that religion in the family is not to be a wistful
memory of the past but a most vital force in the making of the better
day that is coming, this volume is offered as a contribution and a
summons.
The Editors
New Year's Day, 1915
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. An Interpretation of the Family 1
II. The Present Status of Family Life 10
III. The Permanent Elements in Family Life 27
IV. The Religious Place of the Family 37
V. The Meaning Of Religious Education in the Family 46
VI. The Child's Religious Ideas 60
VII. Directed Activity 75
VIII. The Home as a School 87
IX. The Child's Ideal Life 101
X. Stories and Reading 110
XI. The Use of the Bible in the Home 119
XII. Family Worship 126
XIII. Sunday in the Home 145
XIV. The Ministry of the Table 164
XV. The Boy and Girl in the Family 173
XVI. The Needs of Youth 183
XVII. The Family and the Church 198
XVIII. Children and the School 212
XIX. Dealing with Moral Crises 218
XX. Dealing with Moral Crises (_Continued_) 231
XXI. Dealing with Moral Crises (_Continued_) 240
XXII. Dealing with Moral Crises (_Concluded_) 249
XXIII. The Personal Factors in Religious Education 259
XXIV. Looking to the Future 268
Suggestions for Class Work 281
A Book List 290
Index 297
CHAPTER I
AN INTERPRETATION OF THE FAMILY
§ 1. TAKING THE HOME IN RELIGIOUS TERMS
The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless
families, irreverent children, and the decadence of the old type of
separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and
insufficient purposes. Where the home is only an opportunity for
self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding-house, a
sleeping-shelf, an implement for social advantage. While it is true that
general economic developments have effected marked changes in domestic
economy, the happiness and efficiency of the family do not depend wholly
on the parlor, the kitchen, or the clothes closet. Rather, everything
depends on whether the home and family are considered in worthy and
adequate terms.
Homes are wrecked because families refuse to take home-living in
religious terms, in social terms of sacrifice and service. In such
homes, organized and conducted to satisfy personal desires rather than
to meet social responsibilities, these desires become ends rather than
agencies and opportunities.
They who marry for lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even
in its form of self-preservation, is an unstable foundation for a home.
It costs too much to maintain a home if you measure it by the personal
advantages of parents. What hope is there for useful and happy family
life if the newly wedded youth have both been educated in selfishness,
habituated to frivolous pleasures, and guided by ideals of success in
terms of garish display? Yet what definite program for any other
training does society provide? Do the schools and colleges, Sunday
schools and churches teach youth a better way? How else shall they be
trained to take the home and family in terms that will make for
happiness and usefulness? It is high time to take seriously the task of
educating people to religious efficiency in the home.
§ 2. THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE
The family needs a religious motive. More potent for happiness than
courses in domestic economy will be training in sufficient domestic
motives. It will take much more than modern conveniences, bigger
apartments, or even better kitchens to make the new home. Essentially
the problem is not one of mechanics but of persons. What we call the
home problem is more truly a _family_ problem. It centers in persons;
the solution awaits a race with new ideals, educated to live as more
than dust, for more than dirt, for personality rather than for
possessions. We need young people who establish homes, not simply
because they feel miserable when separated, nor because one needs a
place in which to board and the other needs a boarder, but because the
largest duty and joy of life is to enrich the world with other lives and
to give themselves in high love to making those other lives of the
greatest possible worth to the world.
The family must come to a recognition of social obligations. We all hope
for the coming ideal day. Everywhere men and women are answering to
higher ideals of life. But the new day waits for a new race. Modern
emphasis on the child is a part of present reaction from materialism.
New social ideals are personal. We seek a better world for the sake of a
higher race. The emphasis on child-welfare has a social rather than a
sentimental basis. The family is our great chance to determine childhood
and so to make the future. The child of today is basic to the social
welfare of tomorrow. He is our chance to pay to tomorrow all that we owe
to yesterday. The family as the child's life-school is thus central to
every social program and problem.
§ 3. WIDER CHILD-WELFARE
This age knows that man does not live by bread alone. Interest in
child-welfare is for the sake of the child himself, not for the sake of
his clothes or his physical condition. Concern about soap and
sanitation, hygiene and the conveniences of life grows because these all
go to make up the soil in which the person grows. There is danger that
our emphasis on child-welfare may be that of the tools instead of the
man; that we may become enmeshed in the mechanism of well-being and lose
sight of the being who should be well. To fail at the point of character
is to fail all along the line. And we fail altogether, no matter how
many bathtubs we give a child, how many playgrounds, medical
inspections, and inoculations, unless that child be in himself strong
and high-minded, loving truth, hating a lie, and habituated to live in
good-will with his fellows and with high ideals for the universe. Modern
interest in the material factors of life is on account of their potency
in making real selfhood; we acknowledge the importance of the physical
as the very soil in which life grows. But the fruits are more than the
soil, and a home exists for higher purposes than physical conveniences;
these are but its tools to its great end. Somehow for purposes of social
well-being we must raise our thinking of the family to the aim of the
development of efficient, rightly minded character. The family must be
seen as making spiritual persons.
