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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Religious Education in the Family, by Henry
+F. Cope
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Religious Education in the Family
+
+
+Author: Henry F. Cope
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 21, 2006  [eBook #17570]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE
+FAMILY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Stacy Brown Thellend, Kevin Handy, John Hagerson, and
+the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PRESENT STATUS OF FAMILY LIFE
+
+
+§ 1. CONTRASTED TYPES
+
+In a beautiful village, in one of the farther western states, two men
+were discussing the possible future of the home and of family life.
+Sitting in the brilliant moonlight, looking through the leafy shades,
+watching the lights of a score of homes, each surrounded by lawn and
+shade trees, each with its group on the front porch, where vines trailed
+and flowers bloomed, listening to the hum of conversation and the
+strains of music in one home and another, it seemed, to at least one of
+these men, that this type of living could hardly pass away. The separate
+home, each family a complete social integer, each with its own circle of
+activities and interests, its own group, and its own table and fireside,
+seemed too fine and beautiful, too fair and helpful, to perish under
+economic pressure. Indeed, one felt that the village home furnished a
+setting for life and a soil for character development far higher and
+more efficient than could be afforded by any other domestic
+arrangement--that it approached the ideal.
+
+But two weeks later two men sat in an upper room, in the second largest
+city in America, discussing again the future of the family. Instead of
+the quiet music of the village, the clang of street cars filled the
+ears, trains rushed by, children shouted from the paved highway,
+families were seated by open windows in crowded apartments, seeking cool
+air; the total impression was that of being placed in a pigeonhole in a
+huge, heated, filing-case, where each separate space was occupied by a
+family. One felt the pressure of heated, crowded kitchens, suffocating
+little dining-rooms; one knew that the babies lay crying in their beds
+at night, gasping their very lives away, and that the young folks were
+wandering off to amusement parks and moving-picture shows. Here was an
+entirely different picture. How long could family life persist under
+these conditions where privacy was almost gone and comfort almost
+unknown?
+
+In the village separate home integers appear ideal; in the city they are
+possible only to the few. The many, at present, find them a crushing
+burden. Desirable as privacy is, it can be purchased at too high a
+price. It costs too much to maintain separate kitchens and dining-rooms
+under city conditions.
+
+
+§ 2. COMMUNAL TENDENCIES
+
+Present conditions spell waste, inefficiency, discomfort. The woman
+lives all day in stifling rooms, poorly lighted, with the nerve-racking
+life of neighbors pouring itself through walls and windows. The men
+come from crowded shops and the children from crowded schoolrooms to
+crowd themselves into these rooms, to snatch a meal, or to sleep. How
+can there be real family life? What joy can there be or what ideals
+created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes
+are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse
+and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.
+
+Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community living, that
+just as the social life of the separate house porches in the villages
+has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all the
+activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long could
+the family as a unit continue under these conditions?
+
+The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we
+apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the
+same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop large
+belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more
+and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words,
+highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as
+business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economically
+done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing
+prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.
+
+
+§ 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT
+
+It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are
+involved in the tendency toward communal living. At the beginning of the
+industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each family
+was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was little more than a
+nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such as
+workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home furnished
+nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own
+children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of
+effort except in the church.
+
+The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the
+factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and
+the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a
+living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger
+sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family
+educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually learned
+their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of the
+house, where they played as children in the shavings, or watched the
+glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's
+discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their
+tasks. The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of
+each day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a
+large share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system,
+to a large extent the family lost the father.
+
+When the workshop left the home its most efficient school was taken from
+it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical, but
+the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy seeks to
+realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing; schooling was
+perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the incalculable
+value of informality and reality. The father gone and the mother still
+fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical training
+for life which home industry had afforded. On the one hand, the young
+became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of the
+voracious factory system.
+
+This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to
+Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child.
+Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now
+they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place
+of the parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the
+father and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now
+loses the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six
+hours of the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The
+family, once living under one roof, now is found scattered; it has
+reached out into factory and school. Its hours of unified life have been
+markedly reduced.
+
+But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That
+which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in the
+form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made by the
+women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves, and meat--all
+formerly home products for the use of the family producing them--now
+were prepared in larger quantities, by mechanical processes, and were
+brought back into the home. Woman's labor was lightened; the older girls
+were liberated from the loom and they began to seek occupation,
+education, and diversion according to their opportunities in life.
+
+That last step made it possible for people to think of the communization
+of home industry, to think of eating food cooked in other ovens than
+their own, to think of one oven large enough for a whole village. Many
+interesting experiments in co-operative living immediately sprang up.
+But the next step came slowly and, even now, is only firmly established
+in the cities, in the actual abandonment of the family kitchen for the
+community kitchen in the form of the restaurant. In such families we
+have unity only in the hours of sleep and recreation.
+
+Along with abandonment of the separate kitchen there has proceeded
+the abandonment of the parlor in the homes of the middle classes.
+To lose the old, mournful front room may be no subject for tears,
+but the loss of the evening family group, about the fireside or
+the reading-lamp, is a real and sad loss. The commercialized amusements
+have offered greater attractions to vigorous youth. The theater and
+its lesser satellites, amusements, entertainments, lectures, the
+lyceum, and recreation-by-proxy in ball games and matches have taken
+the place of united family recreation. Of course this has been a
+natural development of the older village play-life and has been by
+no means an unmixed ill.
+
+Now, behold, what has become of the old-time home life! The family that
+spent nearly twenty-four hours together now spends a scarce seven or
+eight, and these are occupied in sleeping! Little wonder that the next
+step is taken--the abandonment of this remainder, the sleep period,
+under a domestic roof, as the family moves into a hotel!
+
+Along with the tendency toward communal working and eating we see the
+tendency to communal living by the development of the apartment
+building. Since roof-trees are so expensive, and since in a practical
+age, few of us can afford to pay for sentiment, why not put a dozen
+families under one roof-tree? True we sacrifice lawns, gardens, natural
+places for children to play; we lose birds and flowers and the charm of
+evening hours on porches, or galleries, but think of what we gain in
+bricks and mortar, in labor saved from splitting wood and shoveling
+coal, in janitor service! The transition is now complete; the home is
+simply that item in the economic machinery which will best furnish us
+storage for our sleeping bodies and our clothes!
+
+We are undoubtedly in a period of great changes in family life, and no
+family can count on escaping the influence of the change. The one single
+outstanding and most potent change, so far as the character of family
+life is concerned, is, in the United States, the rapid polarization of
+population in the cities. The United States Census Bureau counts all
+residents in cities of over 8,000 population as "urban." In 1800 the
+"urban" population was 4 per cent of the total population; in 1850 it
+was 12.5 per cent; in 1870, 20.9 per cent; in 1890, 29.2 per cent; in
+1900, 33.1 per cent; in 1910 it was estimated at 40 per cent.[2] Here
+is a trend so clearly marked that we cannot deny its reality, while its
+significance is familiar to everyone today.
+
+However, the village type remains; there are still many homes where a
+measure of family unity persists, where at least in one meal daily and,
+for purposes of sleeping and, occasionally, for the evening hours of
+recreation, there is a consciousness of home life. Yet the most remote
+village feels the pressure of change. The few homes conforming to the
+older ideals are recognized as exceptional. The city draws the village
+and rural family to itself, and the contagion of its customs and ideals
+spreads through the villages and affects the forms of living there.
+Youths become city dwellers and do not cease to scoff at the village
+unless later years give them wisdom to appreciate its higher values. The
+standard of domestic organization is established by the city; that type
+of living is the ideal toward which nearly all are striving.
+
+The important question for all persons is whether the changes now taking
+place in family life are good or ill. It is impossible to say whether
+the whole trend is for the better; the many elements are too diverse and
+often apparently conflicting. Faith in the orderly development of
+society gives ground for belief that these changes ultimately work for a
+higher type of family life. The city may be regarded as only a
+transition stage in social evolution--the compacting of masses of
+persons together that out of the new fusing and welding may arise new
+methods of social living. The larger numbers point to more highly
+developed forms of social organization. When these larger units discover
+their greater purposes, above factory and mill and store, and realize
+them in personal values, the city life will be a more highly developed
+mechanism for the higher life of man. The home life will develop along
+with that city life.
+
+
+§ 4. PURPOSEFUL ORGANIZATION
+
+At present the home is suffering, just as the city is suffering, from a
+lack of that purposeful organization which will order the parts aright
+and subject the processes to the most important and ultimate purposes.
+The city is simply an aggregation of persons, scarcely having any
+conscious organization, thrown together for purposes of industry. It
+will before very long organize itself for purposes of personal welfare
+and education. The family is usually a group bound in ties of struggle
+for shelter, food, and pleasure. Such consciousness as it possesses is
+that of being helplessly at the mercy of conflicting economic forces.
+The adjustment of those forces, their subjection to man's higher
+interests, must come in the future and will help the family to freedom
+to discover its true purpose.
+
+It is easy to insist on the responsibility of parents for the
+character-training of their children, but it is difficult to see how
+that responsibility can be properly discharged under industrial
+conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole
+day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to
+furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull
+monotony of labor to care for life's finer interests. The welfare of the
+family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be
+secured in one part progress in the whole ensues.
+
+There are those who raise the question whether family life is a
+permanent form of social organization for which we may wisely contend,
+or is but a phase from which the race is now emerging. Some see signs
+that the ties of marriage will be but temporary, that children will be
+born, not into families but into the life of the state, bearing only
+their mothers' names and knowing no brothers and sisters save in the
+brotherhood of the state. Whether the permanent elements in family life
+furnish a sufficiently worthy basis for its preservation is a subject
+for careful consideration.
+
+
+§ 5. THE HOME AND THE FAMILY
+
+The family is more important than the home, just as the man is more than
+his clothing. The form of the home changes; the life of the family
+continues unchanged in its essential characteristics. The family causes
+the home to be. Professor Arthur J. Todd insists that the family is the
+basis of marriage, rather than marriage the cause of the family.[3]
+Small groups for protection and social living would precede formal
+arrangements of monogamy. Westermarck concludes that it was "for the
+benefit of the young that male and female continued to live
+together."[4] The importance of this consideration for us lies in the
+thought of the overshadowing importance of this social group which we
+now call the family. The family is the primary cell of society, the
+first unit in social organization. Our thought must balance itself
+between the importance of this social group, to be preserved in its
+integrity, and the value of the home, with its varied forms of activity
+and ministry, as a means of preserving and developing this group, the
+family.
+
+One hears today many pessimistic utterances regarding the modern home.
+Some even tell us that it is doomed to become extinct. Without doubt
+great economic changes in society are producing profound changes in the
+organization and character of the home. But the home has always been
+subject to such changes; the factor which we need to watch with greater
+care is the family; the former is but the shell of the latter.
+
+The character of each home will depend largely on the economic condition
+of those who dwell in it. The homes of every age will reflect the social
+conditions of that age. The picture in historical romances of the home
+of the mediaeval period, where the factory, or shop, joined the
+dining-room, where the apprentices ate and roomed in the home, where one
+might be compelled to furnish and provision his home literally as his
+castle for defense, presents a marked difference to the home of this
+century tending to syndicate all its labors with all the other homes of
+the community. Since the home is simply the organization and mechanism
+of the family life, it is most susceptible to material and social
+changes. It varies as do the fashions of men.
+
+Much that we assume to be detrimental to the life of the home is simply
+due to the fact that in the evolution of society the family, as it were,
+puts on a new suit of clothes, adopts new forms of organization to meet
+the changing external conditions.
+
+
+§ 6. THE HOME CHANGING; THE FAMILY ABIDING
+
+The home is of importance only as a tool, a means to the final ends of
+the family life; the test of its efficiency is not whether it maintains
+traditional forms but whether it best serves the highest aims of family
+life. We may abandon all the older customs; our regret for them, as we
+look back on the days of home cooking, cannot be any greater than the
+regrets of our parents or grandparents looking back on the
+spinning-wheel and the hand loom that cumbered the kitchen of their
+childhood. Surely no one contends that family life has deteriorated,
+that human character is one whit the poorer, because we have discarded
+the family spinning-wheel. Through the changes of a developing
+civilization, as man has moved from the time when each one built his own
+house, worked with his own tools to make all his supplies, to these days
+of specialized service in community living, the home has changed with
+each step of industrial progress, but the family has remained
+practically unchanged.
+
+The family stands a practically unchanging factor of personal qualities
+at the center of our civilization; the family rather than the home
+determines the character of the coming days. In its social relationships
+are rooted the things that are best in all our lives. In its social
+training lie the solutions of more problems in social adjustment and
+development than we are willing to admit. The family is the soil of
+society, central to all its problems and possibilities.
+
+Before church or school the family stands potent for character. We are
+what we are, not by the ideals held before us for thirty minutes a week
+or once a month in a church, nor by the instructions given in the
+classroom; we are what parents, kin, and all the circumstances that have
+touched us daily and hourly for years have determined we should be.
+
+The sweetest memories of our lives cluster about the scenes of family
+life. The rose-embowered cottage of the poet is not the only spot that
+claims affectionate gratitude; many look back to a city house wedged
+into its monotonous row. But, wherever it might be, if it sheltered love
+and held a shrine where the altar fires of family sacrifice burned,
+earth has no fairer or more sacred spot. The people rather than the
+place made it potent.
+
+Stronger even than the memories that remain are the marks of habits,
+tendencies, tastes, and dispositions there acquired. Many a man who has
+left no fortune worth recording to his sons has left them something
+better, the aptitude for things good and honorable, the memory of a good
+name, and the heritage of a life that was worthy of honor. The personal
+life has been always the enduring thing. Our concern for the future
+should be not whether we can pass on intact the forms of home
+organization, but whether we can give to the next day the force of ideal
+family life. Perhaps like Mary we would do well to turn our eyes from
+the much serving, the mechanisms of the home, to set our minds on the
+better part, the personal values in the association of lives in the
+family.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. ii, xi, xii. Hodder
+     & Stoughton, $2.50.
+
+     Charles R. Henderson, _Social Duties from the Christian Point of
+     View_, chaps. ii, iii. The University of Chicago Press, $1.25.
+
+     C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Jacob A. Riis, _Peril and Preservation of the Home_. Jacobs,
+     Philadelphia, Pa., $1.00.
+
+     Charles R. Henderson, _Social Elements_. Scribner, $1.50.
+
+     Charles F. Thwing, _The Recovery of the Home_. American Baptist
+     Publication Society, $0.15.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. The tendency toward community life illustrated in the schools,
+     amusement parks, and hotel life. Remembering the ultimate purpose
+     of the family, how far is communal life desirable?
+
+     2. Does the apartment or tenement building furnish a suitable
+     condition for the higher purposes of the family?
+
+     3. Is it possible to restore to the home some of the benefits lost
+     by present factory consolidation of industry?
+
+     4. What can take the place of the old household arts and of those
+     which are now passing?
+
+     5. What steps should be taken to secure to the family a larger
+     measure of the time in terms of occupation of the parents?
+
+     6. What are the important things to contend for in this
+     institution? Why should we expect change in the form of the home
+     and what are the features which should not be changed?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Figures taken from C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious
+Education in the American Home_, 1911.
+
+[3] A.J. Todd, _Primitive Family and Education_, p. 21. A most valuable
+and suggestive book.
+
+[4] Cited by Todd, p. 21.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE PERMANENT ELEMENTS IN FAMILY LIFE
+
+
+§ 1. THE DOMINANT MOTIVE
+
+The chief end of society is to improve the race, to develop the higher
+and steadily improving type of human beings. We can test the life of the
+family and determine the values of its elements by asking whether and in
+what degree they minister to this end, the growth of better persons.
+This is more than a theoretical aim or one conceived in a search for
+ideals. It is written plain in our passions and strongest inclinations.
+That which parents supremely desire for their children is that they may
+become strong in body, capable and alert in mind, and animated by worthy
+principles and ideals. The parent desires a good man, fit to take his
+place, do his work, make his contribution to the social well-being, able
+to live to the fulness of his powers, to take life in all its reaches of
+meaning and heights of vision and beauty. In true parenthood all hopes
+of success, of riches, fame, and ease, are seen but as avenues to this
+end, as means of making the finer character, of growing the ideal
+person. If we were compelled to choose for our children we should elect
+poverty, pain, disgrace, toil, and suffering if we knew this was the
+only highway to full manhood and womanhood, to completeness of
+character. Indeed, we do constantly so choose, knowing that they must
+endure hardness, bear the yoke in their youth, and learn that
+
+    Love and joy are torches lit
+    At altar fires of sacrifice.
+
+With this dominating purpose clearly in mind we are prepared to ask,
+What are the elements of family life which among the changes of today we
+need most carefully to preserve in order to maintain efficiency in
+character development? In days when the outer shell of domestic
+arrangements changes, when readjustments are being made in the
+organization of the family, what is there too precious to lose, so
+worthy and essential that we waste no time when seeking to maintain it?
+
+
+§ 2. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--SOCIAL QUALITIES
+
+The first great element to be preserved in all family life is that of
+the power of the small group for purposes of character development. The
+infant's earliest world is the mother's arms. In order to grow into a
+man fitted for the wider world of social living, he must learn to live
+in a world within his comprehension. A child's life moves through the
+widening circles of mother-care, family group, neighborhood, school,
+city, state, and nation into world-living. He must take the first steps
+before he is able to take the next ones. He must learn to live with the
+few as preparation for living with the many. In earliest infancy he
+takes his first unconscious lessons in the fine art of living with other
+folks as he relates himself to parents and to brothers and sisters.
+
+Secondly, the family life affords the best agency for social training.
+The family is the ideal democracy into which the child-life is born.
+Here habits are formed, ideals are pictured, and life itself is
+interpreted. It is an ideal democracy, first, because it is a social
+organization existing for the sake of persons. The family comes nearer
+to fulfilling the true ideal of a democratic social order than does any
+other institution. It is founded to bring lives into this world; it is
+maintained for the sake of those lives; all its life, its methods, and
+standards are determined, ideally, by the needs of persons. It is an
+ideal democracy, secondly, because its guiding principle is that the
+greater lives must be devoted to the good of the lesser, the parent for
+the little child, the older members for the younger, in an attempt to
+extend to the very least the greatest good enjoyed by all. Thirdly,
+ideally it is a true democracy in that it gives to each member a share
+in its own affairs and develops the power to bear responsibilities and
+to carry each his own load in life. Thus the family group is the best
+possible training for the life and work of the larger group, the state,
+and for world-living.[5] The maintenance of the ideals of the state, as
+a democracy, depends on the continuance of this institution with its
+peculiar power to train life in infancy and childhood for the life of
+manhood in the state. Such training can be given only in the smaller
+group that is governed by the motives peculiar to home and family life.
+The power to impress these principles depends on the size of the group.
+The small social organization, the family circle of from three members
+to even a dozen, bound by ties of affection, is the one great, efficient
+school, training youth to live in social terms.
+
+Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first. Our age especially
+needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise
+above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal
+qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes
+most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures
+every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its
+riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal
+qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations,
+affection. The true home gives to every child-life the power to choose
+the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only
+the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the
+world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's
+spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No
+life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that
+lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.
+
+
+§ 3. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--THE MORAL LIFE
+
+Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be
+noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life.
+"The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."[6] Here
+the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins
+life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all
+virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them,
+"the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The
+moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived
+for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a
+matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions. Neither is it a matter
+of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this
+comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life
+which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the
+right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of
+rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society
+points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right
+thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner
+compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest
+possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of
+loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which
+begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in
+the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most
+potential school. Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are
+strengthened by the pleasurable emotions. It is a joy to be loyal to
+those we love. Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the
+loyalty, or the love?
+
+The power of this small social group of the family to develop the
+fundamental principle of loyalty, the root of all virtues, gives a
+position of great importance to the affections in the family. We do well
+to contend for the maintenance of conditions of family living which will
+strengthen the ties of affection. If children could be thrust into the
+care of the state, in large groups, separated from parental care and
+oversight, it is difficult to see what emotional stimulus toward
+affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would
+in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and
+mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in
+orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal
+care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents
+stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small
+children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the
+ideal--a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but
+these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds
+and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values of their
+affections and on them to build a wise discipline for childhood by
+providing adequate training of parents for their duties.
+
+Fifthly, there are some elements of the cost of family life, even its
+apparently unnecessary sacrifice and pain, that we do well to seek to
+keep. Character grows in paying the high price of maintaining a family.
+It is the most expensive form of living for adults. Marriages are now
+delayed because of the fear of the actual monetary cost; but far more
+serious is the cost in care, in nerves, in patience, in all the great
+elements of self-denial. No child ever knows what he has cost until he
+has children of his own. But this discipline of self-denial is that
+which saves us from selfishness. It is necessary to have some personal
+objects for which to give our lives if they are to be saved from
+centrifugation, from death through ingrowing affection. True, many
+bachelors and spinsters have learned the way of self-denying,
+fellow-serving love. But how can a true parent escape that lesson? Nor
+does it stop with parents; as children grow up together they, too, must
+learn mutual forbearance, conciliation, and, soon, the joy of service.
+One sees selfishness in the little child gradually fading in the
+practice of family service, helpfulness, consideration for others. The
+single child in a family misses something more important than playmates;
+he misses all the education of play and service. But who cannot remember
+many families that have grown to beauty of character under the
+discipline of home life, and especially when this has involved real
+sacrifices? The stories in the Pepper books illustrate the spirit that
+blossoms under the trials and hardships of the struggle of a family for
+a livelihood and for the maintenance of a home.
+
+A clear function becomes evident for this social group called the
+family. It is that of dealing with young lives, in groups bound by ties
+of blood and similarity, for purposes of the development of personal
+character. The family has an essentially educational function. Bearing
+in mind that "educational" means the orderly development of the powers
+of the life, we can think of our families as existing for this purpose
+and to be tested by their ability to do this work, especially by their
+ability to develop persons, young lives, that have the power, the
+vision, the acquired habits and experience to live as more than animals.
+The family is an educational institution dealing with child-life for its
+full growth and its self-realization, especially on character levels.
+The educational function suggests the features of family life which we
+do well to seek to preserve. Many incidental forms may pass, but the
+essential human relations and experiences that go to develop life and
+character must be maintained at any cost.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_, chap. vii. Lothrop, Lee &
+     Shepard, $1.60.
+
+     W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. iv, v. Hodder &
+     Stoughton, $2.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     "The Improvement of Religious Education," _Proceedings of the
+     Religious Education Association_, I, 119-23. $0.50.
+
+     _Religious Education_, April, 1911, VI, 1-48.
+
+     S.P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott, _The Delinquent Child and the
+     Home_. Russell Sage Foundation, $2.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the chief end of all forms of social organization?
+
+     2. What is in the last analysis the aim of every parent?
+
+     3. What advantage has the family over the school and larger groups
+     for educational purposes?
+
+     4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?
+
+     5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.
+
+     6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character
+     development? In what way do these come to the surface in the
+     family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?
+
+     7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain
+     or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial
+     advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent
+     disadvantages in the life of the family?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] See "Democracy in the Home," _American Journal of Sociology_,
+January, 1912.
+
+[6] Francis G. Peabody, _The Approach to the Social Question_, p. 94.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RELIGIOUS PLACE OF THE FAMILY
+
+
+§ 1. DEVELOPMENT AS A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION
+
+The family is the most important religious institution in the life of
+today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this
+place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain
+quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the
+children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their
+instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize
+as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those
+practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent
+care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we
+know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of
+responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious
+ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to
+separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this
+task. The higher the type of family life the more fully does it
+discharge its function in the education of the child.[7]
+
+It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three
+stages, or types, of relationship based on the breeding of children, or
+three stages of development toward family life. The first is a loose and
+indefinite relationship existing principally between the adults, or the
+males and females, under which children born when not desired are
+neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of
+either parent, or of neither. Since the group, associated through
+infancy with at least one parent, is as yet undeveloped, any instruction
+will be individual and usually incidental.
+
+The second form is that of a kind of family unity, either about the
+mother or the father, or both, or about a group of parents, in which the
+children live together and are sheltered and nurtured for their earlier
+years. Here, however, the real relationship of the child is to the
+tribe, the family is but his temporary guardian, and, at least by the
+age of puberty, he will be initiated into the tribal secrets. If he is a
+boy, he will cease to be a member of the family group and will go to
+live in the "men's house," becoming a part of the larger life of the
+tribe.[8] Such moral and religious instruction as he may acquire will
+come from the songs, traditions, and conversation which he hears as a
+child.
+
+The third type approaches the modern ideal, with a greater or less
+degree of permanent unity between the two parents and with permanence in
+the group of the offspring. The parental responsibility continues for a
+greater length of time and, since the tribe makes smaller claims, and
+the parents live in the common domestic group, much more instruction is
+possible and is given. The tribal ideals, the traditions, observances,
+and religious rites are imparted to children gradually in their homes.
+
+The last type brings us to the Hebrew conception of family life. It
+developed toward the Christian ideal. At first, polygamy was permitted;
+woman was the chattel of man and excluded from any part in the religious
+rites. But it included the ideal of monogamy in its tradition of the
+origin of the world, it denounced and punished adultery (Deut. 22: 22),
+and it gave especial attention to the training of the offspring. "And
+these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and
+thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of
+them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way,
+and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up ... and thou shalt
+write them upon the door-posts of thy house and upon thy gates" (Deut.
+6: 6, 7, 9).
+
+Much later, the messianic hope, the belief that in some Jewish family
+there should be born one divinely commissioned and endowed to liberate
+Israel and to give the Jews world-sovereignty, operated to elevate the
+conception of motherhood and, through that, of the family. It made
+marriage desirable and children a blessing; it rendered motherhood
+sacred. It tended to center national hopes and religious ideals about
+the family.[9]
+
+There are a few glimpses of ideal family life in the Old Testament. They
+are all summed up in the eloquent tribute to motherhood in the words of
+King Lemuel in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. It must be
+remembered, however, that such ideals did not belong to the Jews alone,
+that Plutarch shows many pictures of maternal fidelity and wifely
+devotion, that Greek and Roman history have their Cornelia, Iphigenia,
+and Mallonia.[10]
+
+The Jews are an excellent example of the power of the family life to
+maintain distinct characteristics and to secure marked development.
+Practically throughout all the Christian era they have been a people
+without a land, a constitution, or a government, and yet never without
+race consciousness, national unity, and separateness. Their unity has
+continued in spite of dispersion, persecution, and losses; they have
+remained a race in the face of political storms that have swept other
+peoples away. Their unity has continued about two great centers, the
+customs of religion and the life of the family.
+
+     The results of Jewish respect for family life can also be seen in
+     the health of their own children. In 1910, for instance, among poor
+     Jews in Manchester the mortality of infants under one year of age
+     was found to be 118 per thousand; among poor Gentiles, 300 per
+     thousand; and comparisons made some six years ago between Jewish
+     and Gentile children in schools in the poorer parts of Manchester
+     and Leeds (England) have shown that the Jewish children are
+     uniformly taller, they weigh more, and their bones and teeth are
+     superior.[11]
+
+
+§ 2. THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY
+
+The Christian family is a type peculiar to itself, not as a new
+institution, for it has developed out of earlier race experience, but as
+controlled by a new interpretation, the spirit and conception of the
+home and family given in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He did not
+give formal rules for the regulation of homes; rather he made a
+spiritual ideal of family life the basic thought of all his teaching. He
+said more about the family than concerning any other human institution,
+yet he established no family life of his own. He is called the founder
+of the church, yet he scarcely mentions that institution, while he
+frequently teaches concerning home duties and family relations. He
+glorifies the relations of the family by making them the figure by which
+men may understand the highest relations of life. He speaks more of
+fatherhood and sonship than of any other relations. He gives direction
+for living, using the family terms of brotherhood. He points forward to
+ideal living in a home beyond this life. He teaches men when they think
+of God and when they address him to take the family attitude and call
+him Father.
+
+If we sum up all the teachings of Jesus and separate them from our
+preconceptions of their theological content, we cannot but be impressed
+with the facts that he seized upon the family life as the best
+expression of the highest relationships; that he pointed to a purified
+family life, in which spiritual aims would dominate, as the best
+expression of ideal relationships among his followers; and that he
+glorified marriage and really made the family the great, divine,
+sacramental institution of human society.
+
+We can hardly overestimate the importance of such teaching to the
+character of the family. The early Christians not only accepted Jesus as
+their teacher and savior; they took their family life as the opportunity
+to show what the Kingdom of God, the ideal society, was like. Family
+life was consecrated. Men and women belonged to the new order with
+their whole households. Religion became largely a family matter. The
+worship that had been confined to the temple now made an altar in every
+home and a holy of holies in the midst of every family. The scriptures
+that belonged to the synagogue now belonged in the home. Above all, this
+family existed for the purposes taught by Jesus, that men might grow in
+brotherhood toward the likeness of the divine Fatherhood. It was an
+institution, not for economic purpose of food and shelter, not for
+personal ends of passion or pride, but for spiritual purpose, for the
+growth of persons, especially the young in the home, in character, into
+"the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."
+
+Christianity is essentially a religion of ideal family life. It
+conceives of human society, not in terms of a monarchy with a king and
+subjects, but in terms of a family with a great all-Father and his
+children, who live in brotherhood, who take life as their opportunity
+for those family joys of service and sacrifice. It hopes to solve the
+world's ills, not by external regulations, but by bringing all men into
+a new family life, a birth into this new family life with God, so
+securing a new personal environment, a new personality as the center and
+root of all social betterment. He who would come into this new social
+order must come into the divine family, must humble himself and become
+as a little child, must know his Father and love his brothers.
+
+Christianity, then, not only seeks an ideal family; it makes the family
+the ideal social institution and order. It makes family life holy,
+sacramental, religious in its very nature. This fact gives added
+importance to the preservation and development of the ideals of family
+life for the sake of their religious significance and influence. It not
+only makes religion a part of the life of the home but makes a religious
+purpose the very reason for the existence of the Christian type of home.
+It makes our homes essentially religious institutions, to be judged by
+religious products.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chap. xvi. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+     Article on "The Family," in Hastings, _Encyclopaedia of Religion
+     and Ethics_.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     On the educational function of the family: A.J. Todd, _The
+     Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_. Putnam, $2.00.
+
+     On the religious place of the family: C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The
+     Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.
+
+     I.J. Peritz, "Biblical Ideal of the Home," _Religious Education_,
+     VI, 322.
+
+     H. Hanson, _The Function of the Family_. American Baptist
+     Publication Society, $0.15.
+
+     W. Becker, _Christian Education, or the Duties of Parents_. Herder,
+     $1.00. A striking presentation of the Roman Catholic view; could be
+     read to advantage by all parents.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What place did religion hold in the primitive family? What
+     reference or allusion do we find in the Old Testament to the place
+     of religion in the family (Deut. 6:7-9, 20-25)? What in the New
+     Testament?
+
+     2. What has been the effect of purity of family life on the Jewish
+     race?
+
+     3. What place did the family hold in the teachings of Jesus?
+
+     4. What shall we think of the relations of the church and family as
+     to their comparative rights and our duty to them?
+
+     5. Do you agree that the family is the most important religious
+     institution?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] For a brief statement see Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_,
+Lecture 4, § 7; also Todd, _The Family as an Educational Agency_.
+
+[8] See Webster, _Primitive Secret Societies_, chaps. i, ii.
+
+[9] On the place of the family in different religious systems see the
+fine article under "Family" in Hastings, _Encyclopaedia of Religion and
+Ethics_.
+
+[10] See Lecky, _History of European Morals_, chap. ii.
+
+[11] Quoted by Lofthouse in _Ethics and the Family_, p. 8, from W. Hall,
+in _Progress_ (London), April, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY
+
+
+§ 1. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY
+
+With the brief statement of the history of the family and of its
+function in society which has already been given we are prepared to put
+together the two conclusions: first, that the family has an educational
+function, in that it exists as a social institution for the protection,
+nurture, development, and training of young lives, and, secondly, that
+it is a religious institution, the most influential and important of all
+religious institutions, whenever it realizes in any adequate degree its
+possibilities, because it is rooted in love and loyalty. It exists for
+personal and spiritual ideals and, in Christianity, it is inseparably
+connected with the teachings and the ideals of Jesus. It is educational
+in function and religious in character, so that it is essentially an
+institution for religious education. Religious education is not an
+occasional incident in its life; it is the very aim and dominating
+purpose of a high-minded family.
+
+
+§ 2. WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION?
+
+To make this the more clear we may need to clarify our minds as to
+certain popular conceptions of education. Education means much more
+than instruction; religious education means much more than instruction
+in religion. Many habitually think of an educational institution as
+necessarily a place where pupils sit at desks and teachers preside over
+classes, the teachers imparting information which is to be memorized by
+the pupils, so that, from this point of view, a Sunday school would be
+almost the only institution for the religious education of children in
+existence, because it is the only one exclusively devoted to imparting
+instruction to children in specifically religious subjects. Such a view
+would limit religious education in the home to the formal teaching of
+the Bible and religious dogma by parents. The memorizing of scriptural
+passages and of the different catechisms once constituted a regular duty
+in almost all well-ordered homes. Today it is rarely attempted. Does
+that mean that religious education has ceased in the home?
+
+But education means much more than instruction. Education is the whole
+process, of which instruction is only a part. Education is the orderly
+development of lives, according to scientific principles, into the
+fulness of their powers, the realization of all their possibilities, the
+joy of their world, the utmost rendering in efficiency of their service.
+It includes the training of powers of thought, feeling, willing, and
+doing; it includes the development of abilities to discern,
+discriminate, choose, determine, feel, and do. It prepares the life for
+living with other lives; it prepares the whole of the life, developing
+the higher nature, the life of the spirit, for living in a spiritual
+universe.
+
+Religious education, then, means much more than instruction in the
+literature, history, and philosophy of religion. It means the kind of
+directed development which regards the one who is developing as a
+religious person, which seeks to develop that one to fulness of
+religious powers and personality, and which uses, as means to that end,
+material of religious inspiration and significance and, indeed, regards
+all material in that light. Religious education seeks to direct a
+religious process of growth with a religious purpose for religious
+persons. Religious education is the spirit which characterizes the work
+of every educator who looks on the child as a spiritual nature, a
+religious person; it is the work of every educator who sees his aim as
+that of training this spiritual person to fulness of living in a society
+essentially spiritual.
+
+In simplest possible terms, religious education means the training of
+persons to live the religious life and to do their work in the world as
+religious persons. It must mean, then, the development of character; it
+includes the aim, in the parents' minds, to bring their children up to
+the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. It is evident that
+this is a much greater task, and yet more natural and beautiful, than
+mere instruction in formal ideas or words in the Bible or in a
+catechism; that it is not and cannot be accomplished in some single
+period, some set hour, but is continuous, through all the days; that it
+pervades not only the spoken words, but the actions, organization, and
+the very atmosphere of the home.
+
+
+§ 3. THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
+
+Normal persons never stop growing. Just as children grow all the time in
+their bodies, so do adults and all others grow all the time in mind and
+will and powers of the higher life whenever they live normally. We grow
+spiritually, not only in church and under the stimulus of song and
+prayer, but we grow when the beauty of the woods appeals to us, when the
+face lightens at the face of a friend, when we meet and master a
+temptation, when we brace up under a load, when we do faithfully the
+dreary, daily task, when we adjust our thoughts in sympathy to others,
+when we move in the crowd, when we think by ourselves. The educational
+process is continuous. The children in the home are being moved,
+stimulated, every instant, and they are being changed in minute but
+nevertheless real and important degrees by each impression. There is
+never a moment in which their character is not being developed either
+for good or for ill. Religious education--that is, the development of
+their lives as religious persons--goes on all the time in the home, and
+it is either for good or for ill.
+
+Next to the idea of the continuous and all-pervasive character of this
+process of religious development the most important thought for us is
+that religious education in the home may be determined by ourselves.
+This continuous, fateful process is not a blind, resistless one. It is
+our duty to direct it. It is possible for wise parents to determine the
+characters of their children. We must not forget this. It cannot be too
+strongly insisted on. The development of life is under law. This is an
+orderly world. Things do not just happen in it. We believe in a law that
+determines the type of a cabbage, the character of a weed. Do we believe
+that this universe is so ordered that there is a law for weeds and none
+for the higher life of man? Do we hold that cabbages grow by law but
+character comes by chance? If there is a law we may find it and must
+obey it. If we may know how to develop character, with as great
+certainty as we know how to do our daily work, will not this be our
+highest task, our greatest joy, the supreme thing to do in life?
+
+
+§ 4. THE CONSEQUENT OBLIGATION
+
+This is the first great obligation of parents and of those who are
+willing to accept the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. We have
+no right to bring into this world lives with all the possibilities that
+a religious nature involves unless we know how to develop those lives
+for the best and from the worst. When we picture what a little child may
+become, from the vile, depraved, despoiling beast or the despicable,
+sneaking hypocrite on one extreme, to the upright, God-loving,
+man-serving man or woman with the love of purity, honor, truth, and
+goodness speaking through the life, we may well pause, realizing we need
+more than a sentimental desire that the child may reach the heights of
+goodness: we must know the way there and the methods of leading the life
+in that way. True devotion to God and to childhood will mean more than
+petitions for the salvation of children; it will mean the prayer that is
+labor and the labor that is prayer to know how they may attain fulness
+of spiritual life; it will mean reverent searching into the divine ways
+of growth in grace. The study of the means and methods of religious
+education, especially of children, in the home and family, is one of the
+most evident and important religious duties resting on parents and all
+who contemplate marriage and family life.
+
+
+§ 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD?
+
+In discussing the development of character in children one hears often
+the question, "Which is the earliest virtue to appear in a child?"
+People will debate whether it is truthfulness, reverence, kindness, or
+some other virtue. All this implies a picture of the child as a tree
+that sends forth shoots of separate virtues one after another. But the
+character desired is not a series of branches, it is rather like a
+symmetrical tree; it is not certain parts, but it is the whole of a
+personality. The development of religious character is not a matter of
+consciously separable virtues, but is the determination of the trend and
+quality of the whole life. Moral training is not a matter of cultivating
+honesty today, purity tomorrow, and kindness the day after. Virtues have
+no separate value. Character cannot be disintegrated into a list of
+independent qualities. We seek a life that, as a whole life, loves and
+follows truth, goodness, and service.
+
+
+§ 6. EARLY TENDENCIES
+
+But it is wise to inquire as to those manifestations of a pure and
+spiritual life which will earliest appear. One does not need to look far
+for the answer. Children are always affectionate; they manifest the
+possibilities of love. True, this affection is rooted in physiological
+experience, based on relations to the mother and on daily propinquity to
+the rest of the family, but it is that which may be colored by devotion,
+elevated by unselfish service, and may become the first great, ideal
+loyalty of the child's life. Little boys will fight and girls will
+quarrel more readily over the question of the merits of their respective
+parents than over any other issue. Almost as soon as a child can talk he
+boasts of the valor of his father, the beauty of his mother. Here is
+loyalty at work. He stands for them; he resents the least doubt as to
+their superiority, not because they give him food and shelter, but
+because they are his, because to him they are worthy; in all things they
+have the worth, the highest good; they are, in person, the virtue of
+life. Therefore in fighting for the reputation of his parents he is
+practicing loyalty to an ideal.
+
+The principle of loyalty is the life-force of virtue; it is like the
+power that sends the tree toward the heavens, the upthrust of life. It
+may be cultivated in a thousand ways. Provided there is the outreach and
+upreach of loyalty within and that there is furnished without the worthy
+object, ideal, and aim, the life will grow upward and increase in
+character, beauty, and strength.
+
+Next to the affectionate idealization of parents and home-folk one of
+the earliest manifestations of the spirit of loyalty in the child is
+his desire to have a share in the activities of the home. He would not
+only look like those he admires; he would do what they do. This is more
+than mere imitation; it is loyalty at work again. The direction of this
+tendency is one of the largest opportunities before parents and can make
+the most important contribution to character.
+
+The religious life of the child is essentially a matter of loyalty. His
+faith, affections, aspirations, and endeavors turn toward persons,
+institutions, and concepts which are to him ideal. He does not analyze,
+he cannot describe, or even narrate, his religious experiences, but he
+affectionately moves, with a sense of pleasure, toward those things
+which seem to him ideal, toward parents, customs of the home or school,
+the church, his class, his teacher, toward characters in story-books. He
+is likely to think of Jesus in just that way, as the one person whom he
+would most of all like to know and be with. The life of virtue and the
+religious life then will be weak or strong in the measure that the child
+has the stimulating ideals which call forth his loyalty and in the
+measure that he has opportunity to express that loyalty. His religious
+life will consist, not so much in external forms perhaps, still less in
+intellectual statements about theology or even about his own
+experiences, as in a growing realization of the great ideals, an
+increasing sense of their meaning and reality within, and, on the
+objective side, a steady moving of his life toward them in action and
+habits and therefore in character and quality.
+
+
+§ 7. IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS
+
+It is worth while to insist upon two important considerations. Parents
+who stand as gardeners watching the growth of the tender plant of
+child-character may be looking for developments that never ought to come
+and will be disappointed because they were looking for the wrong thing.
+First, in watching for the beginnings of the religious life of the child
+in the family we are not expecting some new addition to the life, but
+rather the development of this whole life as a unity in a definite
+direction which we call religious. It is the first and most important
+consideration that religious education is not something added to the
+life as an extra subject of interest, but the development of the whole
+life into religious character and usefulness. Secondly, this growth of
+religious character is going on all the time. It is not separable into
+pious periods; it is a part of the very life of the family. Perhaps this
+increases the difficulty of our task, for it removes it from the realm
+of the mechanical, from that which is easily apprehended and estimated.
+It takes the task of the religious education of children out of the
+statistical into the vital, and reminds us that we are growing life
+every second, that there is never a moment when religious education is
+not in operation. This demands a consideration, not alone of lessons, of
+periods of worship and instruction, but of every influence, activity,
+and agency in all the family life that in any way affects the thinking,
+feeling, and action of the child. We are thinking of something more
+important than organizing instruction and exercises in religion in the
+home; we are thinking of organizing the family life for religious
+purposes, for the purpose of growing lives into their spiritual fulness.
+
+Perhaps the capital mistake in the religious education of the family is
+that we overemphasize this or the other method and mechanism instead of
+bending every effort to secure a real religious atmosphere and soil in
+which young souls can really grow while we leave the process of growth
+more largely to the great husbandman. And the second great mistake is
+that we are looking for mechanical evidence of a religious life instead
+of for the development of a whole person. We must reinterpret the family
+to ourselves and see it as the one great opportunity life affords us to
+grow other lives and to bring them to spiritual fulness by providing a
+social atmosphere of the spirit and a constant, normal presentation of
+social living in spiritual terms.
+
+
+§ 8. THE ORGANIZATION OF LOYALTY
+
+When parents conceive the family in these terms and so organize the life
+of the home, the child becomes conscious of the fact, and at once the
+life of the family furnishes him with his first, his nearest, and most
+satisfactory appeal to loyalty. He feels that which he cannot analyze or
+express, the spiritual beauty and loyalty of family life. That life
+furnishes a soil and atmosphere for his soul. It is an atmosphere made
+of many elements: the primary and dominating purpose of parents and
+older persons, the habitual life of service and love, the consciousness
+of the reality of the Divine Presence, the fragrance of chastened
+character and experience, the customs of worship and affections. These
+things are not easily created, they cannot be readily defined, nor can
+directions be given in a facile manner for their cultivation. They are
+the elements most difficult to describe, hardest of all to secure when
+lacking, least easily labeled, not to be purchased ready-made, and yet
+without them religious education is wholly impossible in the family.
+Without this immediate appeal to loyalty the loyalties of the child
+toward higher and divine aims do not develop early; they are retarded
+and often remain dormant. For us all scarcely any more important
+question can be presented than this: What appeals to spiritual idealism
+and loyalty does our family life present to the child? What quickening
+of love for goodness and purity, truth and service, is there in the home
+and its conduct?
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chaps. i, ii, xii,
+     xiii. Revell, $1.35.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. i, ii.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     J.T. McFarland, _Preservation versus Resurrection_. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.07.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children_, chaps. i, ii, xv. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chaps. i, iv, xvi.
+     Revell, $1.35.
+
+     E.C. Wilm, _Culture of Religion_, chaps. i, ii. Pilgrim Press,
+     $0.75.
+
+     C.W. Rischell, _The Child as God's Child_. Methodist Book Concern,
+     $0.75.
+
+     E.E. Read Mumford, _The Dawn of Character_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.20. See especially chap. xii on "The Dawn of Religion."
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. How would you define education?
+
+     2. What is the difference between education and religious
+     education?
+
+     3. What makes the home especially effective in education?
+
+     4. Is it true that it is possible to discover the laws of growth
+     and so determine the development of character?
+
+     5. Recall any very early manifestations of religious character in
+     small children. What would you regard as the best kind of
+     manifestation?
+
+     6. What is the essential principle of the right life? How may we
+     develop this in childhood?
+
+     7. What are the things which most of all impress children?
+
+     8. Would you think it wise to bring a child under the influence of
+     a religious revival?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CHILD'S RELIGIOUS IDEAS
+
+
+How shall I begin to talk with my child about religion? Even the most
+religious parents feel hesitancy here. It may not be at all due to the
+unfamiliarity of the subject, though that is often the case; hesitation
+is due principally to a conscious artificiality in the action. It seems
+unnatural to say, "My child, I want to talk with you about your
+religious life." And so it is. There is something wrong when that
+appears to be the only way. That situation indicates a lack of freedom
+of thought and intercourse with the child and a lack of naturalness in
+religion.
+
+
+§ 1. THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFICULTY
+
+The instinct is correct that tells us that we should be trespassing on a
+child's rights, or breaking down his proper reticence, in abruptly and
+formally questioning him about his religious life. The reserve of
+children in this matter must be respected. The inner life of aspiration,
+of conscious relationship to the divine, is too sacred for display, even
+to those who are near to us. He violates the child's reverence who tears
+away his reticence. Even though the child may not consciously object,
+the process leads him toward the irreverent, facile self-exposure of
+the soul that characterizes some prayer meetings. But we may, also, as
+easily err in the other direction and, by failing to invite the
+confidences of our children, lead them to suppose we have no interest in
+their higher life.
+
+
+§ 2. CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS
+
+First, we must be content to wait for the child to open his heart. We
+must not force the door. But we can invite him to open, and the one form
+of invitation that scarcely ever fails is for you to give him your
+confidence. Talk honestly, simply to him of the aspects of your
+religious life that he can understand. If he knows that you confide in
+him, he will confide in you. Here beware of sentimentality. Religion to
+the child will find expression in everyday experiences. Your philosophy
+of religion he cannot comprehend, and with your mature emotions he has
+no point of contact. Perhaps the best method of approach is to relate
+your memories of those experiences which you _now see_ to have had
+religious significance to you. At the time they may have had no such
+special meaning. You did not then analyze them. Your child will not and
+must not analyze them, either; he must simply feel them.
+
+Secondly, rid your mind of the "times and seasons" notion. There is no
+more reason why you should talk religion on Sunday than on Monday,
+unless the day's interests have quickened the child's questioning. There
+can be no set period; no times when you say, "This is the forty-five
+minutes of spiritual instruction and conversation." The time available
+may be very short, only a sentence may be possible, or it may be
+lengthened; everything will depend on the interest. It must be natural,
+a real part of the everyday thought and talk, lifted by its character
+and subject to its own level. Its value depends on its natural reality.
+
+
+§ 3. RELIGIOUS REALITY
+
+Thirdly, avoid the mistake of confounding conversation on "religion"
+with religious conversation, of thinking that the desired end has been
+attained when you have discussed the terminology of theology. To
+illustrate, in the family one hardly ever hears the word hygiene, but
+well-trained children learn much about the care of their bodies in
+health, and the family economy is directed consciously to that end. A
+good, nourishing meal always contributes more to health than many
+lectures on dietetics. Yet back, hidden away in the manager's mind, is
+the science of dietetics. So is it with quickening the child's power and
+thought in the spiritual life. We must avoid the abstract, the
+intellectually analytical. Religion should present itself concretely,
+practically, and as an atmosphere and ideal in the family. We parents
+must not look for theological interest in the child. A Timothy Dwight at
+ten or twelve, though once found in Sunday-school library books, is a
+monstrosity. The child's aspiration, his religious devotion, his love
+for God will find expression in almost every other way before it will be
+formulated into questions of a serious theological character. Nor ought
+we to force upon him the phrases of religion to which we are accustomed.
+He will live in another day and must speak its tongue. His faith must
+find itself in consciousness and then be permitted to clothe itself in
+appropriate garments of words. Those garments must be woven out of the
+realities of actual experiences in the child's life. We cannot prepare
+or make them for him. The expression of religion will be consonant with
+the stage of development. If his faith is to be real he must never be
+allowed or tempted to imagine that if only he can use the words, the
+verbal symbol, he has the fact, the life-experience. Try then to use
+words which are simple and meaningful to him and be content to wait for
+life to lead him to formulate vital verbal forms for himself.
+
+
+§ 4. PATIENCE AND COMMON-SENSE
+
+Fourthly, we must have faith in God's laws of growth. If we be but
+faithful, furnishing the soil, the seed, the nurture, we must wait for
+the increase. Many factors which we cannot control will determine
+whether it shall be early or late and what form it shall take. We must
+wait. It is high folly that pulls up the sprouting grain to see whether
+it is growing properly.
+
+Fifthly, manifestations of the religious life will vary in children and
+in families. The commonest error is to expect some one popular form
+alone, to imagine that all children must pass through some standardized
+experiences. Mrs. Brown's Willy may rise in prayer meeting. Do not be
+downhearted. Willy is only doing that which he has seen his parents do,
+and, usually, only because they do it. Your boy, or girl, is seeking
+health of life, of thought, of action; is growing in character. Let them
+grow, help them to grow. You know they love you even when they say
+little about it; you do not expect them to climb to the housetop and
+declare their affection. A flower does not sing about the sun, it grows
+toward it. That is the test of the child's religion: Is he growing
+Godward in life, action, character?
+
+
+§ 5. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD
+
+Sixthly, deal most carefully with the child's consciousness of God. The
+truth is that the child in the average home has a consciousness of God.
+It grows out of formal references in social rites and customs, informal
+allusions in conversation, and direct statements and instruction. But
+frequently the resultant mental picture is a misleading one, sometimes
+even vicious in its moral effect. Where superstitious servants take more
+interest in the child's religious ideas than do his parents, we have the
+child whose life is darkened by the fear of an omnipotent ogre.
+Nursemaids will slothfully scare small children into silence by threats
+of the awful presence of a bogey god. The life of the spirit cannot be
+trusted to the hireling. Parents must be sure of the character as well
+as the superficial competency of those who come closest to childhood. A
+child's ideas are formed before he goes to school. The family cannot
+delegate the formation of dominant ideas to persons trained only for
+nursery tasks.
+
+But frequently the mother is a misleading teacher. To her the child goes
+with all the big questions outside the immediate world of things. Is she
+prepared to answer the questions? Few dilemmas of our life today are
+more pathetic than this: the mother has outgrown the theology of her
+childhood; she remembers keenly the suffering and superstition, the
+struggle that followed the darkened pictures she received as a little
+one, but she has nothing better to offer the child. No one has taught
+her how to put the later, more spiritual concepts into language for the
+child of our day. Weakly she falls back on the forms of words she once
+abhorred.
+
+There are certainly two approaches of reality for the child-mind to the
+idea of God. Two immediate experiences are rich in meaning; they are the
+life of the family and the wonder of the everyday world, the life and
+variety of nature and human activities. The first is a very simple and
+rich approach. By every possible means help children in the family to
+think of God as the great and good Father of us all. Do this in the
+phrasing of prayers and graces, in the answers to their questions, in
+the casual word. Why should we assume that the Fatherhood of God is for
+the adult alone? And why should it be that this rich concept dawns on us
+like a new day of freedom in truth in later years instead of becoming
+ours in childhood and so determining the habit and attitude of our
+lives? The finest, the ideal person is, to the child, the father. God in
+terms of fatherhood is the sum and source of all that is ideal in
+personality.
+
+The child's keen interest in the world of nature is our opportunity to
+lead him to love the gracious source of all beauty and goodness. How
+keen is the child's enjoyment of the beauty of the world! Can we forever
+fix the general concept of all this beauty as the thought of God in the
+words of flower and leaf, mountain and stream? And might we not also
+connect the idea of God with the affairs of daily life? That depends on
+the parent's attitude of mind; if we think of the universal life that is
+behind all battles and business and affairs, there will be a difference
+in our answers to the thousand curious inquiries that rise in the
+child's mind.
+
+Nor must we leave the child to think of God as a separate, far-off
+person, on a throne somewhere in the skies. The child is finding his way
+into a universe. The God who is a minute fraction of that universe makes
+possible the religion that is no more than a negligible fraction of
+life. The child asks concerning clouds, the sea, the trees, the birds,
+and all the world about him; he tends to interpret it causally and
+ideally. Childhood affords the great opportunity for giving the color,
+the beauty and glory, the life of the divine to all this universe, to
+instil the feeling that God is everywhere, in all and through all, and
+that in him we live and move and have our being. The child's joy in this
+world can thus be given a religious meaning. He sings
+
+    My God, I thank thee thou hast made
+    This earth so bright....,
+
+and so beauty and joy become part of his religion. His faith becomes a
+gladsome thing; he knows that the trees of the forest clap their hands,
+the mountains and the hills sing, and the morning stars chant together
+in the gladness of the divine life.
+
+Such a view of the world comes not by prearranged and indoor interviews.
+One must walk out into the good outdoor world for the opportunity and
+the inspiration. The garden plot, the park, and, best of all, the open
+fields and woods speak to a child and furnish us an open book from which
+we may teach him to read. Recalling religious impressions, the writer
+would testify to feeling nothing deeper, as a result of church
+attendance in childhood, than the shapes of seats and the colors of
+walls; but there remain deep impressions of wonder, beauty, and the
+meaning of God from Sunday mornings spent with his father under the
+great beeches in Epping Forest, listening to the reading and singing of
+the old hymns, or joining in conversation on the woods and the flowers,
+and even on the legends of Robin Hood in the forest.
+
+
+§ 6. THE EVERYDAY OPPORTUNITIES
+
+Seventhly, natural conversation affords the best opportunity for direct
+instruction. A child is a peripatetic interrogation. His questions cover
+the universe; there are no doors which you desire to see opened that he
+will not approach at some time. There is great advantage when the
+religious question rises normally; when the child begins it and when the
+interest continues with the same naturalness as in conversation on any
+other subject. Then questions usually take one of three forms: mere
+childish, curious questions, questions on conduct, and questions on
+religion in its organized form.
+
+The child's curiosity is the basis of even those questions which have
+usually been credited to preternatural piety. The tiny youngster who
+asks strange questions about God asks equally startling ones about
+fairies or about his grandmother. But his questions give us the chance
+to direct him to right thoughts of God. Here we need to be sure of our
+own thoughts and to keep in mind our principal purpose, to quicken in
+this child loyalty to the highest and best. He must be shown a God whom
+he can love and, at the same time, one who will call for his growing
+loyalty, his courage, and devotion. Everything for the child's future
+depends on the pictures he now forms. We all carry to a large degree our
+childhood's view of God.
+
+Some of the child's questions probe deep; how shall we answer them? When
+you know the truth tell him the truth, being sure that it is told in
+language that really conveys truth to his mind. The danger is that
+parents will attempt to tell more than they know, to answer questions
+that cannot be answered, or that they will, in sloth or cowardice or
+ignorance, tell children untrue things. If a child asks, "Did God make
+the world?" the answer that will be true to the child may be a simple
+affirmative. If the child asks or his query implies, "Did God make the
+leaves, or the birds, with his fingers?" we had better take time to
+show the difference between man's making of things and the working of
+the divine energy through all the process of the development of the
+world. When the child asks, "Mother, if God made all things, why did he
+make the devil?" it would surely be wise and opportune to correct the
+child's mental picture of a personal anti-God and to take from him his
+bogey of a "devil." But the question of the relation of God to the
+existence of evil would remain, and the best a parent could do would be
+to illustrate the necessities of freedom of choice and will in life by
+similar freedom in the family.
+
+It must be remembered that children's curious questions are only their
+attempt to discover their world, that they have no peculiar religious
+significance, but that they afford the parent a vital opportunity for
+direct religious instruction. These questions must be treated seriously;
+something is missing in parental consciousness when the child's
+questions furnish only material for jesting relation to the family
+friends.
+
+
+§ 7. MORAL TEACHING
+
+_Questions on conduct_: Scores of times in the day the children come in
+from play or from school and tell of what has happened. Their more or
+less breathless recitals very often include vigorous accounts of
+"cheating," "naughtiness," unfair play, unkind words, discourtesies,
+all dependent as to their character on the age of the children and all
+opening doors for free conversation on duties and conduct. Here lies one
+of the large opportunities for moral instruction. There is no need to
+attempt to make formal occasions for this; so long as children play and
+live with others they are under the experience of learning the art of
+living with one another; this is the simple essence of morality. The
+parent's answers to their questions on conduct, the comments on their
+criticisms, and the conversation that may easily be directed on these
+subjects count tremendously with the child in establishing his ideals
+and modes of conduct. Returning to his play, there is no mightier
+authority he can quote than to say, "My mother says--," or "My father
+says--."
+
+Let no one say that instruction in moral living is not religious, for
+there can be no adequate guidance in morals without religion, nor can
+the religious quality of the life find expression adequately except
+through conduct in social living. Children need more than the rules for
+living; they must feel motives and see ideals. They do not live by rules
+any more than we do. Besides the rule that is known there must be a
+reason for following it and a strong desire to do so. All ethical
+teaching needs this imperative and motivation of religion, the
+quickening of loyalty to high ideals, the doing of the right for
+reasons of love as well as of duty and profit.
+
+The father's opportunity comes especially with the boys. They are sure
+to bring to him their ethical questions on games and sport; he knows
+more about boys' fights and struggles than does the mother. When the
+boys begin to discuss their games the father cannot afford to lack
+interest. Trivial as the question may seem to be, it is the most
+important one of the day to the boy and, for the interests of his
+character, it may be the most important for many a day to the father. If
+he answers with sympathy and interest this question on a "foul ball" or
+on marbles or peg-tops, he has opened a door that will always stay open
+so long as he approaches it with sincerity; if he slights it, if he is
+too busy with those lesser things that seem great to him, he has closed
+a door into the boy's life; it may never be opened again. Children learn
+life through the life they are now living. Real preparation for the
+world of business and larger responsibilities comes by the child's
+experiences of his present world of play and schooling and family
+living. To help him to live this present life aright is the best
+training that can be given for the right living of all life.
+
+_Questions on organized religion_: As children grow up, the church comes
+into their range of interests. Just as they often make the day school
+focal for conversation, as they recount their day's work there, so they
+retain impressions of the church school, of the services of the church,
+and will always ask many questions about this institution and its
+observances. Here is the opportunity, in free conversation, to tell the
+child the meaning of the church, the significance of membership therein,
+and to lead him to conscious relationship to the society of the
+followers of Jesus. (See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church.")
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Alice E. Fitts, "Consciousness of God in Children," _The Aims of
+     Religious Education_, pp. 330-38. Religious Education Association,
+     $1.00.
+
+     W.G. Koons, _Child's Religious Life_, sec. II. Eaton & Mains,
+     $1.00.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, chap. vi. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     George Hodges, _The Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. i-vi.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Child and His Religion_, chap. ii. The
+     University of Chicago Press, $0.75.
+
+     Edward Lyttleton, _The Corner-Stone of Education_, chap. viii.
+     Putnam, $1.50.
+
+     T. Stephens (ed.), _The Child and Religion_. Putnam, $1.50.
+
+     C.W. Richell, _The Child as God's Child_. Eaton & Mains, $0.75.
+
+     W.G. Koons, _The Child's Religious Nature_. Eaton & Mains, $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special difficulties which you feel about
+     introducing the topic of religion to children? Describe any methods
+     or modes of approach which have seemed successful?
+
+     2. Would you regard it as a fault if a child seems unwilling to
+     talk about religion? What do you think "religion" means to the
+     child-mind?
+
+     3. In what ways do children's aptitudes differ and what factors
+     probably determine the difference? What was your own childish
+     conception of God? Did you love God or fear him? Why?
+
+     4. Is it ever right to teach the child those conceptions which we
+     have outgrown? What about Santa Claus and fairies? How can you use
+     childish figures of speech as an avenue to more exact truth?
+
+     5. Does the child learn more through ears or eyes? Through which
+     agency do we seek to convey religious ideas?
+
+     6. Is it possible to make the child see the intimate relation
+     between conduct and religion? How would you do this?
+
+     7. Give some of the characteristics of a religious child of seven
+     years, of ten.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+DIRECTED ACTIVITY
+
+
+Probably all parents find themselves at some time thinking that the
+real, fundamental problem of training their children lies in dealing
+with their superabundant energy. "He is such an active child!" mothers
+complain. Were he otherwise a physician might properly be consulted. But
+the child's activity does seriously interfere with parental peace. It
+takes us all a long time to learn that we are not, after all, in our
+homes in order to enjoy peaceful rest, but in order to train children
+into fulness of life. That does not mean that the home should be without
+quiet and rest, but that we must not hope to repress the energy of
+childhood. One might as well hope to plug up a spring in the hillside.
+Our work is to direct that activity into glad, useful service.
+
+
+§ 1. VALUE OF ACTIVITY
+
+The things we do not only indicate character, they determine it. Our
+thoughts have value and power as they get into action. To bend our
+energies toward an ideal is to make it more real, to make it a part of
+ourselves. Children learn by doing--learn not only that which they are
+doing but life itself.
+
+It may be doubted whether a child ever grew who did not plead to have a
+share in the work he saw going on about him. That desire to help is part
+of that fundamental virtue of loyalty of which we have spoken above; it
+is his desire to be true to the tendency of the home, to give himself to
+the realization of its purposes. Of course he does not think this out at
+all. But this desire on the part of the child to have a hand in the
+day's work is the parent's fine opportunity for a most valuable and
+influential form of character direction.
+
+One of the tests of a worthy character is whether the life is
+contributory or parasitic, whether one carries his load, does his work,
+makes his contribution, or simply waits on the world for what he can
+get. A religious interpretation of and attitude toward life is
+essentially that of self-giving in service. "My Father worketh hitherto
+and I work." "I must be about my Father's business." How noticeable is
+the child's interest in the vivid word-picture of One who "went about
+doing good"!
+
+
+§ 2. THE BLESSING OF LABOR
+
+The home is the first place for life's habituation to service. The child
+is greatly to be pitied who has no duties, no share in the work. Where
+the hands are unsoiled the heart is the easier sullied. It is the height
+of mistaken kindness, one of the common errors of an unthinking,
+superficial affection, to protect our children from work. This is a
+world of the moral order and of the glory of work.
+
+When the child is very small it must learn this by having committed to
+it very simple duties. As soon as it is able to handle things it may
+learn to do that which is most helpful with those things, to care for
+its toys, to put them away neatly. A child can learn while very young to
+take care of its spoon, of certain clothes, of chair, and pencil and
+paper. True, it is much easier to "pick up" after the child; but to do
+so is to yield to our own sloth. The more tedious way is the one we must
+follow if we would train the child.
+
+Besides the care of his possessions the child will gladly take a share
+in the general work of the home. Let some daily duty be assigned to each
+one; such simple responsibilities as picking up all papers and magazines
+and seeing that they are properly stacked or disposed of may be given to
+one; another may sweep the stairs every day with a whisk broom (in one
+instance a boy of eight did this daily); another may be "librarian,"
+caring for all books; each one, after eight years of age, should make
+her own bed; each one should be entirely responsible for his own table
+in his room. Many homes permit of many other "chores," such as keeping
+up the supply of small kindling, caring for a pet or even a larger
+animal, keeping a little personal garden or vegetable plot. Under those
+normal conditions of living, which some day we may reach, where each
+family, or all families, have trees and flowers and ample space, the
+opportunities are increased for joyous child activities which
+consciously contribute to social well-being as a whole.
+
+
+§ 3. RELIGION IN ACTION
+
+Perhaps some will say, this is not religious education, it is everyday
+training. Yes, it is "everyday training," but it is the training of a
+religious person with the religious purpose of habituating the child to
+give his life in service to his world. That is precisely what we
+need--_religion in everyday action_. The atmosphere and habitual
+attitude and conversation of the family must be depended on to give a
+really religious meaning to these everyday acts, to make them as
+religious as going to church, perhaps more so, and so to make them a
+training for the life that is religious, not in word only, but in deed
+and in truth.
+
+Whatever we may say to children on the subject of religion, whether
+directly or in teaching by indirection through songs and worship, must
+pass over somehow into action in order to have meaning and reality. It
+must be realized in order to be real. The difficulty that appears is
+that of connecting the daily act with its spiritual significance. Yet
+that is not as difficult as it seems. If the act has religious
+significance to us, if we form the habit of really worshiping God with
+our work, seeking in it to do his will, the child will know it. We
+cannot keep that hidden. The spiritual life will never be more real to
+the child than it is to us, and no amount of moralizing or
+spiritualizing about our acts or his will give them religious
+significance.
+
+At least one person will testify that, after being brought up in a
+really religious home, the most strikingly religious memory of that home
+is an occasion when he delightedly carried a tray of food to a sick
+neighbor. It was doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing
+the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the
+life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are
+acts repeated until they pass from the volitional to the involuntary.
+The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the
+willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it
+becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the
+flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a
+share in all our ministries.[12]
+
+The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in
+forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social
+activities for students to carry out.[13] The parents ought to know what
+is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to
+co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of
+service suggested for the children, these activities lose all
+perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a
+normal part of life.
+
+Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we
+were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we
+were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a
+sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our
+thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for,
+and that joy will be their strength.
+
+
+§ 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE
+
+The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own
+activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may
+acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the
+chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life.
+Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or ride in private
+cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted
+life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have
+without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy
+remain the passive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he
+is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert
+him from the pauper habit.
+
+The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of
+passive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to
+shield them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The
+religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the
+days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and
+finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men.
+Vain is all family worship, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless
+we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the
+imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in
+heart. The family may make this the normal way to live.
+
+If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of
+the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see
+itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and
+helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people
+the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight in
+self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in
+relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial,
+and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a
+child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere
+is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.
+
+The whole attitude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of
+the family. The greedy family makes the grafting citizen. The grasping
+home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace. Greater than
+the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the
+ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizenship
+in your home. No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beatitudes or
+week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of
+envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home.
+Home action and attitude count for more than all besides.
+
+It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power
+of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective
+method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole
+social duty unselfishly.
+
+
+§ 5. FAMILY TRAINING FOR SOCIAL LIVING
+
+The supreme test of the religious life here is ability to live among men
+as brothers and to cause the conditions of the divine family to be
+realized on earth. If we can realize that the purpose of Jesus was to
+bring men into the family of God, that the aim of all religious endeavor
+is the family character in men and women and the conditions of that
+family in all society, we must surely appreciate the possibility of the
+human family as a training school for this larger family of humanity.
+
+The infant approaches social living by the pathway of the society of the
+family. We all go out into life through widening circles, first the
+mother's arms, then the family, the neighborhood, the city, the state,
+the nation, the world-life. Each circle prepares for the next. The
+family is the child's social order; its life is his training for the
+larger life of nation and human brotherhood.
+
+Just how men and women will live in society is determined principally by
+the bent of their characters in the social order of the family. Their
+attitude to the world follows the attitude of the family, especially of
+the parents. They interpret the larger world by the lesser. The home is
+the great school of citizenship and social living.
+
+All the moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the
+purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its
+cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and
+motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the
+coming generation to live in a religious society, in one which will
+steadily move toward the divine ideal of perfect family relations
+through brotherhood and fatherhood. Its business is not to get children
+ready for heaven, but to train them to make all life heavenly. Its aim
+is not alone children who will not tear down the parents' reputation,
+but men and women who will build up the actual worth and beauty of all
+lives.
+
+The realization, in the family, of the purpose of training youth to
+social living and service in the religious spirit depends on two things:
+a spirit and passion in the family for social justice and order, and the
+direction of the activities of the family toward training in social
+usefulness.
+
+Only the social spirit can give birth to the social spirit. True lovers
+of men, who set the values of life and of the spirit first, who give
+their lives that all men may have freedom and means to find more
+abundant life, come out of the families where the passion of human love
+burns high. The selfish family, self-centered, caring not at all in any
+deep sense for the well-being of others, existing to extract the juice
+of life and let who will be nourished on the rind, becomes effective to
+make the social highwayman, the oppressor. From such a family comes he
+who breaks laws for his pocketbook and impedes the enactment of laws
+lest human rights should prevent his acquisition of wealth; he who
+hates his brother man--unless that brother has more than he has; the foe
+of the kingdom of goodness and peace and brotherhood.
+
+And goodness is as contagious as badness. Children catch the spirit of
+social love and idealism in the family. Where men and women are deeply
+concerned with all that makes the world better for lives, better for
+babies and mothers, for workers, and, above all, for the values of the
+spirit gained through leisure, opportunities, and higher incentives;
+where the family is more concerned with folks than with furniture; where
+habitually it thinks of people as Jesus did, as the objects most of all
+worth seeking, worth investing in, there children receive direction,
+habituation, and motivation for the life of religion, the life that
+binds them in glad love to the service of their fellows, and makes them
+think of all their life as the one great chance to serve, to make a
+better world, and to bring God's great family closer together here.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, pp. 142-50. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+     W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_, pp. 85-102. Pilgrim Press,
+     $1.00.
+
+     G. Johnson, _Education by Plays and Games_, Part I. Ginn & Co.,
+     $0.90.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     E.D. Angell, _Play_. Little, Brown & Co., $1.50.
+
+     Fisher, Gulick, _et al._, "Ethical Significance of Play,"
+     _Materials for Religious Education_, pp. 197-215. Religious
+     Education Association, $0.50.
+
+     Publications of the Play Ground Association.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     PLAY
+
+     Forbush, _Manual of Play_. Jacobs, $1.00.
+
+     A. Newton, _Graded Games_. Barnes, $1.25.
+
+     Von Palm, _Rainy Day Pastimes_. Dana Estes, $1.00.
+
+     Johnson, _When Mother Lets Us Help_. Moffat, Yard & Co., $0.75.
+
+     WORK
+
+     Canfield, _What Shall We Do Now?_ Stokes, $1.50.
+
+     Beard, _Jack of All Trades_. Scribner, $2.00.
+
+     Beard, _Things Worth Doing_. Scribner, $2.00.
+
+     Bailey, _Garden Making_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     Bailey (ed.), _Something to Do_ (magazine). School Arts Publishing
+     Co.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Is the quiet child an ideal child? How far should we go in
+     restraining activity?
+
+     2. The relative advantages of work and leisure for children. What
+     of the value of chores to you; did you do them? Describe any forms
+     of children's service in the home which have come under your
+     observation.
+
+     3. What forms of community service can be done by children and by
+     young people?
+
+     4. Recall any lessons learned by activity in your early home life.
+
+     5. Give in their order, according to your judgment, the potencies
+     for religious character in the home.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] A short list of books on child activity in the home is appended at
+the end of this chapter; a fairly complete list, long enough for any
+family, will be found on p. 117 of _The Church School_, by W.S. Athearn.
+
+[13] See W.N. Hutchins, _Graded Social Service for the Sunday School_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE HOME AS A SCHOOL[14]
+
+
+The home is so mighty as a school because, requiring little time for
+formal instruction, it enlists its scholars so largely in informal
+activities. It trains for life by living; it trains as an institution,
+by a group of activities, a series of duties, a set of habits. If the
+home is to prepare for social living it will be most of all and best of
+all by its organization and conduct as a social institution.
+
+
+§ 1. AN IDEAL COMMUNITY
+
+For the purposes of society homes must be social-training centers; they
+must be conducted as communities if their members are to be fitted for
+communal living. No boy is likely to be ready for the responsibilities
+of free citizenship who has spent his years in a home under an absolute
+monarchy; or, as is today perhaps more frequently the case, in a
+condition of unmitigated anarchy. A free society cannot consist of units
+not free. The problems of parental discipline arise and appear as
+persistently irritating and perplexing stumbling-blocks in many a home
+simply because that home is organized altogether out of harmony and
+relation with the normal life in which it is set. Society environing the
+home gives its members the habits of twentieth-century autonomy,
+individual initiative and responsibility, together with collective
+living and working, while the home often seeks to perpetuate
+thirteenth-century absolutism, serfdom, and subjection. In social living
+outside the home we learn to do the will of all; in the home we attempt
+to compel children to do the will of one.
+
+
+§ 2. COMMUNITY INTERESTS
+
+The home organized as a social community will give to every member,
+according to his ability, a share in its guidance and will expect from
+every member the free contribution of his powers. Its rules will be made
+by the will of all, and its affairs governed, not by an executive board
+composed of the parents, but by the free participation and choice of
+all. The young will learn to choose by choosing; will learn both how to
+rule and to be ruled by a share in ruling.
+
+To be explicit, suppose a piece of furniture is desired for the home.
+Two plans at least are possible: first, the "head of the home" may go
+forth and purchase it without consulting anyone, or after advising with
+the other "head"; or, second, before a purchase is made, the wisdom of
+such an addition to the furniture may be suggested in the open council
+of the whole family and the purchase discussed and determined by all.
+Such councils, usually coming at or after the principal meal, freely
+participated in by all, give even to the youngest a sense of the cost of
+a home, of the care that goes into it, with, what is more important, a
+sense of a share in these cares and costs; they cultivate habits of
+prudence, of consideration of a matter, of steady judgments, of
+deference to the wishes and wisdom of others. Of still greater
+importance is another practical issue of such a plan--that every member
+of the household has a new sense of proprietorship with deepened
+responsibility. Instead of thinking of any household possession as
+father's or mother's, or even mine, it becomes _ours_. The parents no
+longer need to say, "Children, do not mar the furniture; it costs money
+to replace it." The children know that already, and they have the same
+pride in the home possessions and the same desire to preserve them as
+they have in that which is peculiarly their own. A habit of mind results
+from such a course so that, by thinking in terms of common possession of
+the best things of life, there is cultivated that respect for the rights
+of others which is simply right social thinking.
+
+The same plan could be pursued in relation to almost every interest of
+the family--as the planning of the annual vacation and outing, the
+holidays, picnics, and birthday celebrations, the church and religious
+exercises. Above all, in the last mentioned, this social spirit may be
+cultivated. The father may cease to be the "high priest" for his family
+and become a worshiper along with the other members. The effect will be
+that his children are more likely to stay as worshipers with him than if
+they gazed on him as on some lonely elevation, unrelated to them in his
+religious exercises. The reading, the song, the prayers, the comment and
+discussion, the story-telling, and all that may make up the regular
+specific religious activities of the family should be such that all may
+have a share in them. Nothing could be finer, diviner, and bring larger
+helpfulness for social living than the attempt of the least little
+lisping child to throw herself into the unified family act of prayer, as
+when one little tot, unable to say the Lord's Prayer, united in worship
+at the time of that act by saying, as reverently as possible, "One, two,
+three, four, five," etc., up to ten. The ability to count was her latest
+accomplishment; counting to ten was bringing the very best thing she
+then had and, in the act of family worship, offering her part to the
+Most High. A fine sense of worship and a desire to be one with the
+others in this united, communal service prompted the participation.
+
+
+§ 3. COMMUNITY SERVICE
+
+Community service may be cultivated in the home. Here is the ideal
+social community, where there are neither parasites nor paupers, where
+all give of their best for the best of all. No one doubts that the baby
+gives its full share of happiness and cheer, and the aged their offering
+of consolation and experience; but the difficulty is supposed to be with
+the lad and the girl who would rather play than work. Usually this is
+because the habits of co-operation in the life of this community have
+been too long neglected. The small boy or girl had no share in its work.
+Parents are too busy to think through the matter of finding suitable
+duties for all. It is so much easier to do things one's self, even
+though the child misses the benefits of participation. More frequently
+the blame lies in the fact that parents desire to shield children from
+labor. Some would have them grow up without knowing what they count as
+the degradation of toil. But a boy who knows nothing of the "chores" has
+missed half the joys of boyhood, and has a terribly hard lesson ahead of
+him when he goes out to relate himself to life. No matter what one's
+station may be, there is a part to be played, and one's piece of work to
+be done. The greatest unkindness we can do our children is to train them
+to lives that do not play their part. The home is our chance to train a
+man to harmonious usefulness in his world. Not only should the family
+train to social co-operation and service, but it should train to
+efficiency therein. Do not let your child's duties become a farce; let
+them exact as much of him as the world will exact also; that is,
+efficiency, accuracy, thoroughness, and fidelity.
+
+
+§ 4. A SCHOOL OF SOCIAL MINISTRY
+
+The family trains lives for social ministry. The unsocial lives come out
+of unsocial homes. The home that exists for itself alone trains lives
+that exist only for themselves; these are the homes that throw the sand
+of selfishness into the wheels of society; they ultimately effect social
+suicide through selfishness. The attitude and atmosphere of the home are
+of first importance here. As we think, so will our children act. If the
+home is to us a place without responsibilities for the neighborhood,
+without duties to neighbors, without social roots, then it is a school
+for industrial, commercial, and social greed and warfare. As we think in
+our hearts and talk at our table, so are we educating those who sit
+thereat.
+
+If we would have our homes really efficient and worthy agencies for
+education in social living, the first thing to do is to seek the social
+atmosphere, to cultivate all those influences which young lives
+unconsciously absorb. We all know that character comes through
+environment in large measure, and that the mental and spiritual
+environment is by far the most potent. Here is something that affects us
+more than the finest or poorest furniture and that gives the real zest
+and flavor to any meal. The choice of our own reading enters here, not
+only the matter of reading in sociology, but of all reading, as to
+whether it blinds with class prejudices, intensifies caste feeling, or
+atrophies social sympathy by pandering to selfishness and sensuousness.
+The control of our own feelings and judgment enters here. Do we
+sedulously cultivate charity for others? Do we stifle impatience,
+bitterness, class feeling? Do we guide the conversation of visitors and
+the family group so that antisocial passions are subdued and a spirit of
+brotherly love and compassion for all is cultivated? Here men and women
+have opportunity to give evidence of a change of heart; here they need
+that awakening to social consciousness which is a new birth, a
+regeneration into the life of the Son of Man who came to give his life.
+
+By its active ministry the family is training for social living. When a
+child carries a bowl of soup to some sick or needy one, he learns a
+lesson never to be forgotten. The memories of hours of planning and
+preparation for some neighborly service--the making of bread, the
+packing of a box, the preserves for the sick--shine out like sunshine
+spots along childhood's ways; they direct manhood's steps.
+
+We are gradually learning that social duties are not learned save
+through social deeds; that even the most carefully prepared and
+perfectly pedagogical systems of instruction fail, standing alone. The
+college student uses the laboratory method in his sociology--though we
+know that sociology may be as far from social living as the poles are
+apart. The Social Service Association of the Young Men's Christian
+Association has given up attempts to teach social duty in favor of the
+plan of undertaking specific pieces of social activity. The home must
+adopt the laboratory method. The important thing is, not what the father
+or mother may systematically teach about the social duties of the
+children, but what kinds of service, of ministry and normal activity
+they may lead the children to; that is, in what ways they may all
+together discharge their functions in society.
+
+
+§ 5. FAMILIES AS COMMUNITY FACTORS
+
+Each family must clearly see its normal relations to its community, to
+the social whole; first, as an association of social beings having
+social duties, obligations, and privileges; then, to see that the
+ordering of the daily life is the largest single factor in determining
+the value of the family to the development of the community, fitting
+harmoniously into the larger community, and rendering its share of
+service.
+
+The disorderly home spreads its immoral contagion beyond its walls, out
+into the front yard, out and up and down the street, and all through the
+village and city. The City Beautiful cannot come until we have the Home
+Beautiful. Training each one to play his part in keeping the house in
+order, picking up and setting in place his own tools and playthings,
+preventing and removing litter, scraps, and elements of disorder and
+discomfort, acquiring habits of neatness based on social motives--these
+things make more for the city of beauty and health than all our lectures
+on clean cities.
+
+No family lives to itself. Young people need to see clearly how their
+homes and their habits in the home impinge on other homes and lives.
+This is impressed upon us in an accentuated and acute degree in city
+living. One can hardly imagine a finer discipline of grace than
+apartment living, though one may well question whether it is not morally
+and hygienically flying in the face of the natural order. We may not
+have for a long time municipal ordinances forbidding boiled dinners,
+limburger, and phonographs in city apartments; but if, unfortunately, we
+are compelled to live in these modern abominations, we ought to
+cultivate a conscience that will not inflict our idiosyncrasies, either
+in culinary aromas or in musical taste, on our neighbors. But there are
+matters greater than these by which the home trains for social
+thoughtfulness. No man has a right to grow weeds at home, because the
+seeds never stay there. A howling dog, a disease-breeding sty, a
+fly-harboring stable, must be viewed, not from the point of the family's
+convenience, but from that of others' welfare.
+
+
+§ 6. TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP
+
+The family has a duty to train children for Christian citizenship. No
+other institution can take its place even here. Courses of lectures in
+churches and settlements effect excellent results, and the study of
+civics from the moral and ideal viewpoint should be encouraged in the
+schools; but the home is the place where, after all, citizens are
+trained and the value or menace of their citizenship determined. If we
+stop long enough to get a clear understanding of what we mean by
+citizenship this will be the more evident.
+
+Citizenship is the condition of full communal, social living in a
+democracy. It is not a special department or activity of a man's life
+which he exercises once in a while, as at the primary or at the polls or
+through the political campaign; it is a permanent condition, the
+condition of his social living in a democracy. It seems to be worth
+while to think of this enough to be quite sure of it, for we have
+thought too long of citizenship as a special aspect of one's life or as
+an occasional duty; we have called for good citizenship at times of
+election and have been content with dormant citizenship at other times;
+we have said that one was exercising his citizenship when he voted, and
+have forgotten that he was exercising it or abusing or neglecting it as
+he walked the streets, talked with his neighbors, or in any way lived
+the life that has relations to other lives.
+
+Matters of citizenship are simply matters of social living, as social
+living expresses itself through what we call government; that is,
+through communal, civic, national administration and regulation.
+Citizenship is social control in action, not through political activity
+alone, but through all that concerns civic and communal life. In view of
+this it may be worth while to look a little more closely into the
+relations of family life to this matter of the determination of the
+character of our citizenship.
+
+The family is an agency for religious training in citizenship. The
+family is the first, smallest, and still the most common and potent
+social group. It is the community in which we nearly all learn communal
+living. At first it is a child's world, then comes his city, and then
+his nation, but ere long again the family is his own kingdom. Its
+ideals, constantly interpreted in action, determine our ideals. Where
+the father is greedy, self-centered, regarding the home as solely for
+his convenience as his private boarding-house, where he is a despotic
+boss, why should not the son at least tolerate bossism in his city if he
+does not himself pattern after his father on a wider scale and regard
+the city or the state as his private boarding-house and the treasury as
+his private manger? Where the mother is a petty parasite, what wonder
+the children regard with indifference, if not even with admiration, the
+whole system of civic and social barnacles, leeches, and other
+parasites?
+
+The very organization of the home must prepare for civic duty by laying
+upon all appropriate duties and activities. It ought to be an ideal type
+of community. But that can never be until we take the training of
+parents seriously in hand; until we cease to delegate the pedagogy of
+courtship, marriage, and home-founding to the comic supplements of the
+Sunday papers and to the joke columns. Parents must themselves be
+trained for the business of the organization of homes as educational
+agencies.
+
+The life and work of the home ought to train religiously for
+citizenship, by causing each to bear his due share of the burdens of
+all. Where the child has been forced to do the indolent parent's share,
+to support the slothful father, he can only look forward to the time
+when he will be free to support only himself, and have no other than
+purely egoistic obligations; this is an utterly immoral conception, and
+one squarely opposed to good citizenship. Where the boy or the girl has
+been trained to regard all toil as dishonorable, where each has been
+taught scrupulously to avoid every burden, they come into social living
+with habits set against bearing their share and toward making others
+carry them. The indolent parent makes the tax-dodging citizen, as the
+indulgent parent often makes the place-hunting citizen who becomes a tax
+on the public.
+
+The ideals of the family determine the needs of citizens. Its
+conversation, its reading, its customs, set the standard of social
+needs. Where the father laughs at the smartness of the artful dodge in
+politics, where the mother sighs after the tinsel and toys that she
+knows others have bought with corrupt cash, where the conversation at
+the meal-table steadily, though often unconsciously, lifts up and lauds
+those who are out after the "real thing," the eager ears about that
+board drink it in and childish hearts resolve what they will do when
+they have a chance. Where no voice speaks for high things, where no tide
+of indignation against wrong sweeps into language, where the children
+never feel that the parents have great moral convictions--where no
+vision is, the people perish.
+
+Yet to realize this civic responsibility of the home would be, in the
+greater number of instances, to remedy it. In those other instances
+where there are no civic ideals, where the domestic conscience is dead,
+there rests upon the state, upon society, for its own sake, the
+responsibility to train those children so that, at any rate, they will
+not perpetuate homes of this type. We may do very much by the
+stimulation and direction of parents. Men need but to be reminded of
+their duty to make it a part of their business to train their children
+in social duty.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Taylor, _Religion in Social Action_, chaps. vii, viii. Dodd, Mead &
+     Co., $1.25.
+
+     E.J. Ward, _The Social Center_, chap. v. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Lofthouse, _Ethics in the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the special social importance of the family?
+
+     2. How do children acquire their social ideals from the home?
+
+     3. What are the advantages which the home has as a school?
+
+     4. How do homes train for the responsibilities of citizenship?
+
+     5. Can you describe any plans of community councils in the home?
+
+     6. How would you promote community service in the family?
+
+     7. What are the dangers of unsocial and selfish lives growing in
+     the home?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] This chapter is, with the publisher's kind permission, taken, with
+sundry minor changes, from the author's pamphlet, _The Home as a School
+for Social Living_, published by the American Baptist Publication
+Society in the "Social Service Series."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE CHILD'S IDEAL LIFE
+
+
+The modern child is likely to miss one of the great character enrichings
+which his parents had, in that he is in danger of growing up entirely
+ignorant of the poetic setting of religious thought in historic and
+dignified hymns. The great hymns have done more for religious thought
+and character than all the sermons that have ever been preached. Even in
+the adult of the purely intellectual cast the hymn, aided by rhythm,
+music, repetition, and emotion, is likely to become a more permanent
+part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of
+ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more
+than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a
+world of imagery!
+
+
+§ 1. SONG AND STORY
+
+Very early life's ideals are presented in poetic form; plays,
+school-life, love of country, friendships, all take or are given metric
+expression. So, for children, hymns have a perfectly natural place. The
+child sings as he plays, sings as he works, sings in school, and, as
+long as life and memory hold, these words of song will be his
+possession; in declining years, when eyes are failing and other
+interests may wane, fragments of childhood's songs and youth's poems
+will sing themselves over in his memory; while in the years between how
+often will some stanza or line spring into the focus of thought just at
+the moment when it can give brave and helpful direction!
+
+Those years of facile memorization should be like the ant's summer, a
+period of steady storing in mind of the world's treasures of thought. No
+man ever had too many good and beautiful thoughts in his memory. Few
+have failed to recall with gratitude some apparently long-forgotten word
+of cheer, light, and inspiration stored in childhood. The special virtue
+of the hymn, among all poetic forms of great thoughts, is that memory is
+strengthened by the music and the thought further idealized by it, while
+frequent repetition fixes it the more firmly and repetition in
+congregational song adds the high value of emotional association.
+
+But what kinds of memory treasures are being given to the modern child
+in the realm of religion? In by far the greater number of instances in
+the United States neither church nor Sunday school nor home brings to
+him any knowledge of the great hymns of religion.[15] In the churches
+that use these hymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday
+services; he is in the children's service or the school, while in the
+majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has
+substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified
+hymns. Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance,
+cavort, or drone through the frivolities of "popular" gospel songs is
+only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to
+divorce worship and thought, to make worship a matter of purely
+superficial emotions, and to form the habit of expressing religion, the
+highest experience of life, in language, often irreverent and almost
+always trivial, slangy, or ridiculous. It is an insult to the
+intelligence of children to ask them to sing
+
+    We're pilgrims o'er the sands of time,
+      We have not long to stay,
+    The lifeboat soon is coming,
+      To carry the pilgrims away.
+
+It is the duty of parents to know what their children are learning in
+the Sunday school. Not only are they often missing the opportunity to
+lay up the treasure of elevating, inspiring thoughts; they are acquiring
+crude, mistaken, misleading theological concepts in the hideous,
+revolting figures of "evangelistic songs"; they are storing their minds
+with atrocities in English and in figures of speech; they are acquiring
+the habits of sentimentality in religion and inhibiting the finer,
+higher feelings. They are blunting their higher feelings by repeating
+incongruous and nauseating figures of being "washed in blood," or they
+are carelessly singing sentiments they do not understand.
+
+What can the family do about this? It ought to assert its rights in the
+church. It ought to protest and rebel against the debauching of mind and
+the degrading of religion (all for the sake of selling trashy books at
+$25 per hundred). A parent would do better to keep his child from church
+and Sunday school than to permit his mind to be filled with the
+sanguinary pictures of God, the mediaeval theology of the modern
+songbook, and its offenses against truth in thought and form. But the
+family can work positively and more effectively by providing good hymns
+for children in the home.
+
+
+§ 2. TRAINING IN SONG
+
+Almost without exception all children will sing if encouraged early in
+life. In the family group one has only to start a familiar song and soon
+all will be singing. It is just as natural to sing "Abide with Me" when
+the family sits together in the evening as it is to start "My Alabama
+Choo-choo." Children like the swing of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" just
+as much as in the northern states they like "Marching through Georgia."
+If they do not know the hymns the home is the best of all places in
+which to learn them.
+
+A large section of real family life is missing in families that do not
+sing together. A home without song lacks one of the strongest bonds of
+family unity, and the after-years will be deprived of a memory dear
+indeed to many others. Days often come when the wheels of family life
+seem to develop friction, when little rifts seem to throw the members
+far apart, but the evening song brings them together. The unity of
+action, of feeling, the development of emotions above the day's
+irritation and strife, all help to new joys in family living.
+
+We may well think of the fine songs and the great hymns together. There
+is no fixed wall between "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," and "The Son
+of God Goes Forth," nor between "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Jerusalem
+the Golden." The modern home has the musical instruments to lead in
+song--though they are not always essential--and lacks only the planning
+and forethought to develop the joys of song. It must provide the thought
+that applies the simpler forms of musical expression to the sweetening
+and enriching of life.
+
+Let no one say, "My family is not musical." That simply means that your
+family does not take time for music and song. Build on the training in
+patriotic and folk-songs given in the schools; sing these same songs
+over in the home and then associate with the best of them the best of
+the hymns. Cultivate the habit of binding the whole realm of feeling in
+music together, the hymns and the songs, to make religion mean beauty
+and devotion and to make the finer sentiments of life truly religious.
+
+This costs time and thought. Someone must plan that the books of songs
+and hymns are provided, that the opportunity is given, and that wise,
+unobtrusive leadership is there. Have ready several copies of the book
+containing the best hymns. Think out your plan of procedure in advance,
+selecting the songs, or at least the first one. Then at the right time
+simply begin to play that song and you will scarcely need to invite the
+children to sing with you.
+
+Should anyone doubt whether children will enjoy singing good hymns, he
+may purchase a few records for the phonograph, for example, "O Come All
+Ye Faithful," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "O Zion Haste," "Holy,
+Holy, Holy," "Abide with Me." These will suit those of from ten upward;
+younger children will enjoy "Can a Little Child Like Me," "Brightly
+Gleams Our Banner," "Jesus Loves Me." "I Think When I Read That Sweet
+Story," and "For the Beauty of the Earth," though they will join gladly
+in the other hymns. Or, instead of using the phonograph, sit down
+quietly at the piano and play these hymns, with just enough emphasis for
+the children to catch the rhythm, and they will soon be standing at the
+piano singing with you.[16]
+
+
+§ 3. PLAY ACTIVITY
+
+The child is a playing animal. Play is not an invention of the devil,
+designed to plague parents and to lead children to waste their time. It
+is nature's best method of education, for when a child plays he is
+simply reaching forward in his activities to the realization of his
+ideals. Play is idealized experiences. There is always a significance of
+wider and maturer experience in children's play. Therefore the family
+must find space and time and adaptation of organization to the child's
+need of spontaneous, free activity in play.
+
+The special religious value of play lies in the fact that the child in
+his games is experimenting with life, learning its lessons; especially
+is he learning the art of living with other lives. It is our religious
+duty to see to it that our children become used to living in society by
+playing in social groups. Scarcely anyone is more to be pitied than the
+lonely child standing in the corner of the playground, able only to
+watch the games, because parental prohibition has already made him a
+solitary and unsocial creature.
+
+The educational potencies of play are so great that we dare not leave
+its activities to chance. Parents must study the power of play, its
+psychological and educational values, in order to direct its activity to
+the highest good.
+
+The adequate care of a child's play-life will involve, in addition to
+the trained intelligence of the parents, provision for space in the
+house and also outdoors, willingness to subordinate our peace and our
+pleasure to the child's play at times, a reasonable though not
+necessarily expensive provision of play materials, attention to the
+character of the plays and playmates. The home will not lose its harmony
+and beauty if it is filled with playing children. Its function has to do
+with their development rather than with the preservation of chairs.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.F. Cope, _Hymns You Ought to Know_, Introduction. Revell, $1.50.
+
+     W.F. Pratt, _Musical Ministries_. Revell, $1.00.
+
+     H.W. Hulbert, _The Church and Her Children_, chap. x. Revell,
+     $1.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     For a list of great hymns see _Hymns You Ought to Know_, edited by
+     Henry F. Cope, and mentioned above. It contains one hundred
+     standard hymns with a brief account of each hymn and of each
+     author.
+
+     E.D. Eaton, "Hymns for Youth," _Religious Education_, December,
+     1912, VII, 509.
+
+     See report of the Commission on Worship in the Sunday School, in
+     _Religious Education_, October, 1914.
+
+     Read especially the chapter on this subject in H.H. Hartshorne,
+     _Worship in the Sunday School_. Columbia University, $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What special advantages do songs and hymns have in their
+     pedagogical power?
+
+     2. What hymns do you remember from childhood? In what way are these
+     hymns valuable to you?
+
+     3. What changes would you like to see in the hymns the children
+     learn today?
+
+     4. What difficulties do you find in training children to sing in
+     the home?
+
+     5. Is it worth while to teach children to play? What games have
+     special educational value? What games have religious significance
+     or value? Give reasons for your opinions.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[15] One of the best collections of suitable religious songs is _Worship
+and Song_. Pilgrim Press, $0.40.
+
+[16] An excellent plan is worked out in _The Children's Hour of Story
+and Song_ by Moffat and Hidden, Unitarian Sunday School Society, in
+which children's stories are given and following them suitable songs and
+hymns with the music for each.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+STORIES AND READING
+
+
+If we would teach religion to our children we must adopt the method of
+Jesus; that of telling stories. The story has the advantage, first, of
+its natural interest, and, then, of the indirect manner of its
+presentation of the truth, together with the fact that that truth is
+embodied in a statement of life and experience. Besides, story-telling
+to any person of active interests is one of the easiest and most
+stimulating methods of teaching.
+
+
+§ 1. STORY-TELLING
+
+So much has already been written on the art of telling stories that only
+a few suggestions are needed here. First, understand why you tell the
+story. Normally a double motive enters in, namely, the conveyance of
+truth in life, at the same time affording real pleasure to the
+listeners. Either motive alone will be inadequate. You cannot convey the
+truth without the desire to give pleasure; you cannot make the pleasure
+worth while without the truth. But this is the place to insist that the
+truth which you desire to convey must find its way to the conviction of
+the child through the story and not through any moral or preface or
+particular statement which you may make. The moral or lesson must be
+clear to you but carefully held in reserve to direct the matter and
+manner of the story.
+
+Secondly, be prepared to pay the price of this most effective method of
+instruction. It will cost the reservation of a certain amount of time
+both for acquiring the story and for relating it. It will require
+careful thought and planning, especially to be sure that the story is
+told in sympathy with the child's world. People who are too busy to tell
+their children stories are, perhaps fortunately, coming to realize that
+they are too busy to have children. If it looks like a waste of time to
+turn off the lights and sit by the firelight for from twenty to thirty
+minutes, we shall need to revise our estimates of the value of
+child-character. Nor must we shrink from the investment of time in
+preparation for the narration of the story; if it is worth telling, it
+is worth telling well.
+
+Thirdly, keep a record of sources of stories. This may be preserved in a
+notebook. One parent used a card-index for this purpose. There are a few
+books published containing good collections.[17] You will find most
+valuable your own little book in which you have noted down the fugitive
+stories and short selections which are to be found in general
+literature.[18]
+
+Fourthly, do not tell a story so as to close the child's interest in the
+narrative. Stories ought to lead to inquiry and further reading in the
+book or other source from which they have been drawn; indeed,
+story-telling is one excellent method of quickening an interest in
+reading.
+
+Fifthly, allow the children to retell the stories to one another. Often
+the whole family will be entertained and helped by the explanation which
+a small child will give of the story he has learned by hearing it
+repeated a few times from his mother's lips.
+
+Sixthly, telling Bible stories to children in the quiet hour is the best
+of all methods to stimulate their interest in the Bible itself. It is
+much better to tell the story in your own language than to read it
+either in the Bible or in a paraphrase. For one reason, you will never
+tell it twice the same way, and children will watch with interest
+changes in the narration. As soon as they can read, secure some of the
+simple Bible narratives and put these in their hands.[19]
+
+
+§ 2. BOOKS AND READING
+
+A home without books is like a house with only one window; it can look
+out in only one direction, in that of the present. It knows only a
+limited world; its children have a short measure of the joy of life,
+they can know here only those whom they see today, their friends must be
+few, their world narrow and confined.
+
+If the books are not in your home the children will find them elsewhere.
+Unless the school kills the taste for reading, as it sometimes does, the
+young folks will open ways somehow into the ideal realm of books. As
+they grow up, the book takes the place of the story. The printed page is
+the child's key to all routes of travel, routes that lead to other times
+and lands, routes that lead to other people and into their hearts and
+minds. The child sees conduct and feels it as it is in action in lives
+before him, but he begins to discriminate and to analyze it only through
+reading; souls are revealed where the purpose of the writer is that the
+reader may see the springs of action in the character portrayed.
+Fiction, biography, travel, and adventure soon pass from the merely
+exterior happenings to the discovery of meanings in character.
+
+
+§ 3. DANGERS OF READING
+
+Since the book needs only one for its enjoyment, while the story
+requires two, there is less control over reading. There is only one way
+to be sure that children are not devouring vicious books and that is to
+make sure that they have an ample supply of healthful, helpful ones.
+This is especially necessary in a day that caters to sloth in reading.
+The tendency is for reading to take the facile decline from book to
+cheap magazine, from magazine to newspaper, and from the newspaper to
+skimming the headlines and the "funnies." The cheaper papers appeal to
+the lowest intelligence and strike at the line of least moral and mental
+resistance. Reading enriches the life but little and may impoverish it
+greatly unless there is developed the habit of drawing on the world's
+great treasures of thought and feeling. Open windows in your children's
+souls by giving them books; keep them open by encouraging the reading
+habit. Great souls wait for them, willing to converse and become their
+friends and teachers if they will but take down these books from the
+shelves and open them with an eager mind.
+
+
+§ 4. DEVELOPING GOOD TASTE
+
+_What can be done to quicken a love of good reading in children?_
+Recognize that not all children develop this appetite at the same age,
+that girls read more than boys, that boys usually have a period of
+decline in reading interest from seventeen to twenty-one or even later.
+But everything really depends on whether we ourselves love good books
+and keep them on hand. One of the life-centers of a family should be the
+bookshelf, while the picture of the evening lamp and the reading group
+will constitute one of its best memories. Where books are at hand and
+where they are used daily, the children need little urging to read. Now
+this does not mean that yards of choice editions make a book-loving
+family. There is a difference between bindings and books. It means books
+known and loved, familiar friends for daily converse, books on handy
+shelves and fit to be used as common food.
+
+_Do you know what your children read?_ Do you watch as carefully the
+food of mind and spirit as you do that of the body? Do you show an
+interest in the books they plan to draw from the public library? Can you
+guide them intelligently when they ask for suggestions of interesting
+books? Do you know the healthful, suitable ones?
+
+
+§ 5. PROMOTION OF THE READING INTEREST
+
+The Sunday school might aid greatly in promoting the habit of selecting
+and reading good books. Children often come home from day school
+clamoring for some book which the teacher has recommended as interesting
+and valuable. The Sunday-school teacher's recommendation would also
+carry weight. In every church, whether there exists a Sunday-school
+library or not, there ought to be a library or book committee which
+would watch for the right reading for the different grades and would
+cause the titles of good books to be placed on a bulletin board.
+Further, such a committee might very well place a copy of the book
+selected in the teacher's hand in order that the teacher might call the
+attention of the class directly to it. Of course the range of selection
+should be as wide as the world of books and should include fiction,
+romance, song, and story.[20] Parents could do the same sort of thing.
+Why not talk up the best books we remember? As to those old-time books,
+we need to realize that tastes change. Perhaps they owed much of their
+interest to their vivid descriptions of contemporary life. Therefore we
+must commend the new books, those that belong to the children's own
+days, too. This can be done, provided we really know the books, not by
+saying, "We should like you to read _Sandford and Merton_," but rather,
+"There is a capital story in _Captains Courageous_; have any of you read
+it?" Leave the matter there, or, at most, go only far enough to
+stimulate interest.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_, chaps. i-v. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.50.
+
+     Forbush, _The Coming Generation_, chap. viii. Appleton, $1.50
+
+     Winchester, "Good and Bad Books in the Home," in _The Bible in
+     Practical Life_, p. 38. Religious Education Association, $2.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_. Sturgis & Walton,
+     $1.25.
+
+     H.W. Mabie, _Books and Culture_. Dodd, Mead & Co., $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     ON STORY-TELLING
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_. Eaton & Mains, $0.50.
+
+     Wyche, _Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them_. Newson & Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     L.S. Houghton, _Telling Bible Stories_. Scribner, $1.25.
+
+     Bryant, _How to Tell Stories for Children_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     E.M. and G.E. Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_.
+     Sturgis & Walton, $1.25.
+
+     DIRECTING CHILDREN'S READING IN THE HOME
+
+     Macy, _A Children's Guide to Reading_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.25.
+
+     Field, _Finger Posts to Children's Reading_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     Arnold, _A Mother's List of Books for Children_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     For a short practical list see the different lists classified under
+     Sunday-School Departments in W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_,
+     particularly pp. 54, 83, 118, 169. Pilgrim Press, $1.00.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Do you remember any stories which especially impressed you as a
+     child? What were their qualities? What were the qualities of their
+     narration?
+
+     2. What are your difficulties in story-telling to children?
+
+     3. Is the habit of reading books passing among children? If so,
+     what are the reasons?
+
+     4. What responsibility has the public library toward the child's
+     selection of books? toward promoting book reading?
+
+     5. How many families co-operate with the library?
+
+     6. How might the church co-operate?
+
+     7. Does the reading of newspapers by children affect their general
+     habits of reading? In what ways?
+
+     8. What personal difference is there, if any, between the effect of
+     a borrowed book and of one the child owns?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] Laura E. Cragin, _Kindergarten Bible Stories_. Fifty-six of the Old
+Testament stories. There is also a companion volume of New Testament
+stories.
+
+James Baldwin, _Old Stories of the East_. Fresh and interesting versions
+of the familiar Old Testament stories.
+
+Kate Douglas Wiggin, _The Story Hour_. Good stories and a suggestive
+introduction on story-telling.
+
+_Half a Hundred Stories for the Little People_, by various authors.
+
+[18] _A List of Good Stories to Tell to Children under Twelve Years of
+Age_, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, $0.05. There are references to
+books in which the stories may be found, including 25 Bible stories, 16
+fables, 14 myths, 14 Christmas stories, 7 Thanksgiving stories, etc.
+
+[19] Such as O'Shea, _Old World Wonder Stories_; George Hodges, _The
+Garden of Eden_; Cragin, _Old Testament Stories_; Mary Stewart, _Tell Me
+a True Story_.
+
+[20] The H.W. Wilson Co., White Plains, New York, publishes a list of
+_Children's Books for Sunday-School Libraries_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE USE OF THE BIBLE IN THE HOME
+
+
+If we keep clearly in mind the aim of religious education in the family
+as that of the development of the lives of religious persons, the place
+and value of the Bible will be evident. It will be used as a means of
+developing and directing lives. This will be quite different from a
+perfunctory use because our fathers used it or a use under the
+compulsion of the fear lest some strange evil should befall us, some
+visitation of an offended deity.
+
+
+§ 1. THE CHILD'S NEED
+
+Children need the Bible as a part of their social heritage. Just as they
+get a larger life, inspired and stimulated by the realization of their
+connection with the past of their family and their country, so the Bible
+brings them into connection with the religious history of the race.
+General history brings heroic forefathers into the stream of
+consciousness; we feel the push of their lives. So the Bible reveals the
+stream farther back and makes us part of the process of life in unity
+with great characters and great movements.
+
+The child has a right to the Bible as his literary heritage. Here in the
+Bible is the precipitation of the ideals of a people unique in the
+place which religion held in their lives. Here is a literature which is
+the source of much of the best in the language and reading of the
+child's life. Its phrases are beautiful and convenient embodiments of
+religious ideals; they will have a steadily developing richness of
+meaning as life opens out to the child.[21]
+
+
+§ 2. DIFFICULTIES
+
+The difficulties in the way of the use of the Bible in the home are: the
+crowded programs, or a lack of time due to the absence of any program
+for the days; a feeling of unnaturalness in the special reading of this
+book; the decay of the custom of reading aloud; parental ignorance of
+the Bible and especially of its beauties for the young; and the
+excessive amount of task-reading frequently required by the schools. The
+Sunday school also sometimes offends in this respect by overemphasis on
+academic tasks for home work.
+
+
+§ 3. METHODS
+
+First, let parents use the Bible themselves. Use the books as you wish
+children to use them. This will be the longest step you can take toward
+the solution of the problem.
+
+Secondly, use the Bible naturally. When children have an aversion to the
+Bible it is due usually to two causes: the peculiar place and use of
+the book which makes it a thing apart from life, and often an object of
+dread; and the practice of using it as a task-book, to be opened only in
+order to prepare Sunday-school lessons. Just as it takes years to
+overcome the aversion set up against English literature by its
+analytical study in the schools, so that the child becomes a man before
+he voluntarily reads Dickens, Thackeray, the poets, and essayists, in
+the same manner we have succeeded in making the Bible undesirable to
+youth. If you read passages aloud, use the tone of voice which would be
+appropriate if this was a new book not bound in leather. Read it for
+pleasure as one would read a literary masterpiece--not because opinion
+might frown on you if you had not read the classic. Does someone object
+that that would be to degrade the Bible to the level of secular
+writings? You cannot degrade a literature; it makes its own level and
+our labels do not affect it. Certain it is that a pious tone of voice
+will not protect the Bible from the secular level. But to use it
+unnaturally will degrade it in the opinion of those who hear us.
+
+Thirdly, make its use a pleasure. All children enjoy story-telling and
+listening to reading. Many parents practice the children's hour, some
+period in the day when they will, alone with the children, read and talk
+with them. Let the Bible story be the reward of a good day, something
+promised as an incentive to good behavior. Children delight, not alone
+in the story itself, but in rhythmic passages, in the poetic flights of
+Isaiah and the beautiful imagery of the Psalms. To them it is natural
+and pleasant to think of the hills that skipped and the stars that sang
+and the trees that gave forth praise. They know the song of nature and
+are happy to find it put into words.
+
+Fourthly, use the Bible as a book of life. How many times a day do
+questions of conduct arise in the family! How often do children ask what
+is right, and freely discuss the question! Here is a book rich in
+precept and example on at least many of the questions. There are
+pictures of actual lives meeting real temptations; there are the
+epigrammatic precepts of Proverbs and of the teachings of Jesus. Call
+attention to them, not as settling the question out of hand, but as
+testimony to the point. Accustom children to getting the light of the
+Bible on their lives, remembering that this book is a light and not a
+fence nor a code of laws.
+
+Fifthly, use the Bible in worship. This does not conflict with the plea
+for its use naturally, for worship should be as natural as any of the
+social pleasures of the family. Here select those passages for reading
+which count most for the spirit of worship. It is a good plan to read a
+short passage, suitable for memorizing, so frequently that children
+learn it and are able to repeat it in concert. Be sure that all the
+passages read or recited are short. It will often be wise to preface the
+reading with a brief account of its original circumstances, so that all
+may hear the words as the actual utterances of a real man living in real
+life.
+
+Sixthly, provide material which helps to make the Bible interesting, and
+which helps children to see its pictures through the eyes of geography
+and history.[22]
+
+Seventhly, make the use of the Bible possible at all times for all. See
+that as soon as the child can read he has his own Bible, that it is in
+large, readable type, as much like any other book as possible. It is no
+evidence of grace to ruin the eyes over diamond-text Bibles. If
+possible, also provide separate books of the Bible, in modern literary
+form and some in the idiom of our day.[23]
+
+
+§ 4. DOUBTFUL METHODS
+
+It is doubtful whether good comes from the use of the Bible as a
+riddle-book, nor do the "Bible games" tend to develop a natural
+appreciation of the book. There is no new light but rather a confusing
+shadow thrown on the character of Joseph by the foolish conundrum
+concerning Pharaoh making a ruler out of him. Sending a child to the
+Bible to discover the shortest verse, the longest, the middle one, etc.,
+trains him to regard it as an odd kind of book, to think of it as a
+dictionary, and to use it less.
+
+We assume too readily that a knowledge of the separate details of
+biblical information, such as the date of the Flood, the age of
+Methuselah, the names of the twelve tribes, the twelve apostles, the
+books of the two Testaments, is the desired end. But one might know all
+these things and many more and be not one whit the better. For the child
+surely the desirable end is that he may feel deeply the attractiveness
+of the character of Joseph or of Jesus, may say within himself, "What a
+fine man; I want to be like him." Be sure the persons are real, that you
+see them living their lives in their times, just as you live your life
+now.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     T.G. Soares, "Making the Bible Real to Boys," in _Boy Training_,
+     pp. 117-40. Association Press, $0.75.
+
+     W.T. Lhamon, "Bible in the Home," _Religious Education_, December,
+     1912, p. 486.
+
+     G. Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. x. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     _The Bible in Practical Life._ Religious Education Association.
+     Numerous references to the use of the Bible in the home in this
+     volume.
+
+     Patterson Dubois, _The Natural Way_, sec. iv. Revell, $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     "Passages of Bible for Memorization," _Religious Education_,
+     August, 1906.
+
+     Louise S. Houghton, _Telling Bible Stories_. Scribner, $1.25.
+
+     Johnson, _The Narrative Bible_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.50.
+
+     Hall and Wood, _The Bible Story_, 5 vols. King, $2.00 by
+     subscription.
+
+     Courtney, _The Literary Man's Bible_. Crowell, $1.25.
+
+     The above are but a few of the many collections of biblical
+     material.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the conditions which seem to make the reading of the
+     Bible different from other reading? Is there a sense of unreality
+     about it as a book? What are the causes?
+
+     2. Try the experiment of reading the story of Joseph at one
+     sitting. Try to retell this to children.
+
+     3. What biblical material stands out in your memory of childhood?
+     In what degree is this due to the art of the story-teller or the
+     reader? to the character of the material?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] See M.J.C. Foster, _The Mother the Child's First Bible Teacher_.
+
+[22] Mackie, _Bible Manners and Customs_.
+
+Chamberlin, _Introduction to the Bible for Teachers of Children_.
+
+Worcester, _On Holy Ground_, 2 vols.
+
+[23] For example, Moulton, _Modern Reader's Bible_. The new Jewish
+renderings of Old Testament books are good, especially the Psalms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+FAMILY WORSHIP
+
+
+Family worship has declined until, at least in the United States, the
+percentage of families practicing daily worship in the home is so small
+as to be negligible. If this meant that a general institution of
+religion had passed out of existence the fact would be highly
+significant. But it is well to remember that family worship has never
+been a general institution. We have generalized the picture of the
+"Cotter's Saturday Night" so eloquently drawn by Burns; it has been
+applied to every night and to every fireside. Daily family worship was
+observed in practically all the Puritan homes of New England; but there
+is no evidence for it as a uniform custom, either in other parts of this
+country or in other parts of the world, save perhaps in sections of
+Scotland. True, there were many families which observed the custom; but
+there were also many families of church members and doubtless of truly
+religious people in which family worship as a regular institution was
+unknown. This has been especially true in the type of family life which
+has developed under modern social conditions. Further, even so simple an
+exercise as grace at meals has not always been a general custom.
+
+
+§ 1. PAST CUSTOMS
+
+But the fact today is that family worship is so rare as to be counted
+phenomenal wherever found. The instances, though not general, were
+common a generation ago. Many are living to whom family worship afforded
+the largest part of their conscious and formal religious education.
+Following the morning meal, or, occasionally, the evening meal, the
+family waited while the father, or the mother in his absence, read a
+portion of the Scriptures and offered prayer. In other families the act
+of worship would be the closing one of the day, perhaps participated in
+by the older members only, the younger children having repeated their
+prayers at bedside on retiring. A thousand happy and sacred associations
+gather about the memories of these occasions: the sense of reverence,
+the feeling that the home was a sacred place, the impression of noble
+words and elevating thoughts, the reflex influence of the prayer that
+committed all to the keeping and guidance of God.[24]
+
+
+§ 2. WHY FAMILY WORSHIP?
+
+Parents need to see the values in family worship. We have been insisting
+on the primary importance of the religious interpretation of the family
+as an institution, on the power of the religious motive, and the
+atmosphere of religion. But wherever there is a truly religious motive
+and a permanent religious atmosphere these will find definite expression
+in acts easily recognized as religious. Love is the motive and
+atmosphere of the true home, but love blossoms into words and bears
+fruit in a thousand deeds. The life of love dies without reality in act.
+Ideals are precipitated in expressive acts. So is it with religion in
+the home; it must not only be real in its sincerity, it must be
+realized, must pass over into conduct and action, as suggested above in
+chaps. vii and viii. And it must do this in ways so sharply defined and
+readily recognized as to leave no doubt as to their meaning. True, all
+acts may be religious and thus full of worship--this is most important
+of all--but worship expressly unites all such acts in a spirit of
+loyalty and aspiration.
+
+Worship is a necessity for the sake of the ideal unity of the family
+life. Just as the individual must not only feel the religious emotion
+but must also do the thing called for, so must this united personality
+of the family give expression to its faith and aspiration, its motives
+and emotions, in such a manner that, acting as a social unit, all can
+together put the inner life into the outer form. The social value of
+family worship is the strongest reason for its maintenance. It is the
+united act of the family group, the one in which group consciousness is
+expressly directed to the highest possible aims. Every period of worship
+brings the family into unity at an ideal level.
+
+The expression of religion in definite forms is necessary for children,
+too, as furnishing a means by which they can manifest their feeling of
+the higher meaning of family life. The reality of that feeling is
+stimulated in the daily, common life of the right family; the hour of
+worship is one out of many definite forms of its concrete expression. It
+is the form which gathers up the totality of feeling and aspiration into
+an act of worship and praise toward God, the Father of all families. It
+is evident there cannot be true worship in the family that is
+irreligious in its essential qualities, in its character, in its ideals
+and atmosphere.
+
+
+§ 3. ADVANTAGES
+
+The period of worship is a necessity in interpreting to all the spirit
+and meaning of a religious family. It objectifies the inner life. It
+makes definite, tangible, and easily remembered the general impressions
+of religion. It precipitates the atmosphere of religion into
+definiteness. In the chemical laboratory of a university there is
+usually a decided atmosphere of chemistry, but no one expects to become
+a chemical engineer by absorbing that atmosphere, nor even to attain a
+simple working knowledge by merely general impressions. Definiteness
+aids in gathering up our knowledge, our impressions.
+
+The reading of the Bible in the home will give, when the passages are
+wisely chosen, forms of language into which the often chaotic but
+nevertheless valuable and potential emotions of youth fall as into a
+beautiful mold; they become remembered forms of beauty thereafter.
+
+Family worship furnishes opportunity for direct religious instruction.
+When the home life has its regular institution, as regular as meals and
+play, the formality, the apparent abnormality of conversation about
+religion, is absent. Children expect and look forward to the period when
+the family will lay other things aside to think on the eternal values.
+Their questions in the breathing-space that always ought to follow
+worship become perfectly natural and sincere.
+
+Family worship lifts the whole level of family life. Ideally conceived,
+it simply means the family unity consciously coming into its highest
+place. Children may not understand all the reading nor enter into the
+motives for all parts of the petition, but they do feel that this moment
+is the one in which the family enters a holy place. They feel that God
+is real and that their family life is a part of his whole care and of
+his life. One short period of natural reverence sends light and calm
+all through the day. Where the home is the place where true prayer is
+offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship; here
+and into this group there cannot easily enter strife, bickerings, or
+baseness. One short period, five minutes or even less, of quietness, of
+united turning toward the eternal, gives tone to the day and finer
+atmosphere to the home.
+
+What our community life might be like without the churches, faulty or
+incompetent as we may know some of them to be, what that life would lose
+and miss without them is precisely, and perhaps in larger degree, what
+the family life misses without its own institution of regular devotion
+and worship.
+
+
+§ 4. THE DIFFICULTIES
+
+We can always afford to do that which is most worth while doing; our
+essential difficulty is to shake off the delusion of the lesser values,
+the lower prizes, to realize that, of all the good of life, the
+characters of our children, the gain we can all make in the eternal
+values of the spirit, in love and joy and truth and goodness, is the
+gain most worth while. We tend to set the making of a living before the
+making of lives. We need to see the development of the powers of
+personality, the riches of character, as the ultimate, dominant purpose
+of all being. Once grasp that, and hold to it, and we shall not allow
+lesser considerations, such as the pressure of business, the desire for
+gain, for ease, for pleasure, for social life, to come before this first
+and highest good; we shall make time for definite conscious religion in
+the life of the family.[25]
+
+
+§ 5. TYPES OF WORSHIP
+
+There are three simple forms which worship takes in the family: first,
+grace offered at the meals; secondly, the prayers of children on
+retiring and, occasionally, on rising; thirdly, the daily gathering of
+the family for an act of the spirit. The statement of the three forms
+reads so as to give them a formal character, but the most important
+point to remember is that wherever they are true acts of worship they
+are formal only in that they occur at definite, determined times and
+places. The acts have no merit in themselves. Merely to institute their
+observance will not secure religious feeling and life in the home. These
+three observances have arisen because at these times there is the best
+and most natural opportunity for the expression of aspiration, desire,
+and feeling.
+
+
+§ 6. METHODS OF FAMILY WORSHIP
+
+1. _Grace at meals._--Shall we say grace at meals? To assent because it
+is the custom, or because it was so done in our childhood's home, may
+make an irreligious mockery of the act. Perhaps, too, there are some who
+even hesitate to omit the grace from an unspoken fear that the food
+might harm them without it. All have heard grace so muttered, or
+hurriedly and carelessly spoken, void of all feeling and thought, that
+the act was almost unconscious, a species of "vain repetition."
+
+There are two outstanding aspects of the asking of a blessing--the
+desire to express gratitude for the common benefits of life, and the
+expression of a wish, with the recognition of its realization, that at
+each meal the family group might include the Unseen Guest, the Infinite
+Spirit of God. That wish lifts the meal above the dull level of
+satisfying appetites. Just as, in good society, we seek to make the meal
+much more than an eating of food, "a feast of reason and a flow of
+soul," so does this act make each meal a social occasion lifted toward
+the spiritual. The one thought at the beginning, the thought of the
+reality of the presence of God, and of the nearness of the divine to us
+in our daily pleasures, gives a new level to all our thinking.
+
+How shall we say grace, or "ask a blessing"? First, with simplicity and
+sincerity. Avoid long, elaborate, ornate phrases. It is better to err
+in rhetoric than in feeling and reality. The sonorous grace may soon
+become stilted and offensive. It is better to say in your own words just
+what you mean, for that will help all, even to the youngest, to mean
+what they say with you.
+
+Vary the form of petition. Sometimes let it be the silent grace of the
+Quakers; sometimes children will enjoy singing one of the old four-line
+stanzas, as
+
+    Be present at our table, Lord,
+    Be here and everywhere adored;
+    These mercies bless and grant that we
+    May feast in Paradise with thee.