§ 4. THE COST OF A FAMILY
Taking the home in religious terms will mean, then, conceiving it as an
institution with a religious purpose, namely, that of giving to the
world children who are adequately trained and sufficiently motived to
live the social life of good-will. The family exists to give society
developed, efficient children. It fails if it does not have a religious,
a spiritual product. It cannot succeed except by the willing
self-devotion of adult lives to this spiritual, personal purpose.
A family is the primary social organization for the elementary purpose
of breeding the species, nurturing and training the young. This is its
physiological basis. But its duties cannot be discharged on the
physiological plane alone. This elementary physiological function is
lifted to a spiritual level by the aim of character and the motive of
love. Families cannot be measured by their size; they must be measured
by the character of their products. If quality counts anywhere it counts
here, though it is well to remember that it takes some reasonable
quantity to make right quality in each.
The family needs a religious motive. It demands sacrifice. To follow
lower impulses is to invite disaster. The home breeds bitterness and
sorrow wherever men and women court for lust, marry for social standing,
and maintain an establishment only as a part of the game of social
competition. To sow the winds of passion, ease, idle luxury, pride, and
greed is to reap the whirlwind. Moreover, it is to miss the great
chance of life, the chance to find that short cut to happiness which
men call pain and suffering.
A family is humanity's great opportunity to walk the way of the cross.
Mothers know that; some fathers know it; some children grow up to learn
it. In homes where this is true, where all other aims are subordinated
to this one of making the home count for high character, to training
lives into right social adjustment and service, the primary emphasis is
not on times and seasons for religion; religion is the life of that
home, and in all its common living every child learns the way of the
great Life of all. In vain do we torture children with adult religious
penances, long prayers, and homilies, thinking thereby to give them
religious training. The good man comes out of the good home, the home
that is good in character, aim, and organization, not sporadically but
permanently, the home where the religious spirit, the spirit of
idealism, and the sense of the infinite and divine are diffused rather
than injected. The inhuman, antisocial vampires, who suck their
brothers' blood, whether they be called magnates or mob-leaders,
grafters or gutter thieves, often learned to take life in terms of graft
by the attitude and atmosphere of their homes.[1]
§ 5. MOTIVES FOR A STUDY OF THE FAMILY
The modern family is worthy of our careful study. It demands painstaking
attention, both because of its immediate importance to human happiness
and because of its potentiality for the future of society. The kind of
home and the character of family life which will best serve the world
and fulfil the will of God cannot be determined by sentiment or
supposition. We are under the highest and sternest obligation to
discover the laws of the family, those social laws which are determined
by its nature and purpose, to find right standards for family life, to
discriminate between the things that are permanent and those that are
passing, between those we must conserve and those we must discard, to be
prepared to fit children for the finer and higher type of family life
that must come in the future.
Methods of securing family efficiency will not be discovered by
accident. If it is worth while to study the minor details, such as
baking cakes and sweeping floors, surely it is even more important to
study the larger problems of organization and discipline. There is a
science of home-direction and an art of family living; both must be
learned with patient study.
It is a costly thing to keep a home where honor, the joy of love, and
high ideals dwell ever. It costs time, pleasures, and so-called social
advantages, as well as money and labor. It must cost thought, study,
and investigation. It demands and deserves sacrifice; it is too sacred
to be cheap. The building of a home is a work that endures to eternity,
and that kind of work never was done with ease or without pain and loss
and the investment of much time. Patient study of the problems of the
family is a part of the price which all may pay.
No nobler social work, no deeper religious work, no higher educational
work is done anywhere than that of the men and women, high or humble,
who set themselves to the fitting of their children for life's business,
equipping them with principles and habits upon which they may fall back
in trying hours, and making of home the sweetest, strongest, holiest,
happiest place on earth.
Heaven only knows the price that must be paid for that; heaven only
knows the worth of that work. But if we are wise we shall each take up
our work for our world where it lies nearest to us, in co-operation with
parents, in service and sacrifice as parents or kin, our work in the
shop where manhood is in the making, where it is being made fit to dwell
long in the land, in the family at home.
I. References for Study
Edward Lyttleton, _The Corner-Stone of Education_, chaps. i, vii.
Putnam, $1.50.
A. Gandier, "Religious Education in the Home," _Religious
Education_, June, 1914, pp. 233-42.
II. Further Reading
_The Family a Religious Agency_
C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.
J.D. Folsom, _Religious Education in the Home_. Eaton & Mains,
$0.75.
G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_. Revell, $1.35.
_The Place of the Family_
A.J. Todd, _The Family as an Educational Agency_. Putnam, $2.00.
W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50.
J.B. Robins, _The Family a Necessity_. Revell, $1.25.
III. Topics for Discussion
1. Describe the changes within recent times in the conditions of
the home, its work, housing, and supplies. How far have these
changes affected the community of the family, the continuity of its
personal relationships, and its religious service?
2. What are the fundamental causes of family disasters? Admitting
that there are sufficient grounds for divorce in numerous
instances, what other causes enter into the high number of
divorces?
3. State in your own terms the ultimate reasons for the maintenance
of a family.
4. What are the motives which would make people willing to bear the
high cost of founding and conducting a home?
5. What points of emphasis does this study suggest in the matter of
the education of public opinion?
6. State your distinction between the family and the home; which is
the more important and why?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The Corner-Stone of Education_, by Edward Lyttleton, headmaster of
Eton, is a striking argument on the determinative influence of parental
habits and attitudes of mind.