+
+One might use the first three of the following lines for breakfast and
+the last three at another meal:
+
+    For the new morning with its light,
+    For rest and shelter of the night,
+      We thank the heavenly Father.
+
+    For rest and food, for love and friends,
+    For everything his goodness sends,
+      We thank the heavenly Father.[26]
+
+or
+
+    When early in the morning the birds lift up their songs,
+    We bring our praise to Jesus to whom all praise belongs.
+
+One especially needs to guard against the purely dietetic grace, the one
+that only asks that the deity will aid digestion, as that form so often
+heard, "Bless these mercies to our use."[27]
+
+Should we say grace on all occasions of meals? What shall we do at the
+social dinner in the home? The answer depends on the purpose of the
+grace. Is it not that in our own group we may have the consciousness of
+the presence of God? When the meal is that of our own group with a
+friend or two, we bring the friends into the group and the act of family
+worship is maintained. Usually this is the case. So it will be when the
+group is entirely at one in this desire: the asking of grace will be
+perfectly natural. But when the group is a large one, when the sense of
+family unity is lost, or when the observance would seem unnatural, it is
+better to omit it. Grace in large gatherings often seems an uncovering
+of the sacred aspects of the home life.
+
+2. _Bedtime prayers._--What of children's bedtime prayers? Many can
+remember them. To many the most natural, helpful time for formal periods
+of prayer is in the quiet of the bedroom just before retiring. But there
+is a grave danger in establishing a regular custom of bedside prayers
+for children, a danger manifest in the very form of certain of these
+prayers, as
+
+    Now I lay me down to sleep,
+    I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
+
+It is as though the child were saying, "The day is ended during which I
+have been able to take care of myself, the hours of helpless sleep
+begin, and I ask God to take care of me through the terrors of the
+night." For some children, at least, the night has been made terrible by
+that thought; they have been led to feel that the day was safe and
+beautiful, but that the night was so dangerous and fearful that only the
+great God could keep them through it, and it was an open question
+whether their prayer for that keeping would be heard.
+
+One must avoid also the notion that such prayers are part of a price
+paid, a system of daily taxation in return for which heaven furnishes us
+police protection.
+
+The best plan seems to be to encourage children to pray, to establish in
+them the habit of closing the day with quiet, grateful thoughts, to
+watch especially that the prayers learned in early life do not distort
+the child's thoughts of God, and to make the evening prayer an
+opportunity for the child to express his desires to God his Father and
+Friend. Having done this, as the children grow up it is best to leave
+them free to pray when and where they will. One may properly encourage
+the evening, private prayer; but the child ought to have the feeling
+that it is not obligatory, that it must grow out of his desire to talk
+with God, and, above all, that it has no special connection with the
+hour and act of retiring for sleep but rather, so far as time is
+concerned, with the closing of the day. Mothers must see far beyond the
+charm of the picture formed by the little white-robed figure at her
+knee. There is no hour so rich in possibilities for this growing life.
+It is one of the great opportunities to guide its consciousness of
+God.[28]
+
+3. _General family prayers._--It is true that, in many homes, under
+modern conditions of business, it is almost impossible for the family to
+be united at the hour when worship used to be customary, following
+breakfast. However, that is not the only hour available. In many
+respects it is a poor one for the purpose of social worship; it lacks
+the sense of leisure. But there are few families where the members do
+not all gather for the evening meal. It is not difficult to plan at its
+close for ten minutes in which all shall remain. Without leaving the
+table it is possible to spend a short time in united, social worship.
+Or, by establishing the custom and steadily following it, it is possible
+to leave the table and in less than ten minutes find ample time for
+worship in another room.
+
+Really everything depends at first on how much we desire to have family
+worship, whether we see its beauty and value in the knitting of home
+ties, in the elevation of the family spirit, and in the quickening of
+the religious ideas. We find time to eat simply because we must; when
+the necessity of the spirit is upon us we shall find time also to
+worship and to pray.
+
+Next to the will to make time comes the question of method. First,
+determine to be simple, natural, and informal. A stilted exercise soon
+becomes a burden and a source of pain to all. In whatever you do, seek
+to make it possible for all to have a share by seeing that every thought
+is expressed within the intelligence of even the younger members, that
+is, of those who desire to have a share. This does not mean descending
+to "baby-talk." Just read the Twenty-third Psalm; that is not baby talk,
+but a child of seven can understand what is meant up to the measure of
+his experience; the language is essentially simple though the ideas are
+sublime.
+
+Secondly, insure brevity. For that part of worship in which all are
+expected regularly to unite, ten minutes should be ample. Some excellent
+programs will not take more than half this time. Family worship is not a
+diminutive facsimile of church worship. Doubtless the experiment has
+failed in many families because the father has attempted to preach to a
+congregation which could not escape. Keep in mind the thought that this
+is to be a high moment in each day in which every member will have an
+equal share.
+
+Thirdly, plan for the largest possible amount of common participation.
+This is to be the expression of the unity of the family life. Children
+enjoy doing things co-operatively and in concert.
+
+Fourthly, treat the occasion naturally in relation to other affairs.
+Proceed to the worship without formal notice, without change of voice,
+and without apology to visitors. Take this for granted. At the close
+move on into other duties without the sense of coming back into the
+world. You have not been out of it; you have only recognized the eternal
+life and love everywhere in it.
+
+4. _Suggestions of plans._--There are given below seven outlines of
+plans of worship. They are plans which have been in use and have been
+tried for years. Their only merit is simplicity and practicability; but
+they are at least worthy of trial. There is no special significance in
+the arrangement of the days and this may be changed in any way
+desirable. Further, all plans should be elastic; there will come special
+days, such as festivals and birthdays, when the program should be
+varied. For example, on a birthday the child whose anniversary then
+occurs should have the privilege of making the choice of recitation or
+reading or of determining the order of all the parts of this brief
+period of worship.
+
+
+     MONDAY
+
+     1. A short psalm repeated in concert.
+
+     2. A brief, informal petition by father or mother.
+
+     3. The Lord's Prayer, in which all join.
+
+     Before attempting even this simple plan, prepare for it by first
+     selecting several suitable psalms. The following should be
+     included: the 1st, 19th, 23d, 24th, 100th, 117th, 121st, and a part
+     of the 103d. You would do well to memorize one of these yourself,
+     so as to be able to lead without reading from the book. Next, think
+     over with some care the things for which you may pray, the
+     aspirations which your children can share with you. Few things are
+     more difficult than this, so to pray that all can make the prayer
+     their own. Let it also be a prayer of love and joy, not a craven
+     begging off from punishments, nor a cowardly plea for protection
+     and provision. We can pray over all these things with gratitude and
+     with confidence toward the God of love. Do not try to preach in
+     your prayers. Many prayers have been ruined by preaching, just as
+     some preaching has been spoiled by praying to the people. Usually
+     four or five sentences will do for the one day. Better a single
+     thought simply expressed than the most brilliant attempt to inform
+     the Almighty on all the events of the world that day.
+
+     A prayer in which all can join is always desirable. The Lord's
+     Prayer never wearies us nor grows old. Children enter into it with
+     some new meaning every day; it covers all our great, common, daily
+     needs.
+
+
+     TUESDAY
+
+     1. A few favorite memory verses repeated by all (from either the
+     Bible or other literature).
+
+     2. Read a very brief passage from the Bible.
+
+     3. Prayer, ending with the Lord's Prayer.
+
+     Many excellent selections will be found in Dr. Dole's book
+     mentioned at the end of this chapter. Encourage children, however,
+     to make their selections from the poems and passages they already
+     know.
+
+     The passage of the Bible selected to be read should be one which
+     first of all incites to worship, and should be chosen for its
+     inspiration and literary beauty. A few lines from the great
+     chapters of Isaiah (e.g., chaps. 35 and 55), from the Psalms (e.g.,
+     Pss. 61, 65, 145), from the Sermon on the Mount, from 1 Cor., chap.
+     13, from the parables of Jesus, will be suitable.
+
+     The closing prayer may be extemporaneous or may be read from one of
+     the books of prayers. Many of the prayers in the Episcopal Prayer
+     Book are especially beautiful and quite suitable. Of course in
+     families of the Episcopal church the collect for the day would be
+     the right prayer to use. It is sometimes necessary to use prayers
+     prepared beforehand; some persons never acquire the ability to pray
+     aloud, even in their own families. But halting sentences that are
+     your own, that your children recognize as yours, may mean more to
+     them than the finest flowing phrases from a book. Use the prayers
+     from the book, not as a substitute, but as an addition.
+
+
+     WEDNESDAY
+
+     1. A good poem from general literature.
+
+     2. Prayer.
+
+     There are so many good collections of the great and inspiring poems
+     that one hesitates to recommend any collection. Remember that a
+     poem may be religious and imbued with the spirit of worship,
+     helpful to the purpose of this occasion, even though it contains no
+     allusions to Scripture and makes no direct references to religious
+     belief. "A House by the Side of the Road"[29] is thoroughly human,
+     popular, and could not even be accused of being a classic; but it
+     has a helpful motive and is likely to lead the will toward the life
+     of service and brotherhood. Some would prefer to read a part of one
+     of the great hymns.
+
+
+     THURSDAY
+
+     1. A brief reading or recitation from the New Testament.
+
+     2. A few moments' conversation on the reading.
+
+     3. A very brief prayer followed by a song.
+
+     The only apparent difficulty here is in starting the conversation.
+     Do not ask formal questions; rather put them something like this:
+     "I wonder whether people would do just the same on our street
+     today." Make the conversation as general as possible; do not
+     slight, nor scoff at, the contribution of even the least in the
+     group.
+
+
+     FRIDAY
+
+     1. A few verses in concert.
+
+     2. Read a parable or very brief narrative.
+
+     3. The Lord's Prayer.
+
+     The reading had better be from one of the paraphrases if it is a
+     narrative from the Old Testament.[30] Even in reading the New
+     Testament one can at times use with advantage the
+     _Twentieth-Century Bible_ or the _Modern Reader's Bible_.
+
+
+     SATURDAY
+
+     1. A period of song.
+
+     2. Closing prayer, with the Lord's Prayer.
+
+     Perhaps only one song can be sung. It need not be a hymn; that
+     should depend on the choice of the children. Help them to put
+     together all the good songs, including the hymns, in one category
+     in their minds.
+
+
+     SUNDAY
+
+     1. Ask: "What has been the best we have read or repeated in our
+     worship this week?"
+
+     2. Ask: "What shall we learn for memory repetition this week, what
+     psalm or other passage for our concerted worship?"
+
+     3. Read the psalm selected.
+
+     4. Closing prayer.
+
+     5. Period of song, lasting as long as desired.
+
+     This exercise evidently permits of extension in time and should be
+     arranged in accordance with the program for the day.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     George Hodges, _The Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. viii,
+     ix. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     _The Improvement of Religious Education_, pp. 108 to 123. Religious
+     Education Association, $0.50.
+
+     Mrs. B.S. Winchester, "Methods and Materials Available," _Religious
+     Education_, October, 1911. $0.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Koons, _The Child's Religious Life_. Eaton & Mains, $1.00.
+
+     Hartshorne, _Worship in the Sunday School_. Columbia University,
+     $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     A.R. Wells, _Grace before Meat_. U.S.C.E., $0.25.
+
+     C.F. Dole, _Choice Verses_. Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts.
+     Privately printed.
+
+     F.A. Hinckley (ed.), _Readings for Sunday School and Home_.
+     American Unitarian Association, $0.35.
+
+     J. Martin, _Prayers for Little Men and Women_. Harper, $1.25.
+
+     S. Hart (ed.), _Short Daily Prayers for Families_. Longmans, $0.60.
+
+     G.A. Miller, _Some Out-Door Prayers_. Crowell, $0.35.
+
+     Oxenden, _Family Prayers_. Longmans, $1.50.
+
+     George Skene, _Morning Prayers for Home Worship_. Methodist Book
+     Concern, $1.50.
+
+     W.E. Barton, _Four Weeks of Family Prayer_. Puritan Press, Oak
+     Park, Ill.
+
+     Abbott, _Family Prayers_. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.50.
+
+     _Prayers for Parents and Children._ Young Churchman Co., Milwaukee,
+     Wisconsin, $0.15.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the causes for the decay of the custom of family
+     worship?
+
+     2. What influences us most: public opinion, popular custom,
+     economic pressure?
+
+     3. How have the changes affected the religious influence of the
+     home?
+
+     4. What features of the older customs are most worth preserving?
+
+     5. Recall any of childhood's prayers which you remember. How many
+     maintain the custom of bedtime prayers in mature life?
+
+     6. What should be the central motive of "grace" at meals?
+
+     7. Would there be advantage in occasionally omitting the "grace"?
+
+     8. Give reasons for and against "grace."
+
+     9. Criticize the proposed plan of evening family prayers.
+
+     10. Describe any plans which have been tried.
+
+     11. Why is it desirable to maintain family worship?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[24] For a study of children's worship see H.H. Hartshorne, _Worship in
+the Sunday School_; "Report of Commission on Graded Worship," _Religious
+Education_, October, 1914.
+
+[25] "Parents who give up such a practice as family prayers mainly
+because they know of many other people who have done the same are
+just as much the slaves of public opinion and ignorant cant as the
+narrowest Lowlander who forbids his children secular history on
+Sunday."--Lyttleton, _Corner-Stone of Education_, pp. 207-8.
+
+[26] Quoted by W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_.
+
+[27] A number of good poems are given in A.R. Wells, _Grace before
+Meat_.
+
+[28] W.B. Forbush gives a number of poetic forms of prayer for children
+in _The Religious Nurture of a Little Child_, pp. 12, 13.
+
+[29] By Samuel Walter Foss.
+
+[30] One handy form is _The Heart of the Bible_, prepared by E.A.
+Broadus; another, _The Children's Bible_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+SUNDAY IN THE HOME
+
+
+Almost every family finds Sunday a problem. Other days are well occupied
+with full programs; this one has a program for only part of its time.
+Other days are rich with the liberty of happy action, but this one is
+frequently marked by inaction, repression, and limitations. As soon as
+the evanescent pleasure of Sunday clothes has passed, for those for whom
+it existed at all, the children settle down to endure the day.
+
+
+§ 1. THE MEANING OF THE DAY
+
+Fathers and mothers who vent a sigh of relief when Sunday is over must
+marvel at the strains of "O day of joy and gladness." Yet this day
+defeats its purpose when it is of any other character. We have no right
+to rob it of its joy and its healing balm. On the day made for man,
+sacred to his highest good, whatever hinders the real happiness of the
+child ought to be set aside.
+
+Instead of accepting traditions regarding the method of observing the
+Sunday, would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, For what use of
+the day can we properly be held responsible? Here are so many--fifty-two
+a year--days of special opportunity. To us who complain that business
+interferes with the personal education of our children through the week,
+what ought this day to mean? To us who lament the little time we can
+spend with our families, what ought this day to mean? And what ought we
+to try to make it mean to children?
+
+We call this God's day; what must some children think of a God who robs
+his day of all pleasure? If this is the kind of day he makes, then how
+unattractive would be his years and eternity! It is the day when we have
+our best opportunity to show them what God is like, to interpret his
+world and his works in terms of beauty, kindness, riches of thought, and
+love.
+
+It ought to be the day reserved for the best in life, for the treasures
+of affection, for the uses of the spirit. Whatever is done this day must
+come to this test, Is this a ministry to the life of goodness, truth,
+and loving service? Does this enrich lives? In other words, we may put
+the broad educational test to the day and its program and determine all
+by ministry to growing lives.
+
+
+§ 2. CONSERVING THE VALUES
+
+The family faces the problem of the opposition between the rights of man
+on this day and the greed of commerce, the fight between a day of rest
+and a day of work. Man's right to rest is assured, legally, but
+commerce in the name of amusement and in the guise of petty and
+unnecessary trading constantly maintains its fight to invade the day of
+rest, to turn it from ministry to man as a person to the dull level of
+the week of ministry to things. The home has much at stake in this
+struggle. It needs one day free from the life that tears its members
+apart, free from the toil that engrosses thought, free for its members
+to live together as spiritual beings.
+
+In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to
+the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use
+of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious
+opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life. It is
+devoted to personality, to man's rights as a religious being.
+
+Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one
+another, shall look into faces of friends and companions! And this
+opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an
+act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one
+family. That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our
+Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that
+makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's
+service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the
+church family. If we think of the day as affording us the pleasure of
+social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning
+will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. Of
+course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and
+school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.[31]
+
+Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all
+the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the
+presence of one another which is the essential life of the family. It
+has always been a good custom for friends to visit on this day, for
+families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather
+again for a few hours. It is the day when we have time to discover how
+much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when,
+looking into the eyes of those we love, we see "the light that never was
+on sea or land," the ultimate good!
+
+The hours of being together are the hours of real education. Children
+cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives
+need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for
+real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere
+with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church.
+
+
+§ 3. THE PROBLEM OF PLAY
+
+What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday? Is there
+any other kind of child? They all want to. It is as natural for a child
+to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary. A child is a
+growing person learning life by play. Because play seems trivial to us
+we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day
+devoted to the higher life. In some families play is forbidden because
+children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate
+piety and pleasure.
+
+Shall we then throw down all barriers and make this day the same as all
+others? No, rather make the day different by throwing down barriers that
+stand on other days. Let this be the day when the barriers between
+father and sons, parents and children, are let down and all can enter
+into the joy of living.
+
+Play is to a child the idealization of life's experiences and the
+realization of its ideals. That is why he plays at school, idealizing
+the everyday life; that is why he plays at housekeeping, at being in
+church, at being a railway engineer, even a highwayman or an outlaw. The
+traditional games are the game of life itself in terms of childhood.
+Play as idealized experience and realized ideals is to the child what
+the church, worship, and the reading of fiction and essays are to the
+adult. Play is the child's method of reaching forward into life's
+meaning. Some games as old as history carry a weight of human tradition
+and experience as rich for a child as the adult obtains from historical
+review and from association with the past. There is a sense in which the
+child playing these games opens the Bible of the race.[32]
+
+We cannot make children over into our pattern; we have to learn from
+them. Indeed, we come to life through their ways. We must become as
+little children. Before we settle the question of play on Sunday we do
+well to be sure that we know what play means to children, that we really
+grasp something of its educational value and its religious potency. Then
+we can proceed to a family policy in Sunday play.
+
+
+§ 4. A POLICY ON PLAY
+
+_Keep the day as one of family unity._ Help the child to think of it as
+a day protected for the sake of family togetherness. You can play that
+for this day the ideal is already realized of a family life
+uninterrupted by the demands of labor and business.
+
+_Maintain the unity by doing the ideal things together._ Go to the place
+of worship together, provided it is the place where the child can find
+expression for spiritual ideals. If the Sunday school does not really
+lift the child-life and really teach the child, if it is not honest with
+him and makes no suitable provision for his developing nature, he will
+be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at
+home. That means the application of parents to this hour.[33] It
+banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing
+pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud
+of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at
+times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the better type of
+Sunday school is more and more to be found; children are more and more
+receiving a ministry actually determined by their needs. So far as the
+church service is concerned the ideal situation is found when a parallel
+service is provided for children, based on their needs and capacities.
+As to attendance, under other circumstances, in the family pew, that
+depends on whether the child is gaining an aversion to the church by the
+torture and tedium often involved. Without doubt many adults acquired
+the settled habit of sleeping in church because that was the only
+possible relief in childhood.[34]
+
+_Maintain the family unity by stepping into the child's ideal life.
+Expect activity and use it._ Why should we assume that because the adult
+finds a Sunday nap enjoyable the child will be blessed by enforced
+silence? I would rather see a father playing catch with his boys on
+Sunday than see the boys cowed into silence while he slept a Sabbath
+sleep. Children will play. Their play is innocent; more, it may be
+helpful and educative; we can insure these values in it by our
+participation. That is the parent's opportunity for a closer sympathy
+with his children. Playing together is the closest living, thinking, and
+feeling together. Where games are shared, confidences, secrets, and
+aspirations are shared, too. Besides, the participation of the adult may
+tend to tone up the game and to moderate boisterousness.
+
+_Seek the beautiful._ Speaking as one who has been under both the
+puritanical regulation and the so-called "continental" freedom of Sunday
+observance, nothing seems much more beautiful than the sight of an
+entire family playing at home, in the park, or off in the woods or the
+fields of the country. Life is strengthened, ideals are lifted, family
+ties knit closer, gratitude is quickened, and courage stimulated by play
+of this kind.
+
+
+§ 5. POINTS OF DIFFERENCE
+
+But because it is evidently most important that this day should be
+different from other days, it is well to mark that difference in our
+plays and pleasures and to follow some simple principles for Sunday
+play.
+
+First, make it the day of the _best_ plays. The participation of parents
+will tend to have this effect. Sometimes some forms of play may be
+reserved for this day.
+
+Secondly, our play should never interfere with the rights of those who
+desire to be quiet or to observe the day in ways differing from ours. We
+must respect the rights of all.
+
+Thirdly, our play must not cause additional or unnecessary labor.
+
+Fourthly, our play must not interfere with the pleasures of others. For
+instance, in the city children who can use the public tennis courts
+every day should keep off them on Sunday in order to give opportunity to
+those who can use them only on that day.
+
+Having said so much on play on Sundays, we must not leave the impression
+that play is the principal thing. It would be the principal thing for
+children compelled to work or confined in crowded tenements on all other
+days. This is a day of rest. Play should not be carried beyond the rest
+and refreshment stage.
+
+Nor must we assume that a recognition of play involves neglect of
+worship and instruction. Both should be cherished among the delights of
+the day. Every attempt to make the day a happy one, by normal play,
+associates the emphasis on worship with increased happiness in the
+child's mind.
+
+
+§ 6. THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON PROBLEM
+
+"What shall we do?" the children ask restlessly on Sunday afternoons,
+and it is by no means a strange question. All the week they have their
+school work, on Saturdays their play. No wonder Sunday afternoon seems
+dull. Yet if we older ones use it aright this is our opportunity to give
+them the best time of all the week. We can make this part of the day
+really a holiday if we just take time to plan it right. There is
+something wrong in the home in which the child, as he grows up, does not
+look forward happily to his Sunday afternoons.
+
+Sunday afternoon should be a family festival time. Keep it sacred to the
+family. Business and social life claim us all the week, and the church
+claims its share of this day; but these afternoon hours we can, if we
+will, reserve for our own home life, for the closer drawing together of
+children and parents. To hold this time sacred for the children and
+their interests will help to solve "the Sunday afternoon problem."
+
+1. _The child's question, "What shall I do next?"_--Children are
+dynamic, perpetually active. They grow in the direction toward which
+their activities are turned. Repression is impossible. We must either
+find the best things for them to do, or let them chance on things good
+or bad. The following outline for Sunday afternoon is given in the hope
+that it may help to answer the "what next."
+
+
+     1. Begin to make _The Family Book_.
+
+     2. Give "festival name" to the day, and take an excursion in honor
+     of the one for whom the day is named.
+
+     3. Organize an exploring party to discover peoples and scenes of
+     long, long ago.
+
+     4. Get acquainted with some beautiful home thoughts.
+
+     5. Enjoy an evening hour of song and praise.
+
+
+2. _"The Family Book."_--To start _The Family Book_, mother or father
+raises the question at dinner: "What was the best Sunday of all last
+year, and why was it the best?" Everyone, from the oldest down to the
+least, should have a chance to tell. The statements of the older ones
+will encourage the younger.
+
+That question will start another: What is the very best thing we can
+remember about the year past? Let everyone take a pencil and paper and
+in just ten minutes decide on and write down the one thing best worth
+remembering. Perhaps the baby cannot write yet, but he or she will want
+paper and pencil, too. Now, instead of making our answers known to one
+another, we fold the papers and keep them till the evening meal. We will
+open them then and talk it all over. Afterward we are going to copy the
+answers into a new book we are going to make.
+
+This new book is to be called _The Family Book_, and we expect to put
+into it all the pleasant things we wish to record about our home and
+family. Any blank book with ruled lines will do. Some time today we will
+elect a keeper of the book, and before we go to bed we will see the
+first entry in that book under the title, "Happy Memories of 1915." That
+will make a good beginning for _The Family Book_. Next Sunday we will
+discuss and set down in the book the happy memories of the intervening
+week.
+
+3. _The festival name._--Now, we have been sitting, talking, and writing
+as long as the children will care to be still. Suppose we all go
+outdoors together, every one of us. What if the weather is bad? It is
+seldom truly bad, and there is so much real happiness in going out in
+all weathers together.
+
+But where shall we go? There is no fun in walking simply for exercise or
+health. Well, says father, we can decide where to go by naming the day.
+How? We will find the most interesting birthday or anniversary that
+falls today or during the next week. If one of the family has a birthday
+then, that one shall choose our walk for us. If not, then when we have
+chosen the national hero or heroine whose birthday falls near this time,
+or the event the anniversary of which comes nearest, we will go, if
+possible, where something will remind us of that person or event.
+
+So we fall to discussing the possibilities. We search through almanacs
+until we find the anniversary that suits us all. Perhaps one of the
+parents has anticipated all this by looking up the matter, and has a
+good name to suggest. Or the older ones may consult a dictionary of
+dates. It may turn out to be the birthday of a national hero. In the
+city he may have a statue; in the country may be found the kinds of
+woods, flowers, or animals he loved.
+
+4. _The exploring party._--But even after the walk it will not be long
+before the little ones are asking, "What can we do next?" So we organize
+the exploring party. Our object is to discover the countries, scenes,
+strange peoples, and most interesting persons we have heard of in the
+Bible. We are to find them in the advertising sections of old magazines.
+Let each one take a magazine and go through it, looking for oriental
+scenes, for pictures of incidents and of men and women that will remind
+him of Bible scenes and characters. These are to be cut out, explained,
+and arranged in the order of time, as they happened, every member of the
+family helping. The same plan may be applied to scenes of missionary
+work, using blank books for stories of heroism which children will
+illustrate with the magazine pictures.
+
+5. _Home thoughts._--"Home, sweet home," is just a corner of the
+afternoon saved for the discovery and reading of selections that are
+worth keeping in our memories and are also likely to help us hold our
+homes in some measure of the love and reverence they deserve. There are
+songs of home that ought never to be forgotten.
+
+6. _Religious reading and songs close the day happily._--Children love
+religious reading and songs, provided they are offered for their worth
+and not as an exercise, or to be learned as an empty duty. Take down
+your Bible and read Psalm 100, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all
+ye lands"; see whether they do not all enjoy the music and majesty of
+those lines. You will not find it difficult to secure their co-operation
+in learning that by heart.
+
+Then close the day with an hour of song. The children will remember
+songs learned thus all their lives; therefore those worth remembering
+should be chosen. For one, there is that dear old song many of us
+learned at mother's knee, "Jesus loves me, this I know." That and others
+that are appropriate can be found in almost every hymnbook. Many books
+of school songs also have a few hymns and Sunday songs that children
+like.
+
+Parents are puzzled, perhaps most of all, to choose appropriate stories
+to read to the children on Sunday. Youngsters prefer, of course, the
+told story to the read one, but if you wish to read you will make no
+mistake in selecting _Christie's Old Organ_; _Aunt Abbey's Neighbors_,
+by Annie T. Slosson; _The Book of Golden Deeds_, by Charlotte M. Yonge;
+and _Telling Bible Stories_, by Louise S. Houghton. _Some Great Stories
+and How to Tell Them_, by Richard Wyche, and _Story Telling_, by Edna
+Lyman, will serve as good guides to what to tell, and how to tell it.
+
+7. _Naming the day._--From week to week variety should enter into the
+Sunday program. On the Sunday following the one described above we can
+begin at the dinner table the happy task of "naming the day." We can
+decide whether it shall be called after one of our own number, whose
+birthday falls near this date, or after one of the anniversaries of the
+week following.
+
+Perhaps someone suggests calling it after the feast day of the church
+year observed by certain churches. That should lead to discussion and
+investigation of the meaning of the day.
+
+When all are agreed on a name, write it under its date on your wall
+calendar. It will be a convenient suggestion for next year, unless the
+decision is for a different name when the day again comes round. It will
+also call to mind some of the interesting discussions which it aroused.
+
+After this we might call for _The Family Book_, which now contains, you
+will recall, the family's decision as to the best Sunday and the
+happiest occurrences of the year before. The keeper, appointed last
+week, must bring it out. We can read what we wrote a week ago and decide
+on the things worth entering this week. Records of birthdays, special
+happenings to each of the family, the bright sayings of little ones, and
+the visits of friends and relatives all should go in.
+
+8. _"I remember" stories._--While _The Family Book_ is open is the
+psychological moment for father and mother to tell stories of their
+childhood. Every child likes to hear the story that begins, "I
+remember," and feels a thrill of pride in belonging to something that
+goes back and has a history. The old family album is a never-failing
+source of delight, not so much because of the pictures as because of
+what they suggest of family traditions.
+
+Now is a good time to select some certain thing which shall be used only
+on this day, such as a festival lamp or candlestick, some festival
+plates or dishes--just one thing or set of things toward the use of
+which we can look forward during the week. This helps to make Sunday
+what we used to call "a treat."
+
+9. _Golden deeds._--Last week we started _The Family Book_ in which to
+keep a record of all the happy experiences that belong to our family.
+This week we begin another book. In it we expect to place every week
+just one splendid story, the account of a golden deed, some piece of
+everyday kindness or heroism of which we have read or heard or which we
+have witnessed. Everyone is to have a chance to contribute to this book,
+all the family deciding by vote each week as to which story should be
+placed on its pages.
+
+Did you read in the paper this week of some brave or kindly deed done by
+a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? Did you see someone do an act of
+kindness? Cut out the account or write out the story and have it ready
+for your own _Golden Deed Book_. Everyone must watch all the week for
+the right kind of stories. It is wonderful how much good you will find
+in the world when you are looking for it.
+
+Sunday afternoons all the family can hear each story and talk over its
+fine points of virtue and goodness. Thus may be developed an
+appreciation of the human qualities that are really admirable. We can
+discuss also the probability of certain of the stories and the
+righteousness of the deeds.
+
+Any blank book will do, or even a composition book. It will help to keep
+hands happily occupied if you make your own covers and cut out gilt
+letters for the title. Often you can find pictures to illustrate the
+stories chosen; sometimes you may prefer to draw the illustrations. Keep
+_The Golden Deed Book_ in a safe and convenient place, because there
+ought to be something to go into it every week. For instance, did you
+read the other day of the young man who jumped in front of a train to
+save a young girl? He lost his life, but he saved hers. Can you find
+that story and put it in the book? Perhaps you have found one that seems
+even more fitting.
+
+10. _Various plans._--Giving happiness creates it. Plan something every
+Sunday for the happiness of others. Occasionally go in a body to call on
+someone who will be made happy by the visit.
+
+If you walk in the park or elsewhere, see how many things you can
+discover that you have read about in the Bible or know to be mentioned
+there.
+
+Try the game of "guessing hymns." While someone plays the familiar
+tunes, each takes a turn at identifying them and the hymns to which they
+belong.
+
+Set aside twenty minutes for each one to write a letter to send to the
+brother or sister, relative or friend, at a distance. Even the baby can
+scratch something which he thinks is a "real enough" letter in penciled
+scribbles.
+
+Close the day with quiet reading and song, or with the memory exercise
+in which all endeavor to repeat some simple psalm or a few verses, like
+the Beatitudes. All children like to repeat the Lord's Prayer in family
+concert.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Emilie Poulsson, _Love and Law in Child Training_, chaps. i-iv.
+     Milton Bradley, $1.00.
+
+     _Happy Sundays for Children_ and _Sunday in the Home_. Pamphlets.
+     American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     _Sunday Play._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life,
+     Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. xiii. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     _A Year of Good Sundays._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
+     Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the real problem of Sunday in the family? Is it that of
+     securing quiet or of wisely directing the action of the young?
+
+     2. Recall your childhood's Sundays. Were they for good or ill?
+
+     3. What are the arguments against children playing on Sunday? Is
+     there any essential relation between the play of children and the
+     wide-open Sunday of commercialized amusements?
+
+     4. Can you describe forms of play in which practically all the
+     family might unite?
+
+     5. What characteristics should distinguish play on Sundays from
+     other days? Is it wise to attempt thus to distinguish this day?
+
+     6. Criticize the suggestions on occupations for Sunday afternoons.
+
+     7. Recall any especially helpful forms of the use of this day in
+     your childhood, or coming under your observation.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church."
+
+[32] See chap. vii on "Directed Activity," and the references for study
+at its end.
+
+[33] Much may be learned by a study of Primary plans in a modern Sunday
+school. See Athearn, _The Church School_, chap. vi.
+
+[34] Since we are dealing here especially with religious education in
+the family, the author refers to his more extended treatment of the
+question of children in church services in _Efficiency in the Sunday
+School_, chap. xv.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE MINISTRY OF THE TABLE
+
+
+Shall the periods for meals be for the body only or shall we see in them
+happy occasions for the enriching of the higher life? Upon the answer
+depends whether the table shall be little more than a feeding-trough or
+the scene of constant mental and character development. In some memories
+the meals stand out only in terms of food, while pictures of dishes and
+fragments of food fill the mind; in others there are borne through all
+life pictures of happy faces and thoughts of cheer, of knowledge gained
+and ideals created in the glow of conversation.
+
+
+§ 1. THE OPPORTUNITY
+
+The family is together as a united group at the table more than anywhere
+besides. Table-talk, by its informality and by the aid of the pleasures
+of social eating, is one of the most influential means of education.
+Depend upon it, children are more impressed by table-talk than by
+teacher-talk or by pulpit-talk. They expect moralizing on the other
+occasions, but here the moral lessons throw out no warning; they meet no
+opposition; they are--or ought to be, if they would be effective--a
+natural part of ordinary conversation and, by being part and parcel of
+everyday affairs, they become normally related to life. The table is the
+best opportunity for informal, indirect teaching, and this is for
+children the natural and only really effective form of moral
+instruction.
+
+The child comes to these social occasions with a hungry mind as well as
+with an empty stomach. His mind is always receptive--even more so than
+his stomach; at the table he is absorbing that which will stay with him
+much longer than his food. Even if we were thinking of his food alone,
+we should still do well to see that the table is graced by happy and
+helpful conversation; nothing will aid digestion more than good cheer of
+the spirit; it stimulates the organs and, by diverting attention from
+the mere mechanics of eating, it tends to that most desirable end, a
+leisurely consumption of food.
+
+The general conversation of the family group has more to do with
+character development in children than we are likely to realize, and the
+table is peculiarly the opportunity for general conversation. Here, most
+of all, we need to watch its character and consider its teaching
+effects. Where father scolds or mother complains the children grow
+fretful and quarrelsome. Where father spends the time in reciting the
+sharp dealing of the market or the political ring, where mother
+delights in dilating on the tinsel splendors of her social rivalries,
+they teach the children that life's object is either gain at any cost or
+social glory. But it is just as easy to do precisely the opposite, to
+speak of the pleasures found in simpler ways, to glory in goodness and
+kindness, and to teach, by relating the worthy things of the day, the
+worth of love and truth and high ideals. The news of the day may be
+discussed so as to make this world a game of grab, inviting youth to
+cast conscience and honor to the winds and to plunge into the greedy
+struggle, or so as to make each day a book of beautiful pictures of
+life's best pleasures and enduring prizes.
+
+
+§ 2. DIRECTING TABLE-TALK
+
+But table-talk, helpful, cheerful, and educative, does not occur by
+accident. It comes, first, from our own constant and habitual thought of
+the meals in social and spiritual, as well as in physical, terms. And it
+reaches its possibilities as we endeavor to create and direct the kind
+of conversation that is desired. "Let all your speech be seasoned with
+salt," wrote the apostle, and we might add, let your salt be seasoned
+with good speech. That is the quality we must seek, the seasoning of
+healthful, saving, and not insipid, speech.
+
+One of the great advantages of "grace before meat" lies in this: it
+gives a tone to the occasion. Its chief meaning is surely that we
+remind ourselves of the ever-present guest who is also the giver of all
+good. Where the grace is not a perfunctory act, but rather the welcoming
+of such a guest, the meal has started on a high level. We cannot do
+better than so to act and speak as those who take the divine presence
+for granted. We need not preach about it; we need only to assume it and
+move on the level of that friendship. Children will feel it; they will
+seek to answer to it, and will find pleasure in the very thought which
+they have perhaps never expressed in words.
+
+The central idea of the grace suggests another means of helpful
+influences at the table, by bringing into our homes, for the meals, the
+friends whose lives will lift these younger ones. It is worth everything
+to live even for an hour with good and broadening lives. There are
+obligations to our guests to be considered, and their wishes should be
+consulted, but one always feels that children are being cheated when
+they are sent to eat at another table and deprived of the peculiar
+intimate touch with lives that bring the benefits of travel and
+experience. Ask your own memory what some persons who ate at the table
+with you in childhood meant to you.
+
+The wise hostess knows that even when she brings together the group of
+mature folks, and even when they are wise and witty, she must be
+prepared adroitly to inspire the conversation or it may flag at times.
+How much more does the conversation need direction where we have the
+same group every day composed largely of immature persons! When you have
+thought of all the portions and all the plates, have you thought of the
+food for the spirit?
+
+Before suggesting methods of selection and direction, let a word of
+explanation be said: food for the spirit is not confined to theology, to
+hymns and the Bible; it is whatever will help us to feel and think of
+life as an affair of the spirit. And this must come in very simple
+terms, by the elementary steps, for young folks. It will be whatever
+will in any way help us to live more kindly, more cheerfully, more as
+though this really were God's world and all folks his family. Whatever
+does this is truly religious.
+
+
+§ 3. METHODS
+
+Plan for the food of the spirit as seriously at least as for the food of
+the body. Learn to recognize poisons and also indigestibles. The first
+are subjects of scandal, bitterness of spirit, malice, impatience,
+tale-bearing, unkindly criticism, and discontent. The second are
+subjects too heavy for children: your formal theology would be one of
+them, your judgments on some intricate subjects may be among them. It is
+seldom wise to announce negative injunctions, but we can make up our
+own minds to avoid the conversational poisons and, when they appear, it
+is always easy to push them out. Even when the unpleasant subject is so
+common to all and has been so impressive in the day's experience that it
+threatens to become the sole, absorbing topic, we can say, "We won't
+talk of it at table! Let's find something better." But we must then have
+ready the something better; that will be possible only by forethought.
+
+First, save up during the day, or between the meals, the best thoughts,
+the cheering, kind, ideal, and amusing incidents. Cultivate the habit of
+saying to yourself, "This is something for us all to enjoy tonight at
+the table."
+
+Secondly, expect the other members to bring their best. Ask for "the
+best news of the day" from one and another. Encourage them to tell of
+good things seen and done and of pleasant and ideal things heard and
+spoken.
+
+Thirdly, use the incidents as the basis of discussion. Let children tell
+what they think of moral situations. Often they will quote the opinions
+of teachers and others. Always you will secure under these circumstances
+the unreserved expression of what they actually think. A free, informal
+conversation of this sort where opinions are kindly examined and
+compared is the finest kind of teaching.
+
+Fourthly, do not forget the grace of humor. To see the odd, whimsical,
+startling side of the incident or experience trains one to see the
+interplay of life, to catch a ray of light from all things, and to
+moderate our tendency to permit our tragedies to pull the heavens down.
+
+Fifthly, use this period to strengthen the consciousness of family unity
+by recounting past happy experiences and discussing plans of family
+life. In one family there are few meals from October to Christmas that
+do not include reminiscences of the summer in the woods and by the
+water, or from Christmas to June without plans for the next summer in
+the same place. Then, too, if you are contemplating something new, a
+piano, a chair, an automobile, talk it all over here. Let each one have
+his share in the planning. The effect is most important for character;
+the children acquire the sense of a share in the family community life.
+They get their first lessons in citizenship in this group, and they thus
+learn social living. Then when the chair, or what not, is bought, it is
+not alone the parents' possession; it belongs to all and all treat it as
+the property of all.
+
+Sixthly, introduce great guests who cannot come in person. It is fine
+fun to say, "We have with us tonight a man who loved bees and wrote
+books." Let them guess who it was; help, if necessary, by an allusion
+to _The Life of the Bee_ and _The Blue Bird_. They will want to know
+more about Maeterlinck and they will joyously imagine what they would
+say to him and how he would answer, what he would eat and how he would
+behave. In this way we may enjoy knowing better Lincoln, Whittier,
+Florence Nightingale, and an innumerable company.
+
+Seventhly, this is the place to remind ourselves that table-manners are
+no small part of the moral life. By the habituation of custom we can
+establish lives in attitudes of everyday thoughtfulness for others, in
+the underlying consideration of others which is the basis of all
+courtesy. Children's questions on table-etiquette must be met, not only
+by the formal rules, but also by their explanation in the intent of
+every gentle life to give pleasure and not pain to others, so to live in
+all things as to find helpful harmony with other lives and to help them
+to find and be the best. It is not only impolite to grab and guzzle, it
+is unsocial and so unmoral, because it is both a bad example and a
+distressing sight to others. It is irreligious, because whatever tends
+to make this life less beautiful must be offensive to the God who made
+all things good.
+
+If we ourselves seek to maintain beauty, order, and kindliness in the
+conduct of the table, our children acquire a love of all that makes for
+beauty and order and kindliness, for righteousness in the little things
+of life. A clean tablecloth may be a means of grace. You have to try to
+live up to it. Order and quietness in eating are not separable from the
+rest of the life. To lift up life at any point is to raise the whole
+level. To let it down at any point is to let all down. But to lift up
+the level of conversation at the table is to raise the level of the
+entire occasion and to make it more than a period of eating, to convert
+it into a festival, a joyous occasion of the spirit. The meal should be
+in all things worthy of the unseen guest.
+
+How near we all come together at the table! In its freedom how clearly
+are we seen by our children! Here they know us for what we are and so
+learn to interpret life.
+
+
+     I. Reference for Study
+
+     _Table Talk._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life,
+     Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     II. Topics Tor Discussion
+
+     1. The relation of mental conditions to digestion.
+
+     2. The relation of table-etiquette to life-habits.
+
+     3. The table as an opportunity for the grace of courtesy, and the
+     relation of this grace to Christian character.
+
+     4. Training children in listening as well as in talking at table.
+
+     5. Do you regard table-talk and table-manners as having any
+     directly religious values? Why?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE BOY AND GIRL IN THE FAMILY
+
+
+Much that has been said so far has had in mind only the problems of
+dealing with younger children in the life of the home. Indeed, almost
+all literature on education in the family is devoted to the years prior
+to adolescence. But older boys and girls need the family and the family
+needs them. Many of the more serious problems of youth with which
+society is attempting to deal are due to the fact that from the age of
+thirteen on boys have no home life and girls, especially in the cities,
+are deprived of the home influences.
+
+
+§ 1. THE GROWING BOY
+
+The life of the family must have a place for the growing boy. It must
+make provision for his physical needs; these are food, activity, rest,
+and shelter. Youth is a period of physical crisis. Health is the basis
+of a sound moral life. Many of the lad's apparently strange propensities
+are due to the physical changes taking place in his body and, often, to
+the fact that it is assumed that his rugged frame needs no care or
+attention.[35]
+
+It will take more than tearful pleading to hold him to his home; he can
+be held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most
+attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering
+boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded
+quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makeshift bed, and
+the general home organization which long ago assumed that a boy could be
+left out of the reckoning.
+
+The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to
+that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree
+that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him
+about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a
+chance to do part of the work, not only its "chores," but also its forms
+of service. But even a boy's attitude to the "chores" will depend on
+whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of
+unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be
+responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does
+regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services
+which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his
+training for the larger citizenship and society of service.[36]
+
+The boy is a playing animal. Not all homes can be fully equipped with
+play apparatus. But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as
+though children needed nothing but meals and beds. The shame of the
+modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for passive
+adults. To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human
+creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are
+shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to
+force him out to the life of the streets. The thoughtless
+self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical
+effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.[37]
+
+But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the grass and
+among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation. For
+the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary,
+and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or
+pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off
+the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof. If
+possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his
+friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of
+home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.[38]
+
+A workbench in the attic or basement has saved many a boy from the
+street. Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a
+home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but
+families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the
+home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the
+purpose of a salon.[39]
+
+
+§ 2. RELIGIOUS SERVICE
+
+In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to
+one form of participation in the religious life. Whatever the family
+gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the
+support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of
+one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending
+itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world. The
+form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family
+conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the
+means of determining his share in such extension. The child's gifts to
+the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the
+threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own
+account--partly his own direct earnings--appropriated for this or for
+other purposes by himself and with the advice of his parents. Family
+councils on forms of participation in ideal activities, by gifts and by
+service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the
+child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.[40]
+
+The boy needs friendship. Not all his needs can be met by the schoolboys
+whom he may bring into his room, nor can they all be met by his mother's
+affection. He needs a father. The most serious obstacle to the religious
+education of boys is that most of them are half-orphans; intellectually
+and spiritually they have no fathers. The American ideal seems to be
+that the man shall be the money-maker, the woman the social organizer,
+and the children shall be committed to hired shepherds or left to shift
+for themselves.
+
+
+§ 3. THE FATHER AND THE BOY
+
+No one else can be quite the teacher for the boy that his father ought
+to be. No man can ever commit to another, still less to some tract or
+book, the duty of guiding his boy to sanity and consecration in the
+matter of the sex problems.
+
+The first word that needs to be said on this subject is that such
+problems receive safe and sufficient guidance only in the atmosphere of
+affection and reverence. Do not attempt to teach this boy of yours as
+though you were dealing with a class in physiology. The largest thing
+you can do for him is to quicken a reverence for the body and for the
+functions of life. By your own attitude, by your own expressions and
+opinions, lead him to a hatred and abhorrence of the base, filthy, and
+bestial, to a healthy fear and detestation of all that despoils and
+degrades manhood, and to a reverence for purity, beauty, and life.[41]
+
+Be prepared to give him, on the basis of reverence, the clean, clear
+facts. Be sure you have the facts. Do not think he is ignorant; he is in
+a world seething with conversation, stories, pictures, and experiences
+of evil. The trouble is that his facts are partial, distorted, and
+unbalanced by positive errors; his knowledge is gained from the street
+and the school-yard. Only a personal teacher can help him unravel the
+good from the bad, the true from the false. Do not trust to your own
+general knowledge; take time to read one of the simple and sane books on
+this subject.[42] Be ready to lead him aright. Remember this subject has
+provoked a large number of books, many of which are foolish and others
+unwholesome. Do not try to deputize your duty to some doubtful book.
+
+
+§ 4. FATHERING THE BOY
+
+But the boy needs more than instruction on a special subject; he needs
+personality, he needs the time and thought of, and _personal contact_
+with, his father. Men who do not live with boys never know what they
+lose. And alas, see what the boy misses! He has been his mother's boy up
+to school age when school takes him and gives him a woman's guidance,
+while the Sunday school is likely to keep him--for a while only--under
+the eye of some dear sister who "just loves boys." The system is a
+vicious one. The lad needs developed masculinity. If he gets it neither
+in school nor in the home he will find it on the street corner, through
+the vicious boy-leader of the degrading poolroom or the alleys.
+
+The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the
+merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as
+simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious
+questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with
+the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering
+your young men if you lost your boys.[43]
+
+
+§ 5. THE GROWING GIRL
+
+Almost all that has been said about the boy applies to the girl of the
+same years. Let _a special plea_ be entered here against the notion that
+girls are favored when sheltered from a share in the activities of the
+home. They desire to express their ideals as much as do boys. Much of
+the so-called craze for amusements is due to the fact that the family is
+so organized that there is no vent to the ideals there, no chance to
+have a share in the business of life. Young folks with the sense that
+"this is our home," not "our parents', but _ours_" bend their energies
+to its adorning, and find in it the chance to realize some of their
+passion for beauty and for service.[44]
+
+Mothers usually do better than do fathers in the matter of sex
+instruction. Yet they usually begin too late, long after the little girl
+has acquired much misleading information in the school. Here, too, the
+first aim must be to quicken reverence for life, to set up the
+conception of the beauty and dignity of sex functions before the baser
+mind of the street has had an opportunity to interpret them in terms of
+the dirt.[45]
+
+Above all, with boys and girls, the whole subject, including marriage
+and the founding of a family, must ever be treated with dignity and
+reverence. Foolish parents jest with their girls about their beaux and
+boast that their little ones are playing at courtship. If they could
+realize the wonder awakened, followed by pain and then by hardened
+sensibilities and coarsened ideals, they would sacrifice their jests for
+the sake of the child's soul. We wonder that youth treats lightly the
+matter of social purity when we have treated the sacred relations of
+life as a jest. If this family in which they now live is to be a place
+of sacred associations, of real religious life, the whole matter of
+marriage and the family must be treated with reverence. Their practice
+will not rise above our everyday ideals as expressed in casual
+conversation and in our own practice.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     THE BOY
+
+     W.A. McKeever, _Training the Boy_, Part III. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     _Boy Training_, Part IV. A Symposium. Associated Press.
+
+     Johnson, _The Problems of Boyhood_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     THE GIRL
+
+     Margaret Slattery, _The Girl in Her Teens_, chaps. iv, vii. Sunday
+     School Times Co., $0.50.
+
+     Wayne, _Building Your Girl_. McClurg, $0.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation_. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     Puffer, _The Boy and His Gang_. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.
+
+     Irving King, _The High School Age_. Bobbs-Merrill, $1.00.
+
+     _Building Childhood_, A Symposium. Sunday School Times Co., $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special needs of the growing boy?
+
+     2. What are the things that a boy enjoys in his home?
+
+     3. In what way does city life interfere with the natural
+     development of the child?
+
+     4. What are some of the natural expressions of religion for a boy?
+
+     5. How early should the sex instruction begin?
+
+     6. What does a father owe to the boy, and what are the best methods
+     of meeting the duty?
+
+     7. What are the normal activities for girls in the home?
+
+     8. What are their especial needs?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[35] A good brief book on the problem of the adolescent is E.T. Swift,
+_Youth and the Race_; another, from the school point of view, is Irving
+King, _The High-School Age_, which has much material of great value to
+parents.
+
+[36] On the various activities of boys see W.A. McKeever, _Training the
+Boy_.
+
+[37] See the notable report by Breckinridge and Abbott, _The Delinquent
+Child and the Home_.
+
+[38] On the gregarious instincts see J.A. Puffer, _The Boy and His
+Gang_.
+
+[39] See the books on manual work given in chap. vii, "Directed
+Activity."
+
+[40] On the religious life of the boy in relation to society and the
+church see Allan Hoben, _The Minister and the Boy_, and the author's
+treatment of boys and the Sunday school in _Efficiency in the Sunday
+School_, chap. xiv; also J. Alexander _et al._, _Training the Boy_, a
+symposium.
+
+[41] On the attitude of reverence in this question read Dr. Cabot's fine
+essay, _The Christian Approach to Social Morality_.
+
+[42] The works of Dr. W.S. Hall, _From Boyhood to Manhood_, for parents'
+guidance with boys of thirteen to eighteen; E. Lyttleton, _Training of
+the Young in Laws of Sex_, is excellent for fathers; _Reproduction and
+Sexual Hygiene_ is a text for older youth to be recommended; also, for
+reading, N.E. Richardson, _Sex Culture Talks_, D.S. Jordan, _The
+Strength of Being Clean_.
+
+[43] For further studies of the problem of the boy parents would do well
+to read: _Building Boyhood_, a symposium; W.A. McKeever, _Training the
+Boy;_ W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation;_ W.D. Hyde, _The Quest of
+the Best_.
+
+[44] On activities see W.A. McKeever, _Training the Girl_.
+
+[45] On the problem with young children see M. Morley, _The Renewal of
+Life_; in connection with older girls see K.H. Wayne, _Building Your
+Girl_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE NEEDS OF YOUTH
+
+
+Families are for the spiritual development of youth as well as of
+childhood. The home is for the young people as well as for the younger
+ones. But the very period when they slip from church school is also the
+period when they are often lost to the real life of the family. In some
+measure this is due to the natural development of the social life. The
+youths go out to work, move forward into enlarging social groups which
+demand more of their free time. They are learning the life of the larger
+world of which they are now a part.
+
+
+§ 1. THE SCHOOL OF YOUTH
+
+But the family is still the home of these young people; normally it is
+still the most vital educational influence for them. Yet there is no
+problem more baffling than that of family ministry for, and leadership
+of, the higher life of youth.
+
+It is a short-measure interpretation of the home which thinks of it as
+only for young children and old folks. The young men and women from
+sixteen to twenty and over still need training and direction; they need
+close touch with other lives in affection and in an ideal atmosphere. In
+a few years they, too, will be home-makers, and here in the home they
+are very directly learning the art of family life.
+
+For youth there are few effective schools, outside the home, other than
+the streets and the places of commercialized amusement. Even where the
+other agencies of training are used, such as college, classes, and
+associations (such as the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A.), life, at that
+period, needs the restraints on selfishness that come from family life,
+the refining and socializing power of the family group.
+
+
+§ 2. SPECIAL NEEDS OF YOUTH
+
+What are the special needs of youth upon which the family may base a
+reasonable program for their higher needs?
+
+First, the need of sound physical health. This is a period of physical
+adjustment. Rapid bodily growth is nearly or quite at an end; new
+functions are asserting themselves. The new demands for directed
+activity may, under the ambitious impulses of youth, make undue drafts
+on the energies. The apparent moodiness that at times characterizes this
+period may be due to poor health. The moral strain of the period will
+need sound muscles and good health. Parents who would sit up all
+night--perhaps involuntarily--when the baby has the colic treat with
+indifference sickness in youth and too readily assume that the young
+man or the young woman will outgrow these physical ills. But bodily
+maladjustment or incapacity has most serious character effects. To live
+the right life and render high service one needs to be a whole person,
+with opportunity to give undivided attention and undiminished powers to
+the struggle of life.
+
+Secondly, this is peculiarly the period of the joy of friendships. The
+social nature must have its food. This young man has discovered that the
+world consists of something besides things; it is full of people. He is
+just learning that they are all persons like himself. He enters the era
+of conscious personal relationships. He would explore the realm of
+personality. He touches great heights of happiness as other lives are
+opened to him. It is all new and wonderful, this realm of personality,
+with its aspects of feeling, thinking, willing, and longing.
+
+
+§ 3. MAINTAINING FRIENDSHIP WITH YOUTH
+
+Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their
+friendship? They will never tell us, for this world is too new and
+strange for facile description; they are always bashful about their
+hunger for persons until they find the same hunger and joy in us. We
+imagine that they are indifferent to us; the trouble is we are hidden
+from them. We seldom give them a chance to talk as friend to friend,
+not about trifling things, but about life itself and what it means.
+Perhaps at no point do parents exhibit less ability for sympathetic
+reconstruction and interpretation of their own lives than here. They
+recall the pleasures of childhood and provide those pleasures for the
+children. Why not recall the hunger of eighteen years of age and give
+these youths the very bread of our own inner selves? Or do we, when they
+ask this bread, give them the stone of mere provision for their physical
+needs or the scorpion of careless indulgence in things that debase the
+tastes?
+
+One perplexing phenomenon must not be overlooked: it will often happen
+that young people pass through a period of what appears to be parental
+aversion. There will sometimes seem to be suspicion, violent opposition,
+and even hatred of parents. This is no occasion for despair. It is a
+stage of development. It is due to the attempt of a will now realizing
+its freedom under social conditions to adapt itself to the will that has
+hitherto directed it. To some degree the sex consciousness, which leads
+to viewing the parents in a new light, may enter in. It may be easily
+made permanent, however, if parents do not do two things: first, adjust
+themselves and their methods to the new social freedom of the youth,
+and, secondly, fling open the doors into their true selves now fully
+understandable by these men and women.
+
+But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of
+youth. Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will
+feed. Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere. If
+they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere. You can
+scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they
+are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when
+home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth. If you
+are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but
+you will lose a life or lives. Here is the opportunity of the home to
+enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many
+lives.
+
+
+§ 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD
+
+As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful
+realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than
+others. Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel
+him to make a selection. The same law is operative with the young woman.
+Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities;
+it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther. But father
+and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as
+they see their children taking their first evident steps toward
+home-making. What an opportunity is theirs!
+
+Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just
+where some of the most serious mistakes are made. This is no time for
+teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule. If you treat this
+essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young
+people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke. The home is
+the place where the home is treated most irreverently. Of course one
+must not take too seriously those "calf" courtships, prematurely
+fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school
+tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here
+jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what
+would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or
+kindly, simple advice will help most of all.
+
+To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when
+they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth's
+idealism, make high vows and stand on high places. Give them at least
+the opportunity to enter your inmost self, to find there all the light
+you can give them and all the memory of your own joys and hopes. Make
+them feel, though you need not say it, that they are at the threshold of
+a temple. If to you this is an affair of the spirit it will be a matter
+of religion to them.
+
+Approached in such a temper, many of the practical problems of courtship
+settle themselves. Take the case of the young man at home. If he knows
+that you think with him of the high meaning of this experience he will
+not hesitate to bring the young woman to the home. She will feel your
+attitude. Upon this level questions of times and seasons, hours in the
+parlor, and all the matters of their relations will settle themselves.
+If you treat courtship as a matter of the spirit he will do just what he
+most of all wants to do, treat this woman who is to be his mate as a
+person, a spirit, with reverence and love that lifts itself above lust.
+This is the only ground upon which you can appeal to either in matters
+of conduct at this time. The conventions of society they will despise;
+but the inner law speaks to them when the outer letter has no meaning.
+
+
+§ 5. THE SOCIAL LIFE
+
+We must expect our children to go out into their larger world. The
+beginning of adolescence is the normal time of their social awakening,
+their conversion from a nature that turns in upon itself to one that
+moves out into a world of persons. For them, now, the home group ought
+to be seen as a society as well as a family, as the social group
+gathering about a definite ideal and mission into which they should
+delight to project themselves. The appeal of religion is peculiarly
+vivid just now, for it involves a recognition of one's self as a person
+with the power of personal choices and with the opportunity to find
+association with other persons. The family must aid its young people to
+see the opportunity which the church offers for ideal social
+relationships which direct themselves to high and attractive service.
+
+
+§ 6. AMUSEMENTS
+
+What should the family do about the question of the amusements of young
+people?
+
+Healthy young persons must have recreation. They will seek it on its
+highest level first and find their way down the facile descent of
+commercialized amusements only as the higher opportunities are denied
+them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would
+rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than
+sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the
+idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this
+need the home must minister by the provision of space, time,
+opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth,
+selfishness, preoccupation, or a mistaken idea of an empty innocence of
+life you make recreation and social intercourse impossible in the
+family, the young people will find it on the street or in the crowd. In
+the family that plans for recreation and provides facilities and time
+for young people to play the problem is a minor one.
+
+But young people will naturally desire to project themselves into the
+social amusements of the larger groups. Then we ought to know what those
+amusements are; we must be able to advise, from actual knowledge, not
+from hearsay or prejudice, as to the healthful and worth while. The home
+must insist on the provision in the community for the safe socialization
+of amusements. The thousands of young girls in the cities, who tramp the
+pavements down to dance halls, primarily are only seeking the
+satisfaction of a normal craving; and they, on their way to the dance
+halls, pass the splendid plants of the schools and the churches,
+standing dark and idle. Families must develop a public opinion that will
+demand, for the sake of their young people, a provision for amusement
+and recreation that, instead of poisoning the life, shall strengthen,
+dignify, and elevate it. If the demand for clean drinking-water is a
+proper one, is the demand for healthful food for the life of ideals less
+so?
+
+There can be no doubt of the attitude of any home with the least
+conscience for character toward all forms of public amusements in which
+young people are herded promiscuously for the mere purpose of killing
+time in trivialities. The "white cities" with their glittering lights
+and baubles are often moral plague colonies. The amusements debase the
+intellect, blunt the moral sensibilities, and appeal to the baser
+passions. They are the low-water mark, we may hope, of commercialized
+amusement. But they remind us that young people demand company and
+change from the monotony of the day's toil. They ask us as to the
+provision we are making for young people and challenge us to use their
+inclinations for good.
+
+But besides these "shows" there are many dignified forms of social
+recreation. Good music is to be heard and good plays are to be seen.
+
+The theater, whether of the regular drama or of the motion-picture type,
+offers a perplexing problem, principally because, in the first place,
+American people have been too busy conquering a new soil and making a
+living to give careful thought to the social side of aesthetics and
+recreation, and, secondly, because the ministry of social recreation has
+fallen almost entirely under the dominance of the same trend; it has
+been thoroughly commercialized. We cannot cut the puzzling knot by
+simply prohibiting all forms of public theatrical entertainment. For one
+reason, these forms shade off imperceptibly from the church service to
+the extremes of the vaudeville. But the simple fact is that we no longer
+indiscriminately class all theaters as baneful and immoral; we are
+coming to see their potentialities for good. If the young will go, as
+they will--and ought--to the theater, and if the theater can lift their
+ideals, parents would do well to guide their children in this matter and
+to enlist the aid of the theater.
+
+It is worth while to come to a sympathetic understanding of the place of
+the drama and the opera, to see what they have meant in the education of
+the race and what is the significance, to us, of the fact of the strong
+dramatic instinct in childhood. Naturally the subject can only be
+mentioned here and the suggestion be offered that parents take time to
+cultivate an appreciation of good orchestral and concert music and of
+the drama.
+
+The social life will find outlet in other directions. Young people need
+our aid to find social groups which will inspire and develop them,
+especially groups that are serviceful.
+
+
+§ 7. THE CALL TO SERVICE
+
+This is the period when ideals begin to give direction to the hitherto
+undirected activity of childhood and youth. Young people are idealists.
+They see no height too giddy, no task too hard, no dream too roseate,
+and no hope unattainable. If the times are out of joint they believe
+they were "born to set them right." Whatever is wrong or imperfect they
+would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we
+are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so
+the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth.
+Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blasé view of the
+world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead
+of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those
+ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the
+songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your
+Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's passion and let it
+breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and
+conversation the life of ideals.
+
+Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is
+surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the
+period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in
+the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do
+something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We
+know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of
+others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and
+active minds--not with sleepy fatalism--believe in their boys, have boys
+who believe in them.
+
+They wait for leadership. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of
+indifference to social reform and other types of ideal service, get
+back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.
+
+They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their
+service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.
+
+They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It
+will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be
+merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life
+in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of
+the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange
+from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else
+goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to
+today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to
+give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to
+make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious
+person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find
+the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God's world.
+The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are
+interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his
+high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to
+you--as you have been doing all along--by your daily attitude; you will
+have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly
+discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the
+life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to
+realize the God-vision of the world.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.C. King, _Personal and Ideal Elements in Education_, pp. 105-27.
+     Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     E.D. Starbuck, _The Psychology of Religion_, chaps., xvi-xxi.
+     Scribner, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     1. ON YOUTH
+
+     C.R. Brown, _The Young Man's Affairs_. Crowell, $1.00.
+
+     Wayne, _Building the Young Man_. McClurg, $0.50.
+
+     Swift, _Youth and the Race_. Scribner, $1.50.
+
+     Wilson, _Making the Most of Ourselves_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     2. ON RECREATIONS
+
+     L.C. Lillie, _The Story of Music and the Musicians_. Harper, $0.60.
+
+     Gustav Kobbe, _How to Appreciate Music_. Moffat, $1.50.
+
+     P. Chubb, _Festivals and Plays_. Harper, $2.00.
+
+     _Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of
+     Dramatic Plays_, monographs published by the American Institute of
+     Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     L.H. Gulick, _Popular Recreation and Public Morality_. American
+     Unitarian Association. Free.
+
+     M. Fowler, _Morality of Social Pleasures_. Longmans, $1.00.
+
+     Addams, _The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets_. Macmillan,
+     $1.25.
+
+     The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see
+     Herbert A. Jump, _The Religious Possibilities of the Motion
+     Picture_ (a pamphlet) and _Vaudeville and Moving Pictures_, a
+     report of an investigation in Portland, Ore. _Reed College Record,
+     No. 16._
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?
+
+     2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their
+     evenings? Why is this the case?
+
+     3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.
+
+     4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friendship of our
+     young people?
+
+     5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion
+     to parents?
+
+     6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of
+     courtship?
+
+     7. What are the special social needs of young people?
+
+     8. What is the religious significance of the period of social
+     awakening?
+
+     9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amusements?
+
+     10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?
+
+     11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?
+
+     12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE FAMILY AND THE CHURCH
+
+
+If the family is engaged in the development of religious character
+through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close
+relations with the other great social institution engaged in precisely
+the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of
+religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and
+the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained,
+these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.
+
+As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should
+be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home constitutes the
+first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives
+prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of
+social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives
+together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of
+life.
+
+
+§ 1. RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME
+
+Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an
+institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the
+developing relations of children to the church, would be largely solved
+if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these
+two institutions. The institutional difficulties occur because these
+relations appear to be competitive. Here is the family with its
+interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on
+the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time,
+interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture
+unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that
+money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it
+to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from
+the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of
+the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.
+
+But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The
+home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems
+of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the
+opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions. We carelessly
+think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be
+persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests
+of which are in a different sphere. We think of the church as an
+independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or
+shortcomings and to criticize it if it fails to meet our standards,
+just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to
+our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the
+homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.
+
+This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence
+independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and
+makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the
+church and the children. If the church is a thing apart we can analyze
+its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw
+recruits. It marches by while we stand on the curb. But here, surely, is
+one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms: the church is no
+more than our own selves associated for certain purposes. If the church
+fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we
+would a bridge that failed to carry a reasonable load? We do but condemn
+ourselves. If my church is not fit to send my children to, then I must
+help to make it fit. Before falling back on the lazy man's salve of
+caustic ridicule, before taking the seat of the scornful, before setting
+in the child's mind an aversion to this institution, based on my
+opinion, let me be sure I have done all that lies in my power to better
+it. True, I am only one; but surely, where so many family tables are
+each Sunday devoted to finding fault with the church and its services,
+I can find many others who will aid in at least stimulating a sense of
+personal responsibility for any incompleteness in the church.
+
+The family cannot afford to take the attitude of hostile criticism, for
+it is thus fighting its first and most natural ally, the one other
+institution engaged in its own special work. If the forces for spiritual
+character be divided, how easily do the opposing forces enter in and
+occupy! The family needs the support of the wider public opinion of the
+church, insisting on the supremacy of righteousness. The family needs
+the co-operation of the church in its task of developing religious
+lives. The family needs the power of this larger social body controlling
+social conditions and making them contributory to character purposes.
+The family needs the stimulus which a larger group can give to children
+and young people.
+
+This does not mean that we must never criticize the church. It is not
+set off in a niche protected from the acid of secular tongues and minds.
+Ministers of the gospel are unduly resentful of criticism, perhaps
+because, after they leave the seminary, no one has a fair opportunity to
+controvert their publicly stated opinions. But the church needs the
+cleansing powers of kindly, wise, creative criticism. Anyone can find
+fault, but he is wise who can show us a better way. This church is the
+family's ally; it is our business to aid her to greater effectiveness.
+The new church for our own day awaits the services of the men of today.
+
+The purpose of the family is the basis of alliance with the church. As
+in every other relation and purpose of the home, so here: the dominant
+factor is the conscious function of the home and family. If the home is
+really a religious institution it will seek natural alliance with all
+other truly religious institutions. Ideally, what is a church but a
+group of families associated for religious purposes? Is not the church
+simply a number of families co-operating in the ideal purposes of each
+family, the development of the lives of religious persons and the
+control of social conditions for the sake of that purpose? Without
+entering into disputation as to the relationship of little children to
+the church, is there not just this relation to the human society called
+the church, that it is a grouping of families for the purpose of the
+divine family?
+
+
+§ 2. THE FAMILY IDEAL IN THE CHURCH
+
+Would there be any question as to the naturalness of the relation of our
+children to the church if the family ideal so controlled our thinking as
+to saturate theirs? Is not this the present need, that both family and
+church shall conceive the latter in family terms? By this is meant, not
+simply that we shall think of what is called "a family church," a church
+into which we succeed in projecting our families in a fair degree of
+integrity, but that we shall think of the organization and mission of
+the church in terms of family life and of the ideal of the divine
+family. Keeping in mind the general definition already given of a family
+as persons associated for the development of spiritual persons, let us
+hold the church to that same ideal; the lives of persons associated in
+the broadest fellowship that includes both God and man for the purposes
+of spiritual personality. The church then should be the expression of
+that family of which Jesus often spoke, the family that calls God Father
+and man brother.
+
+Closer and more helpful relations between family and church follow where
+the principles of the family prevail in the latter. The family is an
+ideal democracy because it exists primarily for persons. It places the
+value of persons first of all. So with the true church; it will exist to
+grow lives to spiritual fulness, and to this end all buildings,
+adornments, exercises, teachings, and organizations will be but as
+tools, as means serving that purpose. As the family sees its house,
+table, and activities designed to personal ends, so will the church. In
+an institution existing to grow lives, the great principle of democracy
+and of the family will prevail, viz., that to the least we owe the most.
+Just as the home gives its best to the little child, so will the church
+place the child in the midst. Just as the home exists for the child and
+thus holds to itself all other lives, so will the church some day exist
+for the little ones and so hold and use all other lives.
+
+The prime difficulty of relating the children in our families to the
+average church lies in the fact that they are children, while the church
+is an adult institution. Its buildings are designed for adults--save in
+rare and happy exceptions;[46] its services are designed for adults; it
+has a more or less extraneous institution called a school for the
+children. The church spends its money for adults; it compasses sea and
+land to make one proselyte and coerce him back in old age, and allows
+the many that already as children are its own to drift away. It often
+fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the
+growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted
+from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving
+service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the
+development of such lives through childhood and youth. They must hear
+again the Master's voice regarding "these little ones," regarding the
+significance of the child. And all must be loyal to his picture of his
+Kingdom as a family and must, therefore, do what all true families do,
+become child-centric. A church in which children occupy the same place
+that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a
+place for the children. It will be a natural and unnoticed transition
+from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.
+
+
+§ 3. A PLACE FOR ALL IN THE CHURCH
+
+The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an
+insistence on the family conception and the family program in the
+church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there
+a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the
+church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the
+name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let
+the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and
+specially designed worship for child-life--suitable forms of service and
+activity. Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be
+carried over to provide them in the church.
+
+Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church
+by their attitude toward it as the larger family group. To think and act
+toward this institution as our home, the wider home of the families, is
+to establish similar habits of thought in children. Such a concept is
+not always easy to maintain; the church includes many of different
+habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general
+life. Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility
+toward the weaker and immature. This family, the church, just like our
+own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all
+minister to others.
+
+The principal service which the family may render to the church is,
+then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will
+relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural
+for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for
+religious culture and service. Surely this should be the attitude toward
+membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically
+in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church
+as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in
+which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service. The family
+may well hold that relationship steadily before its members. In
+childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who
+learn. The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering
+the way of the religious life and the art of its service. The fellowship
+grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child's relationship
+passes over from the passive to the active, from the involuntary to the
+voluntary--just as it does in the home--and develops, as the child comes
+into social consciousness, into a recognition of himself as belonging to
+a social organization for specific purposes.
+
+
+§ 4. CHILD UNITY WITH THE CHURCH
+
+At some time every child of church-attending parents will want to know
+whether he "belongs to the church." One must be very careful here,
+regardless of the ecclesiastical practice, to show the child that he is
+essentially one with this body, this religious family. He may be too
+young to subscribe his name to its roll, but he belongs at least to the
+full measure of unity appreciable by his mind. He must not be permitted
+to think of himself as an outsider. Indeed, no matter what our theology
+may hold, every religious parent believes that his children belong to
+God. Do they not also belong to the church in at least the sense that
+the church is responsible for their spiritual welfare?
+
+The sense of unity must be developed. Writing the child's name on the
+"Cradle Roll" of the church school may help. Assuming, as he develops,
+that he is a part of this spiritual family, naturally expecting that he
+will have an increasing share in its life, will help more. Parents who
+dedicate their children to God pass on to them the stimulus of that
+dedication. A church service of dedication is likely to impress them
+with a feeling of unity with the church; seeing other children so
+dedicated they know that a similar occasion occurred in their own early
+lives.
+
+The forms of relationship must develop with the nature of the child. The
+church needs not only a graded curriculum of instruction but a graded
+series of relationships by which children, step by step, come into
+closer conscious social unity, each step determined by their developing
+needs and capacities.
+
+It is easy to say that the responsibility lies with the church to
+provide these methods of attachment. But the church we have been
+sketching is a congeries of families, after all, and it will do just
+what these families, particularly the parents in them, stimulate it to
+do.
+
+
+§ 5. INCIDENTAL DIFFICULTIES
+
+But what of those instances in which parents are convinced that the
+church does not furnish a normal and healthy atmosphere for the child's
+spiritual life? There are churches where the Sunday school is simply a
+training school in insubordination, confusion, and irreverence, or where
+religion is so taught as to cultivate superstition and to lead
+eventually either to a painful intellectual reconstruction or to a
+barren denial of all faith. There are churches of one type so devoted
+to the entertainment of adults, to the ministry to the pride of the
+flesh and the lust of things, that a child is likely to be trained to
+pious pride and greed, or of another type, in which religion is a matter
+of verbiage, tradition, and unethical subterfuge.
+
+Parents must be true to their responsibilities. The family is the
+child's first religious institution. Fathers and mothers are not only
+the first and most potent quickeners and guides in the religious life,
+but they are primarily responsible for the selection of all other
+stimuli to that life. Under the drag of our own indifference we must not
+withhold from the child the good he would get even from the church we do
+not particularly enjoy; neither dare we, for fear of criticism or
+ostracism, force the child under influences which, in the name of
+religion, would chill and prevent his spiritual development, would
+twist, dwarf, or distort it. Responsibility to the spiritual purpose of
+the family is far higher than any responsibility to a church. The
+churches are ordered for the souls of men.
+
+What shall we do in the family when the sermon is always tediously dull?
+Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never
+get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for
+them parallel to the adult service of worship.[47] Next, try to
+overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church
+is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many
+criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher
+by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If
+that is essentially your attitude, you cannot complain if your children
+are dissatisfied unless they too are entertained according to their
+childish appetites. When the sermon is poor, put it where it belongs
+proportionately and enlarge on the many good features of church
+fellowship and service.
+
+In a word, let the church be to the family that larger home where
+families live together their life of fellowship and service in the
+spirit and purpose of religion and where there is a natural place for
+everyone.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.W. Hulbert, _The Church and Her Children_, chaps. i-v. Revell,
+     $1.00.
+
+     H.F. Cope, _Efficiency in the Sunday School_, chaps. xiv-xvi.
+     Doran, $1.00.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. xiv.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     A. Hoben, _The Minister and the Boy_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     E.C. Foster, _The Boy and the Church_. Sunday School Times Co.,
+     $0.75.
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, Part II. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special common interests of church and family?
+
+     2. What are the fundamental relationships of the two?
+
+     3. What conception of the church ought to be fostered in the
+     children's minds?
+
+     4. When is criticism of the church unwise?
+
+     5. What changes might be made in church life for the sake of the
+     children?
+
+     6. What changes would bring the church and the home closer
+     together?
+
+     7. What should be the children's conception of unity with the
+     church?
+
+     8. Should children attend, in family groups, the church service of
+     worship?
+
+     9. Does the plan of a short service for children meet the need?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[46] See a pamphlet on _Church School Buildings_ (free) published by the
+Religious Education Association; also H.F. Evans, _The Sunday-School
+Building and Its Equipment_.
+
+[47] See the author's suggestion for the Sunday school in _Efficiency in
+the Sunday School_, chap. xv.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CHILDREN AND THE SCHOOL
+
+
+Wise parents will know the character of the influences affecting their
+children at all times. At no time can their responsibility be delegated
+to others. There is a tendency to think that when children go to school
+the family has a release from responsibility. But the school is simply
+the community--the group of families--syndicating its efforts for the
+formal training of the young. Every family ought to know what the
+community is doing with its children. The school belongs to all; it is
+not the property of a board, nor a private machine belonging to the
+teaching force; it belongs to us and we owe a social duty as well as a
+family obligation to understand its work and its influence on the
+children.
+
+Parents ought to visit the school. Wise principals and teachers will
+welcome them, setting times when visits can best be made. The visitors
+come, not as critics, but as citizens and parents. The principal
+benefits will be an acquaintance with the teachers of our children and a
+better understanding of the conditions under which the children work for
+the greater part of the day. By far the larger number of teachers most
+earnestly desire character results from their work. It will help them
+to know that we are interested in what they are doing.
+
+
+§ 1. HOME AND SCHOOL CO-OPERATION
+
+Parents and teachers, both desiring spiritual results, can find means of
+co-operation. Parent-teacher clubs and associations have done much to
+bring the home and the school together. Meeting regularly in the
+evening, so that fathers, too, can attend, gives opportunity to work out
+a common understanding to raise the spiritual aims of the school, and to
+discover means by which the families may aid in securing better
+conditions for school work.
+
+One of the most important considerations relates to the moral effect of
+the school life and environment. We are committed in this country to the
+principle that the public school cannot teach religion, but this by no
+means relieves it of responsibility for moral character. The family
+needs this ally. Children expect instruction in the school and they feel
+keenly the power of its ideals and the standards established by its
+methods and requirements. The family and the school greatly need to
+co-ordinate their efforts here to the end that there may be under way in
+both an orderly program for the moral training of children.
+
+
+§ 2. THE SCHOOL TEACHING PARENTS
+
+The school may help the home if arrangements are made for parents to
+meet regularly and receive instruction in those forms of moral training
+which can best be given at home. This is one method of solving the vexed
+question of sex instruction. Many hesitate as to the wisdom of such
+instruction in schools; but no one doubts that it ought to be and could
+be given in families but for the fact that parents are both ignorant of
+what to tell and indifferent to the matter. It may be that some day the
+state will not only say that the child must go to school, but also that
+every parent intrusted with children must either prove ability to train
+and instruct in these and other matters or go to school to obtain the
+necessary training. The state would not go beyond its province if it
+required ignorant parents--and that means most of us in matters of moral
+training--to go to school and learn our business. And without waiting
+for such compulsion the school may now offer opportunity for all parents
+to obtain the desired information. Teachers are especially trained to an
+understanding of child-nature and to methods of pedagogy; they are
+prepared to teach many things we ought to know; why should not the
+family obtain the advantage of such expert knowledge?
+
+The school would also be within its province if it undertook to
+stimulate the indifferent parents, both rich and poor, to an
+appreciation of the educational task and opportunity of the home. Each
+institution greatly needs the other. The school reaches all the children
+of all the people; might it not be made a larger means of helping all
+the parents of all the children to quickened moral responsibility and to
+greater educational efficiency?
+
+
+§ 3. CONTROLLING SCHOOL CONDITIONS
+
+The family ought to know the conditions at the school outside the
+recitation or working hours. Few parents have any conception of the
+power of the playground over moral character. Perhaps a smaller number
+realize how dangerous are some of the elements at work there. Play of
+itself is immensely valuable, but play means playfellows, and some of
+these are simply purveyors of indecency and moral contagion in
+conversation and act. We are required to send our children to school; we
+have a right to demand freedom from moral contagion. Do you know what
+goes on in secret places on the grounds? Do you know that the vilest
+ideas and phrases are current in pictures, cards, on scraps of paper,
+and in handwriting on walls, not only in the high schools, but often
+among children of from six to twelve years of age? This is too large a
+subject to be developed properly here. It is one familiar to all
+wide-awake school men and women and ought to be equally so to the
+parents of children. Where the school combats this evil the home should
+intelligently aid; where the school is indifferent the family dare not
+rest until either the indifference is quite dispelled or the indifferent
+dismissed.
+
+Do not expect to get the facts concerning these suggested conditions by
+inquiry among your children. They are reticent, naturally, on such
+matters when talking with adults; besides, the sense of school honor
+holds them to silence. If they tell you voluntarily, you are happy in
+their free confidence. Do not betray it; simply let it lead you to make
+further inquiry at the school from the authorities and stimulate you to
+insist that, for the sake of the spiritual good of the young, the school
+must furnish conditions of moral health.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Ella Lyman Cabot, _Voluntary Help to the Schools_, chaps. vii,
+     viii. Houghton Mifflin Co., $0.60.
+
+     W.A. Baldwin, "The Home and the Public Schools," _Religious
+     Education_, February, 1912. $0.65.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     M. Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in Schools_. 2 vols.
+     Longmans.
+
+     John Dewey, _The School and Society_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     Smith, _All the Children of All the People_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     G.A. Coe, "Virtue and the Virtues," _Religious Education_,
+     February, 1912.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What ought parents to know about public-school life?
+
+     2. In visiting a school what may the parent do to acquire
+     information in the proper way?
+
+     3. How may the home co-operate with the school?
+
+     4. What degree of instruction in morals ought the school to give?
+
+     5. In what way does the school best help in moral training?
+
+     6. What do you know about the conditions on the playgrounds of your
+     own school?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES
+
+
+Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain
+an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness,
+occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our
+children--or of our neighbors' children--to a focus and throw them in
+high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual
+placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry passions rule,
+when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty
+wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we
+suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher
+life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly
+a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of
+development.
+
+A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such
+results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their
+inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual
+and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be
+valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.
+
+Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to
+bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of
+getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to
+remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the
+crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one
+in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt,
+as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort
+of training.
+
+
+§ 1. THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION
+
+The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins
+to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a
+child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the
+perfect tree in the sapling. _Character comes by development_; it is not
+born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore
+parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are
+pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time
+Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper,
+sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a
+psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the
+picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?
+
+When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they
+are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the
+natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in
+which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The
+child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The
+powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call
+physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the
+development of those powers, their training-field and school.
+
+Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the
+grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more
+do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of
+difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other,
+in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a
+stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be
+learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and
+training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right
+to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him
+to be born six feet tall.
+
+A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent,
+then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his
+moral upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition
+of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an
+occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to
+guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way
+for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is
+it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the
+organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not.
+And is it not to be the same with the child?
+
+We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that
+give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as
+isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational
+process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will
+watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.
+
+
+§ 2. THE COLLISION OF WILLS
+
+Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with
+temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The
+martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the
+subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the
+parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of
+will.
+
+When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought
+to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in
+your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness
+will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the
+mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you
+will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice
+of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing entity, able to
+elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive,
+Godlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new
+personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle
+and adjust itself with all other persons.
+
+When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take
+time to think what it means. _Keep your temper._ Do not break before the
+other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied.
+From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from
+force and tradition to a moral plane.
+
+Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request.
+You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more
+important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of
+the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his
+life.
+
+Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to
+consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of
+justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an
+unjust man.
+
+Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic
+explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of
+simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by
+an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It
+may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience.
+Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own
+way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for
+instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circumstances it
+would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration--as a drop of
+acid on a finger tip--than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One
+such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in
+other cases.
+
+Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must
+choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave
+responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of
+the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of
+the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not
+drift, is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of
+feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.
+
+
+§ 3. ANGER
+
+An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes
+justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of
+your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a
+spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of
+protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether
+unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly
+angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so
+near the surface that a pin-prick sets them loose. Usually a study of
+their cases will show either that the attitude of angry opposition to
+everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or
+that it was acquired in the adolescent period.
+
+The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person;
+there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home
+is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most
+directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school
+of normal social living.
+
+Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are
+negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character
+of the child or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons,
+first, as furnishing the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control,
+to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace
+and interfere with the well-being of others.
+
+It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first
+instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded
+to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only
+route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in
+terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.
+
+In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl
+will make a very tardy passage through the normal experience of social
+aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee
+from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner
+alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at
+thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pass quickly. A few allow this
+period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and
+soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at
+this period, or to a lack of healthful friendships.
+
+
+§ 4. METHODS OF DEALING WITH ANGER
+
+It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant
+will not help the case. He may feel the emotion of your anger but
+misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an
+infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or
+affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby
+yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither
+possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural
+depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant
+fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department
+of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to
+the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and
+you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you
+yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its
+reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with
+anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first
+exercises in training character.
+
+_Consider the future._ Each family is a social unit, a little world.
+Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and
+experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which
+prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are
+needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When
+young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality,
+under similar circumstances, serve in the business of mature life?
+Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character.
+Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional
+effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against
+evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be
+purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be
+confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must
+guide it.
+
+When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the
+feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the
+situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that
+not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of
+conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always
+help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he
+may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay
+with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own
+temper.
+
+Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, _train him in
+self-control_. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply
+our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the
+largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is
+the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but it is
+the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of
+society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a
+better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the
+immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike
+service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not
+acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson
+after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and
+school and street.
+
+Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to
+save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the
+rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There
+will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we
+must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the
+rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in
+the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing
+to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with
+strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he
+loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the
+misery of the life without friends, the joy of friendships.
+
+Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of
+forgiveness and, if the occasion warrants, the dignity and courage of
+the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment
+involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson
+of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be
+habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with
+suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how
+great is the victory of forgiveness.[48]
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     _The Problem of Temper._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
+     Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_, chap. v. Pilgrim
+     Press, $0.50.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Patterson Du Bois, _The Culture of Justice_, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead
+     & Co., $0.75.
+
+     E.H. Abbott, _The Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     M. Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg,
+     $1.00 each.
+
+     H.Y. Campbell, _Practical Motherhood_. Longmans, $2.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral
+     crises?
+
+     2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in
+     children?
+
+     3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?
+
+     4. What constitutes the importance of early crises of the will?
+
+     5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy
+     authority?
+
+     6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?
+
+     7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?
+
+     8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly
+     developed life?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[48] See Gow, _Good Morals and Gentle Manners_, chap. viii.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Continued_)
+
+
+§ 1. QUARRELS
+
+A child who never quarrels probably needs to be examined by a physician;
+a child who is always quarreling equally needs the physician. In the
+first there is a lack of sufficient energy so to move as to meet and
+realize some of life's oppositions; in the other there is probably some
+underlying cause for nervous irritability.
+
+It is perfectly natural for healthy people to differ; in childhood's
+realm, where the values and proportions of life are not clearly seen,
+where social adjustments have not been acquired, the differences in
+opinions, as in possessions, lead to the expression of feeling in sharp
+and emphatic terms. Rivalry and conflict are natural to the young
+animal. Children do not wilfully enter into conflicts any more than
+adults; they are only less diplomatic in their language, more direct,
+and more likely to follow the word with attempts at force.
+
+In few things do parents need more patience than in dealing with
+children's quarrels. First, seek to determine quietly the merits of the
+cause; but do not attempt to pronounce a verdict. It is seldom wise to
+act as judge unless you allow the children to act as a jury. But
+ascertain whether the quarrel is an expression somewhere of anger
+against injustice, wrong, or evil in some form. Sometimes their quarrels
+have as much virtue as our crusades. It is a sad mistake to quench the
+feeling of indignation against wrong or of hatred against evil. A boy
+will need that emotional backing in his fights against the base and the
+foes of his kind. While rejoicing in his feeling, show him how to direct
+it, train him to discriminate between hatred of wrong and bitterness
+toward the wrongdoer. Help him to see the good that comes from loving
+people, no matter what they do.
+
+Our methods of dealing with a quarrel will do more to develop their
+sense of justice than all our decisions can. Be sure to get each one to
+state all the facts; insist on some measure of calmness in the recital.
+Keep on sifting down the facts until by their own statements the quarrel
+is seen stripped of passion and standing clear in its own light. Usually
+that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the
+group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary
+acknowledgment of wrong. The boys--or girls--have for the first time
+seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without
+prejudice. They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we
+when convinced against our wishes.
+
+When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still
+not offer a verdict. Put the case to the contestants and let them settle
+it. Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to
+insist on exact statements of fact. That course should be excellent
+training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man's side,
+in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious
+quarrels of later life. Teach children to think through their
+differences.
+
+The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be
+taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is
+out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When
+the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in
+the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious
+dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life
+is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves
+petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find
+unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful
+living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A
+harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a
+matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own
+attitude.
+
+Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the
+family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he
+occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes
+radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he
+quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new,
+self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each
+one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them.
+Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not
+try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he
+will have to live some day.
+
+
+§ 2. FIGHTING
+
+The best of men are likely to have a secret satisfaction in their boys'
+fights, and the bravest of mothers will deplore them. The fathers know
+how hard are the knocks that life is going to give; the mothers hope
+that the boys can be saved from blows. A man's life is often pretty much
+of a fight, every day struggling in competition and rivalry; we have not
+yet learned the lesson of co-operation, and we still tend to think of
+business as a battlefield. Something in us calls for fighting; we have
+to use the utmost strength at our command to fight the evil tendencies
+of our own hearts; often we rejoice in life as a conflict. It feels good
+to find causes worth fighting for. If all this is true of the man, it
+is not strange that the small boy, scarce more than a young savage, will
+find opportunities for conflict. He is more dependent on the weapons of
+force than is his father. He cannot cast out the enemy with a ballot,
+nor with a sneer or biting sarcasm, nor by some device or strategy of
+business or affairs. He can only hit back. Taken altogether, boys settle
+their differences as honestly at least as do men.
+
+Moreover, children's fights are not as cruel as they seem to be; even
+the bloodshed means little either of pain or of injury. A boy may be
+badly banged up today and in full trim tomorrow; it is quite different
+with the wounds bloodlessly inflicted by men in their conflicts.
+
+Does all this mean that boys should be encouraged to fight? No; but it
+does mean that when Billy comes home with one eye apparently retired
+from business, we must not scold him as though he were the first
+wanderer from Eden. That fight may have been precisely the same thing as
+a croquet game to his sister, or any test of skill to his big brother,
+or a business transaction to his father; it was a mere contest of two
+healthy bodies at a time when the body was the outstanding fact of life.
+The fight may give us our chance, however, to aid him to a sense of the
+greatness of life's conflict, to a sense of the qualities that make the
+true fighter. It may leave him open to the appeal of true heroism. We
+must make light of the victory of brute strength, just as we may make
+light of his wounds and scars, and glorify the victory of the mind and
+will.
+
+The boy who fights because he lacks control of temper needs careful
+training. He gets a good deal of discipline on the playground and
+street, but it is not always effective; the beatings may only further
+undermine control. But the lack of self-control will manifest itself in
+many ways and must be remedied at all points. The discipline of daily
+living in the family must come into play here.
+
+
+§ 3. SELF-CONTROL
+
+The matter of self-control is not separable into special features; one
+cannot learn control under one set of moral circumstances without
+learning it for all. The boy who strikes without thinking is simply one
+who acts without thinking. He tends to throw away the brakes of the
+will. The regain of control comes only through training at every point
+in deliberation of action.
+
+Probably there is no other point at which children so frequently and
+readily learn control as in the matter of speech. The family where all
+speak at once, where a babel of sounds leads to a rivalry of vocal
+organs, is not only a nuisance to the neighbors, it is a school of
+uncontrolled action to the children. Just to learn to wait, even after
+the thought is formed into words, until it shall be my turn or my
+opportunity to speak is a fine discipline of control. To do that every
+day, year after year, tends to break up the hair-trigger process of
+action.
+
+Control is gained also by the acquisition of the habit of thought
+regarding general courses of action. We can hardly expect meditation on
+the part of little children. But those who are older, those entering
+their teens, may and should be able to think things out, to plan out the
+day's actions, to determine their own ways of conduct. Children who have
+the custom of quiet, private prayer often develop ability to see their
+conduct in the calm of those moments. They get a mental elevation over
+the day and its deeds.
+
+
+§ 4. GOOD FIGHTS
+
+The evident danger of undue deliberation of action must be met by
+another cure of the personal-conflict spirit; that is, the substitution
+of games of rivalry and skill for the unorganized rivalry and "game" of
+fighting. The transition from the bloody arena to the excitement of a
+game is very easy and natural. But the game is the boy's great chance to
+learn life as a game to be played according to the rules. All that the
+fight calls for--courage, endurance, skill, quickness of action, and
+grim persistence--comes out in a good game. Here is a suitable youthful
+realization of the fight that is worth waging. Our participation in the
+youths' games, our appreciation of their points, our joy in honestly won
+success, is the best possible way to lead up to their taking life in
+terms of a good fight, a grand game, a real chance to call out the
+heroic qualities. Turn every fighting instinct into the good fight that
+will clarify and elevate them all.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     W.L. Sheldon, _Ethics in the Home_, chaps. xi, xii, xiii. Welch &
+     Co., $1.25.
+
+     E.A. Abbott, _Training of Parents_, chap. v. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Ella Lyman Cabot, _Every Day Ethics_. Holt, $1.25.
+
+     M. Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg,
+     $1.00 each.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Do all children quarrel? Should one punish for small quarrels?
+
+     2. What are the facts which ought to be ascertained regarding any
+     quarrel?
+
+     3. What special opportunities do children's differences offer?
+
+     4. What are the causes of habitual petulance? What are the dangers
+     of this habit of mind?
+
+     5. Is fighting necessarily wrong? What part does it play in the
+     lives of men?
+
+     6. What are the dangerous elements in boys' fights?
+
+     7. What special quality of character needs development in this
+     connection?
+
+     8. What are the valuable possibilities in the fighting tendency?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Continued_)
+
+
+§ 1. LYING
+
+Parents are likely to be wilfully blind to the faults of their children.
+But some faults cannot be ignored; they must surely quicken the most
+indifferent parent to thought. We suffer a shock when our own child
+appears as a wilful liar.
+
+"What shall I do when I catch the child in an outright lie? Surely he
+knows that is wrong and that he is wilfully doing the wrong!"
+
+First, be sure whether he is "lying." Lying means a purposeful intent to
+deceive by word of mouth or written word. When Charles Dickens wrote
+_Oliver Twist_ he described a burglary that never happened, so far as he
+knew. He intended the reader to feel that it was true. Was he lying? No;
+because he simply used his imagination to paint a scene which was part
+of a great lesson he desired to teach the English public. Even had he
+had no great moral purpose, it would still not have been a lie, just as
+we do not accuse the writer of even the most frivolous novel of lying.
+He is simply creating, or imitating, in the field of imagination.
+
+Imagination is the child's native world. When the little girl says, "My
+dolly is sick," she is saying that which is not so, but instead of
+reproving her for lying, you prepare an imaginary pill for the doll.
+Many children's lies are simply elaborations of their doll- and
+plaything-imaginings. When my little daughter told me, and insisted upon
+it, that she had seen seven bears, of varied colors, on the avenue,
+should I have reproved her for lying? Was it not better to humor her
+fancy, to draw it out, to give it free play, being careful gradually to
+let her know that I knew it was fancy? I entered into the game with her
+and enjoyed it so long as we all understood it was only fancy. It is a
+crime to crush a child's power of creating a world by imagination, a
+fair world, set in the midst of this world where things are imperfect,
+jarring, and disappointing, a world in which everything is always "just
+so."
+
+But one must also carefully aid the child in distinguishing between the
+world of fancy and the world of fact. This takes time and patience. We
+must not rob the life of fancy nor must we allow the habits of freedom
+with ideas to pass over into habits of carelessly handling realities.
+Along with the development of fancy we must train the powers of exact
+observation and statement of facts. The child who saw seven bears, red,
+green, yellow, etc., must go to see real bears and must tell me exactly
+their colors and forms. Daily training in exactitude of statements of
+real facts is the best antidote for a fancy that has run out of its
+bounds. It establishes a habit of precision in thinking which is the
+essence of truth-telling.
+
+
+§ 2. PROTECTIVE LYING
+
+But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form.
+It may be called protective lying. Ask the little fellow with the
+jam-smeared face, "Have you been in the pantry?" and he is likely to do
+the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat
+that makes it easier to hide from their enemies. He valiantly answers
+"No, Mother." He would protect himself from your reproof. There has been
+awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires
+your approbation most of all. The moral struggle with him is very brief;
+he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his
+negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.
+
+What shall we do? First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for
+jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions. The jam was there and
+you were not. It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a
+wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things
+deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether
+your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and
+sufficient to establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask
+these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It
+would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too
+much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable
+idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with
+them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to
+establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow
+with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the
+acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others,
+and against his own good.
+
+Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the
+temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child
+that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there
+watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought
+of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of
+irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a
+reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel
+in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy
+feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his
+well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper,
+and confidant. I like better the God to whom a little fellow in Montana
+prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy
+Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help
+him to do and know the right.
+
+
+§ 3. OLDER CHILDREN
+
+But protective lying presents a more serious problem with older
+children. The school-teacher and parent meet it, just as the judge and
+the employer meet it in adults. The cure lies early in life.
+Truth-telling is as much a habit as lying is. Perhaps it is more easily
+practiced; its drafts are on the powers of observation and memory rather
+than on those of imagination. Along with the child's imaginative powers
+there must be developed the powers of exact observation and description.
+Exact observation and description or relation are but parts of the
+larger general virtue of precision. Help children at every turn of life
+to be right--right in doing things, right in thinking, in saying, and in
+execution. Precision at any point in life helps lift the life's whole
+level. Truth-telling is not a separable virtue. You cannot make a boy
+truthful in word if you let him lie in deed. You cannot expect he will
+speak the truth if you do not train him to do the truth, in his play, in
+ordering his room, in thinking through his school problems, and in
+thinking through his religious difficulties. Truth-telling is the verbal
+reaction of the life which habitually holds that nothing is right until
+it is just right.
+
+Two things would, ordinarily, make sure of a truthful statement, instead
+of a protective lie, in answer to your question: first, that the young
+person has been trained to the habit of seeing and stating things as
+they are--and that you really give him a chance so to state them, and,
+secondly, that to some degree there has been developed a recognition of
+considerations or values that are higher than either escape from
+punishment or the winning of your approbation. He will choose the course
+that offers what seems to him to be the greater good; he will choose
+between punishment, with rectitude, a good conscience, a sense of unity
+with the higher good, of peace with God his friend, a greater
+approximation to your ideal, on the one side, and, on the other, escape
+from punishment.
+
+Everything in that crisis will depend on how real you have made the good
+to be, how much the sense of the reality of God and his companionship
+has brought of joy and friendship, and how high are his values of the
+actual, the real, the true.
+
+
+§ 4. AT THE CRISIS
+
+But what shall we do as we meet the lie on the lips of the child? First,
+as already suggested, do not wait until you meet it. Train the child to
+the truthful life. Second, be sure you do not make too heavy moral
+demands. Remember the instinct to protect himself from immediate
+punishment or disapprobation is stronger than any other just then. Do
+not ask him to do what the law says the prisoner may not do, incriminate
+himself. We have no right to put on our children tests harder than they
+can bear. Often we put those which are harder than we could face. What
+you will do just then depends on what you have been doing for the
+training of the child or youth. Do not expect him to solve problems in
+moral geometry if you have neglected simple addition in that realm.
+
+Punishment by the blow or the immediate sentence will be futile. The
+offender must know he has trespassed in a realm beyond your
+administration and rule; he has done more than commit an offense against
+you. Whatever consequences follow--such as your hesitation to accept his
+word--must evidently be a part of the operation of the entire moral law.
+Help him to see that lying strikes at the root of all social relations
+and would make all happy and prosperous living, all friendship, and all
+business impossible by destroying social confidence.
+
+Facing the crisis, do not demand more than your training gives you a
+right to expect. Often, instead of the direct categorical question as to
+guilt, we must gradually draw out a narrative of the events in question;
+we must patiently help the child to state the facts and to see the
+values of exactitudes. Without preaching or posing we must bring the
+events into the light of larger areas of time and circles of life, help
+him to see them related to all his life and to all mankind and to the
+very fringes of existence, to God and the eternal. That cannot be done
+in a moment; it is part of a habit of our own minds or it is not really
+done at all. At the moment we can, however, make the deepest impression
+by insistence on the importance of the actual, the real, the exactly
+true.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     E.L. Cabot, _Every Day Ethics_, chaps. xix, xx. Holt, $1.25.
+
+     W.B. Forbush, _On Truth Telling_. Pamphlet. American Institute of
+     Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, pp. 124-33. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     G.S. Hall, "A Study of Children's Lies," _Educational Problems_, I,
+     chap. vi. Appleton, $2.50.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _A Genetic Study of Veracity_. Pamphlet.
+
+     J. Sully, _Studies in Childhood_.
+
+     E.H. Griggs, _Moral Education_. Huebsch, $1.60.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Are there degrees of lying?
+
+     2. When is a lie not a lie?
+
+     3. How can we discriminate among the statements of children?
+
+     4. How can we help them to recognize the qualities of truth?
+
+     5. In what ways are parents to blame for forcing children to
+     protective lying?
+
+     6. What of the relation of the thought of God to the demands for
+     truth?
+
+     7. Would you punish a child for lying and, if so, in what way?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Concluded_)
+
+
+§ 1. DISHONESTY
+
+Many parents appear to think that the child's concepts of property
+rights and of fair dealing are without importance. Habits of pilfering
+are permitted to develop and success in cheating wins admiration. Low
+standards are accepted and religion is divorced from moral questions.
+The family attitude practically assumes that all persons cheat more or
+less and that it is necessary only to use wisdom to insure freedom from
+conviction.
+
+Responsibility lies at home. We shall never have an honest generation
+until we have honest men and women to breed and train it. It is folly to
+think we can lay on the public schools the burden of the moral education
+of the young. Much is already being attempted there; yet little seems to
+be accomplished because the home, having the child before and after
+school and for a longer period each day, furnishes no adequate basis in
+habits, ideals, and instruction for the moral work of the school. If
+parents assume that one cannot succeed with absolute integrity, that
+dishonesty in some degree is necessary to prosperity, then children will
+learn that lesson despite all that may be said elsewhere. Honest
+children grow where, in answer to the false statement, "You will starve
+if you do business honestly," parents say, "Then we will starve."
+
+But the very home life itself can be a teacher of dishonesty. Is it
+largely a matter of sham and pretense for the sake of social glory? Does
+it prefer a cheap veneer to a slowly acquired genuine article? Is the
+front appearance that of a dandy while the backyard looks like a
+slattern? Is the home striving for more than it deserves? Is it trying
+to get more out of life than it puts in? Evading taxes, avoiding duties,
+a community parasite, does it commend to children the arts of social
+cheating and lying? Such homes teach so loudly that no voice could be
+heard in them.
+
+Given the atmosphere, ideals, and practices of the honest life in the
+home itself, the problems of conduct, in the realm of these rights, are
+more than half solved. Here in the home the real training for the life
+of business takes place. Not for an instant can we afford to lower
+standards here, nor to lose sight of the life-long power of our ideals,
+our habits, and our attitudes on the conduct of the next generation. Do
+parents know that the problems of lying, cheating, quarreling are the
+great, vital questions for their children, much more important than
+industrial or professional success in life; that on these all success is
+predicated? If they do, surely they cannot regard the problems which
+arise as mere incidents; surely they will provide for the culture of the
+moral life as definitely as for the culture of the physical or the
+intellectual!
+
+
+§ 2. LESSONS IN HONESTY
+
+But children also acquire habits from their playmates. Whenever the act
+of pilfering appears, the wrong must be made clear. Some sense of
+property rights is necessary; not the right, as some assume, to do what
+you will with a thing because you have it, but the right to enjoy and
+usefully employ it. Help children to see the difference between mine and
+thine. Slovenly moral thinking often comes from too great freedom in
+forgetful borrowing within the family. In this little social group the
+members must first acquire the habits of respect for the rights of
+others. Through toys, tools, and books the lesson may be learned so
+early that it becomes a part of the normal order of things.
+
+Children can learn that the game of life has its rules and that the
+breach of these rules spoils the game and prevents our own happiness.
+They can learn, too, that these are not arbitrary rules; they are like
+the laws of nature; they are the conditions under which alone it is
+possible for people to live together and to make life worth while.
+Gambling is wrong because it is unsocial; it is the attempt to gain
+without an equivalent giving. Cheating is wrong, no matter how many
+practice it, just as surely as cheating is wrong in the game on the
+playground.
+
+Children are really peculiarly sensitive to the social consciousness. In
+school under no circumstances will they do that which the school custom
+forbids or the older boys condemn. In the home, despite contrary
+appearances, the opinion of elders, brothers, sisters, and parents is
+the recognized law. Every small boy wants to be like his big brother.
+Children's conduct may be guided by an understanding of the social will
+outside the school and home. Help them to know that all people
+everywhere in organized society condemn cheating and dishonesty.[49]
+
+Sentiment and emotional feeling must back up all teaching of conduct.
+Your stories and readings should be selected with this in mind. The
+approbation of parents and of the great Father of all enters as an
+effectual motive.
+
+But parents seldom understand these problems; they attempt to deal with
+each one as it arises until they are weary of the seemingly endless
+procession and abandon the task. Their endeavors are based on faint
+memories of such problems in their own youth or on rule-of-thumb
+proverbial philosophy about morals and children. Does not the
+development of moral ability and culture deserve at least as much
+attention as any other phase of the child's life? After all, what do we
+most of all desire for all our children--position, fame, ease? or is it
+not rather simply this, that, no matter what else they do, they may be
+good and useful men and women? Then what are we doing to make them good
+and useful?
+
+A clear view of the need for moral training, a belief that is possible,
+will surely lead to serious attempts to learn the art of moral training.
+In this they need not be without guidance. There is a number of good
+books on character development in the child.[50] The foundation for all
+such training of parents ought to be laid in an understanding of what
+the moral nature is, and then of the laws of its development. Later the
+specific problems may be separately considered.
+
+
+§ 3. TEASING AND BULLYING
+
+Teasing is the child's crude method of experimentation in psychological
+reactions; the teaser desires to discover just how the teased will
+respond. It degenerates, by easy steps, into a thoughtless infliction of
+pain in sheer enjoyment of another's misery, and then into brutal
+bullying. When only two children are together mere teasing will not
+last long; either the teaser will tire of his task or his teasing will
+turn to that lowest of all brutalities, delight in inflicting pain on
+weaker ones.
+
+But teasing is a serious problem in many families; the whole group
+sometimes lives in an atmosphere of ridicule, derision, and annoyance.
+Teasing is likely to appear at its worst wherever a group is gathered,
+for the guilty ones are under the stimulus of the praise of others; they
+inflict mental pain for the sake of winning approbation.
+
+Teasing has a pedagogical basis. A certain amount of ridicule acts
+healthfully on most persons. Even children need sometimes to see their
+weaknesses, and especially their faults of temper, in the light of other
+eyes, in the aspect of the ridiculous. But children are seldom to be
+trusted to discipline one another; freedom to do so is likely to develop
+hardness, indifference to the sufferings of others, and arrogance from
+the sense of lordship. The corrective of ridicule is safe only as it is
+a kindly expression of the sense of humor. The ability to see and to
+show just how foolish or funny some situations are will turn many a
+tragedy of childhood into a comedy. Whenever children laugh at the
+distresses or faults of others, help them to laugh at their own.
+Cultivate the habit of seeing the odd, the whimsical, the humorous side
+of things. A sound sense of kindly humor often will save us all from
+unkind teasing.
+
+
+§ 4. SOME CURES FOR TEASING
+
+Help the habitual and unkind teaser to see how cowardly the act is, to
+see how it is against the spirit of fair play. Call on him to help the
+weaker one. If he is teasing for some fault of temper or some habit,
+show him the chance that is afforded to do the nobler deed of helping
+another to overcome that fault.
+
+Let the cowardly teaser reap the consequences of his own act; he must
+bear the burden of the critic, the expectation of perfection. Teasing
+him for his own shortcomings will sometimes cure him, but usually he
+loses his temper quickly. Make him feel the injustice of the teaser's
+method. If he is a bully he needs bullying. If ever corporal punishment
+is wise it is in such a case. He who inflicts pain simply because he can
+deserves to endure pain inflicted by someone stronger. But one must be
+careful not to confirm him in the coward's code. The injustice of it he
+must see, see by smarting under it. If ever punishment before others is
+wise it is in this case; for surely he who delights in humiliating
+others must be humiliated. But though justice suggests this course,
+experience shows that it does not always work; the bully only bides his
+time, and, cherishing resentment, he wreaks it on the weaker ones.
+
+The best cure for brutal teasing will take a longer time than is
+involved in a thrashing. Besides, the teaser will get his thrashings
+very soon from other boys. It requires time to change the habits that
+make bullying possible. Try gradually helping him to see the beauty and
+pleasure of helpfulness. Give him a chance to give pleasure instead of
+pain. Help him to taste the joy of praise, the praise that helps more
+than all teasing criticism. Help him to see that it is more truly a mark
+of superiority to help, to cheer, to do good, than to oppress and tease.
+Take time to habituate him in helpfulness.
+
+In dealing with teasing in the family, two other things are worth
+remembering: First, the teased must be taught the protective power of
+indifference. Teasers stop as soon as their barbs fail to wound; the fun
+ends there. Laugh at those who laugh at you, and they will soon cease.
+Secondly, the atmosphere and habit of the family determine the course of
+teasing. Where carping criticism and unkindly ridicule abound, children
+cannot be blamed for like habits. Where the sense of humor lightens
+tense situations, where we sacrifice the pleasure of stinging criticism
+for the sake of encouraging those who most need it, children are quick
+to catch those habits too. The teasing child usually comes out of a
+family of similar habits. On seeing our children engaged in teasing
+others, our first thought ought to be as to the extent to which we may
+have been their example in this respect. Constant watchfulness on our
+part against the temptations to tease will have an effect far more
+potent than all attempts to talk them out of the habit; it will lead
+them out.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     1. HONESTY
+
+     P. Du Bois, _The Culture of Justice_, chaps. iii, x. Dodd, Mead &
+     Co., $0.75.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_, chap. viii.
+     Pilgrim Press, $0.50.
+
+     2. TEASING
+
+     W.L. Sheldon, _A Study of Habits_, chap. xvii. Welch & Co.,
+     Chicago, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     ON GENERAL MORAL TRAINING
+
+     Sneath & Hodges, _Moral Training in School and Home_. Macmillan,
+     $0.80.
+
+     E.O. Sisson, _The Essentials of Character_. Macmillan, $1.00.
+
+     H. Thisleton Mark, _The Unfolding of Personality_. The University
+     of Chicago Press, $1.00.
+
+     Paul Carus, _Our Children_. Open Court Publishing Co., $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Of what importance is the child's sense of possession?
+
+     2. What are the first evidences of a consciousness of property
+     rights?
+
+     3. How do homes train in dishonesty?
+
+     4. What is the relation between cheating and dishonesty?
+
+     5. What is a child seeking to do when he teases another?
+
+     6. What are the unfortunate features of teasing?
+
+     7. What is the relation of teasing to bullying?
+
+     8. What cures would you suggest for either?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[49] Parents will be helped by the practical discussions of cheating,
+cribbing, and other boy problems in Johnson, _Problems of Boyhood_.
+
+[50] See "Book List" in Appendix.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE PERSONAL FACTORS IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
+
+
+Whoever will stop to review his early educational experience will be
+impressed with the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain
+teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living
+again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught,
+while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no
+recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many
+silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always
+greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says.
+The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of
+persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.
+
+There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart
+information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with
+subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a
+process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality.
+The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it
+is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the
+persons away you remove all educational potencies.
+
+The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that
+provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you
+can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of
+machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working
+activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people.
+Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives.
+Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the
+family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take
+away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational
+agency, from its religious reality.
+
+
+§ 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES
+
+All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers,
+save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and,
+besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of
+fathers.
+
+There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers
+only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is
+nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood
+wholly in physiological terms, imagining--if they think about it at
+all--that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only
+they know how to bear, feed, and clothe children properly. True, such
+duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good
+provider" who provides only _things_ for his family, no matter with what
+generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves
+first of all.
+
+He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who
+willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with
+his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any
+father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that
+belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but
+who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best
+business in the world, the development of children's characters.
+
+Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to
+provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them
+those social advantages which he missed in youth.
+
+But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives
+itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for
+what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of
+bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality.
+It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home
+is left headless and soon heartless. If we at all desire the fruits of
+character in the home we must give ourselves personally.
+
+It is not alone the habitué of the saloon or the idler in clubs and
+fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share
+of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to
+give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of
+being worse than an infidel. _A father belongs to his home more than he
+belongs to his church._ There have been men, though probably their
+number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and
+obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only
+a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their
+children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly
+home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the
+smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy
+task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among
+their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or
+club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end
+if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.
+
+
+§ 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE
+
+The father owes it to his family _to give himself at his best_, that is,
+as far as possible, when his vitality is freshest and his powers
+keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family
+to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the
+wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children,
+time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have
+you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the
+mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and
+to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith,
+did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is
+often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some
+families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to
+the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is
+at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and
+reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for
+the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get
+at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public
+propaganda.
+
+Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families.
+Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are
+learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that
+two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic
+study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, while so readily
+granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child
+psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we
+should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge?
+There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest
+radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical
+handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder
+if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal
+scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but
+they are not willing to learn how to grow them.
+
+
+§ 3. FATHERING AS A MAN'S TASK
+
+It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of
+your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you.
+Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor
+by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has
+to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the
+time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We
+keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in
+real touch with the boy's world.
+
+Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate
+between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home
+and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion.
+Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and
+look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy
+to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their
+problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while
+remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already
+accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what
+the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and
+legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we
+proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.
+
+Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our
+finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure
+of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be
+what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves.
+All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must
+mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that
+life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his
+world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than
+ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of
+home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come
+upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as
+the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual
+self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of
+the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance
+to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to
+happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of
+peace.
+
+Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just
+as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its
+meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about
+divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or
+misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that
+divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the
+largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of
+our children.
+
+The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home
+have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is
+spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of
+your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious
+person to them.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. vii. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+     K.G. Busby, _Home Life in America_, chaps. i, ii. Macmillan,
+     $2.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     E.A. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     Allen, _Making the Most of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00
+     each.
+
+     Wilm, _The Culture of Religion_, chap. ii. Pilgrim Press, $0.75
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Which do you remember best, your teachers or your lessons? Why?
+
+     2. Describe, from your memory, some of the influences of
+     personality?
+
+     3. Are these influences greater or less with parents on children?
+
+     4. What are the causes that separate parents and children?
+
+     5. How shall we define duties to business, to society, and to the
+     family?
+
+     6. Under what circumstances is one justified in refusing time to
+     the church for the sake of the family?
+
+     7. What are the best times and opportunities for the strengthening
+     of the personal bonds between children and parents?
+
+     8. How shall we overcome the apparent difficulty of maintaining the
+     confidence of children?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
+
+
+Whether we can remedy the ills of family living today or not, we can
+determine the character of the family life of the future. The homes of
+tomorrow are being determined today. The children who swing their feet
+in schoolrooms and play in our gardens will control family living very
+soon. We can do little to reconstruct the old order; we can do
+everything to determine the new. When the mountain sides have been made
+bare, forest conservation cannot save the old trees, but it can prepare
+for new growths. Ours is the larger opportunity because we can determine
+the ideals of our children. Today we can determine that they shall not
+suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind
+ignorance that compelled us to find our own way. We shall see that,
+first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of
+tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first. If
+family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have
+submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of
+things, of materialism.
+
+
+§ 1. A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER
+
+The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a
+conscience for character through all our thinking on the family. We are
+really half-ashamed to talk of character. We blush for ideals but we
+have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of
+the things of beauty and we love only the useful. So we have become
+ashamed of the ideals of the home. Not only do we passively acquiesce in
+the popular attitude of indifference or derision, but we voice it
+ourselves. We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital
+infelicities. We would be ashamed to be caught singing "Home, Sweet
+Home." What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less
+and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial
+affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic
+factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its
+heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary,
+culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that
+you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire,
+turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are
+places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and
+start out from for real living. They are private hotels.
+
+If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of
+the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that
+people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that
+moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life.
+More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient
+right-doing. In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program
+of beginning today ourselves to set first things first, to conserve the
+human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in
+school and church and home count first of all for character. And that
+broader education we ourselves must test first of all by this, whether
+it makes youth competent to live aright, cultivates the love of worthy
+ideals, and makes him willing and able to pay the price of a trained
+life consecrated to the service of his world, to the love of his
+fellows, and to the making of a new world.
+
+We shall need, first, to safeguard the primary motives that enter into
+the founding of families. Those motives begin to develop early. They are
+in the making in childhood. Somehow we must plan the education of youths
+so that they will think of homes and of marriage in new terms. Possibly
+the public school will not only teach the physiology of marriage and the
+bare physical facts of sexual purity, but will teach new ideals of
+family life; it will count it at least as much a duty to cultivate a
+love of home as it is to cultivate a love of country. It can set so
+clearly the final objective of character that even children shall see
+that life has higher ends than money-making and the family greater
+purposes than garish social display.
+
+
+§ 2. THE CHURCH AIDING
+
+Certainly the church must seek to quicken and develop new ideals of
+family life; it must bring religion to our hearths and homes; it must
+worry less about a "home over there," and show how truly heavenly homes
+may be made here. It must not only get youth ready to die, it must
+prepare them to live; to live together on religious terms. It will do
+this, not only by general discussions in the pulpit, but by special
+instruction in classes. No church has a clear conscience in regard to
+any young person contemplating the duties of a family whom it has not
+directly instructed in the duties of that life.
+
+It is a strange spectacle, if we would stop long enough to look at it,
+of the church proclaiming a way of life but scarcely ever teaching it.
+In any church there is a large number of young people under instruction;
+what are they learning? Usually a theological interpretation of an
+ancient religious literature. Some still are learning to hate all other
+persons whose religion differs from the brand carried in that
+institution. In a few years these youths will be bearing social burdens,
+facing temptations, taking up duties; does their teaching relate at all
+to these things? No, indeed, that would be "worldly"; it would seem to
+be sacrilegious to teach them how actually to be religious. The business
+of the church school is still largely that of filling minds with
+theological data rather than training young, trainable lives to become
+religious schoolboys, religious voters, religious parents. How many have
+been at all influenced by Sunday-school teaching when they stepped into
+a polling-booth, when they chose a life-mate, when they guided or
+disciplined their children? If religious education does not at all
+influence us in the great events of life, of what value is it to us?
+Must it not be counted a sheer waste of time?
+
+If we would conserve the human values of the family we must train youth
+to a religious interpretation of the home. If we cannot do that in the
+church we might as well confess that the church cannot touch the sources
+of human affairs.
+
+
+§ 3. IDEALS AND METHODS
+
+No matter what the breadth of the interests of the public school, youth
+will still need training for family living given under religious
+auspices and with the religious aim. The day school may give courses in
+domestic economy, but family living demands more than ability to sweep a
+room or cook an egg. In fact, no one can be competent to meet its higher
+demands unless at least two things are accomplished, first, that he, or
+she, is led to see the family as essentially a religious, spiritual
+institution because it is an association of persons for the purpose of
+developing other persons to spiritual fulness; secondly, that he, or
+she, is moved to willingness to count the work of the family, its
+purpose and aim, as the highest in life and that for which one is
+willing to pay any price of time, treasure, thought, and endeavor.
+
+This means that the fundamental need is that our young people shall grow
+up with a new vision and a new passion for the home and family. That
+passion is needed to give value to any training in the economics or
+mechanics of the home; and that training is precisely the contribution
+which the church should make to all departments of life today. It is the
+prophet, the interpreter, revealing the spiritual meanings of all daily
+affairs and quickening us to right feeling, to highly directed passion
+for worthy ideals.
+
+From the general teaching, the high message of the church, directed to
+this special problem, there must be formed in the mind of the coming
+generation a new picture of the family, a new ethics of its life, a new
+evaluation of its worth. That can come in part by the prophetic message
+from the pulpit, but it will come more naturally and readily by regular
+teaching directed to the actual experiences and the coming needs of the
+young people who are to be home-makers. The soaring ideals pass over
+their heads, but when you teach the practice, the details of the life of
+the family in the spirit of these ideals, as interpreted and determined
+by the higher conception, then they catch the vision through the
+details.
+
+We need two types of classes in church schools in relation to the life
+of the family: First, classes for young people in which their social
+duties as religious persons are carefully taught and discussed. Perhaps
+such courses should not be specifically on "The Family," but this
+institution ought, in the course, to occupy a place proportionate to
+that which belongs to it in life. The instruction should be specific and
+detailed, not simply a series of homilies on "The Christian Family,"
+"Love of Home," etc., but taking up the great problems of the economic
+place of the family today, its spiritual function, questions of choice
+of life-partners, types of dwelling, finances and money relations in the
+family, children and their training, and the actual duties and problems
+which arise in family living.
+
+All topics should be treated from the dominant viewpoint of the family
+as a religious institution for the development of the lives of
+religious persons. The courses should be so arranged as to be given to
+young people of about twenty years of age, or of twenty to twenty-five.
+They should be among the electives offered in the church school.
+
+The second type of class would be for those who are already parents and
+who desire help on their special problems. Many schools now conduct such
+classes, meeting either on Sunday or during the week.[51] Work on
+"Parents' Problems," "Family Religious Education," and similar topics is
+also being given in the city institutes for religious workers. No church
+can be satisfied with its service to the community unless it provides
+opportunity for parents to study their work of character development
+through the family and to secure greater efficiency therein. Such
+classes need only three conditions: a clear understanding of the purpose
+of meeting the actual problems of religious training in the family, a
+leader or instructor who is really qualified to lead and to instruct in
+this subject, and an invitation to parents to avail themselves of this
+opportunity.
+
+The value of such a class would be greatly enhanced if it should be held
+in close co-ordination with similar classes or clubs conducted by the
+public schools.[52] Here all the parents of the community meet in the
+school building, not to discuss how the teachers may satisfy parental
+criticism, but to learn what the school has to teach on modern
+educational methods applied to the life of the child, especially in the
+family, and mutually to find ways of co-operation between the home and
+the school for the betterment of the child.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Articles in _Religious Education_, April, 1911, VI, 1-77.
+
+     Helen C. Putnam in _Religious Education_, June, 1911, VI, 159-66.
+
+     George W. Dawson in _Religious Education_, June, 1911, VI, 167-74.
+
+     Cabot, _Volunteer Help in the Schools_, chap. vii. Houghton Mifflin
+     Co., $0.60.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Forsyth, _Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion_. Hodder & Stoughton,
+     $1.25.
+
+     Lovejoy, _Self-Training for Motherhood_. American Unitarian
+     Association, $1.00.
+
+     Pomeroy, _Ethics of Marriage_. Funk & Wagnalls, $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. In how far are home problems due to the ignorance of parents?
+
+     2. What do you regard as the essentials in the training of parents?
+
+     3. Where can the necessary subjects best be taught?
+
+     4. What are the difficulties in the way of teaching these subjects
+     to young people?
+
+     5. In how far can we direct the reading of young people toward sane
+     and helpful knowledge of family life and duties?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[51] Pamphlets on plans for parents' classes: _The Home and the Sunday
+School_, Pilgrim Press; _Plans for Mothers' and Parents' Meetings_,
+Sunday School Times Co.; _How to Start a Mothers' Department_, David C.
+Cook Co.; _The Parents' Department of the Sunday School_, Connecticut
+Sunday School Association, Hartford, Conn.
+
+[52] See pamphlet published by the National Congress of Mothers: _How to
+Organize Parents' Associations and Mothers' Circles in Public Schools_.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIXES
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+SUGGESTIONS FOR CLASS WORK
+
+
+This book is designed for individual reading or for use in classes. It
+is not a textbook of the same character as a textbook in mathematics or
+history, but the material is arranged so as to be both easily readable
+and of ready analysis for classes. There are two methods of following
+the course: one by work conducted under a regular teacher in a class,
+and the other by private or correspondence study.
+
+
+§ 1. THE CLASS
+
+The class should be composed of parents and other adults, inasmuch as
+the work is designed for them. It may be a class in connection with the
+Sunday school in a church, a class conducted by a mothers' club or
+congress or by a parent-teacher association, or it may be organized
+under other auspices. Or it might be organized by a group of parents in
+any community. The class need not consist of either fathers or mothers
+alone, as the work is planned for both. In any case the work of teaching
+will be facilitated if, in addition to the customary officers of the
+class, the teacher will appoint a librarian, whose duties would be to
+ascertain for the members of the class where the books for study and
+for reference may be obtained, that is, whether they are in the public
+library, church library, or in private collections, and also, whenever
+it is desired to purchase books, where they may best be secured.
+
+
+§ 2. THE TEACHER
+
+The primary requisite for the teacher will be an eagerness to learn, a
+sufficiently deep interest in the subject to lead to thorough study. No
+one can teach this class who already knows all about the subject. A
+spirit sympathetic with the child and the life of the family and a mind
+willing to study the subject will accomplish much more than facile
+rhetorical familiarity with it. The best teacher will not often be "an
+easy talker" on the family; class time is too precious to be occupied
+with a lecture. While, naturally, one who is a parent will speak with
+greater experience than another, the ability to teach this subject
+cannot be limited to fathers and mothers; physiological parenthood is
+less important than spiritual parenthood. The teacher must have, then,
+willingness to study the subject, ability to teach as contrasted with
+mere talking, sympathy with parenthood, and a passion for the religious
+personal values in life.
+
+
+§ 3. GENERAL METHOD
+
+The teacher's aim will be to make this course definitely practical. The
+book is not concerned so much with theories of the family as with the
+present problems of the family, and especially with those that relate to
+moral and religious education. There must be a sense of definite
+problems to be concretely treated in all lessons. The teacher will
+therefore encourage discussion, but will also avoid the tendency to
+drift into desultory conversation. Direct the discussion to avoid
+tedious détours on side issues. Direct the discussion to avoid the
+tendency to treat superficially all the subject at one session. It will
+be necessary frequently to insist that attention be focused upon the
+immediate problems suggested by the lesson for the day, and to ask the
+class to wait until the subjects which they in their eagerness suggest
+shall come in their due order.
+
+Encourage personal experiences as sidelights and criticisms on the text,
+but remember that no single experience is conclusive. Beware of the
+over-elaboration and detailed narration of experiences.
+
+_Insist on a thorough study of the text._ Students should be so prepared
+as to make a lecture superfluous and to allow discussion to take the
+place of review and explanation. The greatest danger in parents' classes
+is that the members do not study; class work becomes indefinite and soon
+loses value. Again, the members of the class often are unwilling to be
+governed by the schedule of lessons, and the class drifts into aimless
+conversation. Adult students especially need to be turned from the
+tendency to regard educational experience as having come to an end with
+their school days. The members of this class will need encouragement;
+they must be stimulated patiently until they have re-formed some habits
+of study and rediscovered the pleasures of systematic thinking. The best
+stimulus will be a teacher so convinced of the supreme importance of the
+subject to be studied as to lead the members to recognize its importance
+and the insignificance of any price they may pay for efficient spiritual
+parenthood.
+
+
+§ 4. CLASS WORK
+
+At the first session teach chap. i, which is introductory. Draw out
+discussion on the points suggested therein, and assign this chapter and
+the one following for the next session. The first lesson will give the
+teacher opportunity to explain and illustrate the method of study,
+presentation, and discussion.
+
+Assign the work carefully each week, calling especial attention to the
+"References for Study." Secure promises from as many as possible to read
+at least one of these references and to prepare a written report, on one
+sheet of paper, for presentation at the next session. Ask others to look
+into the special points which will be found in the references given
+under the heading "Further Reading."
+
+In beginning a lesson it will be wise to call to mind first the
+principle running through the book, that the great work of the family is
+the development of religious persons in the home; then call to mind the
+application of this principle in the last lesson. Make your review very
+brief.
+
+Next, bring out the leading topic of the lesson for the day. This should
+be done so as to present a vital issue and a live topic to the class.
+Very often the best way of doing this is to state a concrete case
+involving the issue discussed. The presentation of a definite set of
+circumstances or a fairly complete experience involving the fundamental
+principles under discussion is an instance of teaching by the "case
+method." If the teacher will consider how the law student is trained by
+the study of _particular cases_, the advantage of the method will be
+clear. Be sure that the "case" selected will include the principles to
+be taught. Prepare the statement of the case beforehand. This should be
+done in a very brief narrative, so giving the instance as to enable the
+class to see the reality of the question. Be sure that your instance is
+itself vital and probable. A class of adults will especially need such
+points of vital contact. By announcing the topic in advance the teacher
+will often be able to obtain definite cases in point from the members.
+
+With the case thus presented take the points in the text and apply them,
+first to the special case alone, but with the purpose of developing the
+principles involved in that and similar cases. Beware of the special
+danger of the case method, namely, that the class may discuss the
+specific instances rather than the principles.
+
+_Teaching is more than telling_; it is stimulating other minds to see
+and comprehend and state for themselves. Therefore the teacher must
+first comprehend and be able to state for himself. Avoid repeating the
+phrases of the text. Get them over into your own language and see that
+the class does the same. Do not fail to call for the brief reports on
+reading, and to make them a real part of the subject of discussion.
+
+_Questioning_ is the natural method of stimulating minds. Use the
+question method, but do not confine yourself to "What does the author
+say on this?" Direct your questions to the points stated and the issues
+raised so as to compel students to think on the topics and so as to draw
+out the results of their thinking. Form your own judgments and help the
+class to form theirs too. Remember that the purpose of the class is to
+get people thinking on the great subjects discussed. The text is not
+written in order that groups of students may learn the author's
+statements, but that they may be led to think seriously on all these
+matters and stimulated to do something about them.
+
+Use the "discussion topics" given at the end of each lesson. They are
+not designed to furnish a syllabus of the lesson, but to suggest
+important questions for discussion, some of which may barely be
+mentioned in the text. They may be used in assigning the advance work,
+giving topics to different students, and they may be used in your review
+of the previous lesson.
+
+A syllabus of each lesson will be helpful, provided it be prepared by
+the students themselves. Encourage the careful reading of the lesson by
+every member of the class, letting the syllabus grow out of this.
+
+Notebooks will have their largest value if used at home for two
+purposes: first, to set down the student's analysis of the book as he
+reads, secondly, to record the student's observations on definite
+problems and on practice in the home. Note-taking in the class will have
+very little value unless it is backed up by study at home.
+
+_Generalization._ Have clearly in your own mind a definite concept of
+the general principle underlying each section. Read through each section
+until you can state the principle for yourself. Bring your teaching into
+a focus at the point of that principle before the lesson ends. Try to
+get the members of the class to state the principle in their own words.
+
+_In action:_ The principles will have little value unless translated
+into practical methods; direct your teaching to their actual use in
+families. Your generalization is for guidance into application. Urge
+that the plans described be actually tried. Expect this and call for
+reports on plans tested in the daily experience of families. If a number
+of students would try, for example, the plan of worship suggested for
+two or three weeks and report their experiences in writing, together
+with the accounts of any other plans tried, a valuable budget of helpful
+knowledge could thus be gathered.[53]
+
+_Conference plan:_ Some classes will be able to meet twice a week,
+taking the lesson at one session and at another spending the time in
+conference. At the conference period the program might provide for (1)
+brief papers by members of the class on topics personally assigned, (2)
+abstracts or summaries of assigned readings, (3) discussion on the
+particular points raised in the papers, and (4) conference on unsettled
+questions from the lesson for the class period preceding.
+
+_Club work:_ A parents' club might be organized, either in a church or
+in connection with a school, which would use this textbook, follow the
+study work with conferences, and would secure for its own use a library
+of the books listed after each chapter. Such a club would be able to put
+into practice some of the plans advocated and could encourage their
+application in groups of families.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[53] The teachers are especially invited to secure records of actual
+experiments of this character. Accounts of tried methods of family
+worship, especially those with new features, which should be given in
+some detail as to the exact plan, the circumstances, the material used,
+and the results, should be sent to the author in care of the publishers.
+Perhaps in this way material which may be valuable to large numbers may
+be gathered.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+A BOOK LIST
+
+
+The following books would be found useful for the working library of a
+class or club following the study of this text or for a section of the
+church library on the home and family. The books marked with an asterisk
+are the ones which may be regarded as of first practical value to
+parents and others studying the development of character in the life of
+the family.
+
+In addition to the titles mentioned below, the the references at the end
+of each chapter in this book will furnish a list of other sources of
+valuable material.
+
+
+     I. the Institution of the Family
+
+     C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.
+     A historical survey of the family with a special study of its
+     modern dangers and needs.
+
+     P.T. Forsyth, _Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion_. Hodder &
+     Stoughton, $1.25. An important, popular statement of the ethics of
+     marriage as the foundation of family life.
+
+     *W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50
+     net. The most important recent book on the family; traces its
+     historical development, the ethical ideals involved in the
+     institution, and discusses its present problems and perplexities.
+
+     Katherine G. Busby, _Home Life in America_. Macmillan, $2.00 net. A
+     popular statement of the outstanding characteristics of life in
+     American homes; entertaining and informing.
+
+     *Clyde W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25. A careful
+     and comprehensive survey, of great value.
+
+     Charles A.L. Reed, _Marriage and Genetics_. Galton Press,
+     Cincinnati, Ohio, $1.00. A surgeon's message on eugenics,
+     especially on the aspects indicated in the title. A study of the
+     laws of human breeding.
+
+
+     II. Child Nature
+
+     *E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_. Pilgrim Press,
+     $0.50. A textbook dealing with the nature of the child and with
+     problems of his training in the home.
+
+     *Irving King, _The High School Age_. Bobbs-Merrill & Co., $1.00
+     net. A study of the nature and needs of boys and girls in the first
+     period of adolescence. Written for all who are alive to the
+     problems of this period as well as for school people; gives
+     constructive suggestions for educational problems.
+
+     Elizabeth Harrison, _A Study of the Child Nature_. Chicago
+     Kindergarten College, $1.00. Long recognized as a standard for
+     parents in the study of the development and functions of the
+     child-life.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Right of the Child to Be Well Born_. Funk &
+     Wagnalls, $0.75. A plain study of eugenics, non-technical and
+     helpful; includes a chapter on eugenics and religion. To be
+     commended to parents.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Child and His Religion_. The University of
+     Chicago Press, $0.75. The religious nature and needs of the child
+     with some suggestions as to method.
+
+     *W. Arter Wright, _The Moral Conditions and Development of the
+     Child_. Jennings & Graham, $0.75. An important and valuable book on
+     the newer views of the religious development of the child-life.
+
+     Frederick Tracy and J. Stempfl, _The Psychology of Childhood_. D.C.
+     Heath & Co., $1.20. Gathers up the general results in the field of
+     child psychology.
+
+     *W.G. Koons, _The Child's Religious Life_. Jennings & Graham,
+     $1.00. From the modern point of view, dealing with some of the
+     interesting problems of the relation of the child to religious life
+     and the development of his religious ideas.
+
+     Thomas Stephens, _The Child and Religion_. Putnam, $1.50. A series
+     of short papers by English writers, particularly on the question of
+     child conversion.
+
+     George A. Hubbell, _Up through Childhood_. Putnam, $1.25. A good
+     general review with special reference to religious problems and
+     religious institutions.
+
+     Edith E.R. Mumford, _The Dawn of Character_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.20. A very important book, dealing especially with the moral
+     development of young children.
+
+
+     III. Training in the Home
+
+     William B. Forbush (ed.), _Guide Book to Childhood_. American
+     Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa. Very valuable as a guide
+     to reading on the many problems of child-training.
+
+     LeGrand Kerr, _The Care and Training of the Child_. Funk &
+     Wagnalls, $0.75. A good, general, brief study of the nature of the
+     child and the method of education.
+
+     William J. Shearer, _The Management and Training of the Child_.
+     Richardson, Smith & Co. A popular and practical statement of many
+     problems and their treatment in the home and school.
+
+     John Wirt Dinsmore, _The Training of Children_. American Book Co.
+     While written for school-teachers, this is one of the best studies
+     which parents could possibly read.
+
+     A.A. Berle, _The School in the Home_. Moffat, Yard & Co., $1.00.
+     Contains much valuable suggestion to parents who really desire to
+     take advantage of the educational opportunities of the home.
+
+     John Locke, _How to Train Up Your Children_. Sampson, Low, Marston
+     & Co., London. Written over two hundred years ago, and yet of very
+     great value in many parts to day.
+
+     *William B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation_. D. Appleton & Co.,
+     $1.50. Discusses the various aspects of child-training in the light
+     of the social consciousness of today. Many of the public agencies
+     for child betterment are carefully discussed.
+
+     *William A. McKeever, _Training the Girl_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     *----, _Training the Boy_. Macmillan, $1.50. These two books
+     constitute one of the best collections of material, most practical
+     and helpful. They view girls and boys as active factors and all the
+     phases of home and community life are studied with reference to
+     their needs.
+
+
+     IV. Special Religious Training in the Home
+
+     *George Hodges, _The Training of the Child in Religion_. D.
+     Appleton & Co., $1.50. One of the few books dealing in any modern
+     manner with the special problems of the religious life of the
+     family.
+
+     Rev. William Becker, _Christian Education or The Duties of
+     Parents_. B. Herder, St. Louis, $1.00. Recent and interesting
+     sermons on the duties of parents in the religious education of the
+     Catholic child; a striking example of messages that ought to be
+     heard from every pulpit.
+
+     John T. Faris, _Pleasant Sunday Afternoons for the Children_.
+     Sunday School Times Co., $0.50. A number of practical plans are
+     suggested.
+
+     *George A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_. Fleming H.
+     Revell Co., $1.35. A book which all parents ought to read for its
+     valuable guidance on the general principles of religious education.
+
+     Elizabeth Grinnell, _How John and I Brought Up the Children_.
+     American Sunday School Union, $0.70. A popular statement in a
+     simple form of methods of dealing with many of the problems of
+     religious training.
+
+
+     V. Moral Training
+
+     Edward H. Griggs, _Moral Education_. B.W. Huebsch, $1.60. One of
+     the best-known books on this question, readable and helpful at many
+     points.
+
+     Ennis Richmond, _The Mind of the Child_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.00. One of the most helpful books because of its new and
+     refreshing point of view.
+
+     *Edward O. Sisson, _The Essentials of Character_. Macmillan, $1.00.
+     A book on the broad principles and ideals; one dealing with the
+     outstanding elements of character.
+
+     Ernest H. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin
+     Co., $1.00. A bright statement of some of the most perplexing
+     problems of family life.
+
+     *Mary Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. First and
+     Second Series. A.C. McClurg & Co., $1.00 each. Takes one after
+     another of the different situations in child-training.
+
+     *Patterson DuBois, _The Culture of Justice_. Dodd, Mead & Co.,
+     $0.75. An important contribution, as it calls attention to some
+     frequently neglected aspects of moral training especially
+     applicable to the home.
+
+     Walter L. Sheldon, _Duties in the Home_. W.M. Welch & Co. A
+     textbook, the thirty sections of which would furnish an excellent
+     basis for parents' discussions of home discipline.
+
+
+     VI. General Reading in the Home
+
+     John Macy, _Child's Guide to Reading_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.25. A
+     discussion of reading and the education of children thereby, with
+     suggestions and criticisms of suitable books in different
+     departments of reading.
+
+     W.T. Taylor, _Finger Posts to Children's Reading_. A.C. McClurg &
+     Co., $1.00. A practical discussion of suitable reading for
+     children, with a list of books.
+
+     *G.W. Arnold, _A Mothers' List of Books for Children_. A.C. McClurg
+     & Co., $1.00. The books are arranged by ages and topics, making
+     this one of the most useful collections available.
+
+     Edward P. St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.35. A textbook, for parents' classes. It contains much valuable
+     material.
+
+     E.M. Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_. Sturgis &
+     Walton, $1.35. One of the best discussions of the principles and
+     methods of story-telling, with a number of good stories.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Activity in relation to character, 75
+
+Amusement of young people, 190
+
+Anger, Dealing with, 224
+
+
+Bible, Methods of using the, 121
+
+Bible, The, in the home, 119
+
+Blessing at table, 133
+
+Book list on the family, 290
+
+Books and reading, 113
+
+Boy, The, in the family, 173
+
+Boys' play, 175
+
+Bullying, 253
+
+
+Character, A constructive policy for, 269
+
+Child nature, Books on, 291
+
+Child unity with the church, 207
+
+Child welfare, Religious meanings of, 3
+
+Childhood characteristics, 53
+
+Christian family, The, as a type, 41
+
+Church, The, and the children, 204
+
+Church, The, and the family, 198
+
+Church, The, and the program of the home, 271
+
+Citizenship, Training for, 96
+
+Class work, Plans of, 281
+
+Community, The, in relation to the home, 88
+
+Community service, 91
+
+Conversation, Religious, 62
+
+Courtship, 188
+
+
+Dishonesty, 249
+
+
+Economic development of the home, 13
+
+Educational function, The, of the family, 46
+
+Educational process, The, 49
+
+
+Factory system, The, and the home, 14
+
+Family as an institution, Books on the, 290
+
+"Family Book," 155
+
+Family defined, 5
+
+Family ideal in the church, 202
+
+Family life, Dominating motive of, 27
+
+Family worship, 126
+
+Family worship, Methods of, 133
+
+Father, The, and the boy, 177
+
+Father, The, and the family, 263
+
+Fighting among children, 234
+
+Function of the family, 46
+
+Future of the family, 268
+
+
+Girl, The, in the family, 180
+
+God, The consciousness of, 64
+
+Grace at table, 133
+
+
+Hebrew family life, 39
+
+Home and school co-operation, 213
+
+Home, is it passing? 10
+
+Home, Religious interpretation of, 1
+
+Home versus family, 18, 22
+
+Honesty, Training in, 249
+
+Hymns for children, 102
+
+
+Jesus' teaching on the family, 42
+
+
+Loyalty as the basic principle, 31, 54
+
+Loyalty, The organization of, 57
+
+Lying and the moral problem, 240
+
+
+Meals, Conversation at, 165
+
+Moral crises, Dealing with, 218
+
+Moral life, religious roots in the family, 31
+
+Moral teaching, 70
+
+Moral training, Books on, 294
+
+Motive, Religious, in the family, 2
+
+Music in the family, 105
+
+
+Organization of home, Purpose of, 19
+
+
+Parental aversion, 186
+
+Parenthood and religious training, 260
+
+Parents' classes, 274
+
+Parents trained in schools, 214
+
+Petulancy in children, 233
+
+Play activity, 107
+
+Play, A policy of, 150
+
+Play on Sunday, 149
+
+Prayers, Children's, 135
+
+Prayers, Family, 137
+
+
+Quarrels of children, 231
+
+Questions, Children's, 69
+
+
+Reading, Developing taste for, 115
+
+Religious character of the family, 46
+
+Religious development of the child, 52
+
+Religious education in the family, Books on, 293
+
+Religious education, Meaning of, 47
+
+Religious growth of the child, 55
+
+Religious history of the family, 37
+
+Religious ideas of children, 60
+
+Religious service, 78, 80
+
+
+School, The home as a, 87
+
+Schools, Public, and the home, 212
+
+Self-control, Developing, 227, 236
+
+Social life of youth, 189
+
+Social qualities to be developed, 28
+
+Social training, 29, 82, 92
+
+Socialization of the home, 16
+
+Song and story, 101
+
+Spiritual values, Place of, 30
+
+Stories and reading, 110
+
+Story-telling, 110
+
+Sunday afternoon problem, 154
+
+Sunday in the home, 145
+
+Sunday play, 149
+
+
+Table, Ministry of the, 164
+
+Table-talk, 169
+
+Teasing and bullying, 253
+
+
+Will, Training the, 221
+
+Work and character, 76
+
+Worship in the family, 126
+
+Worship, Outlines of, 139
+
+
+Youth in the home, 183
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONSTRUCTIVE STUDIES
+
+
+The Constructive Studies comprise volumes suitable for all grades, from
+kindergarten to adult years, in schools or churches. In the production
+of these studies the editors and authors have sought to embody not only
+their own ideals but the best product of the thought of all who are
+contributing to the theory and practice of modern religious education.
+They have had due regard for fundamental principles of pedagogical
+method, for the results of the best modern biblical scholarship, and for
+those contributions to religious education which may be made by the use
+of a religious interpretation of all life-processes, whether in the
+field of science, literature, or social phenomena.
+
+Their task is not regarded as complete because of having produced one or
+more books suitable for each grade. There will be a constant process of
+renewal and change, and the possible setting aside of books which,
+because of changing conditions in the religious world or further advance
+in the science of religious education, no longer perform their function,
+and the continual enrichment of the series by new volumes so that it may
+always be adapted to those who are taking initial steps in modern
+religious education, as well as to those who have accepted and are ready
+to put into practice the most recent theories.
+
+As teachers profoundly interested in the problems of religious
+education, the editors have invited to co-operate with them authors
+chosen from a wide territory and in several instances already well known
+through practical experiments in the field in which they are asked to
+write.
+
+The editors are well aware that those who are most deeply interested in
+religious education hold that churches and schools should be accorded
+perfect independence in their choice of literature regardless of
+publishing-house interests and they heartily sympathize with this
+standard. They realize that many schools will select from the
+Constructive Studies such volumes as they prefer, but at the same time
+they hope that the Constructive Studies will be most widely serviceable
+as a series. The following analysis of the series will help the reader
+to get the point of view of the editors and authors.
+
+
+KINDERGARTEN, 4-6 YEARS
+
+The kindergarten child needs most of all to gain those simple ideals of
+life which will keep him in harmony with his surroundings in the home,
+at play, and in the out-of-doors. He is most susceptible to a religious
+interpretation of all these, which can best be fostered through a
+program of story, play, handwork, and other activities as outlined in
+
+     _The Sunday Kindergarten_ (Ferris). A teachers' manual giving
+     directions for the use of a one- or two-hour period with story,
+     song, play, and handwork. Permanent and temporary material for the
+     children's table work, and story leaflets to be taken home.
+
+
+PRIMARY, 6-8 YEARS, GRADES I-III
+
+At the age of six years when children enter upon a new era because of
+their recognition by the first grade in the public schools the
+opportunity for the cultivation of right social reactions is
+considerably increased. Their world still, however, comprises chiefly
+the home, the school, the playground, and the phenomena of nature. A
+normal religion at this time is one which will enable the child to
+develop the best sort of life in all these relationships, which now
+present more complicated moral problems than in the earlier stage.
+Religious impressions may be made through interpretations of nature,
+stories of life, song, prayer, simple scripture texts, and handwork. All
+of these are embodied in
+
+     _Child Religion in Song and Story_ (Chamberlin and Kern). Three
+     interchangeable volumes; only one of which is used at one time in
+     all three grades. Each lesson presents a complete service, song,
+     prayers, responses, texts, story, and handwork. Constructive and
+     beautiful handwork books are provided for the pupil.
+
+
+JUNIOR, 9 YEARS, GRADE IV
+
+When the children have reached the fourth grade they are able to read
+comfortably and have developed an interest in books, having a "reading
+book" in school and an accumulating group of story-books at home. One
+book in the household is as yet a mystery, the Bible, of which the
+parents speak reverently as God's Book. It contains many interesting
+stories and presents inspiring characters which are, however, buried in
+the midst of much that would not interest the children. To help them to
+find these stories and to show them the living men who are their heroes
+or who were the writers of the stories, the poems, or the letters, makes
+the Bible to them a living book which they will enjoy more and more as
+the years pass. This service is performed by
+
+     _An Introduction to the Bible for Teachers of Children_
+     (Chamberlin). Story-reading from the Bible for the school and home,
+     designed to utilize the growing interest in books and reading found
+     in children of this age, in cultivating an attitude of intelligent
+     interest in the Bible and enjoyment of suitable portions of it.
+     Full instructions with regard to picturesque, historical, and
+     social introductions are given the teacher. A pupil's homework
+     book, designed to help him to think of the story as a whole and to
+     express his thinking, is provided for the pupil.
+
+
+JUNIOR, 10-12 YEARS, GRADES V-VII
+
+Children in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades are hero-worshipers. In
+the preceding grade they have had a brief introduction to the life of
+Jesus through their childish explorations of the gospels. His character
+has impressed them already as heroic and they are eager to know more
+about him, therefore the year is spent in the study of
+
+     _The Life of Jesus_ (Gates). The story of Jesus graphically
+     presented from the standpoint of a hero. A teacher's manual
+     contains full instructions for preparation of material and
+     presentation to the class. A partially completed story of Jesus
+     prepared for the introduction of illustrations, maps, and original
+     work, together with all materials required, is provided for the
+     pupil.
+
+In the sixth grade a new point of approach to some of the heroes with
+whom the children are already slightly acquainted seems desirable. The
+Old Testament furnishes examples of men who were brave warriors,
+magnanimous citizens, loyal patriots, great statesmen, and champions of
+democratic justice. To make the discovery of these traits in ancient
+characters and to interpret them in the terms of modern boyhood and
+girlhood is the task of two volumes in the list. The choice between them
+will be made on the basis of preference for handwork or textbook work
+for the children.
+
+     _Heroes of Israel_ (Soares). Stories selected from the Old
+     Testament which are calculated to inspire the imagination of boys
+     and girls of the early adolescent period. The most complete
+     instructions for preparation and presentation of the lesson are
+     given the teacher in his manual. The pupil's book provides the full
+     text of each story and many questions which will lead to the
+     consideration of problems arising in the life of boys and girls of
+     this age.
+
+     _Old Testament Stories_ (Corbett). Also a series of stories
+     selected from the Old Testament. Complete instructions for vivid
+     presentation are given the teacher in his manual. The pupil's
+     material consists of a notebook containing a great variety of
+     opportunities for constructive handwork.
+
+Paul was a great hero. Most people know him only as a theologian. His
+life presents miracles of courage, struggle, loyalty, and
+self-abnegation. The next book in the series is intended to help the
+pupil to see such a man. The student is assisted by a wealth of local
+color.
+
+     _Paul of Tarsus_ (Atkinson). The story of Paul which is partially
+     presented to the pupil and partially the result of his own
+     exploration in the Bible and in the library. Much attention is
+     given to story of Paul's boyhood and his adventurous travels,
+     inspiring courage and loyalty to a cause. The pupil's notebook is
+     similar in form to the one used in the study of Gates's "Life of
+     Jesus," but more advanced in thought.
+
+
+HIGH SCHOOL, 13-17 YEARS
+
+In the secular school the work of the eighth grade is tending toward
+elimination. It is, therefore, considered here as one of the high-school
+grades. In the high-school years new needs arise. There is necessary a
+group of books which will dignify the study of the Bible and give it as
+history and literature a place in education, at least equivalent to that
+of other histories and literatures which have contributed to the
+progress of the world. This series is rich in biblical studies which
+will enable young people to gain a historical appreciation of the
+religion which they profess. Such books are
+
+     _The Gospel According to Mark_ (Burton). A study of the life of
+     Jesus from this gospel. The full text is printed in the book, which
+     is provided with a good dictionary and many interesting notes and
+     questions of very great value to both teacher and pupil.
+
+     _The First Book of Samuel_ (Willett). Textbook for teacher and
+     pupil in which the fascinating stories of Samuel, Saul, and David
+     are graphically presented. The complete text of the first book of
+     Samuel is given, many interesting explanatory notes, and questions
+     which will stir the interest of the pupil, not only in the present
+     volume but in the future study of the Old Testament.
+
+     _The Life of Christ_ (Burgess). A careful historical study of the
+     life of Christ from the four gospels. A manual for teacher and
+     pupil presents a somewhat exhaustive treatment, but full
+     instructions for the selection of material for classes in which but
+     one recitation a week occurs are given the teacher in a separate
+     outline.
+
+     _The Hebrew Prophets_ (Chamberlin). An inspiring presentation of
+     the lives of some of the greatest of the prophets from the point of
+     view of their work as citizens and patriots. In the manual for
+     teachers and pupils the biblical text in a good modern translation
+     is included.
+
+     _Christianity in the Apostolic Age_ (Gilbert). A story of early
+     Christianity chronologically presented, full of interest in the
+     hands of a teacher who enjoys the historical point of view.
+
+In the high-school years also young people find it necessary to face the
+problem of living the Christian life in a modern world, both as a
+personal experience and as a basis on which to build an ideal society.
+To meet this need a number of books intended to inspire boys and girls
+to look forward to taking their places as home-builders and responsible
+citizens of a great Christian democracy and to intelligently choose
+their task in it are prepared or in preparation. The following are now
+ready:
+
+     _Problems of Boyhood_ (Johnson). A series of chapters discussing
+     matters of supreme interest to boys and girls, but presented from
+     the point of view of the boy. A splendid preparation for efficiency
+     in all life's relationships.
+
+     _Lives Worth Living_ (Peabody). A series of studies of important
+     women, biblical and modern, representing different phases of life
+     and introducing the opportunity to discuss the possibilities of
+     effective womanhood in the modern world.
+
+     _The Third and Fourth Generation_ (Downing). A series of studies in
+     heredity based upon studies of phenomena in the natural world and
+     leading up to important historical facts and inferences in the
+     human world.
+
+
+ADULT GROUP
+
+The Biblical studies assigned to the high-school period are in most
+cases adaptable to adult class work. There are other volumes, however,
+intended only for the adult group, which also includes the young people
+beyond the high-school age. They are as follows:
+
+     _The Life of Christ_ (Burton and Mathews). A careful historical
+     study of the life of Christ from the four gospels, with copious
+     notes, reading references, maps, etc.
+
+     _What Jesus Taught_ (Slaten). This book develops an unusual but
+     stimulating method of teaching groups of students in colleges,
+     Christian associations, and churches. After a swift survey of the
+     material and spiritual environment of Jesus this book suggests
+     outlines for _discussions_ of his teaching on such topics as
+     civilization, hate, war and non-resistance, democracy, religion,
+     and similar topics. Can be effectively used by laymen as well as
+     professional leaders.
+
+     _Great Men of the Christian Church_ (Walker). A series of
+     delightful biographies of men who have been influential in great
+     crises in the history of the church.
+
+     _Christian Faith for Men of Today_ (Cook). A re-interpretation of
+     old doctrines in the light of modern attitudes.
+
+     _Social Duties from the Christian Point of View_ (Henderson).
+     Practical studies in the fundamental social relationships which
+     make up life in the family, the city, and the state.
+
+     _Religious Education in the Family_ (Cope). An illuminating study
+     of the possibilities of a normal religious development in the
+     family life. Invaluable to parents.
+
+     _Christianity and Its Bible_ (Waring). A remarkably comprehensive
+     sketch of the Old and the New Testament religion, the Christian
+     church, and the present status of Christianity.
+
+It is needless to say that the Constructive Studies present no sectarian
+dogmas and are used by churches and schools of all denominational
+affiliations. In the grammar-and high-school years more books are
+provided than there are years in which to study them, each book
+representing a school year's work. Local conditions, and the preference
+of the Director of Education or the teacher of the class will be the
+guide in choosing the courses desired, remembering that in the preceding
+list the approximate place given to the book is the one which the
+editors and authors consider most appropriate.
+
+For prices consult the latest price list. Address
+
+The University of Chicago Press
+Chicago    Illinois
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY***
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Religious Education in the Family, by Henry
+F. Cope</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Religious Education in the Family</p>
+<p>Author: Henry F. Cope</p>
+<p>Release Date: January 21, 2006  [eBook #17570]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: UTF-8</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Stacy Brown Thellend, Kevin Handy, John Hagerson,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net/)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1 class="padtop">
+RELIGIOUS EDUCATION<br />
+IN THE FAMILY<br />
+</h1>
+
+<h3><i>By</i></h3>
+
+<h2><span class="smcap">Henry F. Cope</span></h2>
+
+<h3><i>General Secretary of the Religious Education
+Association</i></h3>
+
+
+<h3 class="padtop">THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS<br />
+CHICAGO, ILLINOIS</h3>
+
+<h5 style="margin-bottom: .5em;">
+<span class="smcap plain">Copyright 1915 By<br />
+The University of Chicago</span></h5>
+
+<hr style='width: 10%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;' />
+
+<h5 style="margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;" class="plain">All Rights Reserved</h5>
+
+<hr style='width: 10%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;' />
+
+<h5 style="margin-top: .5em;" class="plain">Published April 1915<br />
+Second Impression September 1915<br />
+Third Impression March 1916<br />
+Fourth Impression June 1917<br />
+Fifth Impression August 1920<br />
+Sixth Impression July 1922<br />
+Seventh Impression September 1922</h5>
+
+<h5 style="margin-top: 4em;" class="plain">Composed and Printed By<br />
+The University of Chicago Press<br />
+Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.</h5>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<h4 style="margin-bottom: .5em;">THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS<br />
+CHICAGO, ILLINOIS</h4>
+
+<hr style='width: 10%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;' />
+
+<h5 style="margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;">THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY<br />
+NEW YORK</h5>
+
+<hr style='width: 10%; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;' />
+
+<h5 style="margin-top: .5em;">THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS<br />
+LONDON<br />
+THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA<br />
+TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI<br />
+THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY<br />
+SHANGHAI</h5>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">The Editors</span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table class="center" summary="toc" cellpadding="5">
+<tbody>
+<tr>
+<td class="right">I.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">An Interpretation of the Family</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">II.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Present Status of Family Life</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_10">10</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">III.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Permanent Elements in Family Life</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">IV.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Religious Place of the Family</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">V.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Meaning Of Religious Education in the Family</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">VI.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Child's Religious Ideas</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">VII.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Directed Activity</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">VIII.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Home as a School</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">IX.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Child's Ideal Life</span></td>  <td class="right">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_101">101</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">X.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Stories and Reading</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_110">110</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XI.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Use of the Bible in the Home</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_119">119</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XII.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Family Worship</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_126">126</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XIII.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Sunday in the Home</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_145">145</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XIV.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Ministry of the Table</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_164">164</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XV.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Boy and Girl in the Family</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_173">173</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XVI.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Needs of Youth</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XVII.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Family and the Church</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XVIII.</td> <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Children and the School</span></td>     <td class="right"><a href="#Page_212"> 212</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XIX.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Dealing with Moral Crises</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_218">218</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XX.</td> <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Dealing with Moral Crises</span> (<i>Continued</i>)</td>     <td class="right"><a href="#Page_231"> 231</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XXI.</td> <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Dealing with Moral Crises</span> (<i>Continued</i>)</td>   <td class="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XXII.</td> <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Dealing with Moral Crises</span> (<i>Concluded</i>)</td>  <td class="right"> <a href="#Page_249">249</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XXIII.</td> <td class="left"><span class="smcap">The Personal Factors in Religious Education</span> </td>     <td class="right"><a href="#Page_259">259</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right">XXIV.</td>  <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Looking to the Future</span></td>  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_268">268</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td></td> <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Suggestions for Class Work</span></td>      <td class="right"><a href="#Page_281">281</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td></td> <td class="left"><span class="smcap">A Book List</span></td>     <td class="right"> <a href="#Page_281">290</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td></td> <td class="left"><span class="smcap">Index</span></td>     <td class="right"><a href="#Page_281"> 297</a></td>
+</tr></tbody>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>AN INTERPRETATION OF THE FAMILY</h3>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. TAKING THE HOME IN RELIGIOUS TERMS</h4>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They who marry for lust are divorced for further lust. Selfishness, even
+in its form of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE RELIGIOUS MOTIVE</h4>
+
+<p>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 <i>family</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. WIDER CHILD-WELFARE</h4>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. THE COST OF A FAMILY</h4>
+
+<p>Taking the home in religious terms will mean, then, conceiving it as an
+institution with a religious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span> of life, the chance to find that short cut to happiness which
+men call pain and suffering.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">1</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. MOTIVES FOR A STUDY OF THE FAMILY</h4>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>Edward Lyttleton, <i>The Corner-Stone of Education</i>, chaps. i, vii.
+Putnam, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>A. Gandier, "Religious Education in the Home," <i>Religious
+Education</i>, June, 1914, pp. 233-42.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Family a Religious Agency</i></p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;F. and C.&nbsp;B. Thwing, <i>The Family</i>. Lothrop, Lee &amp; Shepard, $1.60.</p>
+
+<p>J.&nbsp;D. Folsom, <i>Religious Education in the Home</i>. Eaton &amp; Mains,
+$0.75.</p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;A. Coe, <i>Education in Religion and Morals</i>. Revell, $1.35.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><i>The Place of the Family</i></p>
+
+<p>A.&nbsp;J. Todd, <i>The Family as an Educational Agency</i>. Putnam, $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;F. Lofthouse, <i>Ethics and the Family</i>. Hodder &amp; Stoughton, $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>J.&nbsp;B. Robins, <i>The Family a Necessity</i>. Revell, $1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>3. State in your own terms the ultimate reasons for the maintenance
+of a family.</p>
+
+<p>4. What are the motives which would make people willing to bear the
+high cost of founding and conducting a home?</p>
+
+<p>5. What points of emphasis does this study suggest in the matter of
+the education of public opinion?</p>
+
+<p>6. State your distinction between the family and the home; which is
+the more important and why?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">1</span></a> <i>The Corner-Stone of Education</i>, by Edward Lyttleton,
+headmaster of Eton, is a striking argument on the determinative
+influence of parental habits and attitudes of mind.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE PRESENT STATUS OF FAMILY LIFE</h3>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. CONTRASTED TYPES</h4>
+
+<p>In a beautiful village, in one of the farther western states, two men
+were discussing the possible future of the home and of family life.
+Sitting in the brilliant moonlight, looking through the leafy shades,
+watching the lights of a score of homes, each surrounded by lawn and
+shade trees, each with its group on the front porch, where vines trailed
+and flowers bloomed, listening to the hum of conversation and the
+strains of music in one home and another, it seemed, to at least one of
+these men, that this type of living could hardly pass away. The separate
+home, each family a complete social integer, each with its own circle of
+activities and interests, its own group, and its own table and fireside,
+seemed too fine and beautiful, too fair and helpful, to perish under
+economic pressure. Indeed, one felt that the village home furnished a
+setting for life and a soil for character development far higher and
+more efficient than could be afforded by any other domestic
+arrangement&mdash;that it approached the ideal.</p>
+
+<p>But two weeks later two men sat in an upper room, in the second largest
+city in America, dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span>cussing again the future of the family. Instead of
+the quiet music of the village, the clang of street cars filled the
+ears, trains rushed by, children shouted from the paved highway,
+families were seated by open windows in crowded apartments, seeking cool
+air; the total impression was that of being placed in a pigeonhole in a
+huge, heated, filing-case, where each separate space was occupied by a
+family. One felt the pressure of heated, crowded kitchens, suffocating
+little dining-rooms; one knew that the babies lay crying in their beds
+at night, gasping their very lives away, and that the young folks were
+wandering off to amusement parks and moving-picture shows. Here was an
+entirely different picture. How long could family life persist under
+these conditions where privacy was almost gone and comfort almost
+unknown?</p>
+
+<p>In the village separate home integers appear ideal; in the city they are
+possible only to the few. The many, at present, find them a crushing
+burden. Desirable as privacy is, it can be purchased at too high a
+price. It costs too much to maintain separate kitchens and dining-rooms
+under city conditions.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. COMMUNAL TENDENCIES</h4>
+
+<p>Present conditions spell waste, inefficiency, discomfort. The woman
+lives all day in stifling rooms, poorly lighted, with the nerve-racking
+life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span> of neighbors pouring itself through walls and windows. The men
+come from crowded shops and the children from crowded schoolrooms to
+crowd themselves into these rooms, to snatch a meal, or to sleep. How
+can there be real family life? What joy can there be or what ideals
+created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes
+are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse
+and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.</p>
+
+<p>Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community living, that
+just as the social life of the separate house porches in the villages
+has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all the
+activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long could
+the family as a unit continue under these conditions?</p>
+
+<p>The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we
+apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the
+same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop large
+belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more
+and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words,
+highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as
+business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>cally
+done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing
+prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT</h4>
+
+<p>It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are
+involved in the tendency toward communal living. At the beginning of the
+industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each family
+was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was little more than a
+nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such as
+workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home furnished
+nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own
+children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of
+effort except in the church.</p>
+
+<p>The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the
+factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and
+the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a
+living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger
+sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family
+educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually learned
+their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of the
+house, where they played as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span> children in the shavings, or watched the
+glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's
+discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their
+tasks. The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of
+each day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a
+large share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system,
+to a large extent the family lost the father.</p>
+
+<p>When the workshop left the home its most efficient school was taken from
+it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical, but
+the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy seeks to
+realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing; schooling was
+perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the incalculable
+value of informality and reality. The father gone and the mother still
+fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical training
+for life which home industry had afforded. On the one hand, the young
+became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of the
+voracious factory system.</p>
+
+<p>This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to
+Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child.
+Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now
+they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place
+of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span> parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the
+father and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now
+loses the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six
+hours of the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The
+family, once living under one roof, now is found scattered; it has
+reached out into factory and school. Its hours of unified life have been
+markedly reduced.</p>
+
+<p>But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That
+which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in the
+form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made by the
+women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves, and meat&mdash;all
+formerly home products for the use of the family producing them&mdash;now
+were prepared in larger quantities, by mechanical processes, and were
+brought back into the home. Woman's labor was lightened; the older girls
+were liberated from the loom and they began to seek occupation,
+education, and diversion according to their opportunities in life.</p>
+
+<p>That last step made it possible for people to think of the communization
+of home industry, to think of eating food cooked in other ovens than
+their own, to think of one oven large enough for a whole village. Many
+interesting experiments in co-operative living immediately sprang up.
+But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span> the next step came slowly and, even now, is only firmly established
+in the cities, in the actual abandonment of the family kitchen for the
+community kitchen in the form of the restaurant. In such families we
+have unity only in the hours of sleep and recreation.</p>
+
+<p>Along with abandonment of the separate kitchen there has proceeded
+the abandonment of the parlor in the homes of the middle classes.
+To lose the old, mournful front room may be no subject for tears,
+but the loss of the evening family group, about the fireside or
+the reading-lamp, is a real and sad loss. The commercialized amusements
+have offered greater attractions to vigorous youth. The theater and
+its lesser satellites, amusements, entertainments, lectures, the
+lyceum, and recreation-by-proxy in ball games and matches have taken
+the place of united family recreation. Of course this has been a
+natural development of the older village play-life and has been by
+no means an unmixed ill.</p>
+
+<p>Now, behold, what has become of the old-time home life! The family that
+spent nearly twenty-four hours together now spends a scarce seven or
+eight, and these are occupied in sleeping! Little wonder that the next
+step is taken&mdash;the abandonment of this remainder, the sleep period,
+under a domestic roof, as the family moves into a hotel!</p>
+
+<p>Along with the tendency toward communal working and eating we see the
+tendency to com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>munal living by the development of the apartment
+building. Since roof-trees are so expensive, and since in a practical
+age, few of us can afford to pay for sentiment, why not put a dozen
+families under one roof-tree? True we sacrifice lawns, gardens, natural
+places for children to play; we lose birds and flowers and the charm of
+evening hours on porches, or galleries, but think of what we gain in
+bricks and mortar, in labor saved from splitting wood and shoveling
+coal, in janitor service! The transition is now complete; the home is
+simply that item in the economic machinery which will best furnish us
+storage for our sleeping bodies and our clothes!</p>
+
+<p>We are undoubtedly in a period of great changes in family life, and no
+family can count on escaping the influence of the change. The one single
+outstanding and most potent change, so far as the character of family
+life is concerned, is, in the United States, the rapid polarization of
+population in the cities. The United States Census Bureau counts all
+residents in cities of over 8,000 population as "urban." In 1800 the
+"urban" population was 4 per cent of the total population; in 1850 it
+was 12.5 per cent; in 1870, 20.9 per cent; in 1890, 29.2 per cent; in
+1900, 33.1 per cent; in 1910 it was estimated at 40 per cent.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">2</a> Here
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>is a trend so clearly marked that we cannot deny its reality, while its
+significance is familiar to everyone today.</p>
+
+<p>However, the village type remains; there are still many homes where a
+measure of family unity persists, where at least in one meal daily and,
+for purposes of sleeping and, occasionally, for the evening hours of
+recreation, there is a consciousness of home life. Yet the most remote
+village feels the pressure of change. The few homes conforming to the
+older ideals are recognized as exceptional. The city draws the village
+and rural family to itself, and the contagion of its customs and ideals
+spreads through the villages and affects the forms of living there.
+Youths become city dwellers and do not cease to scoff at the village
+unless later years give them wisdom to appreciate its higher values. The
+standard of domestic organization is established by the city; that type
+of living is the ideal toward which nearly all are striving.</p>
+
+<p>The important question for all persons is whether the changes now taking
+place in family life are good or ill. It is impossible to say whether
+the whole trend is for the better; the many elements are too diverse and
+often apparently conflicting. Faith in the orderly development of
+society gives ground for belief that these changes ultimately work for a
+higher type of family life. The city may be regarded as only a
+transition stage in social<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span> evolution&mdash;the compacting of masses of
+persons together that out of the new fusing and welding may arise new
+methods of social living. The larger numbers point to more highly
+developed forms of social organization. When these larger units discover
+their greater purposes, above factory and mill and store, and realize
+them in personal values, the city life will be a more highly developed
+mechanism for the higher life of man. The home life will develop along
+with that city life.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. PURPOSEFUL ORGANIZATION</h4>
+
+<p>At present the home is suffering, just as the city is suffering, from a
+lack of that purposeful organization which will order the parts aright
+and subject the processes to the most important and ultimate purposes.
+The city is simply an aggregation of persons, scarcely having any
+conscious organization, thrown together for purposes of industry. It
+will before very long organize itself for purposes of personal welfare
+and education. The family is usually a group bound in ties of struggle
+for shelter, food, and pleasure. Such consciousness as it possesses is
+that of being helplessly at the mercy of conflicting economic forces.
+The adjustment of those forces, their subjection to man's higher
+interests, must come in the future and will help the family to freedom
+to discover its true purpose.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is easy to insist on the responsibility of parents for the
+character-training of their children, but it is difficult to see how
+that responsibility can be properly discharged under industrial
+conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole
+day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to
+furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull
+monotony of labor to care for life's finer interests. The welfare of the
+family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be
+secured in one part progress in the whole ensues.</p>
+
+<p>There are those who raise the question whether family life is a
+permanent form of social organization for which we may wisely contend,
+or is but a phase from which the race is now emerging. Some see signs
+that the ties of marriage will be but temporary, that children will be
+born, not into families but into the life of the state, bearing only
+their mothers' names and knowing no brothers and sisters save in the
+brotherhood of the state. Whether the permanent elements in family life
+furnish a sufficiently worthy basis for its preservation is a subject
+for careful consideration.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. THE HOME AND THE FAMILY</h4>
+
+<p>The family is more important than the home, just as the man is more than
+his clothing. The form of the home changes; the life of the family<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>
+continues unchanged in its essential characteristics. The family causes
+the home to be. Professor Arthur J. Todd insists that the family is the
+basis of marriage, rather than marriage the cause of the family.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">3</a>
+Small groups for protection and social living would precede formal
+arrangements of monogamy. Westermarck concludes that it was "for the
+benefit of the young that male and female continued to live
+together."<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">4</a> The importance of this consideration for us lies in the
+thought of the overshadowing importance of this social group which we
+now call the family. The family is the primary cell of society, the
+first unit in social organization. Our thought must balance itself
+between the importance of this social group, to be preserved in its
+integrity, and the value of the home, with its varied forms of activity
+and ministry, as a means of preserving and developing this group, the
+family.</p>
+
+<p>One hears today many pessimistic utterances regarding the modern home.
+Some even tell us that it is doomed to become extinct. Without doubt
+great economic changes in society are producing profound changes in the
+organization and character of the home. But the home has always been
+subject to such changes; the factor which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span>we need to watch with greater
+care is the family; the former is but the shell of the latter.</p>
+
+<p>The character of each home will depend largely on the economic condition
+of those who dwell in it. The homes of every age will reflect the social
+conditions of that age. The picture in historical romances of the home
+of the mediaeval period, where the factory, or shop, joined the
+dining-room, where the apprentices ate and roomed in the home, where one
+might be compelled to furnish and provision his home literally as his
+castle for defense, presents a marked difference to the home of this
+century tending to syndicate all its labors with all the other homes of
+the community. Since the home is simply the organization and mechanism
+of the family life, it is most susceptible to material and social
+changes. It varies as do the fashions of men.</p>
+
+<p>Much that we assume to be detrimental to the life of the home is simply
+due to the fact that in the evolution of society the family, as it were,
+puts on a new suit of clothes, adopts new forms of organization to meet
+the changing external conditions.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 6. THE HOME CHANGING; THE FAMILY ABIDING</h4>
+
+<p>The home is of importance only as a tool, a means to the final ends of
+the family life; the test of its efficiency is not whether it maintains
+traditional forms but whether it best serves the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span> highest aims of family
+life. We may abandon all the older customs; our regret for them, as we
+look back on the days of home cooking, cannot be any greater than the
+regrets of our parents or grandparents looking back on the
+spinning-wheel and the hand loom that cumbered the kitchen of their
+childhood. Surely no one contends that family life has deteriorated,
+that human character is one whit the poorer, because we have discarded
+the family spinning-wheel. Through the changes of a developing
+civilization, as man has moved from the time when each one built his own
+house, worked with his own tools to make all his supplies, to these days
+of specialized service in community living, the home has changed with
+each step of industrial progress, but the family has remained
+practically unchanged.</p>
+
+<p>The family stands a practically unchanging factor of personal qualities
+at the center of our civilization; the family rather than the home
+determines the character of the coming days. In its social relationships
+are rooted the things that are best in all our lives. In its social
+training lie the solutions of more problems in social adjustment and
+development than we are willing to admit. The family is the soil of
+society, central to all its problems and possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>Before church or school the family stands potent for character. We are
+what we are, not by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span> ideals held before us for thirty minutes a week
+or once a month in a church, nor by the instructions given in the
+classroom; we are what parents, kin, and all the circumstances that have
+touched us daily and hourly for years have determined we should be.</p>
+
+<p>The sweetest memories of our lives cluster about the scenes of family
+life. The rose-embowered cottage of the poet is not the only spot that
+claims affectionate gratitude; many look back to a city house wedged
+into its monotonous row. But, wherever it might be, if it sheltered love
+and held a shrine where the altar fires of family sacrifice burned,
+earth has no fairer or more sacred spot. The people rather than the
+place made it potent.</p>
+
+<p>Stronger even than the memories that remain are the marks of habits,
+tendencies, tastes, and dispositions there acquired. Many a man who has
+left no fortune worth recording to his sons has left them something
+better, the aptitude for things good and honorable, the memory of a good
+name, and the heritage of a life that was worthy of honor. The personal
+life has been always the enduring thing. Our concern for the future
+should be not whether we can pass on intact the forms of home
+organization, but whether we can give to the next day the force of ideal
+family life. Perhaps like Mary we would do well to turn our eyes from
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span> much serving, the mechanisms of the home, to set our minds on the
+better part, the personal values in the association of lives in the
+family.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;F. Lofthouse, <i>Ethics and the Family</i>, chaps. ii, xi, xii. Hodder
+&amp; Stoughton, $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>Charles R. Henderson, <i>Social Duties from the Christian Point of
+View</i>, chaps. ii, iii. The University of Chicago Press, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;W. Votaw, <i>Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+American Home</i>. Religious Education Association, $0.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>Jacob A. Riis, <i>Peril and Preservation of the Home</i>. Jacobs,
+Philadelphia, Pa., $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Charles R. Henderson, <i>Social Elements</i>. Scribner, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Charles F. Thwing, <i>The Recovery of the Home</i>. American Baptist
+Publication Society, $0.15.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. The tendency toward community life illustrated in the schools,
+amusement parks, and hotel life. Remembering the ultimate purpose
+of the family, how far is communal life desirable?</p>
+
+<p>2. Does the apartment or tenement building furnish a suitable
+condition for the higher purposes of the family?</p>
+
+<p>3. Is it possible to restore to the home some of the benefits lost
+by present factory consolidation of industry?</p>
+
+<p>4. What can take the place of the old household arts and of those
+which are now passing?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span></p>
+
+<p>5. What steps should be taken to secure to the family a larger
+measure of the time in terms of occupation of the parents?</p>
+
+<p>6. What are the important things to contend for in this
+institution? Why should we expect change in the form of the home
+and what are the features which should not be changed?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">2</span></a> Figures taken from C.&nbsp;W. Votaw, <i>Progress of Moral and
+Religious Education in the American Home</i>, 1911.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">3</span></a> A.&nbsp;J. Todd, <i>Primitive Family and Education</i>, p. 21. A most
+valuable and suggestive book.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">4</span></a> Cited by Todd, p. 21.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE PERMANENT ELEMENTS IN FAMILY LIFE</h3>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE DOMINANT MOTIVE</h4>
+
+<p>The chief end of society is to improve the race, to develop the higher
+and steadily improving type of human beings. We can test the life of the
+family and determine the values of its elements by asking whether and in
+what degree they minister to this end, the growth of better persons.
+This is more than a theoretical aim or one conceived in a search for
+ideals. It is written plain in our passions and strongest inclinations.
+That which parents supremely desire for their children is that they may
+become strong in body, capable and alert in mind, and animated by worthy
+principles and ideals. The parent desires a good man, fit to take his
+place, do his work, make his contribution to the social well-being, able
+to live to the fulness of his powers, to take life in all its reaches of
+meaning and heights of vision and beauty. In true parenthood all hopes
+of success, of riches, fame, and ease, are seen but as avenues to this
+end, as means of making the finer character, of growing the ideal
+person. If we were compelled to choose for our children we should elect
+poverty, pain, disgrace, toil, and suffering if we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span> knew this was the
+only highway to full manhood and womanhood, to completeness of
+character. Indeed, we do constantly so choose, knowing that they must
+endure hardness, bear the yoke in their youth, and learn that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Love and joy are torches lit<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At altar fires of sacrifice.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>With this dominating purpose clearly in mind we are prepared to ask,
+What are the elements of family life which among the changes of today we
+need most carefully to preserve in order to maintain efficiency in
+character development? In days when the outer shell of domestic
+arrangements changes, when readjustments are being made in the
+organization of the family, what is there too precious to lose, so
+worthy and essential that we waste no time when seeking to maintain it?</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED&mdash;SOCIAL QUALITIES</h4>
+
+<p>The first great element to be preserved in all family life is that of
+the power of the small group for purposes of character development. The
+infant's earliest world is the mother's arms. In order to grow into a
+man fitted for the wider world of social living, he must learn to live
+in a world within his comprehension. A child's life moves through the
+widening circles of mother-care, family group, neighborhood, school,
+city, state,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span> and nation into world-living. He must take the first steps
+before he is able to take the next ones. He must learn to live with the
+few as preparation for living with the many. In earliest infancy he
+takes his first unconscious lessons in the fine art of living with other
+folks as he relates himself to parents and to brothers and sisters.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, the family life affords the best agency for social training.
+The family is the ideal democracy into which the child-life is born.
+Here habits are formed, ideals are pictured, and life itself is
+interpreted. It is an ideal democracy, first, because it is a social
+organization existing for the sake of persons. The family comes nearer
+to fulfilling the true ideal of a democratic social order than does any
+other institution. It is founded to bring lives into this world; it is
+maintained for the sake of those lives; all its life, its methods, and
+standards are determined, ideally, by the needs of persons. It is an
+ideal democracy, secondly, because its guiding principle is that the
+greater lives must be devoted to the good of the lesser, the parent for
+the little child, the older members for the younger, in an attempt to
+extend to the very least the greatest good enjoyed by all. Thirdly,
+ideally it is a true democracy in that it gives to each member a share
+in its own affairs and develops the power to bear responsibilities and
+to carry each his own load in life. Thus the family group<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span> is the best
+possible training for the life and work of the larger group, the state,
+and for world-living.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">5</a> The maintenance of the ideals of the state, as
+a democracy, depends on the continuance of this institution with its
+peculiar power to train life in infancy and childhood for the life of
+manhood in the state. Such training can be given only in the smaller
+group that is governed by the motives peculiar to home and family life.
+The power to impress these principles depends on the size of the group.
+The small social organization, the family circle of from three members
+to even a dozen, bound by ties of affection, is the one great, efficient
+school, training youth to live in social terms.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first. Our age especially
+needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise
+above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal
+qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes
+most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures
+every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its
+riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal
+qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations,
+affection. The true home gives to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span>every child-life the power to choose
+the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only
+the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the
+world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's
+spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No
+life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that
+lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED&mdash;THE MORAL LIFE</h4>
+
+<p>Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be
+noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life.
+"The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">6</a> Here
+the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins
+life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all
+virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them,
+"the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The
+moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived
+for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a
+matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span>Neither is it a matter
+of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this
+comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life
+which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the
+right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of
+rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society
+points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right
+thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner
+compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest
+possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of
+loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which
+begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in
+the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most
+potential school. Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are
+strengthened by the pleasurable emotions. It is a joy to be loyal to
+those we love. Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the
+loyalty, or the love?</p>
+
+<p>The power of this small social group of the family to develop the
+fundamental principle of loyalty, the root of all virtues, gives a
+position of great importance to the affections in the family. We do well
+to contend for the maintenance of conditions of family living which will
+strengthen the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span> ties of affection. If children could be thrust into the
+care of the state, in large groups, separated from parental care and
+oversight, it is difficult to see what emotional stimulus toward
+affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would
+in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and
+mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in
+orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal
+care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents
+stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small
+children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the
+ideal&mdash;a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but
+these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds
+and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values of their
+affections and on them to build a wise discipline for childhood by
+providing adequate training of parents for their duties.</p>
+
+<p>Fifthly, there are some elements of the cost of family life, even its
+apparently unnecessary sacrifice and pain, that we do well to seek to
+keep. Character grows in paying the high price of maintaining a family.
+It is the most expensive form of living for adults. Marriages are now
+delayed because of the fear of the actual monetary cost; but far more
+serious is the cost in care, in nerves,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span> in patience, in all the great
+elements of self-denial. No child ever knows what he has cost until he
+has children of his own. But this discipline of self-denial is that
+which saves us from selfishness. It is necessary to have some personal
+objects for which to give our lives if they are to be saved from
+centrifugation, from death through ingrowing affection. True, many
+bachelors and spinsters have learned the way of self-denying,
+fellow-serving love. But how can a true parent escape that lesson? Nor
+does it stop with parents; as children grow up together they, too, must
+learn mutual forbearance, conciliation, and, soon, the joy of service.
+One sees selfishness in the little child gradually fading in the
+practice of family service, helpfulness, consideration for others. The
+single child in a family misses something more important than playmates;
+he misses all the education of play and service. But who cannot remember
+many families that have grown to beauty of character under the
+discipline of home life, and especially when this has involved real
+sacrifices? The stories in the Pepper books illustrate the spirit that
+blossoms under the trials and hardships of the struggle of a family for
+a livelihood and for the maintenance of a home.</p>
+
+<p>A clear function becomes evident for this social group called the
+family. It is that of dealing with young lives, in groups bound by ties
+of blood and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span> similarity, for purposes of the development of personal
+character. The family has an essentially educational function. Bearing
+in mind that "educational" means the orderly development of the powers
+of the life, we can think of our families as existing for this purpose
+and to be tested by their ability to do this work, especially by their
+ability to develop persons, young lives, that have the power, the
+vision, the acquired habits and experience to live as more than animals.
+The family is an educational institution dealing with child-life for its
+full growth and its self-realization, especially on character levels.
+The educational function suggests the features of family life which we
+do well to seek to preserve. Many incidental forms may pass, but the
+essential human relations and experiences that go to develop life and
+character must be maintained at any cost.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;F. and C.&nbsp;B. Thwing, <i>The Family</i>, chap. vii. Lothrop, Lee &amp;
+Shepard, $1.60.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;F. Lofthouse, <i>Ethics and the Family</i>, chaps. iv, v. Hodder &amp;
+Stoughton, $2.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>"The Improvement of Religious Education," <i>Proceedings of the
+Religious Education Association</i>, I, 119-23. $0.50.</p>
+
+<p><i>Religious Education</i>, April, 1911, VI, 1-48.</p>
+
+<p>S.&nbsp;P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott, <i>The Delinquent Child and the
+Home</i>. Russell Sage Foundation, $2.00.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What is the chief end of all forms of social organization?</p>
+
+<p>2. What is in the last analysis the aim of every parent?</p>
+
+<p>3. What advantage has the family over the school and larger groups
+for educational purposes?</p>
+
+<p>4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?</p>
+
+<p>5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.</p>
+
+<p>6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character
+development? In what way do these come to the surface in the
+family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?</p>
+
+<p>7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain
+or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial
+advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent
+disadvantages in the life of the family?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">5</span></a> See "Democracy in the Home," <i>American Journal of
+Sociology</i>, January, 1912.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">6</span></a> Francis G. Peabody, <i>The Approach to the Social Question</i>,
+p. 94.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE RELIGIOUS PLACE OF THE FAMILY</h3>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. DEVELOPMENT AS A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION</h4>
+
+<p>The family is the most important religious institution in the life of
+today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this
+place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain
+quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the
+children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their
+instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize
+as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those
+practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent
+care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we
+know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of
+responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious
+ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to
+separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this
+task. The higher the type of family life the more fully does it
+discharge its function in the education of the child.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">7</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three
+stages, or types, of relationship based on the breeding of children, or
+three stages of development toward family life. The first is a loose and
+indefinite relationship existing principally between the adults, or the
+males and females, under which children born when not desired are
+neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of
+either parent, or of neither. Since the group, associated through
+infancy with at least one parent, is as yet undeveloped, any instruction
+will be individual and usually incidental.</p>
+
+<p>The second form is that of a kind of family unity, either about the
+mother or the father, or both, or about a group of parents, in which the
+children live together and are sheltered and nurtured for their earlier
+years. Here, however, the real relationship of the child is to the
+tribe, the family is but his temporary guardian, and, at least by the
+age of puberty, he will be initiated into the tribal secrets. If he is a
+boy, he will cease to be a member of the family group and will go to
+live in the "men's house," becoming a part of the larger life of the
+tribe.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">8</a> Such moral and religious instruction as he may acquire will
+come from the songs, traditions, and conversation which he hears as a
+child.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The third type approaches the modern ideal, with a greater or less
+degree of permanent unity between the two parents and with permanence in
+the group of the offspring. The parental responsibility continues for a
+greater length of time and, since the tribe makes smaller claims, and
+the parents live in the common domestic group, much more instruction is
+possible and is given. The tribal ideals, the traditions, observances,
+and religious rites are imparted to children gradually in their homes.</p>
+
+<p>The last type brings us to the Hebrew conception of family life. It
+developed toward the Christian ideal. At first, polygamy was permitted;
+woman was the chattel of man and excluded from any part in the religious
+rites. But it included the ideal of monogamy in its tradition of the
+origin of the world, it denounced and punished adultery (Deut. 22: 22),
+and it gave especial attention to the training of the offspring. "And
+these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and
+thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of
+them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way,
+and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up ... and thou shalt
+write them upon the door-posts of thy house and upon thy gates" (Deut.
+6: 6, 7, 9).</p>
+
+<p>Much later, the messianic hope, the belief that in some Jewish family
+there should be born one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span> divinely commissioned and endowed to liberate
+Israel and to give the Jews world-sovereignty, operated to elevate the
+conception of motherhood and, through that, of the family. It made
+marriage desirable and children a blessing; it rendered motherhood
+sacred. It tended to center national hopes and religious ideals about
+the family.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">9</a></p>
+
+<p>There are a few glimpses of ideal family life in the Old Testament. They
+are all summed up in the eloquent tribute to motherhood in the words of
+King Lemuel in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. It must be
+remembered, however, that such ideals did not belong to the Jews alone,
+that Plutarch shows many pictures of maternal fidelity and wifely
+devotion, that Greek and Roman history have their Cornelia, Iphigenia,
+and Mallonia.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">10</a></p>
+
+<p>The Jews are an excellent example of the power of the family life to
+maintain distinct characteristics and to secure marked development.
+Practically throughout all the Christian era they have been a people
+without a land, a constitution, or a government, and yet never without
+race consciousness, national unity, and separateness. Their unity has
+continued in spite of dispersion, persecution, and losses; they have
+remained a race in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>the face of political storms that have swept other
+peoples away. Their unity has continued about two great centers, the
+customs of religion and the life of the family.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The results of Jewish respect for family life can also be seen in
+the health of their own children. In 1910, for instance, among poor
+Jews in Manchester the mortality of infants under one year of age
+was found to be 118 per thousand; among poor Gentiles, 300 per
+thousand; and comparisons made some six years ago between Jewish
+and Gentile children in schools in the poorer parts of Manchester
+and Leeds (England) have shown that the Jewish children are
+uniformly taller, they weigh more, and their bones and teeth are
+superior.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">11</a></p></div>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY</h4>
+
+<p>The Christian family is a type peculiar to itself, not as a new
+institution, for it has developed out of earlier race experience, but as
+controlled by a new interpretation, the spirit and conception of the
+home and family given in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He did not
+give formal rules for the regulation of homes; rather he made a
+spiritual ideal of family life the basic thought of all his teaching. He
+said more about the family than concerning any other human institution,
+yet he established no family life of his own. He is called the founder
+of the church, yet he scarcely mentions <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>that institution, while he
+frequently teaches concerning home duties and family relations. He
+glorifies the relations of the family by making them the figure by which
+men may understand the highest relations of life. He speaks more of
+fatherhood and sonship than of any other relations. He gives direction
+for living, using the family terms of brotherhood. He points forward to
+ideal living in a home beyond this life. He teaches men when they think
+of God and when they address him to take the family attitude and call
+him Father.</p>
+
+<p>If we sum up all the teachings of Jesus and separate them from our
+preconceptions of their theological content, we cannot but be impressed
+with the facts that he seized upon the family life as the best
+expression of the highest relationships; that he pointed to a purified
+family life, in which spiritual aims would dominate, as the best
+expression of ideal relationships among his followers; and that he
+glorified marriage and really made the family the great, divine,
+sacramental institution of human society.</p>
+
+<p>We can hardly overestimate the importance of such teaching to the
+character of the family. The early Christians not only accepted Jesus as
+their teacher and savior; they took their family life as the opportunity
+to show what the Kingdom of God, the ideal society, was like. Family
+life was consecrated. Men and women belonged to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span> new order with
+their whole households. Religion became largely a family matter. The
+worship that had been confined to the temple now made an altar in every
+home and a holy of holies in the midst of every family. The scriptures
+that belonged to the synagogue now belonged in the home. Above all, this
+family existed for the purposes taught by Jesus, that men might grow in
+brotherhood toward the likeness of the divine Fatherhood. It was an
+institution, not for economic purpose of food and shelter, not for
+personal ends of passion or pride, but for spiritual purpose, for the
+growth of persons, especially the young in the home, in character, into
+"the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."</p>
+
+<p>Christianity is essentially a religion of ideal family life. It
+conceives of human society, not in terms of a monarchy with a king and
+subjects, but in terms of a family with a great all-Father and his
+children, who live in brotherhood, who take life as their opportunity
+for those family joys of service and sacrifice. It hopes to solve the
+world's ills, not by external regulations, but by bringing all men into
+a new family life, a birth into this new family life with God, so
+securing a new personal environment, a new personality as the center and
+root of all social betterment. He who would come into this new social
+order must come into the divine family, must humble himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span> and become
+as a little child, must know his Father and love his brothers.</p>
+
+<p>Christianity, then, not only seeks an ideal family; it makes the family
+the ideal social institution and order. It makes family life holy,
+sacramental, religious in its very nature. This fact gives added
+importance to the preservation and development of the ideals of family
+life for the sake of their religious significance and influence. It not
+only makes religion a part of the life of the home but makes a religious
+purpose the very reason for the existence of the Christian type of home.
+It makes our homes essentially religious institutions, to be judged by
+religious products.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;A. Coe, <i>Education in Religion and Morals</i>, chap. xvi. Revell,
+$1.35.</p>
+
+<p>Article on "The Family," in Hastings, <i>Encyclopaedia of Religion
+and Ethics</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>On the educational function of the family: A.&nbsp;J. Todd, <i>The
+Primitive Family as an Educational Agency</i>. Putnam, $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>On the religious place of the family: C.&nbsp;F. and C.&nbsp;B. Thwing, <i>The
+Family</i>. Lothrop, Lee &amp; Shepard, $1.60.</p>
+
+<p>I.&nbsp;J. Peritz, "Biblical Ideal of the Home," <i>Religious Education</i>,
+VI, 322.</p>
+
+<p>H. Hanson, <i>The Function of the Family</i>. American Baptist
+Publication Society, $0.15.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span></p>
+
+<p>W. Becker, <i>Christian Education, or the Duties of Parents</i>. Herder,
+$1.00. A striking presentation of the Roman Catholic view; could be
+read to advantage by all parents.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What place did religion hold in the primitive family? What
+reference or allusion do we find in the Old Testament to the place
+of religion in the family (Deut. 6:7-9, 20-25)? What in the New
+Testament?</p>
+
+<p>2. What has been the effect of purity of family life on the Jewish
+race?</p>
+
+<p>3. What place did the family hold in the teachings of Jesus?</p>
+
+<p>4. What shall we think of the relations of the church and family as
+to their comparative rights and our duty to them?</p>
+
+<p>5. Do you agree that the family is the most important religious
+institution?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">7</span></a> For a brief statement see Brinton, <i>Religions of Primitive
+Peoples</i>, Lecture 4, &sect; 7; also Todd, <i>The Family as an Educational
+Agency</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">8</span></a> See Webster, <i>Primitive Secret Societies</i>, chaps. i, ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">9</span></a> On the place of the family in different religious systems
+see the fine article under "Family" in Hastings, <i>Encyclopaedia of
+Religion and Ethics</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">10</span></a> See Lecky, <i>History of European Morals</i>, chap. ii.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">11</span></a> Quoted by Lofthouse in <i>Ethics and the Family</i>, p. 8, from
+W. Hall, in <i>Progress</i> (London), April, 1907.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY</h3>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY</h4>
+
+<p>With the brief statement of the history of the family and of its
+function in society which has already been given we are prepared to put
+together the two conclusions: first, that the family has an educational
+function, in that it exists as a social institution for the protection,
+nurture, development, and training of young lives, and, secondly, that
+it is a religious institution, the most influential and important of all
+religious institutions, whenever it realizes in any adequate degree its
+possibilities, because it is rooted in love and loyalty. It exists for
+personal and spiritual ideals and, in Christianity, it is inseparably
+connected with the teachings and the ideals of Jesus. It is educational
+in function and religious in character, so that it is essentially an
+institution for religious education. Religious education is not an
+occasional incident in its life; it is the very aim and dominating
+purpose of a high-minded family.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION?</h4>
+
+<p>To make this the more clear we may need to clarify our minds as to
+certain popular conceptions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span> of education. Education means much more
+than instruction; religious education means much more than instruction
+in religion. Many habitually think of an educational institution as
+necessarily a place where pupils sit at desks and teachers preside over
+classes, the teachers imparting information which is to be memorized by
+the pupils, so that, from this point of view, a Sunday school would be
+almost the only institution for the religious education of children in
+existence, because it is the only one exclusively devoted to imparting
+instruction to children in specifically religious subjects. Such a view
+would limit religious education in the home to the formal teaching of
+the Bible and religious dogma by parents. The memorizing of scriptural
+passages and of the different catechisms once constituted a regular duty
+in almost all well-ordered homes. Today it is rarely attempted. Does
+that mean that religious education has ceased in the home?</p>
+
+<p>But education means much more than instruction. Education is the whole
+process, of which instruction is only a part. Education is the orderly
+development of lives, according to scientific principles, into the
+fulness of their powers, the realization of all their possibilities, the
+joy of their world, the utmost rendering in efficiency of their service.
+It includes the training of powers of thought, feeling, willing, and
+doing; it includes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span> the development of abilities to discern,
+discriminate, choose, determine, feel, and do. It prepares the life for
+living with other lives; it prepares the whole of the life, developing
+the higher nature, the life of the spirit, for living in a spiritual
+universe.</p>
+
+<p>Religious education, then, means much more than instruction in the
+literature, history, and philosophy of religion. It means the kind of
+directed development which regards the one who is developing as a
+religious person, which seeks to develop that one to fulness of
+religious powers and personality, and which uses, as means to that end,
+material of religious inspiration and significance and, indeed, regards
+all material in that light. Religious education seeks to direct a
+religious process of growth with a religious purpose for religious
+persons. Religious education is the spirit which characterizes the work
+of every educator who looks on the child as a spiritual nature, a
+religious person; it is the work of every educator who sees his aim as
+that of training this spiritual person to fulness of living in a society
+essentially spiritual.</p>
+
+<p>In simplest possible terms, religious education means the training of
+persons to live the religious life and to do their work in the world as
+religious persons. It must mean, then, the development of character; it
+includes the aim, in the parents' minds, to bring their children up to
+the measure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span> of the stature of the fulness of Christ. It is evident that
+this is a much greater task, and yet more natural and beautiful, than
+mere instruction in formal ideas or words in the Bible or in a
+catechism; that it is not and cannot be accomplished in some single
+period, some set hour, but is continuous, through all the days; that it
+pervades not only the spoken words, but the actions, organization, and
+the very atmosphere of the home.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS</h4>
+
+<p>Normal persons never stop growing. Just as children grow all the time in
+their bodies, so do adults and all others grow all the time in mind and
+will and powers of the higher life whenever they live normally. We grow
+spiritually, not only in church and under the stimulus of song and
+prayer, but we grow when the beauty of the woods appeals to us, when the
+face lightens at the face of a friend, when we meet and master a
+temptation, when we brace up under a load, when we do faithfully the
+dreary, daily task, when we adjust our thoughts in sympathy to others,
+when we move in the crowd, when we think by ourselves. The educational
+process is continuous. The children in the home are being moved,
+stimulated, every instant, and they are being changed in minute but
+nevertheless real and important degrees by each<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span> impression. There is
+never a moment in which their character is not being developed either
+for good or for ill. Religious education&mdash;that is, the development of
+their lives as religious persons&mdash;goes on all the time in the home, and
+it is either for good or for ill.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the idea of the continuous and all-pervasive character of this
+process of religious development the most important thought for us is
+that religious education in the home may be determined by ourselves.
+This continuous, fateful process is not a blind, resistless one. It is
+our duty to direct it. It is possible for wise parents to determine the
+characters of their children. We must not forget this. It cannot be too
+strongly insisted on. The development of life is under law. This is an
+orderly world. Things do not just happen in it. We believe in a law that
+determines the type of a cabbage, the character of a weed. Do we believe
+that this universe is so ordered that there is a law for weeds and none
+for the higher life of man? Do we hold that cabbages grow by law but
+character comes by chance? If there is a law we may find it and must
+obey it. If we may know how to develop character, with as great
+certainty as we know how to do our daily work, will not this be our
+highest task, our greatest joy, the supreme thing to do in life?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. THE CONSEQUENT OBLIGATION</h4>
+
+<p>This is the first great obligation of parents and of those who are
+willing to accept the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. We have
+no right to bring into this world lives with all the possibilities that
+a religious nature involves unless we know how to develop those lives
+for the best and from the worst. When we picture what a little child may
+become, from the vile, depraved, despoiling beast or the despicable,
+sneaking hypocrite on one extreme, to the upright, God-loving,
+man-serving man or woman with the love of purity, honor, truth, and
+goodness speaking through the life, we may well pause, realizing we need
+more than a sentimental desire that the child may reach the heights of
+goodness: we must know the way there and the methods of leading the life
+in that way. True devotion to God and to childhood will mean more than
+petitions for the salvation of children; it will mean the prayer that is
+labor and the labor that is prayer to know how they may attain fulness
+of spiritual life; it will mean reverent searching into the divine ways
+of growth in grace. The study of the means and methods of religious
+education, especially of children, in the home and family, is one of the
+most evident and important religious duties resting on parents and all
+who contemplate marriage and family life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD?</h4>
+
+<p>In discussing the development of character in children one hears often
+the question, "Which is the earliest virtue to appear in a child?"
+People will debate whether it is truthfulness, reverence, kindness, or
+some other virtue. All this implies a picture of the child as a tree
+that sends forth shoots of separate virtues one after another. But the
+character desired is not a series of branches, it is rather like a
+symmetrical tree; it is not certain parts, but it is the whole of a
+personality. The development of religious character is not a matter of
+consciously separable virtues, but is the determination of the trend and
+quality of the whole life. Moral training is not a matter of cultivating
+honesty today, purity tomorrow, and kindness the day after. Virtues have
+no separate value. Character cannot be disintegrated into a list of
+independent qualities. We seek a life that, as a whole life, loves and
+follows truth, goodness, and service.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 6. EARLY TENDENCIES</h4>
+
+<p>But it is wise to inquire as to those manifestations of a pure and
+spiritual life which will earliest appear. One does not need to look far
+for the answer. Children are always affectionate; they manifest the
+possibilities of love. True, this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span> affection is rooted in physiological
+experience, based on relations to the mother and on daily propinquity to
+the rest of the family, but it is that which may be colored by devotion,
+elevated by unselfish service, and may become the first great, ideal
+loyalty of the child's life. Little boys will fight and girls will
+quarrel more readily over the question of the merits of their respective
+parents than over any other issue. Almost as soon as a child can talk he
+boasts of the valor of his father, the beauty of his mother. Here is
+loyalty at work. He stands for them; he resents the least doubt as to
+their superiority, not because they give him food and shelter, but
+because they are his, because to him they are worthy; in all things they
+have the worth, the highest good; they are, in person, the virtue of
+life. Therefore in fighting for the reputation of his parents he is
+practicing loyalty to an ideal.</p>
+
+<p>The principle of loyalty is the life-force of virtue; it is like the
+power that sends the tree toward the heavens, the upthrust of life. It
+may be cultivated in a thousand ways. Provided there is the outreach and
+upreach of loyalty within and that there is furnished without the worthy
+object, ideal, and aim, the life will grow upward and increase in
+character, beauty, and strength.</p>
+
+<p>Next to the affectionate idealization of parents and home-folk one of
+the earliest manifestations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span> of the spirit of loyalty in the child is
+his desire to have a share in the activities of the home. He would not
+only look like those he admires; he would do what they do. This is more
+than mere imitation; it is loyalty at work again. The direction of this
+tendency is one of the largest opportunities before parents and can make
+the most important contribution to character.</p>
+
+<p>The religious life of the child is essentially a matter of loyalty. His
+faith, affections, aspirations, and endeavors turn toward persons,
+institutions, and concepts which are to him ideal. He does not analyze,
+he cannot describe, or even narrate, his religious experiences, but he
+affectionately moves, with a sense of pleasure, toward those things
+which seem to him ideal, toward parents, customs of the home or school,
+the church, his class, his teacher, toward characters in story-books. He
+is likely to think of Jesus in just that way, as the one person whom he
+would most of all like to know and be with. The life of virtue and the
+religious life then will be weak or strong in the measure that the child
+has the stimulating ideals which call forth his loyalty and in the
+measure that he has opportunity to express that loyalty. His religious
+life will consist, not so much in external forms perhaps, still less in
+intellectual statements about theology or even about his own
+experiences, as in a growing realization of the great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span> ideals, an
+increasing sense of their meaning and reality within, and, on the
+objective side, a steady moving of his life toward them in action and
+habits and therefore in character and quality.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 7. IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS</h4>
+
+<p>It is worth while to insist upon two important considerations. Parents
+who stand as gardeners watching the growth of the tender plant of
+child-character may be looking for developments that never ought to come
+and will be disappointed because they were looking for the wrong thing.
+First, in watching for the beginnings of the religious life of the child
+in the family we are not expecting some new addition to the life, but
+rather the development of this whole life as a unity in a definite
+direction which we call religious. It is the first and most important
+consideration that religious education is not something added to the
+life as an extra subject of interest, but the development of the whole
+life into religious character and usefulness. Secondly, this growth of
+religious character is going on all the time. It is not separable into
+pious periods; it is a part of the very life of the family. Perhaps this
+increases the difficulty of our task, for it removes it from the realm
+of the mechanical, from that which is easily apprehended and estimated.
+It takes the task of the religious education of children out of the
+statistical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span> into the vital, and reminds us that we are growing life
+every second, that there is never a moment when religious education is
+not in operation. This demands a consideration, not alone of lessons, of
+periods of worship and instruction, but of every influence, activity,
+and agency in all the family life that in any way affects the thinking,
+feeling, and action of the child. We are thinking of something more
+important than organizing instruction and exercises in religion in the
+home; we are thinking of organizing the family life for religious
+purposes, for the purpose of growing lives into their spiritual fulness.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the capital mistake in the religious education of the family is
+that we overemphasize this or the other method and mechanism instead of
+bending every effort to secure a real religious atmosphere and soil in
+which young souls can really grow while we leave the process of growth
+more largely to the great husbandman. And the second great mistake is
+that we are looking for mechanical evidence of a religious life instead
+of for the development of a whole person. We must reinterpret the family
+to ourselves and see it as the one great opportunity life affords us to
+grow other lives and to bring them to spiritual fulness by providing a
+social atmosphere of the spirit and a constant, normal presentation of
+social living in spiritual terms.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 8. THE ORGANIZATION OF LOYALTY</h4>
+
+<p>When parents conceive the family in these terms and so organize the life
+of the home, the child becomes conscious of the fact, and at once the
+life of the family furnishes him with his first, his nearest, and most
+satisfactory appeal to loyalty. He feels that which he cannot analyze or
+express, the spiritual beauty and loyalty of family life. That life
+furnishes a soil and atmosphere for his soul. It is an atmosphere made
+of many elements: the primary and dominating purpose of parents and
+older persons, the habitual life of service and love, the consciousness
+of the reality of the Divine Presence, the fragrance of chastened
+character and experience, the customs of worship and affections. These
+things are not easily created, they cannot be readily defined, nor can
+directions be given in a facile manner for their cultivation. They are
+the elements most difficult to describe, hardest of all to secure when
+lacking, least easily labeled, not to be purchased ready-made, and yet
+without them religious education is wholly impossible in the family.
+Without this immediate appeal to loyalty the loyalties of the child
+toward higher and divine aims do not develop early; they are retarded
+and often remain dormant. For us all scarcely any more important
+question can be presented than this: What appeals to spiritual idealism
+and loyalty does our family life present to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span> child? What quickening
+of love for goodness and purity, truth and service, is there in the home
+and its conduct?</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;A. Coe, <i>Education in Religion and Morals</i>, chaps. i, ii, xii,
+xiii. Revell, $1.35.</p>
+
+<p>George Hodges, <i>Training of Children in Religion</i>, chaps. i, ii.
+Appleton, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>J.&nbsp;T. McFarland, <i>Preservation versus Resurrection</i>. Eaton &amp; Mains,
+$0.07.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;W. Votaw, <i>Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+American Home</i>. Religious Education Association, $0.25.</p>
+
+<p>George Hodges, <i>Training of Children</i>, chaps. i, ii, xv. Appleton,
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;A. Coe, <i>Education in Religion and Morals</i>, chaps. i, iv, xvi.
+Revell, $1.35.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;C. Wilm, <i>Culture of Religion</i>, chaps. i, ii. Pilgrim Press,
+$0.75.</p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;W. Rischell, <i>The Child as God's Child</i>. Methodist Book Concern,
+$0.75.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;E. Read Mumford, <i>The Dawn of Character</i>. Longmans, Green &amp; Co.,
+$1.20. See especially chap. xii on "The Dawn of Religion."</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. How would you define education?</p>
+
+<p>2. What is the difference between education and religious
+education?</p>
+
+<p>3. What makes the home especially effective in education?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span></p>
+
+<p>4. Is it true that it is possible to discover the laws of growth
+and so determine the development of character?</p>
+
+<p>5. Recall any very early manifestations of religious character in
+small children. What would you regard as the best kind of
+manifestation?</p>
+
+<p>6. What is the essential principle of the right life? How may we
+develop this in childhood?</p>
+
+<p>7. What are the things which most of all impress children?</p>
+
+<p>8. Would you think it wise to bring a child under the influence of
+a religious revival?</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE CHILD'S RELIGIOUS IDEAS</h3>
+
+
+<p>How shall I begin to talk with my child about religion? Even the most
+religious parents feel hesitancy here. It may not be at all due to the
+unfamiliarity of the subject, though that is often the case; hesitation
+is due principally to a conscious artificiality in the action. It seems
+unnatural to say, "My child, I want to talk with you about your
+religious life." And so it is. There is something wrong when that
+appears to be the only way. That situation indicates a lack of freedom
+of thought and intercourse with the child and a lack of naturalness in
+religion.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFICULTY</h4>
+
+<p>The instinct is correct that tells us that we should be trespassing on a
+child's rights, or breaking down his proper reticence, in abruptly and
+formally questioning him about his religious life. The reserve of
+children in this matter must be respected. The inner life of aspiration,
+of conscious relationship to the divine, is too sacred for display, even
+to those who are near to us. He violates the child's reverence who tears
+away his reticence. Even though the child may not consciously object,
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span> process leads him toward the irreverent, facile self-exposure of
+the soul that characterizes some prayer meetings. But we may, also, as
+easily err in the other direction and, by failing to invite the
+confidences of our children, lead them to suppose we have no interest in
+their higher life.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS</h4>
+
+<p>First, we must be content to wait for the child to open his heart. We
+must not force the door. But we can invite him to open, and the one form
+of invitation that scarcely ever fails is for you to give him your
+confidence. Talk honestly, simply to him of the aspects of your
+religious life that he can understand. If he knows that you confide in
+him, he will confide in you. Here beware of sentimentality. Religion to
+the child will find expression in everyday experiences. Your philosophy
+of religion he cannot comprehend, and with your mature emotions he has
+no point of contact. Perhaps the best method of approach is to relate
+your memories of those experiences which you <i>now see</i> to have had
+religious significance to you. At the time they may have had no such
+special meaning. You did not then analyze them. Your child will not and
+must not analyze them, either; he must simply feel them.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, rid your mind of the "times and seasons" notion. There is no
+more reason why<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span> you should talk religion on Sunday than on Monday,
+unless the day's interests have quickened the child's questioning. There
+can be no set period; no times when you say, "This is the forty-five
+minutes of spiritual instruction and conversation." The time available
+may be very short, only a sentence may be possible, or it may be
+lengthened; everything will depend on the interest. It must be natural,
+a real part of the everyday thought and talk, lifted by its character
+and subject to its own level. Its value depends on its natural reality.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. RELIGIOUS REALITY</h4>
+
+<p>Thirdly, avoid the mistake of confounding conversation on "religion"
+with religious conversation, of thinking that the desired end has been
+attained when you have discussed the terminology of theology. To
+illustrate, in the family one hardly ever hears the word hygiene, but
+well-trained children learn much about the care of their bodies in
+health, and the family economy is directed consciously to that end. A
+good, nourishing meal always contributes more to health than many
+lectures on dietetics. Yet back, hidden away in the manager's mind, is
+the science of dietetics. So is it with quickening the child's power and
+thought in the spiritual life. We must avoid the abstract, the
+intellectually analytical. Religion should present<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span> itself concretely,
+practically, and as an atmosphere and ideal in the family. We parents
+must not look for theological interest in the child. A Timothy Dwight at
+ten or twelve, though once found in Sunday-school library books, is a
+monstrosity. The child's aspiration, his religious devotion, his love
+for God will find expression in almost every other way before it will be
+formulated into questions of a serious theological character. Nor ought
+we to force upon him the phrases of religion to which we are accustomed.
+He will live in another day and must speak its tongue. His faith must
+find itself in consciousness and then be permitted to clothe itself in
+appropriate garments of words. Those garments must be woven out of the
+realities of actual experiences in the child's life. We cannot prepare
+or make them for him. The expression of religion will be consonant with
+the stage of development. If his faith is to be real he must never be
+allowed or tempted to imagine that if only he can use the words, the
+verbal symbol, he has the fact, the life-experience. Try then to use
+words which are simple and meaningful to him and be content to wait for
+life to lead him to formulate vital verbal forms for himself.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. PATIENCE AND COMMON-SENSE</h4>
+
+<p>Fourthly, we must have faith in God's laws of growth. If we be but
+faithful, furnishing the soil,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span> the seed, the nurture, we must wait for
+the increase. Many factors which we cannot control will determine
+whether it shall be early or late and what form it shall take. We must
+wait. It is high folly that pulls up the sprouting grain to see whether
+it is growing properly.</p>
+
+<p>Fifthly, manifestations of the religious life will vary in children and
+in families. The commonest error is to expect some one popular form
+alone, to imagine that all children must pass through some standardized
+experiences. Mrs. Brown's Willy may rise in prayer meeting. Do not be
+downhearted. Willy is only doing that which he has seen his parents do,
+and, usually, only because they do it. Your boy, or girl, is seeking
+health of life, of thought, of action; is growing in character. Let them
+grow, help them to grow. You know they love you even when they say
+little about it; you do not expect them to climb to the housetop and
+declare their affection. A flower does not sing about the sun, it grows
+toward it. That is the test of the child's religion: Is he growing
+Godward in life, action, character?</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD</h4>
+
+<p>Sixthly, deal most carefully with the child's consciousness of God. The
+truth is that the child in the average home has a consciousness of God.
+It grows out of formal references in social rites<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span> and customs, informal
+allusions in conversation, and direct statements and instruction. But
+frequently the resultant mental picture is a misleading one, sometimes
+even vicious in its moral effect. Where superstitious servants take more
+interest in the child's religious ideas than do his parents, we have the
+child whose life is darkened by the fear of an omnipotent ogre.
+Nursemaids will slothfully scare small children into silence by threats
+of the awful presence of a bogey god. The life of the spirit cannot be
+trusted to the hireling. Parents must be sure of the character as well
+as the superficial competency of those who come closest to childhood. A
+child's ideas are formed before he goes to school. The family cannot
+delegate the formation of dominant ideas to persons trained only for
+nursery tasks.</p>
+
+<p>But frequently the mother is a misleading teacher. To her the child goes
+with all the big questions outside the immediate world of things. Is she
+prepared to answer the questions? Few dilemmas of our life today are
+more pathetic than this: the mother has outgrown the theology of her
+childhood; she remembers keenly the suffering and superstition, the
+struggle that followed the darkened pictures she received as a little
+one, but she has nothing better to offer the child. No one has taught
+her how to put the later, more spiritual concepts into language for the
+child of our day.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span> Weakly she falls back on the forms of words she once
+abhorred.</p>
+
+<p>There are certainly two approaches of reality for the child-mind to the
+idea of God. Two immediate experiences are rich in meaning; they are the
+life of the family and the wonder of the everyday world, the life and
+variety of nature and human activities. The first is a very simple and
+rich approach. By every possible means help children in the family to
+think of God as the great and good Father of us all. Do this in the
+phrasing of prayers and graces, in the answers to their questions, in
+the casual word. Why should we assume that the Fatherhood of God is for
+the adult alone? And why should it be that this rich concept dawns on us
+like a new day of freedom in truth in later years instead of becoming
+ours in childhood and so determining the habit and attitude of our
+lives? The finest, the ideal person is, to the child, the father. God in
+terms of fatherhood is the sum and source of all that is ideal in
+personality.</p>
+
+<p>The child's keen interest in the world of nature is our opportunity to
+lead him to love the gracious source of all beauty and goodness. How
+keen is the child's enjoyment of the beauty of the world! Can we forever
+fix the general concept of all this beauty as the thought of God in the
+words of flower and leaf, mountain and stream? And might we not also
+connect the idea of God with the affairs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span> of daily life? That depends on
+the parent's attitude of mind; if we think of the universal life that is
+behind all battles and business and affairs, there will be a difference
+in our answers to the thousand curious inquiries that rise in the
+child's mind.</p>
+
+<p>Nor must we leave the child to think of God as a separate, far-off
+person, on a throne somewhere in the skies. The child is finding his way
+into a universe. The God who is a minute fraction of that universe makes
+possible the religion that is no more than a negligible fraction of
+life. The child asks concerning clouds, the sea, the trees, the birds,
+and all the world about him; he tends to interpret it causally and
+ideally. Childhood affords the great opportunity for giving the color,
+the beauty and glory, the life of the divine to all this universe, to
+instil the feeling that God is everywhere, in all and through all, and
+that in him we live and move and have our being. The child's joy in this
+world can thus be given a religious meaning. He sings</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My God, I thank thee thou hast made<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This earth so bright....,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and so beauty and joy become part of his religion. His faith becomes a
+gladsome thing; he knows that the trees of the forest clap their hands,
+the mountains and the hills sing, and the morning stars chant together
+in the gladness of the divine life.</p>
+
+<p>Such a view of the world comes not by prearranged and indoor interviews.
+One must walk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span> out into the good outdoor world for the opportunity and
+the inspiration. The garden plot, the park, and, best of all, the open
+fields and woods speak to a child and furnish us an open book from which
+we may teach him to read. Recalling religious impressions, the writer
+would testify to feeling nothing deeper, as a result of church
+attendance in childhood, than the shapes of seats and the colors of
+walls; but there remain deep impressions of wonder, beauty, and the
+meaning of God from Sunday mornings spent with his father under the
+great beeches in Epping Forest, listening to the reading and singing of
+the old hymns, or joining in conversation on the woods and the flowers,
+and even on the legends of Robin Hood in the forest.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 6. THE EVERYDAY OPPORTUNITIES</h4>
+
+<p>Seventhly, natural conversation affords the best opportunity for direct
+instruction. A child is a peripatetic interrogation. His questions cover
+the universe; there are no doors which you desire to see opened that he
+will not approach at some time. There is great advantage when the
+religious question rises normally; when the child begins it and when the
+interest continues with the same naturalness as in conversation on any
+other subject. Then questions usually take one of three forms: mere
+childish, curious questions, questions on conduct, and questions on
+religion in its organized form.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The child's curiosity is the basis of even those questions which have
+usually been credited to preternatural piety. The tiny youngster who
+asks strange questions about God asks equally startling ones about
+fairies or about his grandmother. But his questions give us the chance
+to direct him to right thoughts of God. Here we need to be sure of our
+own thoughts and to keep in mind our principal purpose, to quicken in
+this child loyalty to the highest and best. He must be shown a God whom
+he can love and, at the same time, one who will call for his growing
+loyalty, his courage, and devotion. Everything for the child's future
+depends on the pictures he now forms. We all carry to a large degree our
+childhood's view of God.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the child's questions probe deep; how shall we answer them? When
+you know the truth tell him the truth, being sure that it is told in
+language that really conveys truth to his mind. The danger is that
+parents will attempt to tell more than they know, to answer questions
+that cannot be answered, or that they will, in sloth or cowardice or
+ignorance, tell children untrue things. If a child asks, "Did God make
+the world?" the answer that will be true to the child may be a simple
+affirmative. If the child asks or his query implies, "Did God make the
+leaves, or the birds, with his fingers?" we had better take time to
+show<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span> the difference between man's making of things and the working of
+the divine energy through all the process of the development of the
+world. When the child asks, "Mother, if God made all things, why did he
+make the devil?" it would surely be wise and opportune to correct the
+child's mental picture of a personal anti-God and to take from him his
+bogey of a "devil." But the question of the relation of God to the
+existence of evil would remain, and the best a parent could do would be
+to illustrate the necessities of freedom of choice and will in life by
+similar freedom in the family.</p>
+
+<p>It must be remembered that children's curious questions are only their
+attempt to discover their world, that they have no peculiar religious
+significance, but that they afford the parent a vital opportunity for
+direct religious instruction. These questions must be treated seriously;
+something is missing in parental consciousness when the child's
+questions furnish only material for jesting relation to the family
+friends.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 7. MORAL TEACHING</h4>
+
+<p><i>Questions on conduct</i>: Scores of times in the day the children come in
+from play or from school and tell of what has happened. Their more or
+less breathless recitals very often include vigorous accounts of
+"cheating," "naughtiness," unfair play,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span> unkind words, discourtesies,
+all dependent as to their character on the age of the children and all
+opening doors for free conversation on duties and conduct. Here lies one
+of the large opportunities for moral instruction. There is no need to
+attempt to make formal occasions for this; so long as children play and
+live with others they are under the experience of learning the art of
+living with one another; this is the simple essence of morality. The
+parent's answers to their questions on conduct, the comments on their
+criticisms, and the conversation that may easily be directed on these
+subjects count tremendously with the child in establishing his ideals
+and modes of conduct. Returning to his play, there is no mightier
+authority he can quote than to say, "My mother says&mdash;," or "My father
+says&mdash;."</p>
+
+<p>Let no one say that instruction in moral living is not religious, for
+there can be no adequate guidance in morals without religion, nor can
+the religious quality of the life find expression adequately except
+through conduct in social living. Children need more than the rules for
+living; they must feel motives and see ideals. They do not live by rules
+any more than we do. Besides the rule that is known there must be a
+reason for following it and a strong desire to do so. All ethical
+teaching needs this imperative and motivation of religion, the
+quickening of loyalty to high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span> ideals, the doing of the right for
+reasons of love as well as of duty and profit.</p>
+
+<p>The father's opportunity comes especially with the boys. They are sure
+to bring to him their ethical questions on games and sport; he knows
+more about boys' fights and struggles than does the mother. When the
+boys begin to discuss their games the father cannot afford to lack
+interest. Trivial as the question may seem to be, it is the most
+important one of the day to the boy and, for the interests of his
+character, it may be the most important for many a day to the father. If
+he answers with sympathy and interest this question on a "foul ball" or
+on marbles or peg-tops, he has opened a door that will always stay open
+so long as he approaches it with sincerity; if he slights it, if he is
+too busy with those lesser things that seem great to him, he has closed
+a door into the boy's life; it may never be opened again. Children learn
+life through the life they are now living. Real preparation for the
+world of business and larger responsibilities comes by the child's
+experiences of his present world of play and schooling and family
+living. To help him to live this present life aright is the best
+training that can be given for the right living of all life.</p>
+
+<p><i>Questions on organized religion</i>: As children grow up, the church comes
+into their range of interests. Just as they often make the day school<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span>
+focal for conversation, as they recount their day's work there, so they
+retain impressions of the church school, of the services of the church,
+and will always ask many questions about this institution and its
+observances. Here is the opportunity, in free conversation, to tell the
+child the meaning of the church, the significance of membership therein,
+and to lead him to conscious relationship to the society of the
+followers of Jesus. (See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church.")</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>Alice E. Fitts, "Consciousness of God in Children," <i>The Aims of
+Religious Education</i>, pp. 330-38. Religious Education Association,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;G. Koons, <i>Child's Religious Life</i>, sec. II. Eaton &amp; Mains,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p>J. Sully, <i>Children's Ways</i>, chap. vi. Appleton, $1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>George Hodges, <i>The Training of Children in Religion</i>, chaps. i-vi.
+Appleton, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>George E. Dawson, <i>The Child and His Religion</i>, chap. ii. The
+University of Chicago Press, $0.75.</p>
+
+<p>Edward Lyttleton, <i>The Corner-Stone of Education</i>, chap. viii.
+Putnam, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>T. Stephens (ed.), <i>The Child and Religion</i>. Putnam, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;W. Richell, <i>The Child as God's Child</i>. Eaton &amp; Mains, $0.75.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;G. Koons, <i>The Child's Religious Nature</i>. Eaton &amp; Mains, $1.00.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What are the special difficulties which you feel about
+introducing the topic of religion to children? Describe any methods
+or modes of approach which have seemed successful?</p>
+
+<p>2. Would you regard it as a fault if a child seems unwilling to
+talk about religion? What do you think "religion" means to the
+child-mind?</p>
+
+<p>3. In what ways do children's aptitudes differ and what factors
+probably determine the difference? What was your own childish
+conception of God? Did you love God or fear him? Why?</p>
+
+<p>4. Is it ever right to teach the child those conceptions which we
+have outgrown? What about Santa Claus and fairies? How can you use
+childish figures of speech as an avenue to more exact truth?</p>
+
+<p>5. Does the child learn more through ears or eyes? Through which
+agency do we seek to convey religious ideas?</p>
+
+<p>6. Is it possible to make the child see the intimate relation
+between conduct and religion? How would you do this?</p>
+
+<p>7. Give some of the characteristics of a religious child of seven
+years, of ten.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>DIRECTED ACTIVITY</h3>
+
+
+<p>Probably all parents find themselves at some time thinking that the
+real, fundamental problem of training their children lies in dealing
+with their superabundant energy. "He is such an active child!" mothers
+complain. Were he otherwise a physician might properly be consulted. But
+the child's activity does seriously interfere with parental peace. It
+takes us all a long time to learn that we are not, after all, in our
+homes in order to enjoy peaceful rest, but in order to train children
+into fulness of life. That does not mean that the home should be without
+quiet and rest, but that we must not hope to repress the energy of
+childhood. One might as well hope to plug up a spring in the hillside.
+Our work is to direct that activity into glad, useful service.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. VALUE OF ACTIVITY</h4>
+
+<p>The things we do not only indicate character, they determine it. Our
+thoughts have value and power as they get into action. To bend our
+energies toward an ideal is to make it more real, to make it a part of
+ourselves. Children learn by doing&mdash;learn not only that which they are
+doing but life itself.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It may be doubted whether a child ever grew who did not plead to have a
+share in the work he saw going on about him. That desire to help is part
+of that fundamental virtue of loyalty of which we have spoken above; it
+is his desire to be true to the tendency of the home, to give himself to
+the realization of its purposes. Of course he does not think this out at
+all. But this desire on the part of the child to have a hand in the
+day's work is the parent's fine opportunity for a most valuable and
+influential form of character direction.</p>
+
+<p>One of the tests of a worthy character is whether the life is
+contributory or parasitic, whether one carries his load, does his work,
+makes his contribution, or simply waits on the world for what he can
+get. A religious interpretation of and attitude toward life is
+essentially that of self-giving in service. "My Father worketh hitherto
+and I work." "I must be about my Father's business." How noticeable is
+the child's interest in the vivid word-picture of One who "went about
+doing good"!</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE BLESSING OF LABOR</h4>
+
+<p>The home is the first place for life's habituation to service. The child
+is greatly to be pitied who has no duties, no share in the work. Where
+the hands are unsoiled the heart is the easier sullied. It is the height
+of mistaken kindness, one of the common errors of an unthinking,
+superficial affec<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>tion, to protect our children from work. This is a
+world of the moral order and of the glory of work.</p>
+
+<p>When the child is very small it must learn this by having committed to
+it very simple duties. As soon as it is able to handle things it may
+learn to do that which is most helpful with those things, to care for
+its toys, to put them away neatly. A child can learn while very young to
+take care of its spoon, of certain clothes, of chair, and pencil and
+paper. True, it is much easier to "pick up" after the child; but to do
+so is to yield to our own sloth. The more tedious way is the one we must
+follow if we would train the child.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the care of his possessions the child will gladly take a share
+in the general work of the home. Let some daily duty be assigned to each
+one; such simple responsibilities as picking up all papers and magazines
+and seeing that they are properly stacked or disposed of may be given to
+one; another may sweep the stairs every day with a whisk broom (in one
+instance a boy of eight did this daily); another may be "librarian,"
+caring for all books; each one, after eight years of age, should make
+her own bed; each one should be entirely responsible for his own table
+in his room. Many homes permit of many other "chores," such as keeping
+up the supply of small kindling, caring for a pet or even a larger
+animal, keeping a little personal garden or vegetable plot. Under those
+normal conditions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span> of living, which some day we may reach, where each
+family, or all families, have trees and flowers and ample space, the
+opportunities are increased for joyous child activities which
+consciously contribute to social well-being as a whole.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. RELIGION IN ACTION</h4>
+
+<p>Perhaps some will say, this is not religious education, it is everyday
+training. Yes, it is "everyday training," but it is the training of a
+religious person with the religious purpose of habituating the child to
+give his life in service to his world. That is precisely what we
+need&mdash;<i>religion in everyday action</i>. The atmosphere and habitual
+attitude and conversation of the family must be depended on to give a
+really religious meaning to these everyday acts, to make them as
+religious as going to church, perhaps more so, and so to make them a
+training for the life that is religious, not in word only, but in deed
+and in truth.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever we may say to children on the subject of religion, whether
+directly or in teaching by indirection through songs and worship, must
+pass over somehow into action in order to have meaning and reality. It
+must be realized in order to be real. The difficulty that appears is
+that of connecting the daily act with its spiritual significance. Yet
+that is not as difficult as it seems. If the act<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span> has religious
+significance to us, if we form the habit of really worshiping God with
+our work, seeking in it to do his will, the child will know it. We
+cannot keep that hidden. The spiritual life will never be more real to
+the child than it is to us, and no amount of moralizing or
+spiritualizing about our acts or his will give them religious
+significance.</p>
+
+<p>At least one person will testify that, after being brought up in a
+really religious home, the most strikingly religious memory of that home
+is an occasion when he delightedly carried a tray of food to a sick
+neighbor. It was doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing
+the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the
+life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are
+acts repeated until they pass from the volitional to the involuntary.
+The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the
+willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it
+becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the
+flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a
+share in all our ministries.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">12</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in
+forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social
+activities for students to carry out.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">13</a> The parents ought to know what
+is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to
+co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of
+service suggested for the children, these activities lose all
+perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a
+normal part of life.</p>
+
+<p>Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we
+were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we
+were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a
+sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our
+thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for,
+and that joy will be their strength.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE</h4>
+
+<p>The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own
+activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may
+acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the
+chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life.
+Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>ride in private
+cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted
+life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have
+without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy
+remain the passive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he
+is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert
+him from the pauper habit.</p>
+
+<p>The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of
+passive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to
+shield them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The
+religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the
+days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and
+finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men.
+Vain is all family worship, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless
+we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the
+imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in
+heart. The family may make this the normal way to live.</p>
+
+<p>If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of
+the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see
+itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and
+helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people
+the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span> in
+self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in
+relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial,
+and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a
+child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere
+is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.</p>
+
+<p>The whole attitude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of
+the family. The greedy family makes the grafting citizen. The grasping
+home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace. Greater than
+the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the
+ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizenship
+in your home. No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beatitudes or
+week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of
+envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home.
+Home action and attitude count for more than all besides.</p>
+
+<p>It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power
+of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective
+method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole
+social duty unselfishly.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. FAMILY TRAINING FOR SOCIAL LIVING</h4>
+
+<p>The supreme test of the religious life here is ability to live among men
+as brothers and to cause<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span> the conditions of the divine family to be
+realized on earth. If we can realize that the purpose of Jesus was to
+bring men into the family of God, that the aim of all religious endeavor
+is the family character in men and women and the conditions of that
+family in all society, we must surely appreciate the possibility of the
+human family as a training school for this larger family of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>The infant approaches social living by the pathway of the society of the
+family. We all go out into life through widening circles, first the
+mother's arms, then the family, the neighborhood, the city, the state,
+the nation, the world-life. Each circle prepares for the next. The
+family is the child's social order; its life is his training for the
+larger life of nation and human brotherhood.</p>
+
+<p>Just how men and women will live in society is determined principally by
+the bent of their characters in the social order of the family. Their
+attitude to the world follows the attitude of the family, especially of
+the parents. They interpret the larger world by the lesser. The home is
+the great school of citizenship and social living.</p>
+
+<p>All the moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the
+purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its
+cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and
+motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the
+coming generation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span> to live in a religious society, in one which will
+steadily move toward the divine ideal of perfect family relations
+through brotherhood and fatherhood. Its business is not to get children
+ready for heaven, but to train them to make all life heavenly. Its aim
+is not alone children who will not tear down the parents' reputation,
+but men and women who will build up the actual worth and beauty of all
+lives.</p>
+
+<p>The realization, in the family, of the purpose of training youth to
+social living and service in the religious spirit depends on two things:
+a spirit and passion in the family for social justice and order, and the
+direction of the activities of the family toward training in social
+usefulness.</p>
+
+<p>Only the social spirit can give birth to the social spirit. True lovers
+of men, who set the values of life and of the spirit first, who give
+their lives that all men may have freedom and means to find more
+abundant life, come out of the families where the passion of human love
+burns high. The selfish family, self-centered, caring not at all in any
+deep sense for the well-being of others, existing to extract the juice
+of life and let who will be nourished on the rind, becomes effective to
+make the social highwayman, the oppressor. From such a family comes he
+who breaks laws for his pocketbook and impedes the enactment of laws
+lest human rights should prevent his acquisition of wealth; he who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>
+hates his brother man&mdash;unless that brother has more than he has; the foe
+of the kingdom of goodness and peace and brotherhood.</p>
+
+<p>And goodness is as contagious as badness. Children catch the spirit of
+social love and idealism in the family. Where men and women are deeply
+concerned with all that makes the world better for lives, better for
+babies and mothers, for workers, and, above all, for the values of the
+spirit gained through leisure, opportunities, and higher incentives;
+where the family is more concerned with folks than with furniture; where
+habitually it thinks of people as Jesus did, as the objects most of all
+worth seeking, worth investing in, there children receive direction,
+habituation, and motivation for the life of religion, the life that
+binds them in glad love to the service of their fellows, and makes them
+think of all their life as the one great chance to serve, to make a
+better world, and to bring God's great family closer together here.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;A. Coe, <i>Education in Religion and Morals</i>, pp. 142-50. Revell,
+$1.35.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;S. Athearn, <i>The Church School</i>, pp. 85-102. Pilgrim Press,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p>G. Johnson, <i>Education by Plays and Games</i>, Part I. Ginn &amp; Co.,
+$0.90.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;D. Angell, <i>Play</i>. Little, Brown &amp; Co., $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Fisher, Gulick, <i>et al.</i>, "Ethical Significance of Play,"
+<i>Materials for Religious Education</i>, pp. 197-215. Religious
+Education Association, $0.50.</p>
+
+<p>Publications of the Play Ground Association.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Methods and Materials</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">PLAY</p>
+
+<p>Forbush, <i>Manual of Play</i>. Jacobs, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>A. Newton, <i>Graded Games</i>. Barnes, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Von Palm, <i>Rainy Day Pastimes</i>. Dana Estes, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Johnson, <i>When Mother Lets Us Help</i>. Moffat, Yard &amp; Co., $0.75.</p>
+
+<p class="center">WORK</p>
+
+<p>Canfield, <i>What Shall We Do Now?</i> Stokes, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Beard, <i>Jack of All Trades</i>. Scribner, $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>Beard, <i>Things Worth Doing</i>. Scribner, $2.00.</p>
+
+<p>Bailey, <i>Garden Making</i>. Macmillan, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Bailey (ed.), <i>Something to Do</i> (magazine). School Arts Publishing
+Co.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">IV. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. Is the quiet child an ideal child? How far should we go in
+restraining activity?</p>
+
+<p>2. The relative advantages of work and leisure for children. What
+of the value of chores to you; did you do them? Describe any forms
+of children's service in the home which have come under your
+observation.</p>
+
+<p>3. What forms of community service can be done by children and by
+young people?</p>
+
+<p>4. Recall any lessons learned by activity in your early home life.</p>
+
+<p>5. Give in their order, according to your judgment, the potencies
+for religious character in the home.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">12</span></a> A short list of books on child activity in the home is
+appended at the end of this chapter; a fairly complete list, long enough
+for any family, will be found on p. 117 of <i>The Church School</i>, by W.&nbsp;S.
+Athearn.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">13</span></a> See W.&nbsp;N. Hutchins, <i>Graded Social Service for the Sunday
+School</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE HOME AS A SCHOOL<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">14</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>The home is so mighty as a school because, requiring little time for
+formal instruction, it enlists its scholars so largely in informal
+activities. It trains for life by living; it trains as an institution,
+by a group of activities, a series of duties, a set of habits. If the
+home is to prepare for social living it will be most of all and best of
+all by its organization and conduct as a social institution.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. AN IDEAL COMMUNITY</h4>
+
+<p>For the purposes of society homes must be social-training centers; they
+must be conducted as communities if their members are to be fitted for
+communal living. No boy is likely to be ready for the responsibilities
+of free citizenship who has spent his years in a home under an absolute
+monarchy; or, as is today perhaps more frequently the case, in a
+condition of unmitigated anarchy. A free society cannot consist of units
+not free. The problems of parental discipline arise and appear as
+persistently irritating and perplexing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span>stumbling-blocks in many a home
+simply because that home is organized altogether out of harmony and
+relation with the normal life in which it is set. Society environing the
+home gives its members the habits of twentieth-century autonomy,
+individual initiative and responsibility, together with collective
+living and working, while the home often seeks to perpetuate
+thirteenth-century absolutism, serfdom, and subjection. In social living
+outside the home we learn to do the will of all; in the home we attempt
+to compel children to do the will of one.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. COMMUNITY INTERESTS</h4>
+
+<p>The home organized as a social community will give to every member,
+according to his ability, a share in its guidance and will expect from
+every member the free contribution of his powers. Its rules will be made
+by the will of all, and its affairs governed, not by an executive board
+composed of the parents, but by the free participation and choice of
+all. The young will learn to choose by choosing; will learn both how to
+rule and to be ruled by a share in ruling.</p>
+
+<p>To be explicit, suppose a piece of furniture is desired for the home.
+Two plans at least are possible: first, the "head of the home" may go
+forth and purchase it without consulting anyone, or after advising with
+the other "head"; or,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span> second, before a purchase is made, the wisdom of
+such an addition to the furniture may be suggested in the open council
+of the whole family and the purchase discussed and determined by all.
+Such councils, usually coming at or after the principal meal, freely
+participated in by all, give even to the youngest a sense of the cost of
+a home, of the care that goes into it, with, what is more important, a
+sense of a share in these cares and costs; they cultivate habits of
+prudence, of consideration of a matter, of steady judgments, of
+deference to the wishes and wisdom of others. Of still greater
+importance is another practical issue of such a plan&mdash;that every member
+of the household has a new sense of proprietorship with deepened
+responsibility. Instead of thinking of any household possession as
+father's or mother's, or even mine, it becomes <i>ours</i>. The parents no
+longer need to say, "Children, do not mar the furniture; it costs money
+to replace it." The children know that already, and they have the same
+pride in the home possessions and the same desire to preserve them as
+they have in that which is peculiarly their own. A habit of mind results
+from such a course so that, by thinking in terms of common possession of
+the best things of life, there is cultivated that respect for the rights
+of others which is simply right social thinking.</p>
+
+<p>The same plan could be pursued in relation to almost every interest of
+the family&mdash;as the planning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span> of the annual vacation and outing, the
+holidays, picnics, and birthday celebrations, the church and religious
+exercises. Above all, in the last mentioned, this social spirit may be
+cultivated. The father may cease to be the "high priest" for his family
+and become a worshiper along with the other members. The effect will be
+that his children are more likely to stay as worshipers with him than if
+they gazed on him as on some lonely elevation, unrelated to them in his
+religious exercises. The reading, the song, the prayers, the comment and
+discussion, the story-telling, and all that may make up the regular
+specific religious activities of the family should be such that all may
+have a share in them. Nothing could be finer, diviner, and bring larger
+helpfulness for social living than the attempt of the least little
+lisping child to throw herself into the unified family act of prayer, as
+when one little tot, unable to say the Lord's Prayer, united in worship
+at the time of that act by saying, as reverently as possible, "One, two,
+three, four, five," etc., up to ten. The ability to count was her latest
+accomplishment; counting to ten was bringing the very best thing she
+then had and, in the act of family worship, offering her part to the
+Most High. A fine sense of worship and a desire to be one with the
+others in this united, communal service prompted the participation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. COMMUNITY SERVICE</h4>
+
+<p>Community service may be cultivated in the home. Here is the ideal
+social community, where there are neither parasites nor paupers, where
+all give of their best for the best of all. No one doubts that the baby
+gives its full share of happiness and cheer, and the aged their offering
+of consolation and experience; but the difficulty is supposed to be with
+the lad and the girl who would rather play than work. Usually this is
+because the habits of co-operation in the life of this community have
+been too long neglected. The small boy or girl had no share in its work.
+Parents are too busy to think through the matter of finding suitable
+duties for all. It is so much easier to do things one's self, even
+though the child misses the benefits of participation. More frequently
+the blame lies in the fact that parents desire to shield children from
+labor. Some would have them grow up without knowing what they count as
+the degradation of toil. But a boy who knows nothing of the "chores" has
+missed half the joys of boyhood, and has a terribly hard lesson ahead of
+him when he goes out to relate himself to life. No matter what one's
+station may be, there is a part to be played, and one's piece of work to
+be done. The greatest unkindness we can do our children is to train them
+to lives that do not play their part. The home is our chance to train a
+man to harmonious usefulness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span> in his world. Not only should the family
+train to social co-operation and service, but it should train to
+efficiency therein. Do not let your child's duties become a farce; let
+them exact as much of him as the world will exact also; that is,
+efficiency, accuracy, thoroughness, and fidelity.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. A SCHOOL OF SOCIAL MINISTRY</h4>
+
+<p>The family trains lives for social ministry. The unsocial lives come out
+of unsocial homes. The home that exists for itself alone trains lives
+that exist only for themselves; these are the homes that throw the sand
+of selfishness into the wheels of society; they ultimately effect social
+suicide through selfishness. The attitude and atmosphere of the home are
+of first importance here. As we think, so will our children act. If the
+home is to us a place without responsibilities for the neighborhood,
+without duties to neighbors, without social roots, then it is a school
+for industrial, commercial, and social greed and warfare. As we think in
+our hearts and talk at our table, so are we educating those who sit
+thereat.</p>
+
+<p>If we would have our homes really efficient and worthy agencies for
+education in social living, the first thing to do is to seek the social
+atmosphere, to cultivate all those influences which young lives
+unconsciously absorb. We all know that character comes through
+environment in large measure, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span> that the mental and spiritual
+environment is by far the most potent. Here is something that affects us
+more than the finest or poorest furniture and that gives the real zest
+and flavor to any meal. The choice of our own reading enters here, not
+only the matter of reading in sociology, but of all reading, as to
+whether it blinds with class prejudices, intensifies caste feeling, or
+atrophies social sympathy by pandering to selfishness and sensuousness.
+The control of our own feelings and judgment enters here. Do we
+sedulously cultivate charity for others? Do we stifle impatience,
+bitterness, class feeling? Do we guide the conversation of visitors and
+the family group so that antisocial passions are subdued and a spirit of
+brotherly love and compassion for all is cultivated? Here men and women
+have opportunity to give evidence of a change of heart; here they need
+that awakening to social consciousness which is a new birth, a
+regeneration into the life of the Son of Man who came to give his life.</p>
+
+<p>By its active ministry the family is training for social living. When a
+child carries a bowl of soup to some sick or needy one, he learns a
+lesson never to be forgotten. The memories of hours of planning and
+preparation for some neighborly service&mdash;the making of bread, the
+packing of a box, the preserves for the sick&mdash;shine out like sunshine
+spots along childhood's ways; they direct manhood's steps.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We are gradually learning that social duties are not learned save
+through social deeds; that even the most carefully prepared and
+perfectly pedagogical systems of instruction fail, standing alone. The
+college student uses the laboratory method in his sociology&mdash;though we
+know that sociology may be as far from social living as the poles are
+apart. The Social Service Association of the Young Men's Christian
+Association has given up attempts to teach social duty in favor of the
+plan of undertaking specific pieces of social activity. The home must
+adopt the laboratory method. The important thing is, not what the father
+or mother may systematically teach about the social duties of the
+children, but what kinds of service, of ministry and normal activity
+they may lead the children to; that is, in what ways they may all
+together discharge their functions in society.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. FAMILIES AS COMMUNITY FACTORS</h4>
+
+<p>Each family must clearly see its normal relations to its community, to
+the social whole; first, as an association of social beings having
+social duties, obligations, and privileges; then, to see that the
+ordering of the daily life is the largest single factor in determining
+the value of the family to the development of the community, fitting
+harmoniously into the larger community, and rendering its share of
+service.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The disorderly home spreads its immoral contagion beyond its walls, out
+into the front yard, out and up and down the street, and all through the
+village and city. The City Beautiful cannot come until we have the Home
+Beautiful. Training each one to play his part in keeping the house in
+order, picking up and setting in place his own tools and playthings,
+preventing and removing litter, scraps, and elements of disorder and
+discomfort, acquiring habits of neatness based on social motives&mdash;these
+things make more for the city of beauty and health than all our lectures
+on clean cities.</p>
+
+<p>No family lives to itself. Young people need to see clearly how their
+homes and their habits in the home impinge on other homes and lives.
+This is impressed upon us in an accentuated and acute degree in city
+living. One can hardly imagine a finer discipline of grace than
+apartment living, though one may well question whether it is not morally
+and hygienically flying in the face of the natural order. We may not
+have for a long time municipal ordinances forbidding boiled dinners,
+limburger, and phonographs in city apartments; but if, unfortunately, we
+are compelled to live in these modern abominations, we ought to
+cultivate a conscience that will not inflict our idiosyncrasies, either
+in culinary aromas or in musical taste, on our neighbors. But there are
+matters greater than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span> these by which the home trains for social
+thoughtfulness. No man has a right to grow weeds at home, because the
+seeds never stay there. A howling dog, a disease-breeding sty, a
+fly-harboring stable, must be viewed, not from the point of the family's
+convenience, but from that of others' welfare.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 6. TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP</h4>
+
+<p>The family has a duty to train children for Christian citizenship. No
+other institution can take its place even here. Courses of lectures in
+churches and settlements effect excellent results, and the study of
+civics from the moral and ideal viewpoint should be encouraged in the
+schools; but the home is the place where, after all, citizens are
+trained and the value or menace of their citizenship determined. If we
+stop long enough to get a clear understanding of what we mean by
+citizenship this will be the more evident.</p>
+
+<p>Citizenship is the condition of full communal, social living in a
+democracy. It is not a special department or activity of a man's life
+which he exercises once in a while, as at the primary or at the polls or
+through the political campaign; it is a permanent condition, the
+condition of his social living in a democracy. It seems to be worth
+while to think of this enough to be quite sure of it, for we have
+thought too long of citizenship as a special aspect of one's life or as
+an occasional duty; we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span> have called for good citizenship at times of
+election and have been content with dormant citizenship at other times;
+we have said that one was exercising his citizenship when he voted, and
+have forgotten that he was exercising it or abusing or neglecting it as
+he walked the streets, talked with his neighbors, or in any way lived
+the life that has relations to other lives.</p>
+
+<p>Matters of citizenship are simply matters of social living, as social
+living expresses itself through what we call government; that is,
+through communal, civic, national administration and regulation.
+Citizenship is social control in action, not through political activity
+alone, but through all that concerns civic and communal life. In view of
+this it may be worth while to look a little more closely into the
+relations of family life to this matter of the determination of the
+character of our citizenship.</p>
+
+<p>The family is an agency for religious training in citizenship. The
+family is the first, smallest, and still the most common and potent
+social group. It is the community in which we nearly all learn communal
+living. At first it is a child's world, then comes his city, and then
+his nation, but ere long again the family is his own kingdom. Its
+ideals, constantly interpreted in action, determine our ideals. Where
+the father is greedy, self-centered, regarding the home as solely for
+his convenience as his private boarding-house, where he is a despotic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span>
+boss, why should not the son at least tolerate bossism in his city if he
+does not himself pattern after his father on a wider scale and regard
+the city or the state as his private boarding-house and the treasury as
+his private manger? Where the mother is a petty parasite, what wonder
+the children regard with indifference, if not even with admiration, the
+whole system of civic and social barnacles, leeches, and other
+parasites?</p>
+
+<p>The very organization of the home must prepare for civic duty by laying
+upon all appropriate duties and activities. It ought to be an ideal type
+of community. But that can never be until we take the training of
+parents seriously in hand; until we cease to delegate the pedagogy of
+courtship, marriage, and home-founding to the comic supplements of the
+Sunday papers and to the joke columns. Parents must themselves be
+trained for the business of the organization of homes as educational
+agencies.</p>
+
+<p>The life and work of the home ought to train religiously for
+citizenship, by causing each to bear his due share of the burdens of
+all. Where the child has been forced to do the indolent parent's share,
+to support the slothful father, he can only look forward to the time
+when he will be free to support only himself, and have no other than
+purely egoistic obligations; this is an utterly immoral conception, and
+one squarely opposed to good citizenship. Where the boy or the girl has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span>
+been trained to regard all toil as dishonorable, where each has been
+taught scrupulously to avoid every burden, they come into social living
+with habits set against bearing their share and toward making others
+carry them. The indolent parent makes the tax-dodging citizen, as the
+indulgent parent often makes the place-hunting citizen who becomes a tax
+on the public.</p>
+
+<p>The ideals of the family determine the needs of citizens. Its
+conversation, its reading, its customs, set the standard of social
+needs. Where the father laughs at the smartness of the artful dodge in
+politics, where the mother sighs after the tinsel and toys that she
+knows others have bought with corrupt cash, where the conversation at
+the meal-table steadily, though often unconsciously, lifts up and lauds
+those who are out after the "real thing," the eager ears about that
+board drink it in and childish hearts resolve what they will do when
+they have a chance. Where no voice speaks for high things, where no tide
+of indignation against wrong sweeps into language, where the children
+never feel that the parents have great moral convictions&mdash;where no
+vision is, the people perish.</p>
+
+<p>Yet to realize this civic responsibility of the home would be, in the
+greater number of instances, to remedy it. In those other instances
+where there are no civic ideals, where the domestic conscience<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span> is dead,
+there rests upon the state, upon society, for its own sake, the
+responsibility to train those children so that, at any rate, they will
+not perpetuate homes of this type. We may do very much by the
+stimulation and direction of parents. Men need but to be reminded of
+their duty to make it a part of their business to train their children
+in social duty.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>Taylor, <i>Religion in Social Action</i>, chaps. vii, viii. Dodd, Mead &amp;
+Co., $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;J. Ward, <i>The Social Center</i>, chap. v. Appleton, $1.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>Lofthouse, <i>Ethics in the Family</i>. Hodder &amp; Stoughton, $1.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What is the special social importance of the family?</p>
+
+<p>2. How do children acquire their social ideals from the home?</p>
+
+<p>3. What are the advantages which the home has as a school?</p>
+
+<p>4. How do homes train for the responsibilities of citizenship?</p>
+
+<p>5. Can you describe any plans of community councils in the home?</p>
+
+<p>6. How would you promote community service in the family?</p>
+
+<p>7. What are the dangers of unsocial and selfish lives growing in
+the home?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">14</span></a> This chapter is, with the publisher's kind permission,
+taken, with sundry minor changes, from the author's pamphlet, <i>The Home
+as a School for Social Living</i>, published by the American Baptist
+Publication Society in the "Social Service Series."</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE CHILD'S IDEAL LIFE</h3>
+
+
+<p>The modern child is likely to miss one of the great character enrichings
+which his parents had, in that he is in danger of growing up entirely
+ignorant of the poetic setting of religious thought in historic and
+dignified hymns. The great hymns have done more for religious thought
+and character than all the sermons that have ever been preached. Even in
+the adult of the purely intellectual cast the hymn, aided by rhythm,
+music, repetition, and emotion, is likely to become a more permanent
+part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of
+ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more
+than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a
+world of imagery!</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. SONG AND STORY</h4>
+
+<p>Very early life's ideals are presented in poetic form; plays,
+school-life, love of country, friendships, all take or are given metric
+expression. So, for children, hymns have a perfectly natural place. The
+child sings as he plays, sings as he works, sings in school, and, as
+long as life and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span> memory hold, these words of song will be his
+possession; in declining years, when eyes are failing and other
+interests may wane, fragments of childhood's songs and youth's poems
+will sing themselves over in his memory; while in the years between how
+often will some stanza or line spring into the focus of thought just at
+the moment when it can give brave and helpful direction!</p>
+
+<p>Those years of facile memorization should be like the ant's summer, a
+period of steady storing in mind of the world's treasures of thought. No
+man ever had too many good and beautiful thoughts in his memory. Few
+have failed to recall with gratitude some apparently long-forgotten word
+of cheer, light, and inspiration stored in childhood. The special virtue
+of the hymn, among all poetic forms of great thoughts, is that memory is
+strengthened by the music and the thought further idealized by it, while
+frequent repetition fixes it the more firmly and repetition in
+congregational song adds the high value of emotional association.</p>
+
+<p>But what kinds of memory treasures are being given to the modern child
+in the realm of religion? In by far the greater number of instances in
+the United States neither church nor Sunday school nor home brings to
+him any knowledge of the great hymns of religion.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">15</a> In the churches
+that use <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span>these hymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday
+services; he is in the children's service or the school, while in the
+majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has
+substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified
+hymns. Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance,
+cavort, or drone through the frivolities of "popular" gospel songs is
+only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to
+divorce worship and thought, to make worship a matter of purely
+superficial emotions, and to form the habit of expressing religion, the
+highest experience of life, in language, often irreverent and almost
+always trivial, slangy, or ridiculous. It is an insult to the
+intelligence of children to ask them to sing</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">We're pilgrims o'er the sands of time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We have not long to stay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lifeboat soon is coming,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To carry the pilgrims away.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is the duty of parents to know what their children are learning in
+the Sunday school. Not only are they often missing the opportunity to
+lay up the treasure of elevating, inspiring thoughts; they are acquiring
+crude, mistaken, misleading theological concepts in the hideous,
+revolting figures of "evangelistic songs"; they are storing their minds
+with atrocities in English and in figures of speech; they are acquiring
+the habits of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span> sentimentality in religion and inhibiting the finer,
+higher feelings. They are blunting their higher feelings by repeating
+incongruous and nauseating figures of being "washed in blood," or they
+are carelessly singing sentiments they do not understand.</p>
+
+<p>What can the family do about this? It ought to assert its rights in the
+church. It ought to protest and rebel against the debauching of mind and
+the degrading of religion (all for the sake of selling trashy books at
+$25 per hundred). A parent would do better to keep his child from church
+and Sunday school than to permit his mind to be filled with the
+sanguinary pictures of God, the mediaeval theology of the modern
+songbook, and its offenses against truth in thought and form. But the
+family can work positively and more effectively by providing good hymns
+for children in the home.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. TRAINING IN SONG</h4>
+
+<p>Almost without exception all children will sing if encouraged early in
+life. In the family group one has only to start a familiar song and soon
+all will be singing. It is just as natural to sing "Abide with Me" when
+the family sits together in the evening as it is to start "My Alabama
+Choo-choo." Children like the swing of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" just
+as much as in the northern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span> states they like "Marching through Georgia."
+If they do not know the hymns the home is the best of all places in
+which to learn them.</p>
+
+<p>A large section of real family life is missing in families that do not
+sing together. A home without song lacks one of the strongest bonds of
+family unity, and the after-years will be deprived of a memory dear
+indeed to many others. Days often come when the wheels of family life
+seem to develop friction, when little rifts seem to throw the members
+far apart, but the evening song brings them together. The unity of
+action, of feeling, the development of emotions above the day's
+irritation and strife, all help to new joys in family living.</p>
+
+<p>We may well think of the fine songs and the great hymns together. There
+is no fixed wall between "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," and "The Son
+of God Goes Forth," nor between "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Jerusalem
+the Golden." The modern home has the musical instruments to lead in
+song&mdash;though they are not always essential&mdash;and lacks only the planning
+and forethought to develop the joys of song. It must provide the thought
+that applies the simpler forms of musical expression to the sweetening
+and enriching of life.</p>
+
+<p>Let no one say, "My family is not musical." That simply means that your
+family does not take<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span> time for music and song. Build on the training in
+patriotic and folk-songs given in the schools; sing these same songs
+over in the home and then associate with the best of them the best of
+the hymns. Cultivate the habit of binding the whole realm of feeling in
+music together, the hymns and the songs, to make religion mean beauty
+and devotion and to make the finer sentiments of life truly religious.</p>
+
+<p>This costs time and thought. Someone must plan that the books of songs
+and hymns are provided, that the opportunity is given, and that wise,
+unobtrusive leadership is there. Have ready several copies of the book
+containing the best hymns. Think out your plan of procedure in advance,
+selecting the songs, or at least the first one. Then at the right time
+simply begin to play that song and you will scarcely need to invite the
+children to sing with you.</p>
+
+<p>Should anyone doubt whether children will enjoy singing good hymns, he
+may purchase a few records for the phonograph, for example, "O Come All
+Ye Faithful," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "O Zion Haste," "Holy,
+Holy, Holy," "Abide with Me." These will suit those of from ten upward;
+younger children will enjoy "Can a Little Child Like Me," "Brightly
+Gleams Our Banner," "Jesus Loves Me." "I Think When I Read That Sweet
+Story," and "For the Beauty of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span> the Earth," though they will join gladly
+in the other hymns. Or, instead of using the phonograph, sit down
+quietly at the piano and play these hymns, with just enough emphasis for
+the children to catch the rhythm, and they will soon be standing at the
+piano singing with you.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">16</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. PLAY ACTIVITY</h4>
+
+<p>The child is a playing animal. Play is not an invention of the devil,
+designed to plague parents and to lead children to waste their time. It
+is nature's best method of education, for when a child plays he is
+simply reaching forward in his activities to the realization of his
+ideals. Play is idealized experiences. There is always a significance of
+wider and maturer experience in children's play. Therefore the family
+must find space and time and adaptation of organization to the child's
+need of spontaneous, free activity in play.</p>
+
+<p>The special religious value of play lies in the fact that the child in
+his games is experimenting with life, learning its lessons; especially
+is he learning the art of living with other lives. It is our religious
+duty to see to it that our children become <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span>used to living in society by
+playing in social groups. Scarcely anyone is more to be pitied than the
+lonely child standing in the corner of the playground, able only to
+watch the games, because parental prohibition has already made him a
+solitary and unsocial creature.</p>
+
+<p>The educational potencies of play are so great that we dare not leave
+its activities to chance. Parents must study the power of play, its
+psychological and educational values, in order to direct its activity to
+the highest good.</p>
+
+<p>The adequate care of a child's play-life will involve, in addition to
+the trained intelligence of the parents, provision for space in the
+house and also outdoors, willingness to subordinate our peace and our
+pleasure to the child's play at times, a reasonable though not
+necessarily expensive provision of play materials, attention to the
+character of the plays and playmates. The home will not lose its harmony
+and beauty if it is filled with playing children. Its function has to do
+with their development rather than with the preservation of chairs.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>H.&nbsp;F. Cope, <i>Hymns You Ought to Know</i>, Introduction. Revell, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;F. Pratt, <i>Musical Ministries</i>. Revell, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>H.&nbsp;W. Hulbert, <i>The Church and Her Children</i>, chap. x. Revell,
+$1.00.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>For a list of great hymns see <i>Hymns You Ought to Know</i>, edited by
+Henry F. Cope, and mentioned above. It contains one hundred
+standard hymns with a brief account of each hymn and of each
+author.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;D. Eaton, "Hymns for Youth," <i>Religious Education</i>, December,
+1912, VII, 509.</p>
+
+<p>See report of the Commission on Worship in the Sunday School, in
+<i>Religious Education</i>, October, 1914.</p>
+
+<p>Read especially the chapter on this subject in H.&nbsp;H. Hartshorne,
+<i>Worship in the Sunday School</i>. Columbia University, $1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What special advantages do songs and hymns have in their
+pedagogical power?</p>
+
+<p>2. What hymns do you remember from childhood? In what way are these
+hymns valuable to you?</p>
+
+<p>3. What changes would you like to see in the hymns the children
+learn today?</p>
+
+<p>4. What difficulties do you find in training children to sing in
+the home?</p>
+
+<p>5. Is it worth while to teach children to play? What games have
+special educational value? What games have religious significance
+or value? Give reasons for your opinions.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">15</span></a> One of the best collections of suitable religious songs is
+<i>Worship and Song</i>. Pilgrim Press, $0.40.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">16</span></a> An excellent plan is worked out in <i>The Children's Hour of
+Story and Song</i> by Moffat and Hidden, Unitarian Sunday School Society,
+in which children's stories are given and following them suitable songs
+and hymns with the music for each.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>STORIES AND READING</h3>
+
+
+<p>If we would teach religion to our children we must adopt the method of
+Jesus; that of telling stories. The story has the advantage, first, of
+its natural interest, and, then, of the indirect manner of its
+presentation of the truth, together with the fact that that truth is
+embodied in a statement of life and experience. Besides, story-telling
+to any person of active interests is one of the easiest and most
+stimulating methods of teaching.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. STORY-TELLING</h4>
+
+<p>So much has already been written on the art of telling stories that only
+a few suggestions are needed here. First, understand why you tell the
+story. Normally a double motive enters in, namely, the conveyance of
+truth in life, at the same time affording real pleasure to the
+listeners. Either motive alone will be inadequate. You cannot convey the
+truth without the desire to give pleasure; you cannot make the pleasure
+worth while without the truth. But this is the place to insist that the
+truth which you desire to convey must find its way to the conviction of
+the child through the story and not through any moral or preface or
+particular statement which you may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span> make. The moral or lesson must be
+clear to you but carefully held in reserve to direct the matter and
+manner of the story.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, be prepared to pay the price of this most effective method of
+instruction. It will cost the reservation of a certain amount of time
+both for acquiring the story and for relating it. It will require
+careful thought and planning, especially to be sure that the story is
+told in sympathy with the child's world. People who are too busy to tell
+their children stories are, perhaps fortunately, coming to realize that
+they are too busy to have children. If it looks like a waste of time to
+turn off the lights and sit by the firelight for from twenty to thirty
+minutes, we shall need to revise our estimates of the value of
+child-character. Nor must we shrink from the investment of time in
+preparation for the narration of the story; if it is worth telling, it
+is worth telling well.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, keep a record of sources of stories. This may be preserved in a
+notebook. One parent used a card-index for this purpose. There are a few
+books published containing good collections.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">17</a> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>You will find most
+valuable your own little book in which you have noted down the fugitive
+stories and short selections which are to be found in general
+literature.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">18</a></p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, do not tell a story so as to close the child's interest in the
+narrative. Stories ought to lead to inquiry and further reading in the
+book or other source from which they have been drawn; indeed,
+story-telling is one excellent method of quickening an interest in
+reading.</p>
+
+<p>Fifthly, allow the children to retell the stories to one another. Often
+the whole family will be entertained and helped by the explanation which
+a small child will give of the story he has learned by hearing it
+repeated a few times from his mother's lips.</p>
+
+<p>Sixthly, telling Bible stories to children in the quiet hour is the best
+of all methods to stimulate their interest in the Bible itself. It is
+much better to tell the story in your own language than to read it
+either in the Bible or in a paraphrase. For one reason, you will never
+tell it twice the same way, and children will watch with interest
+changes in the narration. As soon as they can read, secure <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span>some of the
+simple Bible narratives and put these in their hands.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">19</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. BOOKS AND READING</h4>
+
+<p>A home without books is like a house with only one window; it can look
+out in only one direction, in that of the present. It knows only a
+limited world; its children have a short measure of the joy of life,
+they can know here only those whom they see today, their friends must be
+few, their world narrow and confined.</p>
+
+<p>If the books are not in your home the children will find them elsewhere.
+Unless the school kills the taste for reading, as it sometimes does, the
+young folks will open ways somehow into the ideal realm of books. As
+they grow up, the book takes the place of the story. The printed page is
+the child's key to all routes of travel, routes that lead to other times
+and lands, routes that lead to other people and into their hearts and
+minds. The child sees conduct and feels it as it is in action in lives
+before him, but he begins to discriminate and to analyze it only through
+reading; souls are revealed where the purpose of the writer is that the
+reader may see the springs of action in the character portrayed.
+Fiction, biography, travel, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>and adventure soon pass from the merely
+exterior happenings to the discovery of meanings in character.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. DANGERS OF READING</h4>
+
+<p>Since the book needs only one for its enjoyment, while the story
+requires two, there is less control over reading. There is only one way
+to be sure that children are not devouring vicious books and that is to
+make sure that they have an ample supply of healthful, helpful ones.
+This is especially necessary in a day that caters to sloth in reading.
+The tendency is for reading to take the facile decline from book to
+cheap magazine, from magazine to newspaper, and from the newspaper to
+skimming the headlines and the "funnies." The cheaper papers appeal to
+the lowest intelligence and strike at the line of least moral and mental
+resistance. Reading enriches the life but little and may impoverish it
+greatly unless there is developed the habit of drawing on the world's
+great treasures of thought and feeling. Open windows in your children's
+souls by giving them books; keep them open by encouraging the reading
+habit. Great souls wait for them, willing to converse and become their
+friends and teachers if they will but take down these books from the
+shelves and open them with an eager mind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. DEVELOPING GOOD TASTE</h4>
+
+<p><i>What can be done to quicken a love of good reading in children?</i>
+Recognize that not all children develop this appetite at the same age,
+that girls read more than boys, that boys usually have a period of
+decline in reading interest from seventeen to twenty-one or even later.
+But everything really depends on whether we ourselves love good books
+and keep them on hand. One of the life-centers of a family should be the
+bookshelf, while the picture of the evening lamp and the reading group
+will constitute one of its best memories. Where books are at hand and
+where they are used daily, the children need little urging to read. Now
+this does not mean that yards of choice editions make a book-loving
+family. There is a difference between bindings and books. It means books
+known and loved, familiar friends for daily converse, books on handy
+shelves and fit to be used as common food.</p>
+
+<p><i>Do you know what your children read?</i> Do you watch as carefully the
+food of mind and spirit as you do that of the body? Do you show an
+interest in the books they plan to draw from the public library? Can you
+guide them intelligently when they ask for suggestions of interesting
+books? Do you know the healthful, suitable ones?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. PROMOTION OF THE READING INTEREST</h4>
+
+<p>The Sunday school might aid greatly in promoting the habit of selecting
+and reading good books. Children often come home from day school
+clamoring for some book which the teacher has recommended as interesting
+and valuable. The Sunday-school teacher's recommendation would also
+carry weight. In every church, whether there exists a Sunday-school
+library or not, there ought to be a library or book committee which
+would watch for the right reading for the different grades and would
+cause the titles of good books to be placed on a bulletin board.
+Further, such a committee might very well place a copy of the book
+selected in the teacher's hand in order that the teacher might call the
+attention of the class directly to it. Of course the range of selection
+should be as wide as the world of books and should include fiction,
+romance, song, and story.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">20</a> Parents could do the same sort of thing.
+Why not talk up the best books we remember? As to those old-time books,
+we need to realize that tastes change. Perhaps they owed much of their
+interest to their vivid descriptions of contemporary life. Therefore we
+must commend the new books, those that belong to the children's own
+days, too. This can be done, provided we really know the books, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>not by
+saying, "We should like you to read <i>Sandford and Merton</i>," but rather,
+"There is a capital story in <i>Captains Courageous</i>; have any of you read
+it?" Leave the matter there, or, at most, go only far enough to
+stimulate interest.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>St. John, <i>Stories and Story Telling</i>, chaps. i-v. Eaton &amp; Mains,
+$0.50.</p>
+
+<p>Forbush, <i>The Coming Generation</i>, chap. viii. Appleton, $1.50</p>
+
+<p>Winchester, "Good and Bad Books in the Home," in <i>The Bible in
+Practical Life</i>, p. 38. Religious Education Association, $2.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>Partridge, <i>Story Telling in School and Home</i>. Sturgis &amp; Walton,
+$1.25.</p>
+
+<p>H.&nbsp;W. Mabie, <i>Books and Culture</i>. Dodd, Mead &amp; Co., $1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Methods and Materials</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">ON STORY-TELLING</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;P. St. John, <i>Stories and Story Telling</i>. Eaton &amp; Mains, $0.50.</p>
+
+<p>Wyche, <i>Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them</i>. Newson &amp; Co.,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p>L.&nbsp;S. Houghton, <i>Telling Bible Stories</i>. Scribner, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Bryant, <i>How to Tell Stories for Children</i>. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;M. and G.&nbsp;E. Partridge, <i>Story Telling in School and Home</i>.
+Sturgis &amp; Walton, $1.25.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center">DIRECTING CHILDREN'S READING IN THE HOME</p>
+
+<p>Macy, <i>A Children's Guide to Reading</i>. Baker &amp; Taylor Co., $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Field, <i>Finger Posts to Children's Reading</i>. McClurg, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Arnold, <i>A Mother's List of Books for Children</i>. McClurg, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>For a short practical list see the different lists classified under
+Sunday-School Departments in W.&nbsp;S. Athearn, <i>The Church School</i>,
+particularly pp. 54, 83, 118, 169. Pilgrim Press, $1.00.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">IV. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. Do you remember any stories which especially impressed you as a
+child? What were their qualities? What were the qualities of their
+narration?</p>
+
+<p>2. What are your difficulties in story-telling to children?</p>
+
+<p>3. Is the habit of reading books passing among children? If so,
+what are the reasons?</p>
+
+<p>4. What responsibility has the public library toward the child's
+selection of books? toward promoting book reading?</p>
+
+<p>5. How many families co-operate with the library?</p>
+
+<p>6. How might the church co-operate?</p>
+
+<p>7. Does the reading of newspapers by children affect their general
+habits of reading? In what ways?</p>
+
+<p>8. What personal difference is there, if any, between the effect of
+a borrowed book and of one the child owns?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">17</span></a> Laura E. Cragin, <i>Kindergarten Bible Stories</i>. Fifty-six
+of the Old Testament stories. There is also a companion volume of New
+Testament stories.
+</p><p>
+James Baldwin, <i>Old Stories of the East</i>. Fresh and interesting versions
+of the familiar Old Testament stories.
+</p><p>
+Kate Douglas Wiggin, <i>The Story Hour</i>. Good stories and a suggestive
+introduction on story-telling.
+</p><p>
+<i>Half a Hundred Stories for the Little People</i>, by various authors.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">18</span></a> <i>A List of Good Stories to Tell to Children under Twelve
+Years of Age</i>, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, $0.05. There are
+references to books in which the stories may be found, including 25
+Bible stories, 16 fables, 14 myths, 14 Christmas stories, 7 Thanksgiving
+stories, etc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">19</span></a> Such as O'Shea, <i>Old World Wonder Stories</i>; George Hodges,
+<i>The Garden of Eden</i>; Cragin, <i>Old Testament Stories</i>; Mary Stewart,
+<i>Tell Me a True Story</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">20</span></a> The H.&nbsp;W. Wilson Co., White Plains, New York, publishes a
+list of <i>Children's Books for Sunday-School Libraries</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE USE OF THE BIBLE IN THE HOME</h3>
+
+
+<p>If we keep clearly in mind the aim of religious education in the family
+as that of the development of the lives of religious persons, the place
+and value of the Bible will be evident. It will be used as a means of
+developing and directing lives. This will be quite different from a
+perfunctory use because our fathers used it or a use under the
+compulsion of the fear lest some strange evil should befall us, some
+visitation of an offended deity.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE CHILD'S NEED</h4>
+
+<p>Children need the Bible as a part of their social heritage. Just as they
+get a larger life, inspired and stimulated by the realization of their
+connection with the past of their family and their country, so the Bible
+brings them into connection with the religious history of the race.
+General history brings heroic forefathers into the stream of
+consciousness; we feel the push of their lives. So the Bible reveals the
+stream farther back and makes us part of the process of life in unity
+with great characters and great movements.</p>
+
+<p>The child has a right to the Bible as his literary heritage. Here in the
+Bible is the precipitation of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span> the ideals of a people unique in the
+place which religion held in their lives. Here is a literature which is
+the source of much of the best in the language and reading of the
+child's life. Its phrases are beautiful and convenient embodiments of
+religious ideals; they will have a steadily developing richness of
+meaning as life opens out to the child.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">21</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. DIFFICULTIES</h4>
+
+<p>The difficulties in the way of the use of the Bible in the home are: the
+crowded programs, or a lack of time due to the absence of any program
+for the days; a feeling of unnaturalness in the special reading of this
+book; the decay of the custom of reading aloud; parental ignorance of
+the Bible and especially of its beauties for the young; and the
+excessive amount of task-reading frequently required by the schools. The
+Sunday school also sometimes offends in this respect by overemphasis on
+academic tasks for home work.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. METHODS</h4>
+
+<p>First, let parents use the Bible themselves. Use the books as you wish
+children to use them. This will be the longest step you can take toward
+the solution of the problem.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, use the Bible naturally. When children have an aversion to the
+Bible it is due usually <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>to two causes: the peculiar place and use of
+the book which makes it a thing apart from life, and often an object of
+dread; and the practice of using it as a task-book, to be opened only in
+order to prepare Sunday-school lessons. Just as it takes years to
+overcome the aversion set up against English literature by its
+analytical study in the schools, so that the child becomes a man before
+he voluntarily reads Dickens, Thackeray, the poets, and essayists, in
+the same manner we have succeeded in making the Bible undesirable to
+youth. If you read passages aloud, use the tone of voice which would be
+appropriate if this was a new book not bound in leather. Read it for
+pleasure as one would read a literary masterpiece&mdash;not because opinion
+might frown on you if you had not read the classic. Does someone object
+that that would be to degrade the Bible to the level of secular
+writings? You cannot degrade a literature; it makes its own level and
+our labels do not affect it. Certain it is that a pious tone of voice
+will not protect the Bible from the secular level. But to use it
+unnaturally will degrade it in the opinion of those who hear us.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, make its use a pleasure. All children enjoy story-telling and
+listening to reading. Many parents practice the children's hour, some
+period in the day when they will, alone with the children, read and talk
+with them. Let the Bible story be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span> the reward of a good day, something
+promised as an incentive to good behavior. Children delight, not alone
+in the story itself, but in rhythmic passages, in the poetic flights of
+Isaiah and the beautiful imagery of the Psalms. To them it is natural
+and pleasant to think of the hills that skipped and the stars that sang
+and the trees that gave forth praise. They know the song of nature and
+are happy to find it put into words.</p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, use the Bible as a book of life. How many times a day do
+questions of conduct arise in the family! How often do children ask what
+is right, and freely discuss the question! Here is a book rich in
+precept and example on at least many of the questions. There are
+pictures of actual lives meeting real temptations; there are the
+epigrammatic precepts of Proverbs and of the teachings of Jesus. Call
+attention to them, not as settling the question out of hand, but as
+testimony to the point. Accustom children to getting the light of the
+Bible on their lives, remembering that this book is a light and not a
+fence nor a code of laws.</p>
+
+<p>Fifthly, use the Bible in worship. This does not conflict with the plea
+for its use naturally, for worship should be as natural as any of the
+social pleasures of the family. Here select those passages for reading
+which count most for the spirit of worship. It is a good plan to read a
+short passage,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span> suitable for memorizing, so frequently that children
+learn it and are able to repeat it in concert. Be sure that all the
+passages read or recited are short. It will often be wise to preface the
+reading with a brief account of its original circumstances, so that all
+may hear the words as the actual utterances of a real man living in real
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Sixthly, provide material which helps to make the Bible interesting, and
+which helps children to see its pictures through the eyes of geography
+and history.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">22</a></p>
+
+<p>Seventhly, make the use of the Bible possible at all times for all. See
+that as soon as the child can read he has his own Bible, that it is in
+large, readable type, as much like any other book as possible. It is no
+evidence of grace to ruin the eyes over diamond-text Bibles. If
+possible, also provide separate books of the Bible, in modern literary
+form and some in the idiom of our day.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">23</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. DOUBTFUL METHODS</h4>
+
+<p>It is doubtful whether good comes from the use of the Bible as a
+riddle-book, nor do the "Bible games" tend to develop a natural
+appreciation of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>the book. There is no new light but rather a confusing
+shadow thrown on the character of Joseph by the foolish conundrum
+concerning Pharaoh making a ruler out of him. Sending a child to the
+Bible to discover the shortest verse, the longest, the middle one, etc.,
+trains him to regard it as an odd kind of book, to think of it as a
+dictionary, and to use it less.</p>
+
+<p>We assume too readily that a knowledge of the separate details of
+biblical information, such as the date of the Flood, the age of
+Methuselah, the names of the twelve tribes, the twelve apostles, the
+books of the two Testaments, is the desired end. But one might know all
+these things and many more and be not one whit the better. For the child
+surely the desirable end is that he may feel deeply the attractiveness
+of the character of Joseph or of Jesus, may say within himself, "What a
+fine man; I want to be like him." Be sure the persons are real, that you
+see them living their lives in their times, just as you live your life
+now.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>T.&nbsp;G. Soares, "Making the Bible Real to Boys," in <i>Boy Training</i>,
+pp. 117-40. Association Press, $0.75.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;T. Lhamon, "Bible in the Home," <i>Religious Education</i>, December,
+1912, p. 486.</p>
+
+<p>G. Hodges, <i>Training of Children in Religion</i>, chap. x. Appleton,
+$1.50.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p><i>The Bible in Practical Life.</i> Religious Education Association.
+Numerous references to the use of the Bible in the home in this
+volume.</p>
+
+<p>Patterson Dubois, <i>The Natural Way</i>, sec. iv. Revell, $1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Methods and Materials</span></p>
+
+<p>"Passages of Bible for Memorization," <i>Religious Education</i>,
+August, 1906.</p>
+
+<p>Louise S. Houghton, <i>Telling Bible Stories</i>. Scribner, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Johnson, <i>The Narrative Bible</i>. Baker &amp; Taylor Co., $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Hall and Wood, <i>The Bible Story</i>, 5 vols. King, $2.00 by
+subscription.</p>
+
+<p>Courtney, <i>The Literary Man's Bible</i>. Crowell, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>The above are but a few of the many collections of biblical
+material.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">IV. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What are the conditions which seem to make the reading of the
+Bible different from other reading? Is there a sense of unreality
+about it as a book? What are the causes?</p>
+
+<p>2. Try the experiment of reading the story of Joseph at one
+sitting. Try to retell this to children.</p>
+
+<p>3. What biblical material stands out in your memory of childhood?
+In what degree is this due to the art of the story-teller or the
+reader? to the character of the material?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">21</span></a> See M.J.C. Foster, <i>The Mother the Child's First Bible
+Teacher</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">22</span></a> Mackie, <i>Bible Manners and Customs</i>.
+</p><p>
+Chamberlin, <i>Introduction to the Bible for Teachers of Children</i>.
+</p><p>
+Worcester, <i>On Holy Ground</i>, 2 vols.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">23</span></a> For example, Moulton, <i>Modern Reader's Bible</i>. The new
+Jewish renderings of Old Testament books are good, especially the
+Psalms.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>FAMILY WORSHIP</h3>
+
+
+<p>Family worship has declined until, at least in the United States, the
+percentage of families practicing daily worship in the home is so small
+as to be negligible. If this meant that a general institution of
+religion had passed out of existence the fact would be highly
+significant. But it is well to remember that family worship has never
+been a general institution. We have generalized the picture of the
+"Cotter's Saturday Night" so eloquently drawn by Burns; it has been
+applied to every night and to every fireside. Daily family worship was
+observed in practically all the Puritan homes of New England; but there
+is no evidence for it as a uniform custom, either in other parts of this
+country or in other parts of the world, save perhaps in sections of
+Scotland. True, there were many families which observed the custom; but
+there were also many families of church members and doubtless of truly
+religious people in which family worship as a regular institution was
+unknown. This has been especially true in the type of family life which
+has developed under modern social conditions. Further, even so simple an
+exercise as grace at meals has not always been a general custom.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. PAST CUSTOMS</h4>
+
+<p>But the fact today is that family worship is so rare as to be counted
+phenomenal wherever found. The instances, though not general, were
+common a generation ago. Many are living to whom family worship afforded
+the largest part of their conscious and formal religious education.
+Following the morning meal, or, occasionally, the evening meal, the
+family waited while the father, or the mother in his absence, read a
+portion of the Scriptures and offered prayer. In other families the act
+of worship would be the closing one of the day, perhaps participated in
+by the older members only, the younger children having repeated their
+prayers at bedside on retiring. A thousand happy and sacred associations
+gather about the memories of these occasions: the sense of reverence,
+the feeling that the home was a sacred place, the impression of noble
+words and elevating thoughts, the reflex influence of the prayer that
+committed all to the keeping and guidance of God.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">24</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. WHY FAMILY WORSHIP?</h4>
+
+<p>Parents need to see the values in family worship. We have been insisting
+on the primary importance of the religious interpretation of the family
+as an <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>institution, on the power of the religious motive, and the
+atmosphere of religion. But wherever there is a truly religious motive
+and a permanent religious atmosphere these will find definite expression
+in acts easily recognized as religious. Love is the motive and
+atmosphere of the true home, but love blossoms into words and bears
+fruit in a thousand deeds. The life of love dies without reality in act.
+Ideals are precipitated in expressive acts. So is it with religion in
+the home; it must not only be real in its sincerity, it must be
+realized, must pass over into conduct and action, as suggested above in
+chaps. vii and viii. And it must do this in ways so sharply defined and
+readily recognized as to leave no doubt as to their meaning. True, all
+acts may be religious and thus full of worship&mdash;this is most important
+of all&mdash;but worship expressly unites all such acts in a spirit of
+loyalty and aspiration.</p>
+
+<p>Worship is a necessity for the sake of the ideal unity of the family
+life. Just as the individual must not only feel the religious emotion
+but must also do the thing called for, so must this united personality
+of the family give expression to its faith and aspiration, its motives
+and emotions, in such a manner that, acting as a social unit, all can
+together put the inner life into the outer form. The social value of
+family worship is the strongest reason for its maintenance. It is the
+united act<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span> of the family group, the one in which group consciousness is
+expressly directed to the highest possible aims. Every period of worship
+brings the family into unity at an ideal level.</p>
+
+<p>The expression of religion in definite forms is necessary for children,
+too, as furnishing a means by which they can manifest their feeling of
+the higher meaning of family life. The reality of that feeling is
+stimulated in the daily, common life of the right family; the hour of
+worship is one out of many definite forms of its concrete expression. It
+is the form which gathers up the totality of feeling and aspiration into
+an act of worship and praise toward God, the Father of all families. It
+is evident there cannot be true worship in the family that is
+irreligious in its essential qualities, in its character, in its ideals
+and atmosphere.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. ADVANTAGES</h4>
+
+<p>The period of worship is a necessity in interpreting to all the spirit
+and meaning of a religious family. It objectifies the inner life. It
+makes definite, tangible, and easily remembered the general impressions
+of religion. It precipitates the atmosphere of religion into
+definiteness. In the chemical laboratory of a university there is
+usually a decided atmosphere of chemistry, but no one expects to become
+a chemical engineer by absorbing that atmosphere, nor even to attain a
+simple<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span> working knowledge by merely general impressions. Definiteness
+aids in gathering up our knowledge, our impressions.</p>
+
+<p>The reading of the Bible in the home will give, when the passages are
+wisely chosen, forms of language into which the often chaotic but
+nevertheless valuable and potential emotions of youth fall as into a
+beautiful mold; they become remembered forms of beauty thereafter.</p>
+
+<p>Family worship furnishes opportunity for direct religious instruction.
+When the home life has its regular institution, as regular as meals and
+play, the formality, the apparent abnormality of conversation about
+religion, is absent. Children expect and look forward to the period when
+the family will lay other things aside to think on the eternal values.
+Their questions in the breathing-space that always ought to follow
+worship become perfectly natural and sincere.</p>
+
+<p>Family worship lifts the whole level of family life. Ideally conceived,
+it simply means the family unity consciously coming into its highest
+place. Children may not understand all the reading nor enter into the
+motives for all parts of the petition, but they do feel that this moment
+is the one in which the family enters a holy place. They feel that God
+is real and that their family life is a part of his whole care and of
+his life. One short period of natural reverence sends light and calm
+all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span> through the day. Where the home is the place where true prayer is
+offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship; here
+and into this group there cannot easily enter strife, bickerings, or
+baseness. One short period, five minutes or even less, of quietness, of
+united turning toward the eternal, gives tone to the day and finer
+atmosphere to the home.</p>
+
+<p>What our community life might be like without the churches, faulty or
+incompetent as we may know some of them to be, what that life would lose
+and miss without them is precisely, and perhaps in larger degree, what
+the family life misses without its own institution of regular devotion
+and worship.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. THE DIFFICULTIES</h4>
+
+<p>We can always afford to do that which is most worth while doing; our
+essential difficulty is to shake off the delusion of the lesser values,
+the lower prizes, to realize that, of all the good of life, the
+characters of our children, the gain we can all make in the eternal
+values of the spirit, in love and joy and truth and goodness, is the
+gain most worth while. We tend to set the making of a living before the
+making of lives. We need to see the development of the powers of
+personality, the riches of character, as the ultimate, dominant purpose
+of all being. Once grasp that, and hold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span> to it, and we shall not allow
+lesser considerations, such as the pressure of business, the desire for
+gain, for ease, for pleasure, for social life, to come before this first
+and highest good; we shall make time for definite conscious religion in
+the life of the family.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">25</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. TYPES OF WORSHIP</h4>
+
+<p>There are three simple forms which worship takes in the family: first,
+grace offered at the meals; secondly, the prayers of children on
+retiring and, occasionally, on rising; thirdly, the daily gathering of
+the family for an act of the spirit. The statement of the three forms
+reads so as to give them a formal character, but the most important
+point to remember is that wherever they are true acts of worship they
+are formal only in that they occur at definite, determined times and
+places. The acts have no merit in themselves. Merely to institute their
+observance will not secure religious feeling and life in the home. These
+three observances have arisen because at these times there is the best
+and most natural opportunity for the expression of aspiration, desire,
+and feeling.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 6. METHODS OF FAMILY WORSHIP</h4>
+
+<p>1. <i>Grace at meals.</i>&mdash;Shall we say grace at meals? To assent because it
+is the custom, or because it was so done in our childhood's home, may
+make an irreligious mockery of the act. Perhaps, too, there are some who
+even hesitate to omit the grace from an unspoken fear that the food
+might harm them without it. All have heard grace so muttered, or
+hurriedly and carelessly spoken, void of all feeling and thought, that
+the act was almost unconscious, a species of "vain repetition."</p>
+
+<p>There are two outstanding aspects of the asking of a blessing&mdash;the
+desire to express gratitude for the common benefits of life, and the
+expression of a wish, with the recognition of its realization, that at
+each meal the family group might include the Unseen Guest, the Infinite
+Spirit of God. That wish lifts the meal above the dull level of
+satisfying appetites. Just as, in good society, we seek to make the meal
+much more than an eating of food, "a feast of reason and a flow of
+soul," so does this act make each meal a social occasion lifted toward
+the spiritual. The one thought at the beginning, the thought of the
+reality of the presence of God, and of the nearness of the divine to us
+in our daily pleasures, gives a new level to all our thinking.</p>
+
+<p>How shall we say grace, or "ask a blessing"? First, with simplicity and
+sincerity. Avoid long, elaborate, ornate phrases. It is better to err
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span> rhetoric than in feeling and reality. The sonorous grace may soon
+become stilted and offensive. It is better to say in your own words just
+what you mean, for that will help all, even to the youngest, to mean
+what they say with you.</p>
+
+<p>Vary the form of petition. Sometimes let it be the silent grace of the
+Quakers; sometimes children will enjoy singing one of the old four-line
+stanzas, as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Be present at our table, Lord,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be here and everywhere adored;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These mercies bless and grant that we<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May feast in Paradise with thee.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>One might use the first three of the following lines for breakfast and
+the last three at another meal:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For the new morning with its light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For rest and shelter of the night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We thank the heavenly Father.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For rest and food, for love and friends,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For everything his goodness sends,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">We thank the heavenly Father.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">26</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>or</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When early in the morning the birds lift up their songs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We bring our praise to Jesus to whom all praise belongs.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>One especially needs to guard against the purely dietetic grace, the one
+that only asks that the deity will aid digestion, as that form so often
+heard, "Bless these mercies to our use."<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">27</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span></p><p>Should we say grace on all occasions of meals? What shall we do at the
+social dinner in the home? The answer depends on the purpose of the
+grace. Is it not that in our own group we may have the consciousness of
+the presence of God? When the meal is that of our own group with a
+friend or two, we bring the friends into the group and the act of family
+worship is maintained. Usually this is the case. So it will be when the
+group is entirely at one in this desire: the asking of grace will be
+perfectly natural. But when the group is a large one, when the sense of
+family unity is lost, or when the observance would seem unnatural, it is
+better to omit it. Grace in large gatherings often seems an uncovering
+of the sacred aspects of the home life.</p>
+
+<p>2. <i>Bedtime prayers.</i>&mdash;What of children's bedtime prayers? Many can
+remember them. To many the most natural, helpful time for formal periods
+of prayer is in the quiet of the bedroom just before retiring. But there
+is a grave danger in establishing a regular custom of bedside prayers
+for children, a danger manifest in the very form of certain of these
+prayers, as</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now I lay me down to sleep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I pray the Lord my soul to keep.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is as though the child were saying, "The day is ended during which I
+have been able to take care of myself, the hours of helpless sleep
+begin, and I ask God to take care of me through the terrors of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span>
+night." For some children, at least, the night has been made terrible by
+that thought; they have been led to feel that the day was safe and
+beautiful, but that the night was so dangerous and fearful that only the
+great God could keep them through it, and it was an open question
+whether their prayer for that keeping would be heard.</p>
+
+<p>One must avoid also the notion that such prayers are part of a price
+paid, a system of daily taxation in return for which heaven furnishes us
+police protection.</p>
+
+<p>The best plan seems to be to encourage children to pray, to establish in
+them the habit of closing the day with quiet, grateful thoughts, to
+watch especially that the prayers learned in early life do not distort
+the child's thoughts of God, and to make the evening prayer an
+opportunity for the child to express his desires to God his Father and
+Friend. Having done this, as the children grow up it is best to leave
+them free to pray when and where they will. One may properly encourage
+the evening, private prayer; but the child ought to have the feeling
+that it is not obligatory, that it must grow out of his desire to talk
+with God, and, above all, that it has no special connection with the
+hour and act of retiring for sleep but rather, so far as time is
+concerned, with the closing of the day. Mothers must see far beyond the
+charm of the picture formed by the little white-robed figure at her
+knee. There<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span> is no hour so rich in possibilities for this growing life.
+It is one of the great opportunities to guide its consciousness of
+God.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">28</a></p>
+
+<p>3. <i>General family prayers.</i>&mdash;It is true that, in many homes, under
+modern conditions of business, it is almost impossible for the family to
+be united at the hour when worship used to be customary, following
+breakfast. However, that is not the only hour available. In many
+respects it is a poor one for the purpose of social worship; it lacks
+the sense of leisure. But there are few families where the members do
+not all gather for the evening meal. It is not difficult to plan at its
+close for ten minutes in which all shall remain. Without leaving the
+table it is possible to spend a short time in united, social worship.
+Or, by establishing the custom and steadily following it, it is possible
+to leave the table and in less than ten minutes find ample time for
+worship in another room.</p>
+
+<p>Really everything depends at first on how much we desire to have family
+worship, whether we see its beauty and value in the knitting of home
+ties, in the elevation of the family spirit, and in the quickening of
+the religious ideas. We find time to eat simply because we must; when
+the necessity of the spirit is upon us we shall find time also to
+worship and to pray.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Next to the will to make time comes the question of method. First,
+determine to be simple, natural, and informal. A stilted exercise soon
+becomes a burden and a source of pain to all. In whatever you do, seek
+to make it possible for all to have a share by seeing that every thought
+is expressed within the intelligence of even the younger members, that
+is, of those who desire to have a share. This does not mean descending
+to "baby-talk." Just read the Twenty-third Psalm; that is not baby talk,
+but a child of seven can understand what is meant up to the measure of
+his experience; the language is essentially simple though the ideas are
+sublime.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, insure brevity. For that part of worship in which all are
+expected regularly to unite, ten minutes should be ample. Some excellent
+programs will not take more than half this time. Family worship is not a
+diminutive facsimile of church worship. Doubtless the experiment has
+failed in many families because the father has attempted to preach to a
+congregation which could not escape. Keep in mind the thought that this
+is to be a high moment in each day in which every member will have an
+equal share.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, plan for the largest possible amount of common participation.
+This is to be the expression of the unity of the family life. Children
+enjoy doing things co-operatively and in concert.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, treat the occasion naturally in relation to other affairs.
+Proceed to the worship without formal notice, without change of voice,
+and without apology to visitors. Take this for granted. At the close
+move on into other duties without the sense of coming back into the
+world. You have not been out of it; you have only recognized the eternal
+life and love everywhere in it.</p>
+
+<p>4. <i>Suggestions of plans.</i>&mdash;There are given below seven outlines of
+plans of worship. They are plans which have been in use and have been
+tried for years. Their only merit is simplicity and practicability; but
+they are at least worthy of trial. There is no special significance in
+the arrangement of the days and this may be changed in any way
+desirable. Further, all plans should be elastic; there will come special
+days, such as festivals and birthdays, when the program should be
+varied. For example, on a birthday the child whose anniversary then
+occurs should have the privilege of making the choice of recitation or
+reading or of determining the order of all the parts of this brief
+period of worship.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">MONDAY</p>
+
+<p>1. A short psalm repeated in concert.</p>
+
+<p>2. A brief, informal petition by father or mother.</p>
+
+<p>3. The Lord's Prayer, in which all join.</p>
+
+<p>Before attempting even this simple plan, prepare for it by first
+selecting several suitable psalms. The following<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span> should be
+included: the 1st, 19th, 23d, 24th, 100th, 117th, 121st, and a part
+of the 103d. You would do well to memorize one of these yourself,
+so as to be able to lead without reading from the book. Next, think
+over with some care the things for which you may pray, the
+aspirations which your children can share with you. Few things are
+more difficult than this, so to pray that all can make the prayer
+their own. Let it also be a prayer of love and joy, not a craven
+begging off from punishments, nor a cowardly plea for protection
+and provision. We can pray over all these things with gratitude and
+with confidence toward the God of love. Do not try to preach in
+your prayers. Many prayers have been ruined by preaching, just as
+some preaching has been spoiled by praying to the people. Usually
+four or five sentences will do for the one day. Better a single
+thought simply expressed than the most brilliant attempt to inform
+the Almighty on all the events of the world that day.</p>
+
+<p>A prayer in which all can join is always desirable. The Lord's
+Prayer never wearies us nor grows old. Children enter into it with
+some new meaning every day; it covers all our great, common, daily
+needs.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">TUESDAY</p>
+
+<p>1. A few favorite memory verses repeated by all (from either the
+Bible or other literature).</p>
+
+<p>2. Read a very brief passage from the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>3. Prayer, ending with the Lord's Prayer.</p>
+
+<p>Many excellent selections will be found in Dr. Dole's book
+mentioned at the end of this chapter. Encourage children, however,
+to make their selections from the poems and passages they already
+know.</p>
+
+<p>The passage of the Bible selected to be read should be one which
+first of all incites to worship, and should be chosen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span> for its
+inspiration and literary beauty. A few lines from the great
+chapters of Isaiah (e.g., chaps. 35 and 55), from the Psalms (e.g.,
+Pss. 61, 65, 145), from the Sermon on the Mount, from 1 Cor., chap.
+13, from the parables of Jesus, will be suitable.</p>
+
+<p>The closing prayer may be extemporaneous or may be read from one of
+the books of prayers. Many of the prayers in the Episcopal Prayer
+Book are especially beautiful and quite suitable. Of course in
+families of the Episcopal church the collect for the day would be
+the right prayer to use. It is sometimes necessary to use prayers
+prepared beforehand; some persons never acquire the ability to pray
+aloud, even in their own families. But halting sentences that are
+your own, that your children recognize as yours, may mean more to
+them than the finest flowing phrases from a book. Use the prayers
+from the book, not as a substitute, but as an addition.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">WEDNESDAY</p>
+
+<p>1. A good poem from general literature.</p>
+
+<p>2. Prayer.</p>
+
+<p>There are so many good collections of the great and inspiring poems
+that one hesitates to recommend any collection. Remember that a
+poem may be religious and imbued with the spirit of worship,
+helpful to the purpose of this occasion, even though it contains no
+allusions to Scripture and makes no direct references to religious
+belief. "A House by the Side of the Road"<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">29</a> is thoroughly human,
+popular, and could not even be accused of being a classic; but it
+has a helpful motive and is likely to lead the will toward the life
+of service and brotherhood. Some would prefer to read a part of one
+of the great hymns.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">THURSDAY</p>
+
+<p>1. A brief reading or recitation from the New Testament.</p>
+
+<p>2. A few moments' conversation on the reading.</p>
+
+<p>3. A very brief prayer followed by a song.</p>
+
+<p>The only apparent difficulty here is in starting the conversation.
+Do not ask formal questions; rather put them something like this:
+"I wonder whether people would do just the same on our street
+today." Make the conversation as general as possible; do not
+slight, nor scoff at, the contribution of even the least in the
+group.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">FRIDAY</p>
+
+<p>1. A few verses in concert.</p>
+
+<p>2. Read a parable or very brief narrative.</p>
+
+<p>3. The Lord's Prayer.</p>
+
+<p>The reading had better be from one of the paraphrases if it is a
+narrative from the Old Testament.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">30</a> Even in reading the New
+Testament one can at times use with advantage the
+<i>Twentieth-Century Bible</i> or the <i>Modern Reader's Bible</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">SATURDAY</p>
+
+<p>1. A period of song.</p>
+
+<p>2. Closing prayer, with the Lord's Prayer.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps only one song can be sung. It need not be a hymn; that
+should depend on the choice of the children. Help them to put
+together all the good songs, including the hymns, in one category
+in their minds.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">SUNDAY</p>
+
+<p>1. Ask: "What has been the best we have read or repeated in our
+worship this week?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span></p>
+
+<p>2. Ask: "What shall we learn for memory repetition this week, what
+psalm or other passage for our concerted worship?"</p>
+
+<p>3. Read the psalm selected.</p>
+
+<p>4. Closing prayer.</p>
+
+<p>5. Period of song, lasting as long as desired.</p>
+
+<p>This exercise evidently permits of extension in time and should be
+arranged in accordance with the program for the day.</p></div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>George Hodges, <i>The Training of Children in Religion</i>, chaps. viii,
+ix. Appleton, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Improvement of Religious Education</i>, pp. 108 to 123. Religious
+Education Association, $0.50.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. B.&nbsp;S. Winchester, "Methods and Materials Available," <i>Religious
+Education</i>, October, 1911. $0.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>Koons, <i>The Child's Religious Life</i>. Eaton &amp; Mains, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Hartshorne, <i>Worship in the Sunday School</i>. Columbia University,
+$1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Methods and Materials</span></p>
+
+<p>A.&nbsp;R. Wells, <i>Grace before Meat</i>. U.S.C.E., $0.25.</p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;F. Dole, <i>Choice Verses</i>. Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts.
+Privately printed.</p>
+
+<p>F.&nbsp;A. Hinckley (ed.), <i>Readings for Sunday School and Home</i>.
+American Unitarian Association, $0.35.</p>
+
+<p>J. Martin, <i>Prayers for Little Men and Women</i>. Harper, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>S. Hart (ed.), <i>Short Daily Prayers for Families</i>. Longmans, $0.60.</p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;A. Miller, <i>Some Out-Door Prayers</i>. Crowell, $0.35.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Oxenden, <i>Family Prayers</i>. Longmans, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>George Skene, <i>Morning Prayers for Home Worship</i>. Methodist Book
+Concern, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;E. Barton, <i>Four Weeks of Family Prayer</i>. Puritan Press, Oak
+Park, Ill.</p>
+
+<p>Abbott, <i>Family Prayers</i>. Dodd, Mead &amp; Co., $0.50.</p>
+
+<p><i>Prayers for Parents and Children.</i> Young Churchman Co., Milwaukee,
+Wisconsin, $0.15.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">IV. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What are the causes for the decay of the custom of family
+worship?</p>
+
+<p>2. What influences us most: public opinion, popular custom,
+economic pressure?</p>
+
+<p>3. How have the changes affected the religious influence of the
+home?</p>
+
+<p>4. What features of the older customs are most worth preserving?</p>
+
+<p>5. Recall any of childhood's prayers which you remember. How many
+maintain the custom of bedtime prayers in mature life?</p>
+
+<p>6. What should be the central motive of "grace" at meals?</p>
+
+<p>7. Would there be advantage in occasionally omitting the "grace"?</p>
+
+<p>8. Give reasons for and against "grace."</p>
+
+<p>9. Criticize the proposed plan of evening family prayers.</p>
+
+<p>10. Describe any plans which have been tried.</p>
+
+<p>11. Why is it desirable to maintain family worship?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">24</span></a> For a study of children's worship see H.&nbsp;H. Hartshorne,
+<i>Worship in the Sunday School</i>; "Report of Commission on Graded
+Worship," <i>Religious Education</i>, October, 1914.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">25</span></a> "Parents who give up such a practice as family prayers
+mainly because they know of many other people who have done the same are
+just as much the slaves of public opinion and ignorant cant as the
+narrowest Lowlander who forbids his children secular history on
+Sunday."&mdash;Lyttleton, <i>Corner-Stone of Education</i>, pp. 207-8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">26</span></a> Quoted by W.&nbsp;S. Athearn, <i>The Church School</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">27</span></a> A number of good poems are given in A.&nbsp;R. Wells, <i>Grace
+before Meat</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">28</span></a> W.&nbsp;B. Forbush gives a number of poetic forms of prayer for
+children in <i>The Religious Nurture of a Little Child</i>, pp. 12, 13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">29</span></a> By Samuel Walter Foss.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">30</span></a> One handy form is <i>The Heart of the Bible</i>, prepared by
+E.&nbsp;A. Broadus; another, <i>The Children's Bible</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>SUNDAY IN THE HOME</h3>
+
+
+<p>Almost every family finds Sunday a problem. Other days are well occupied
+with full programs; this one has a program for only part of its time.
+Other days are rich with the liberty of happy action, but this one is
+frequently marked by inaction, repression, and limitations. As soon as
+the evanescent pleasure of Sunday clothes has passed, for those for whom
+it existed at all, the children settle down to endure the day.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE MEANING OF THE DAY</h4>
+
+<p>Fathers and mothers who vent a sigh of relief when Sunday is over must
+marvel at the strains of "O day of joy and gladness." Yet this day
+defeats its purpose when it is of any other character. We have no right
+to rob it of its joy and its healing balm. On the day made for man,
+sacred to his highest good, whatever hinders the real happiness of the
+child ought to be set aside.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of accepting traditions regarding the method of observing the
+Sunday, would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, For what use of
+the day can we properly be held responsible? Here are so many&mdash;fifty-two
+a year&mdash;days of special<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span> opportunity. To us who complain that business
+interferes with the personal education of our children through the week,
+what ought this day to mean? To us who lament the little time we can
+spend with our families, what ought this day to mean? And what ought we
+to try to make it mean to children?</p>
+
+<p>We call this God's day; what must some children think of a God who robs
+his day of all pleasure? If this is the kind of day he makes, then how
+unattractive would be his years and eternity! It is the day when we have
+our best opportunity to show them what God is like, to interpret his
+world and his works in terms of beauty, kindness, riches of thought, and
+love.</p>
+
+<p>It ought to be the day reserved for the best in life, for the treasures
+of affection, for the uses of the spirit. Whatever is done this day must
+come to this test, Is this a ministry to the life of goodness, truth,
+and loving service? Does this enrich lives? In other words, we may put
+the broad educational test to the day and its program and determine all
+by ministry to growing lives.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. CONSERVING THE VALUES</h4>
+
+<p>The family faces the problem of the opposition between the rights of man
+on this day and the greed of commerce, the fight between a day of rest
+and a day of work. Man's right to rest is assured,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span> legally, but
+commerce in the name of amusement and in the guise of petty and
+unnecessary trading constantly maintains its fight to invade the day of
+rest, to turn it from ministry to man as a person to the dull level of
+the week of ministry to things. The home has much at stake in this
+struggle. It needs one day free from the life that tears its members
+apart, free from the toil that engrosses thought, free for its members
+to live together as spiritual beings.</p>
+
+<p>In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to
+the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use
+of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious
+opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life. It is
+devoted to personality, to man's rights as a religious being.</p>
+
+<p>Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one
+another, shall look into faces of friends and companions! And this
+opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an
+act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one
+family. That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our
+Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that
+makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's
+service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the
+church family. If we think of the day as affording<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span> us the pleasure of
+social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning
+will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. Of
+course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and
+school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">31</a></p>
+
+<p>Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all
+the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the
+presence of one another which is the essential life of the family. It
+has always been a good custom for friends to visit on this day, for
+families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather
+again for a few hours. It is the day when we have time to discover how
+much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when,
+looking into the eyes of those we love, we see "the light that never was
+on sea or land," the ultimate good!</p>
+
+<p>The hours of being together are the hours of real education. Children
+cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives
+need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for
+real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere
+with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. THE PROBLEM OF PLAY</h4>
+
+<p>What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday? Is there
+any other kind of child? They all want to. It is as natural for a child
+to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary. A child is a
+growing person learning life by play. Because play seems trivial to us
+we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day
+devoted to the higher life. In some families play is forbidden because
+children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate
+piety and pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>Shall we then throw down all barriers and make this day the same as all
+others? No, rather make the day different by throwing down barriers that
+stand on other days. Let this be the day when the barriers between
+father and sons, parents and children, are let down and all can enter
+into the joy of living.</p>
+
+<p>Play is to a child the idealization of life's experiences and the
+realization of its ideals. That is why he plays at school, idealizing
+the everyday life; that is why he plays at housekeeping, at being in
+church, at being a railway engineer, even a highwayman or an outlaw. The
+traditional games are the game of life itself in terms of childhood.
+Play as idealized experience and realized ideals is to the child what
+the church, worship, and the reading of fiction and essays are to the
+adult. Play is the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span> child's method of reaching forward into life's
+meaning. Some games as old as history carry a weight of human tradition
+and experience as rich for a child as the adult obtains from historical
+review and from association with the past. There is a sense in which the
+child playing these games opens the Bible of the race.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">32</a></p>
+
+<p>We cannot make children over into our pattern; we have to learn from
+them. Indeed, we come to life through their ways. We must become as
+little children. Before we settle the question of play on Sunday we do
+well to be sure that we know what play means to children, that we really
+grasp something of its educational value and its religious potency. Then
+we can proceed to a family policy in Sunday play.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. A POLICY ON PLAY</h4>
+
+<p><i>Keep the day as one of family unity.</i> Help the child to think of it as
+a day protected for the sake of family togetherness. You can play that
+for this day the ideal is already realized of a family life
+uninterrupted by the demands of labor and business.</p>
+
+<p><i>Maintain the unity by doing the ideal things together.</i> Go to the place
+of worship together, provided it is the place where the child can find
+expression for spiritual ideals. If the Sunday <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>school does not really
+lift the child-life and really teach the child, if it is not honest with
+him and makes no suitable provision for his developing nature, he will
+be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at
+home. That means the application of parents to this hour.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">33</a> It
+banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing
+pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud
+of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at
+times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the better type of
+Sunday school is more and more to be found; children are more and more
+receiving a ministry actually determined by their needs. So far as the
+church service is concerned the ideal situation is found when a parallel
+service is provided for children, based on their needs and capacities.
+As to attendance, under other circumstances, in the family pew, that
+depends on whether the child is gaining an aversion to the church by the
+torture and tedium often involved. Without doubt many adults acquired
+the settled habit of sleeping in church because that was the only
+possible relief in childhood.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">34</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span></p><p><i>Maintain the family unity by stepping into the child's ideal life.
+Expect activity and use it.</i> Why should we assume that because the adult
+finds a Sunday nap enjoyable the child will be blessed by enforced
+silence? I would rather see a father playing catch with his boys on
+Sunday than see the boys cowed into silence while he slept a Sabbath
+sleep. Children will play. Their play is innocent; more, it may be
+helpful and educative; we can insure these values in it by our
+participation. That is the parent's opportunity for a closer sympathy
+with his children. Playing together is the closest living, thinking, and
+feeling together. Where games are shared, confidences, secrets, and
+aspirations are shared, too. Besides, the participation of the adult may
+tend to tone up the game and to moderate boisterousness.</p>
+
+<p><i>Seek the beautiful.</i> Speaking as one who has been under both the
+puritanical regulation and the so-called "continental" freedom of Sunday
+observance, nothing seems much more beautiful than the sight of an
+entire family playing at home, in the park, or off in the woods or the
+fields of the country. Life is strengthened, ideals are lifted, family
+ties knit closer, gratitude is quickened, and courage stimulated by play
+of this kind.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. POINTS OF DIFFERENCE</h4>
+
+<p>But because it is evidently most important that this day should be
+different from other days, it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span> well to mark that difference in our
+plays and pleasures and to follow some simple principles for Sunday
+play.</p>
+
+<p>First, make it the day of the <i>best</i> plays. The participation of parents
+will tend to have this effect. Sometimes some forms of play may be
+reserved for this day.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, our play should never interfere with the rights of those who
+desire to be quiet or to observe the day in ways differing from ours. We
+must respect the rights of all.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, our play must not cause additional or unnecessary labor.</p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, our play must not interfere with the pleasures of others. For
+instance, in the city children who can use the public tennis courts
+every day should keep off them on Sunday in order to give opportunity to
+those who can use them only on that day.</p>
+
+<p>Having said so much on play on Sundays, we must not leave the impression
+that play is the principal thing. It would be the principal thing for
+children compelled to work or confined in crowded tenements on all other
+days. This is a day of rest. Play should not be carried beyond the rest
+and refreshment stage.</p>
+
+<p>Nor must we assume that a recognition of play involves neglect of
+worship and instruction. Both should be cherished among the delights of
+the day. Every attempt to make the day a happy one, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span> normal play,
+associates the emphasis on worship with increased happiness in the
+child's mind.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 6. THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON PROBLEM</h4>
+
+<p>"What shall we do?" the children ask restlessly on Sunday afternoons,
+and it is by no means a strange question. All the week they have their
+school work, on Saturdays their play. No wonder Sunday afternoon seems
+dull. Yet if we older ones use it aright this is our opportunity to give
+them the best time of all the week. We can make this part of the day
+really a holiday if we just take time to plan it right. There is
+something wrong in the home in which the child, as he grows up, does not
+look forward happily to his Sunday afternoons.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday afternoon should be a family festival time. Keep it sacred to the
+family. Business and social life claim us all the week, and the church
+claims its share of this day; but these afternoon hours we can, if we
+will, reserve for our own home life, for the closer drawing together of
+children and parents. To hold this time sacred for the children and
+their interests will help to solve "the Sunday afternoon problem."</p>
+
+<p>1. <i>The child's question, "What shall I do next?"</i>&mdash;Children are
+dynamic, perpetually active. They grow in the direction toward which
+their activities are turned. Repression is impossible. We must either
+find the best things for them to do, or let<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span> them chance on things good
+or bad. The following outline for Sunday afternoon is given in the hope
+that it may help to answer the "what next."</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. Begin to make <i>The Family Book</i>.</p>
+
+<p>2. Give "festival name" to the day, and take an excursion in honor
+of the one for whom the day is named.</p>
+
+<p>3. Organize an exploring party to discover peoples and scenes of
+long, long ago.</p>
+
+<p>4. Get acquainted with some beautiful home thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>5. Enjoy an evening hour of song and praise.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>2. <i>"The Family Book."</i>&mdash;To start <i>The Family Book</i>, mother or father
+raises the question at dinner: "What was the best Sunday of all last
+year, and why was it the best?" Everyone, from the oldest down to the
+least, should have a chance to tell. The statements of the older ones
+will encourage the younger.</p>
+
+<p>That question will start another: What is the very best thing we can
+remember about the year past? Let everyone take a pencil and paper and
+in just ten minutes decide on and write down the one thing best worth
+remembering. Perhaps the baby cannot write yet, but he or she will want
+paper and pencil, too. Now, instead of making our answers known to one
+another, we fold the papers and keep them till the evening meal. We will
+open them then and talk it all over. Afterward we are going to copy the
+answers into a new book we are going to make.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This new book is to be called <i>The Family Book</i>, and we expect to put
+into it all the pleasant things we wish to record about our home and
+family. Any blank book with ruled lines will do. Some time today we will
+elect a keeper of the book, and before we go to bed we will see the
+first entry in that book under the title, "Happy Memories of 1915." That
+will make a good beginning for <i>The Family Book</i>. Next Sunday we will
+discuss and set down in the book the happy memories of the intervening
+week.</p>
+
+<p>3. <i>The festival name.</i>&mdash;Now, we have been sitting, talking, and writing
+as long as the children will care to be still. Suppose we all go
+outdoors together, every one of us. What if the weather is bad? It is
+seldom truly bad, and there is so much real happiness in going out in
+all weathers together.</p>
+
+<p>But where shall we go? There is no fun in walking simply for exercise or
+health. Well, says father, we can decide where to go by naming the day.
+How? We will find the most interesting birthday or anniversary that
+falls today or during the next week. If one of the family has a birthday
+then, that one shall choose our walk for us. If not, then when we have
+chosen the national hero or heroine whose birthday falls near this time,
+or the event the anniversary of which comes nearest, we will go, if
+possible, where something will remind us of that person or event.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So we fall to discussing the possibilities. We search through almanacs
+until we find the anniversary that suits us all. Perhaps one of the
+parents has anticipated all this by looking up the matter, and has a
+good name to suggest. Or the older ones may consult a dictionary of
+dates. It may turn out to be the birthday of a national hero. In the
+city he may have a statue; in the country may be found the kinds of
+woods, flowers, or animals he loved.</p>
+
+<p>4. <i>The exploring party.</i>&mdash;But even after the walk it will not be long
+before the little ones are asking, "What can we do next?" So we organize
+the exploring party. Our object is to discover the countries, scenes,
+strange peoples, and most interesting persons we have heard of in the
+Bible. We are to find them in the advertising sections of old magazines.
+Let each one take a magazine and go through it, looking for oriental
+scenes, for pictures of incidents and of men and women that will remind
+him of Bible scenes and characters. These are to be cut out, explained,
+and arranged in the order of time, as they happened, every member of the
+family helping. The same plan may be applied to scenes of missionary
+work, using blank books for stories of heroism which children will
+illustrate with the magazine pictures.</p>
+
+<p>5. <i>Home thoughts.</i>&mdash;"Home, sweet home," is just a corner of the
+afternoon saved for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span> discovery and reading of selections that are
+worth keeping in our memories and are also likely to help us hold our
+homes in some measure of the love and reverence they deserve. There are
+songs of home that ought never to be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>6. <i>Religious reading and songs close the day happily.</i>&mdash;Children love
+religious reading and songs, provided they are offered for their worth
+and not as an exercise, or to be learned as an empty duty. Take down
+your Bible and read Psalm 100, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all
+ye lands"; see whether they do not all enjoy the music and majesty of
+those lines. You will not find it difficult to secure their co-operation
+in learning that by heart.</p>
+
+<p>Then close the day with an hour of song. The children will remember
+songs learned thus all their lives; therefore those worth remembering
+should be chosen. For one, there is that dear old song many of us
+learned at mother's knee, "Jesus loves me, this I know." That and others
+that are appropriate can be found in almost every hymnbook. Many books
+of school songs also have a few hymns and Sunday songs that children
+like.</p>
+
+<p>Parents are puzzled, perhaps most of all, to choose appropriate stories
+to read to the children on Sunday. Youngsters prefer, of course, the
+told story to the read one, but if you wish to read you will make no
+mistake in selecting <i>Christie's Old Organ</i>; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span><i>Aunt Abbey's Neighbors</i>,
+by Annie T. Slosson; <i>The Book of Golden Deeds</i>, by Charlotte M. Yonge;
+and <i>Telling Bible Stories</i>, by Louise S. Houghton. <i>Some Great Stories
+and How to Tell Them</i>, by Richard Wyche, and <i>Story Telling</i>, by Edna
+Lyman, will serve as good guides to what to tell, and how to tell it.</p>
+
+<p>7. <i>Naming the day.</i>&mdash;From week to week variety should enter into the
+Sunday program. On the Sunday following the one described above we can
+begin at the dinner table the happy task of "naming the day." We can
+decide whether it shall be called after one of our own number, whose
+birthday falls near this date, or after one of the anniversaries of the
+week following.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps someone suggests calling it after the feast day of the church
+year observed by certain churches. That should lead to discussion and
+investigation of the meaning of the day.</p>
+
+<p>When all are agreed on a name, write it under its date on your wall
+calendar. It will be a convenient suggestion for next year, unless the
+decision is for a different name when the day again comes round. It will
+also call to mind some of the interesting discussions which it aroused.</p>
+
+<p>After this we might call for <i>The Family Book</i>, which now contains, you
+will recall, the family's decision as to the best Sunday and the
+happiest occurrences of the year before. The keeper,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span> appointed last
+week, must bring it out. We can read what we wrote a week ago and decide
+on the things worth entering this week. Records of birthdays, special
+happenings to each of the family, the bright sayings of little ones, and
+the visits of friends and relatives all should go in.</p>
+
+<p>8. <i>"I remember" stories.</i>&mdash;While <i>The Family Book</i> is open is the
+psychological moment for father and mother to tell stories of their
+childhood. Every child likes to hear the story that begins, "I
+remember," and feels a thrill of pride in belonging to something that
+goes back and has a history. The old family album is a never-failing
+source of delight, not so much because of the pictures as because of
+what they suggest of family traditions.</p>
+
+<p>Now is a good time to select some certain thing which shall be used only
+on this day, such as a festival lamp or candlestick, some festival
+plates or dishes&mdash;just one thing or set of things toward the use of
+which we can look forward during the week. This helps to make Sunday
+what we used to call "a treat."</p>
+
+<p>9. <i>Golden deeds.</i>&mdash;Last week we started <i>The Family Book</i> in which to
+keep a record of all the happy experiences that belong to our family.
+This week we begin another book. In it we expect to place every week
+just one splendid story, the account of a golden deed, some piece of
+everyday kindness or heroism of which we have read or heard<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span> or which we
+have witnessed. Everyone is to have a chance to contribute to this book,
+all the family deciding by vote each week as to which story should be
+placed on its pages.</p>
+
+<p>Did you read in the paper this week of some brave or kindly deed done by
+a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? Did you see someone do an act of
+kindness? Cut out the account or write out the story and have it ready
+for your own <i>Golden Deed Book</i>. Everyone must watch all the week for
+the right kind of stories. It is wonderful how much good you will find
+in the world when you are looking for it.</p>
+
+<p>Sunday afternoons all the family can hear each story and talk over its
+fine points of virtue and goodness. Thus may be developed an
+appreciation of the human qualities that are really admirable. We can
+discuss also the probability of certain of the stories and the
+righteousness of the deeds.</p>
+
+<p>Any blank book will do, or even a composition book. It will help to keep
+hands happily occupied if you make your own covers and cut out gilt
+letters for the title. Often you can find pictures to illustrate the
+stories chosen; sometimes you may prefer to draw the illustrations. Keep
+<i>The Golden Deed Book</i> in a safe and convenient place, because there
+ought to be something to go into it every week. For instance, did you
+read the other day of the young man who jumped in front of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span> train to
+save a young girl? He lost his life, but he saved hers. Can you find
+that story and put it in the book? Perhaps you have found one that seems
+even more fitting.</p>
+
+<p>10. <i>Various plans.</i>&mdash;Giving happiness creates it. Plan something every
+Sunday for the happiness of others. Occasionally go in a body to call on
+someone who will be made happy by the visit.</p>
+
+<p>If you walk in the park or elsewhere, see how many things you can
+discover that you have read about in the Bible or know to be mentioned
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Try the game of "guessing hymns." While someone plays the familiar
+tunes, each takes a turn at identifying them and the hymns to which they
+belong.</p>
+
+<p>Set aside twenty minutes for each one to write a letter to send to the
+brother or sister, relative or friend, at a distance. Even the baby can
+scratch something which he thinks is a "real enough" letter in penciled
+scribbles.</p>
+
+<p>Close the day with quiet reading and song, or with the memory exercise
+in which all endeavor to repeat some simple psalm or a few verses, like
+the Beatitudes. All children like to repeat the Lord's Prayer in family
+concert.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>Emilie Poulsson, <i>Love and Law in Child Training</i>, chaps. i-iv.
+Milton Bradley, $1.00.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Happy Sundays for Children</i> and <i>Sunday in the Home</i>. Pamphlets.
+American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Sunday Play.</i> Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life,
+Philadelphia, Pa.</p>
+
+<p>Hodges, <i>Training of Children in Religion</i>, chap. xiii. Appleton,
+$1.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Methods and Materials</span></p>
+
+<p><i>A Year of Good Sundays.</i> Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
+Life, Philadelphia, Pa.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">IV. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What is the real problem of Sunday in the family? Is it that of
+securing quiet or of wisely directing the action of the young?</p>
+
+<p>2. Recall your childhood's Sundays. Were they for good or ill?</p>
+
+<p>3. What are the arguments against children playing on Sunday? Is
+there any essential relation between the play of children and the
+wide-open Sunday of commercialized amusements?</p>
+
+<p>4. Can you describe forms of play in which practically all the
+family might unite?</p>
+
+<p>5. What characteristics should distinguish play on Sundays from
+other days? Is it wise to attempt thus to distinguish this day?</p>
+
+<p>6. Criticize the suggestions on occupations for Sunday afternoons.</p>
+
+<p>7. Recall any especially helpful forms of the use of this day in
+your childhood, or coming under your observation.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">31</span></a> See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">32</span></a> See chap. vii on "Directed Activity," and the references
+for study at its end.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">33</span></a> Much may be learned by a study of Primary plans in a
+modern Sunday school. See Athearn, <i>The Church School</i>, chap. vi.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">34</span></a> Since we are dealing here especially with religious
+education in the family, the author refers to his more extended
+treatment of the question of children in church services in <i>Efficiency
+in the Sunday School</i>, chap. xv.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE MINISTRY OF THE TABLE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Shall the periods for meals be for the body only or shall we see in them
+happy occasions for the enriching of the higher life? Upon the answer
+depends whether the table shall be little more than a feeding-trough or
+the scene of constant mental and character development. In some memories
+the meals stand out only in terms of food, while pictures of dishes and
+fragments of food fill the mind; in others there are borne through all
+life pictures of happy faces and thoughts of cheer, of knowledge gained
+and ideals created in the glow of conversation.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE OPPORTUNITY</h4>
+
+<p>The family is together as a united group at the table more than anywhere
+besides. Table-talk, by its informality and by the aid of the pleasures
+of social eating, is one of the most influential means of education.
+Depend upon it, children are more impressed by table-talk than by
+teacher-talk or by pulpit-talk. They expect moralizing on the other
+occasions, but here the moral lessons throw out no warning; they meet no
+opposition; they are&mdash;or ought to be, if they would be effective&mdash;a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>
+natural part of ordinary conversation and, by being part and parcel of
+everyday affairs, they become normally related to life. The table is the
+best opportunity for informal, indirect teaching, and this is for
+children the natural and only really effective form of moral
+instruction.</p>
+
+<p>The child comes to these social occasions with a hungry mind as well as
+with an empty stomach. His mind is always receptive&mdash;even more so than
+his stomach; at the table he is absorbing that which will stay with him
+much longer than his food. Even if we were thinking of his food alone,
+we should still do well to see that the table is graced by happy and
+helpful conversation; nothing will aid digestion more than good cheer of
+the spirit; it stimulates the organs and, by diverting attention from
+the mere mechanics of eating, it tends to that most desirable end, a
+leisurely consumption of food.</p>
+
+<p>The general conversation of the family group has more to do with
+character development in children than we are likely to realize, and the
+table is peculiarly the opportunity for general conversation. Here, most
+of all, we need to watch its character and consider its teaching
+effects. Where father scolds or mother complains the children grow
+fretful and quarrelsome. Where father spends the time in reciting the
+sharp dealing of the market or the political ring, where mother<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>
+delights in dilating on the tinsel splendors of her social rivalries,
+they teach the children that life's object is either gain at any cost or
+social glory. But it is just as easy to do precisely the opposite, to
+speak of the pleasures found in simpler ways, to glory in goodness and
+kindness, and to teach, by relating the worthy things of the day, the
+worth of love and truth and high ideals. The news of the day may be
+discussed so as to make this world a game of grab, inviting youth to
+cast conscience and honor to the winds and to plunge into the greedy
+struggle, or so as to make each day a book of beautiful pictures of
+life's best pleasures and enduring prizes.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. DIRECTING TABLE-TALK</h4>
+
+<p>But table-talk, helpful, cheerful, and educative, does not occur by
+accident. It comes, first, from our own constant and habitual thought of
+the meals in social and spiritual, as well as in physical, terms. And it
+reaches its possibilities as we endeavor to create and direct the kind
+of conversation that is desired. "Let all your speech be seasoned with
+salt," wrote the apostle, and we might add, let your salt be seasoned
+with good speech. That is the quality we must seek, the seasoning of
+healthful, saving, and not insipid, speech.</p>
+
+<p>One of the great advantages of "grace before meat" lies in this: it
+gives a tone to the occasion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span> Its chief meaning is surely that we
+remind ourselves of the ever-present guest who is also the giver of all
+good. Where the grace is not a perfunctory act, but rather the welcoming
+of such a guest, the meal has started on a high level. We cannot do
+better than so to act and speak as those who take the divine presence
+for granted. We need not preach about it; we need only to assume it and
+move on the level of that friendship. Children will feel it; they will
+seek to answer to it, and will find pleasure in the very thought which
+they have perhaps never expressed in words.</p>
+
+<p>The central idea of the grace suggests another means of helpful
+influences at the table, by bringing into our homes, for the meals, the
+friends whose lives will lift these younger ones. It is worth everything
+to live even for an hour with good and broadening lives. There are
+obligations to our guests to be considered, and their wishes should be
+consulted, but one always feels that children are being cheated when
+they are sent to eat at another table and deprived of the peculiar
+intimate touch with lives that bring the benefits of travel and
+experience. Ask your own memory what some persons who ate at the table
+with you in childhood meant to you.</p>
+
+<p>The wise hostess knows that even when she brings together the group of
+mature folks, and even when they are wise and witty, she must be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span>
+prepared adroitly to inspire the conversation or it may flag at times.
+How much more does the conversation need direction where we have the
+same group every day composed largely of immature persons! When you have
+thought of all the portions and all the plates, have you thought of the
+food for the spirit?</p>
+
+<p>Before suggesting methods of selection and direction, let a word of
+explanation be said: food for the spirit is not confined to theology, to
+hymns and the Bible; it is whatever will help us to feel and think of
+life as an affair of the spirit. And this must come in very simple
+terms, by the elementary steps, for young folks. It will be whatever
+will in any way help us to live more kindly, more cheerfully, more as
+though this really were God's world and all folks his family. Whatever
+does this is truly religious.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. METHODS</h4>
+
+<p>Plan for the food of the spirit as seriously at least as for the food of
+the body. Learn to recognize poisons and also indigestibles. The first
+are subjects of scandal, bitterness of spirit, malice, impatience,
+tale-bearing, unkindly criticism, and discontent. The second are
+subjects too heavy for children: your formal theology would be one of
+them, your judgments on some intricate subjects may be among them. It is
+seldom wise to announce<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span> negative injunctions, but we can make up our
+own minds to avoid the conversational poisons and, when they appear, it
+is always easy to push them out. Even when the unpleasant subject is so
+common to all and has been so impressive in the day's experience that it
+threatens to become the sole, absorbing topic, we can say, "We won't
+talk of it at table! Let's find something better." But we must then have
+ready the something better; that will be possible only by forethought.</p>
+
+<p>First, save up during the day, or between the meals, the best thoughts,
+the cheering, kind, ideal, and amusing incidents. Cultivate the habit of
+saying to yourself, "This is something for us all to enjoy tonight at
+the table."</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, expect the other members to bring their best. Ask for "the
+best news of the day" from one and another. Encourage them to tell of
+good things seen and done and of pleasant and ideal things heard and
+spoken.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, use the incidents as the basis of discussion. Let children tell
+what they think of moral situations. Often they will quote the opinions
+of teachers and others. Always you will secure under these circumstances
+the unreserved expression of what they actually think. A free, informal
+conversation of this sort where opinions are kindly examined and
+compared is the finest kind of teaching.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, do not forget the grace of humor. To see the odd, whimsical,
+startling side of the incident or experience trains one to see the
+interplay of life, to catch a ray of light from all things, and to
+moderate our tendency to permit our tragedies to pull the heavens down.</p>
+
+<p>Fifthly, use this period to strengthen the consciousness of family unity
+by recounting past happy experiences and discussing plans of family
+life. In one family there are few meals from October to Christmas that
+do not include reminiscences of the summer in the woods and by the
+water, or from Christmas to June without plans for the next summer in
+the same place. Then, too, if you are contemplating something new, a
+piano, a chair, an automobile, talk it all over here. Let each one have
+his share in the planning. The effect is most important for character;
+the children acquire the sense of a share in the family community life.
+They get their first lessons in citizenship in this group, and they thus
+learn social living. Then when the chair, or what not, is bought, it is
+not alone the parents' possession; it belongs to all and all treat it as
+the property of all.</p>
+
+<p>Sixthly, introduce great guests who cannot come in person. It is fine
+fun to say, "We have with us tonight a man who loved bees and wrote
+books." Let them guess who it was; help, if neces<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span>sary, by an allusion
+to <i>The Life of the Bee</i> and <i>The Blue Bird</i>. They will want to know
+more about Maeterlinck and they will joyously imagine what they would
+say to him and how he would answer, what he would eat and how he would
+behave. In this way we may enjoy knowing better Lincoln, Whittier,
+Florence Nightingale, and an innumerable company.</p>
+
+<p>Seventhly, this is the place to remind ourselves that table-manners are
+no small part of the moral life. By the habituation of custom we can
+establish lives in attitudes of everyday thoughtfulness for others, in
+the underlying consideration of others which is the basis of all
+courtesy. Children's questions on table-etiquette must be met, not only
+by the formal rules, but also by their explanation in the intent of
+every gentle life to give pleasure and not pain to others, so to live in
+all things as to find helpful harmony with other lives and to help them
+to find and be the best. It is not only impolite to grab and guzzle, it
+is unsocial and so unmoral, because it is both a bad example and a
+distressing sight to others. It is irreligious, because whatever tends
+to make this life less beautiful must be offensive to the God who made
+all things good.</p>
+
+<p>If we ourselves seek to maintain beauty, order, and kindliness in the
+conduct of the table, our children acquire a love of all that makes for
+beauty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span> and order and kindliness, for righteousness in the little things
+of life. A clean tablecloth may be a means of grace. You have to try to
+live up to it. Order and quietness in eating are not separable from the
+rest of the life. To lift up life at any point is to raise the whole
+level. To let it down at any point is to let all down. But to lift up
+the level of conversation at the table is to raise the level of the
+entire occasion and to make it more than a period of eating, to convert
+it into a festival, a joyous occasion of the spirit. The meal should be
+in all things worthy of the unseen guest.</p>
+
+<p>How near we all come together at the table! In its freedom how clearly
+are we seen by our children! Here they know us for what we are and so
+learn to interpret life.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">Reference for Study</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Table Talk.</i> Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life,
+Philadelphia, Pa.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Topics Tor Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. The relation of mental conditions to digestion.</p>
+
+<p>2. The relation of table-etiquette to life-habits.</p>
+
+<p>3. The table as an opportunity for the grace of courtesy, and the
+relation of this grace to Christian character.</p>
+
+<p>4. Training children in listening as well as in talking at table.</p>
+
+<p>5. Do you regard table-talk and table-manners as having any
+directly religious values? Why?</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE BOY AND GIRL IN THE FAMILY</h3>
+
+
+<p>Much that has been said so far has had in mind only the problems of
+dealing with younger children in the life of the home. Indeed, almost
+all literature on education in the family is devoted to the years prior
+to adolescence. But older boys and girls need the family and the family
+needs them. Many of the more serious problems of youth with which
+society is attempting to deal are due to the fact that from the age of
+thirteen on boys have no home life and girls, especially in the cities,
+are deprived of the home influences.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE GROWING BOY</h4>
+
+<p>The life of the family must have a place for the growing boy. It must
+make provision for his physical needs; these are food, activity, rest,
+and shelter. Youth is a period of physical crisis. Health is the basis
+of a sound moral life. Many of the lad's apparently strange propensities
+are due to the physical changes taking place in his body and, often, to
+the fact that it is assumed that his rugged frame needs no care or
+attention.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">35</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It will take more than tearful pleading to hold him to his home; he can
+be held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most
+attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering
+boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded
+quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makeshift bed, and
+the general home organization which long ago assumed that a boy could be
+left out of the reckoning.</p>
+
+<p>The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to
+that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree
+that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him
+about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a
+chance to do part of the work, not only its "chores," but also its forms
+of service. But even a boy's attitude to the "chores" will depend on
+whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of
+unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be
+responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does
+regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services
+which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his
+training for the larger citizenship and society of service.<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">36</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The boy is a playing animal. Not all homes can be fully equipped with
+play apparatus. But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as
+though children needed nothing but meals and beds. The shame of the
+modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for passive
+adults. To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human
+creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are
+shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to
+force him out to the life of the streets. The thoughtless
+self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical
+effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">37</a></p>
+
+<p>But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the grass and
+among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation. For
+the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary,
+and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or
+pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off
+the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof. If
+possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his
+friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of
+home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">38</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span></p><p>A workbench in the attic or basement has saved many a boy from the
+street. Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a
+home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but
+families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the
+home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the
+purpose of a salon.<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">39</a></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. RELIGIOUS SERVICE</h4>
+
+<p>In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to
+one form of participation in the religious life. Whatever the family
+gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the
+support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of
+one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending
+itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world. The
+form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family
+conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the
+means of determining his share in such extension. The child's gifts to
+the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the
+threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own
+account&mdash;partly his own direct earnings&mdash;appropriated for this or for
+other purposes by himself and with <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>the advice of his parents. Family
+councils on forms of participation in ideal activities, by gifts and by
+service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the
+child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">40</a></p>
+
+<p>The boy needs friendship. Not all his needs can be met by the schoolboys
+whom he may bring into his room, nor can they all be met by his mother's
+affection. He needs a father. The most serious obstacle to the religious
+education of boys is that most of them are half-orphans; intellectually
+and spiritually they have no fathers. The American ideal seems to be
+that the man shall be the money-maker, the woman the social organizer,
+and the children shall be committed to hired shepherds or left to shift
+for themselves.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. THE FATHER AND THE BOY</h4>
+
+<p>No one else can be quite the teacher for the boy that his father ought
+to be. No man can ever commit to another, still less to some tract or
+book, the duty of guiding his boy to sanity and consecration in the
+matter of the sex problems.</p>
+
+<p>The first word that needs to be said on this subject is that such
+problems receive safe and sufficient <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span>guidance only in the atmosphere of
+affection and reverence. Do not attempt to teach this boy of yours as
+though you were dealing with a class in physiology. The largest thing
+you can do for him is to quicken a reverence for the body and for the
+functions of life. By your own attitude, by your own expressions and
+opinions, lead him to a hatred and abhorrence of the base, filthy, and
+bestial, to a healthy fear and detestation of all that despoils and
+degrades manhood, and to a reverence for purity, beauty, and life.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">41</a></p>
+
+<p>Be prepared to give him, on the basis of reverence, the clean, clear
+facts. Be sure you have the facts. Do not think he is ignorant; he is in
+a world seething with conversation, stories, pictures, and experiences
+of evil. The trouble is that his facts are partial, distorted, and
+unbalanced by positive errors; his knowledge is gained from the street
+and the school-yard. Only a personal teacher can help him unravel the
+good from the bad, the true from the false. Do not trust to your own
+general knowledge; take time to read one of the simple and sane books on
+this subject.<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">42</a> Be ready to lead him aright. Remember this subject has
+provoked <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span>a large number of books, many of which are foolish and others
+unwholesome. Do not try to deputize your duty to some doubtful book.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. FATHERING THE BOY</h4>
+
+<p>But the boy needs more than instruction on a special subject; he needs
+personality, he needs the time and thought of, and <i>personal contact</i>
+with, his father. Men who do not live with boys never know what they
+lose. And alas, see what the boy misses! He has been his mother's boy up
+to school age when school takes him and gives him a woman's guidance,
+while the Sunday school is likely to keep him&mdash;for a while only&mdash;under
+the eye of some dear sister who "just loves boys." The system is a
+vicious one. The lad needs developed masculinity. If he gets it neither
+in school nor in the home he will find it on the street corner, through
+the vicious boy-leader of the degrading poolroom or the alleys.</p>
+
+<p>The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the
+merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as
+simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious
+questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with
+the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering
+your young men if you lost your boys.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">43</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. THE GROWING GIRL</h4>
+
+<p>Almost all that has been said about the boy applies to the girl of the
+same years. Let <i>a special plea</i> be entered here against the notion that
+girls are favored when sheltered from a share in the activities of the
+home. They desire to express their ideals as much as do boys. Much of
+the so-called craze for amusements is due to the fact that the family is
+so organized that there is no vent to the ideals there, no chance to
+have a share in the business of life. Young folks with the sense that
+"this is our home," not "our parents', but <i>ours</i>" bend their energies
+to its adorning, and find in it the chance to realize some of their
+passion for beauty and for service.<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">44</a></p>
+
+<p>Mothers usually do better than do fathers in the matter of sex
+instruction. Yet they usually begin too late, long after the little girl
+has acquired much misleading information in the school. Here, too, the
+first aim must be to quicken reverence for life, to set up the
+conception of the beauty and dignity of sex functions before the baser
+mind of the street has had an opportunity to interpret them in terms of
+the dirt.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">45</a></p>
+
+<p>Above all, with boys and girls, the whole subject, including marriage
+and the founding of a family, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">181</a></span>must ever be treated with dignity and
+reverence. Foolish parents jest with their girls about their beaux and
+boast that their little ones are playing at courtship. If they could
+realize the wonder awakened, followed by pain and then by hardened
+sensibilities and coarsened ideals, they would sacrifice their jests for
+the sake of the child's soul. We wonder that youth treats lightly the
+matter of social purity when we have treated the sacred relations of
+life as a jest. If this family in which they now live is to be a place
+of sacred associations, of real religious life, the whole matter of
+marriage and the family must be treated with reverence. Their practice
+will not rise above our everyday ideals as expressed in casual
+conversation and in our own practice.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">THE BOY</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;A. McKeever, <i>Training the Boy</i>, Part III. Macmillan, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><i>Boy Training</i>, Part IV. A Symposium. Associated Press.</p>
+
+<p>Johnson, <i>The Problems of Boyhood</i>. The University of Chicago
+Press, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE GIRL</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Slattery, <i>The Girl in Her Teens</i>, chaps. iv, vii. Sunday
+School Times Co., $0.50.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne, <i>Building Your Girl</i>. McClurg, $0.50.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;B. Forbush, <i>The Coming Generation</i>. Appleton, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Puffer, <i>The Boy and His Gang</i>. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Irving King, <i>The High School Age</i>. Bobbs-Merrill, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p><i>Building Childhood</i>, A Symposium. Sunday School Times Co., $1.00.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What are the special needs of the growing boy?</p>
+
+<p>2. What are the things that a boy enjoys in his home?</p>
+
+<p>3. In what way does city life interfere with the natural
+development of the child?</p>
+
+<p>4. What are some of the natural expressions of religion for a boy?</p>
+
+<p>5. How early should the sex instruction begin?</p>
+
+<p>6. What does a father owe to the boy, and what are the best methods
+of meeting the duty?</p>
+
+<p>7. What are the normal activities for girls in the home?</p>
+
+<p>8. What are their especial needs?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">35</span></a> A good brief book on the problem of the adolescent is E.&nbsp;T.
+Swift, <i>Youth and the Race</i>; another, from the school point of view, is
+Irving King, <i>The High-School Age</i>, which has much material of great
+value to parents.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">36</span></a> On the various activities of boys see W.&nbsp;A. McKeever,
+<i>Training the Boy</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">37</span></a> See the notable report by Breckinridge and Abbott, <i>The
+Delinquent Child and the Home</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">38</span></a> On the gregarious instincts see J.&nbsp;A. Puffer, <i>The Boy and
+His Gang</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">39</span></a> See the books on manual work given in chap. vii, "Directed
+Activity."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">40</span></a> On the religious life of the boy in relation to society
+and the church see Allan Hoben, <i>The Minister and the Boy</i>, and the
+author's treatment of boys and the Sunday school in <i>Efficiency in the
+Sunday School</i>, chap. xiv; also J. Alexander <i>et al.</i>, <i>Training the
+Boy</i>, a symposium.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">41</span></a> On the attitude of reverence in this question read Dr.
+Cabot's fine essay, <i>The Christian Approach to Social Morality</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">42</span></a> The works of Dr. W.&nbsp;S. Hall, <i>From Boyhood to Manhood</i>, for
+parents' guidance with boys of thirteen to eighteen; E. Lyttleton,
+<i>Training of the Young in Laws of Sex</i>, is excellent for fathers;
+<i>Reproduction and Sexual Hygiene</i> is a text for older youth to be
+recommended; also, for reading, N.&nbsp;E. Richardson, <i>Sex Culture Talks</i>,
+D.&nbsp;S. Jordan, <i>The Strength of Being Clean</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">43</span></a> For further studies of the problem of the boy parents
+would do well to read: <i>Building Boyhood</i>, a symposium; W.&nbsp;A. McKeever,
+<i>Training the Boy;</i> W.&nbsp;B. Forbush, <i>The Coming Generation;</i> W.&nbsp;D. Hyde,
+<i>The Quest of the Best</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">44</span></a> On activities see W.&nbsp;A. McKeever, <i>Training the Girl</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">45</span></a> On the problem with young children see M. Morley, <i>The
+Renewal of Life</i>; in connection with older girls see K.&nbsp;H. Wayne,
+<i>Building Your Girl</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE NEEDS OF YOUTH</h3>
+
+
+<p>Families are for the spiritual development of youth as well as of
+childhood. The home is for the young people as well as for the younger
+ones. But the very period when they slip from church school is also the
+period when they are often lost to the real life of the family. In some
+measure this is due to the natural development of the social life. The
+youths go out to work, move forward into enlarging social groups which
+demand more of their free time. They are learning the life of the larger
+world of which they are now a part.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE SCHOOL OF YOUTH</h4>
+
+<p>But the family is still the home of these young people; normally it is
+still the most vital educational influence for them. Yet there is no
+problem more baffling than that of family ministry for, and leadership
+of, the higher life of youth.</p>
+
+<p>It is a short-measure interpretation of the home which thinks of it as
+only for young children and old folks. The young men and women from
+sixteen to twenty and over still need training and direction; they need
+close touch with other lives in affection and in an ideal atmosphere. In
+a few years they,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span> too, will be home-makers, and here in the home they
+are very directly learning the art of family life.</p>
+
+<p>For youth there are few effective schools, outside the home, other than
+the streets and the places of commercialized amusement. Even where the
+other agencies of training are used, such as college, classes, and
+associations (such as the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A.), life, at that
+period, needs the restraints on selfishness that come from family life,
+the refining and socializing power of the family group.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. SPECIAL NEEDS OF YOUTH</h4>
+
+<p>What are the special needs of youth upon which the family may base a
+reasonable program for their higher needs?</p>
+
+<p>First, the need of sound physical health. This is a period of physical
+adjustment. Rapid bodily growth is nearly or quite at an end; new
+functions are asserting themselves. The new demands for directed
+activity may, under the ambitious impulses of youth, make undue drafts
+on the energies. The apparent moodiness that at times characterizes this
+period may be due to poor health. The moral strain of the period will
+need sound muscles and good health. Parents who would sit up all
+night&mdash;perhaps involuntarily&mdash;when the baby has the colic treat with
+indifference sickness in youth and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span> too readily assume that the young
+man or the young woman will outgrow these physical ills. But bodily
+maladjustment or incapacity has most serious character effects. To live
+the right life and render high service one needs to be a whole person,
+with opportunity to give undivided attention and undiminished powers to
+the struggle of life.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, this is peculiarly the period of the joy of friendships. The
+social nature must have its food. This young man has discovered that the
+world consists of something besides things; it is full of people. He is
+just learning that they are all persons like himself. He enters the era
+of conscious personal relationships. He would explore the realm of
+personality. He touches great heights of happiness as other lives are
+opened to him. It is all new and wonderful, this realm of personality,
+with its aspects of feeling, thinking, willing, and longing.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. MAINTAINING FRIENDSHIP WITH YOUTH</h4>
+
+<p>Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their
+friendship? They will never tell us, for this world is too new and
+strange for facile description; they are always bashful about their
+hunger for persons until they find the same hunger and joy in us. We
+imagine that they are indifferent to us; the trouble is we are hidden
+from them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span> We seldom give them a chance to talk as friend to friend,
+not about trifling things, but about life itself and what it means.
+Perhaps at no point do parents exhibit less ability for sympathetic
+reconstruction and interpretation of their own lives than here. They
+recall the pleasures of childhood and provide those pleasures for the
+children. Why not recall the hunger of eighteen years of age and give
+these youths the very bread of our own inner selves? Or do we, when they
+ask this bread, give them the stone of mere provision for their physical
+needs or the scorpion of careless indulgence in things that debase the
+tastes?</p>
+
+<p>One perplexing phenomenon must not be overlooked: it will often happen
+that young people pass through a period of what appears to be parental
+aversion. There will sometimes seem to be suspicion, violent opposition,
+and even hatred of parents. This is no occasion for despair. It is a
+stage of development. It is due to the attempt of a will now realizing
+its freedom under social conditions to adapt itself to the will that has
+hitherto directed it. To some degree the sex consciousness, which leads
+to viewing the parents in a new light, may enter in. It may be easily
+made permanent, however, if parents do not do two things: first, adjust
+themselves and their methods to the new social freedom of the youth,
+and, secondly, fling open the doors into their true<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span> selves now fully
+understandable by these men and women.</p>
+
+<p>But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of
+youth. Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will
+feed. Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere. If
+they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere. You can
+scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they
+are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when
+home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth. If you
+are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but
+you will lose a life or lives. Here is the opportunity of the home to
+enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many
+lives.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD</h4>
+
+<p>As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful
+realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than
+others. Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel
+him to make a selection. The same law is operative with the young woman.
+Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities;
+it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther. But father
+and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as
+they see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">188</a></span> their children taking their first evident steps toward
+home-making. What an opportunity is theirs!</p>
+
+<p>Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just
+where some of the most serious mistakes are made. This is no time for
+teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule. If you treat this
+essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young
+people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke. The home is
+the place where the home is treated most irreverently. Of course one
+must not take too seriously those "calf" courtships, prematurely
+fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school
+tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here
+jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what
+would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or
+kindly, simple advice will help most of all.</p>
+
+<p>To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when
+they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth's
+idealism, make high vows and stand on high places. Give them at least
+the opportunity to enter your inmost self, to find there all the light
+you can give them and all the memory of your own joys and hopes. Make
+them feel, though you need not say it, that they are at the threshold of
+a temple. If to you this is an affair of the spirit it will be a matter
+of religion to them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Approached in such a temper, many of the practical problems of courtship
+settle themselves. Take the case of the young man at home. If he knows
+that you think with him of the high meaning of this experience he will
+not hesitate to bring the young woman to the home. She will feel your
+attitude. Upon this level questions of times and seasons, hours in the
+parlor, and all the matters of their relations will settle themselves.
+If you treat courtship as a matter of the spirit he will do just what he
+most of all wants to do, treat this woman who is to be his mate as a
+person, a spirit, with reverence and love that lifts itself above lust.
+This is the only ground upon which you can appeal to either in matters
+of conduct at this time. The conventions of society they will despise;
+but the inner law speaks to them when the outer letter has no meaning.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. THE SOCIAL LIFE</h4>
+
+<p>We must expect our children to go out into their larger world. The
+beginning of adolescence is the normal time of their social awakening,
+their conversion from a nature that turns in upon itself to one that
+moves out into a world of persons. For them, now, the home group ought
+to be seen as a society as well as a family, as the social group
+gathering about a definite ideal and mission into which they should
+delight to project themselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span> The appeal of religion is peculiarly
+vivid just now, for it involves a recognition of one's self as a person
+with the power of personal choices and with the opportunity to find
+association with other persons. The family must aid its young people to
+see the opportunity which the church offers for ideal social
+relationships which direct themselves to high and attractive service.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 6. AMUSEMENTS</h4>
+
+<p>What should the family do about the question of the amusements of young
+people?</p>
+
+<p>Healthy young persons must have recreation. They will seek it on its
+highest level first and find their way down the facile descent of
+commercialized amusements only as the higher opportunities are denied
+them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would
+rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than
+sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the
+idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this
+need the home must minister by the provision of space, time,
+opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth,
+selfishness, preoccupation, or a mistaken idea of an empty innocence of
+life you make recreation and social intercourse impossible in the
+family, the young people will find it on the street or in the crowd. In
+the family that plans<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span> for recreation and provides facilities and time
+for young people to play the problem is a minor one.</p>
+
+<p>But young people will naturally desire to project themselves into the
+social amusements of the larger groups. Then we ought to know what those
+amusements are; we must be able to advise, from actual knowledge, not
+from hearsay or prejudice, as to the healthful and worth while. The home
+must insist on the provision in the community for the safe socialization
+of amusements. The thousands of young girls in the cities, who tramp the
+pavements down to dance halls, primarily are only seeking the
+satisfaction of a normal craving; and they, on their way to the dance
+halls, pass the splendid plants of the schools and the churches,
+standing dark and idle. Families must develop a public opinion that will
+demand, for the sake of their young people, a provision for amusement
+and recreation that, instead of poisoning the life, shall strengthen,
+dignify, and elevate it. If the demand for clean drinking-water is a
+proper one, is the demand for healthful food for the life of ideals less
+so?</p>
+
+<p>There can be no doubt of the attitude of any home with the least
+conscience for character toward all forms of public amusements in which
+young people are herded promiscuously for the mere purpose of killing
+time in trivialities. The "white cities" with their glittering lights
+and baubles are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span> often moral plague colonies. The amusements debase the
+intellect, blunt the moral sensibilities, and appeal to the baser
+passions. They are the low-water mark, we may hope, of commercialized
+amusement. But they remind us that young people demand company and
+change from the monotony of the day's toil. They ask us as to the
+provision we are making for young people and challenge us to use their
+inclinations for good.</p>
+
+<p>But besides these "shows" there are many dignified forms of social
+recreation. Good music is to be heard and good plays are to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>The theater, whether of the regular drama or of the motion-picture type,
+offers a perplexing problem, principally because, in the first place,
+American people have been too busy conquering a new soil and making a
+living to give careful thought to the social side of aesthetics and
+recreation, and, secondly, because the ministry of social recreation has
+fallen almost entirely under the dominance of the same trend; it has
+been thoroughly commercialized. We cannot cut the puzzling knot by
+simply prohibiting all forms of public theatrical entertainment. For one
+reason, these forms shade off imperceptibly from the church service to
+the extremes of the vaudeville. But the simple fact is that we no longer
+indiscriminately class all theaters as baneful and immoral; we are
+coming to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span> see their potentialities for good. If the young will go, as
+they will&mdash;and ought&mdash;to the theater, and if the theater can lift their
+ideals, parents would do well to guide their children in this matter and
+to enlist the aid of the theater.</p>
+
+<p>It is worth while to come to a sympathetic understanding of the place of
+the drama and the opera, to see what they have meant in the education of
+the race and what is the significance, to us, of the fact of the strong
+dramatic instinct in childhood. Naturally the subject can only be
+mentioned here and the suggestion be offered that parents take time to
+cultivate an appreciation of good orchestral and concert music and of
+the drama.</p>
+
+<p>The social life will find outlet in other directions. Young people need
+our aid to find social groups which will inspire and develop them,
+especially groups that are serviceful.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 7. THE CALL TO SERVICE</h4>
+
+<p>This is the period when ideals begin to give direction to the hitherto
+undirected activity of childhood and youth. Young people are idealists.
+They see no height too giddy, no task too hard, no dream too roseate,
+and no hope unattainable. If the times are out of joint they believe
+they were "born to set them right." Whatever is wrong or imperfect they
+would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we
+are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span> loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so
+the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth.
+Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blas&eacute; view of the
+world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead
+of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those
+ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the
+songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your
+Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's passion and let it
+breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and
+conversation the life of ideals.</p>
+
+<p>Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is
+surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the
+period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in
+the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do
+something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We
+know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of
+others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and
+active minds&mdash;not with sleepy fatalism&mdash;believe in their boys, have boys
+who believe in them.</p>
+
+<p>They wait for leadership. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of
+indifference to social reform<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">195</a></span> and other types of ideal service, get
+back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.</p>
+
+<p>They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their
+service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.</p>
+
+<p>They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It
+will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be
+merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life
+in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of
+the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange
+from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else
+goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to
+today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to
+give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to
+make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious
+person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find
+the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God's world.
+The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are
+interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his
+high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to
+you&mdash;as you have been doing all along&mdash;by your daily attitude; you will
+have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span>
+discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the
+life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to
+realize the God-vision of the world.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>H.&nbsp;C. King, <i>Personal and Ideal Elements in Education</i>, pp. 105-27.
+Macmillan, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;D. Starbuck, <i>The Psychology of Religion</i>, chaps., xvi-xxi.
+Scribner, $1.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">1. ON YOUTH</p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;R. Brown, <i>The Young Man's Affairs</i>. Crowell, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Wayne, <i>Building the Young Man</i>. McClurg, $0.50.</p>
+
+<p>Swift, <i>Youth and the Race</i>. Scribner, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Wilson, <i>Making the Most of Ourselves</i>. McClurg, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p class="center">2. ON RECREATIONS</p>
+
+<p>L.&nbsp;C. Lillie, <i>The Story of Music and the Musicians</i>. Harper, $0.60.</p>
+
+<p>Gustav Kobbe, <i>How to Appreciate Music</i>. Moffat, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>P. Chubb, <i>Festivals and Plays</i>. Harper, $2.00.</p>
+
+<p><i>Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of
+Dramatic Plays</i>, monographs published by the American Institute of
+Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.</p>
+
+<p>L.&nbsp;H. Gulick, <i>Popular Recreation and Public Morality</i>. American
+Unitarian Association. Free.</p>
+
+<p>M. Fowler, <i>Morality of Social Pleasures</i>. Longmans, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Addams, <i>The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets</i>. Macmillan,
+$1.25.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">197</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see
+Herbert A. Jump, <i>The Religious Possibilities of the Motion
+Picture</i> (a pamphlet) and <i>Vaudeville and Moving Pictures</i>, a
+report of an investigation in Portland, Ore. <i>Reed College Record,
+No. 16.</i></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?</p>
+
+<p>2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their
+evenings? Why is this the case?</p>
+
+<p>3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.</p>
+
+<p>4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friendship of our
+young people?</p>
+
+<p>5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion
+to parents?</p>
+
+<p>6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of
+courtship?</p>
+
+<p>7. What are the special social needs of young people?</p>
+
+<p>8. What is the religious significance of the period of social
+awakening?</p>
+
+<p>9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amusements?</p>
+
+<p>10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?</p>
+
+<p>11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?</p>
+
+<p>12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE FAMILY AND THE CHURCH</h3>
+
+
+<p>If the family is engaged in the development of religious character
+through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close
+relations with the other great social institution engaged in precisely
+the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of
+religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and
+the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained,
+these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.</p>
+
+<p>As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should
+be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home constitutes the
+first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives
+prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of
+social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives
+together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of
+life.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME</h4>
+
+<p>Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an
+institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the
+developing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span> relations of children to the church, would be largely solved
+if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these
+two institutions. The institutional difficulties occur because these
+relations appear to be competitive. Here is the family with its
+interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on
+the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time,
+interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture
+unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that
+money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it
+to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from
+the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of
+the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.</p>
+
+<p>But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The
+home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems
+of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the
+opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions. We carelessly
+think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be
+persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests
+of which are in a different sphere. We think of the church as an
+independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or
+shortcomings and to criticize it if it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span> fails to meet our standards,
+just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to
+our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the
+homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.</p>
+
+<p>This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence
+independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and
+makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the
+church and the children. If the church is a thing apart we can analyze
+its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw
+recruits. It marches by while we stand on the curb. But here, surely, is
+one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms: the church is no
+more than our own selves associated for certain purposes. If the church
+fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we
+would a bridge that failed to carry a reasonable load? We do but condemn
+ourselves. If my church is not fit to send my children to, then I must
+help to make it fit. Before falling back on the lazy man's salve of
+caustic ridicule, before taking the seat of the scornful, before setting
+in the child's mind an aversion to this institution, based on my
+opinion, let me be sure I have done all that lies in my power to better
+it. True, I am only one; but surely, where so many family tables are
+each Sunday devoted to finding fault with the church<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span> and its services,
+I can find many others who will aid in at least stimulating a sense of
+personal responsibility for any incompleteness in the church.</p>
+
+<p>The family cannot afford to take the attitude of hostile criticism, for
+it is thus fighting its first and most natural ally, the one other
+institution engaged in its own special work. If the forces for spiritual
+character be divided, how easily do the opposing forces enter in and
+occupy! The family needs the support of the wider public opinion of the
+church, insisting on the supremacy of righteousness. The family needs
+the co-operation of the church in its task of developing religious
+lives. The family needs the power of this larger social body controlling
+social conditions and making them contributory to character purposes.
+The family needs the stimulus which a larger group can give to children
+and young people.</p>
+
+<p>This does not mean that we must never criticize the church. It is not
+set off in a niche protected from the acid of secular tongues and minds.
+Ministers of the gospel are unduly resentful of criticism, perhaps
+because, after they leave the seminary, no one has a fair opportunity to
+controvert their publicly stated opinions. But the church needs the
+cleansing powers of kindly, wise, creative criticism. Anyone can find
+fault, but he is wise who can show us a better way. This church is the
+family's ally; it is our business to aid her to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span> greater effectiveness.
+The new church for our own day awaits the services of the men of today.</p>
+
+<p>The purpose of the family is the basis of alliance with the church. As
+in every other relation and purpose of the home, so here: the dominant
+factor is the conscious function of the home and family. If the home is
+really a religious institution it will seek natural alliance with all
+other truly religious institutions. Ideally, what is a church but a
+group of families associated for religious purposes? Is not the church
+simply a number of families co-operating in the ideal purposes of each
+family, the development of the lives of religious persons and the
+control of social conditions for the sake of that purpose? Without
+entering into disputation as to the relationship of little children to
+the church, is there not just this relation to the human society called
+the church, that it is a grouping of families for the purpose of the
+divine family?</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE FAMILY IDEAL IN THE CHURCH</h4>
+
+<p>Would there be any question as to the naturalness of the relation of our
+children to the church if the family ideal so controlled our thinking as
+to saturate theirs? Is not this the present need, that both family and
+church shall conceive the latter in family terms? By this is meant, not
+simply that we shall think of what is called "a family church," a church
+into which we succeed in pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>jecting our families in a fair degree of
+integrity, but that we shall think of the organization and mission of
+the church in terms of family life and of the ideal of the divine
+family. Keeping in mind the general definition already given of a family
+as persons associated for the development of spiritual persons, let us
+hold the church to that same ideal; the lives of persons associated in
+the broadest fellowship that includes both God and man for the purposes
+of spiritual personality. The church then should be the expression of
+that family of which Jesus often spoke, the family that calls God Father
+and man brother.</p>
+
+<p>Closer and more helpful relations between family and church follow where
+the principles of the family prevail in the latter. The family is an
+ideal democracy because it exists primarily for persons. It places the
+value of persons first of all. So with the true church; it will exist to
+grow lives to spiritual fulness, and to this end all buildings,
+adornments, exercises, teachings, and organizations will be but as
+tools, as means serving that purpose. As the family sees its house,
+table, and activities designed to personal ends, so will the church. In
+an institution existing to grow lives, the great principle of democracy
+and of the family will prevail, viz., that to the least we owe the most.
+Just as the home gives its best to the little child, so will the church
+place the child in the midst. Just<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span> as the home exists for the child and
+thus holds to itself all other lives, so will the church some day exist
+for the little ones and so hold and use all other lives.</p>
+
+<p>The prime difficulty of relating the children in our families to the
+average church lies in the fact that they are children, while the church
+is an adult institution. Its buildings are designed for adults&mdash;save in
+rare and happy exceptions;<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">46</a> its services are designed for adults; it
+has a more or less extraneous institution called a school for the
+children. The church spends its money for adults; it compasses sea and
+land to make one proselyte and coerce him back in old age, and allows
+the many that already as children are its own to drift away. It often
+fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the
+growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted
+from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving
+service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the
+development of such lives through childhood and youth. They must hear
+again the Master's voice regarding "these little ones," regarding the
+significance of the child. And all must be loyal to his picture of his
+Kingdom as a family and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">205</a></span>must, therefore, do what all true families do,
+become child-centric. A church in which children occupy the same place
+that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a
+place for the children. It will be a natural and unnoticed transition
+from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. A PLACE FOR ALL IN THE CHURCH</h4>
+
+<p>The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an
+insistence on the family conception and the family program in the
+church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there
+a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the
+church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the
+name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let
+the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and
+specially designed worship for child-life&mdash;suitable forms of service and
+activity. Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be
+carried over to provide them in the church.</p>
+
+<p>Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church
+by their attitude toward it as the larger family group. To think and act
+toward this institution as our home, the wider home of the families, is
+to establish similar habits of thought in children. Such a concept is
+not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span> always easy to maintain; the church includes many of different
+habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general
+life. Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility
+toward the weaker and immature. This family, the church, just like our
+own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all
+minister to others.</p>
+
+<p>The principal service which the family may render to the church is,
+then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will
+relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural
+for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for
+religious culture and service. Surely this should be the attitude toward
+membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically
+in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church
+as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in
+which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service. The family
+may well hold that relationship steadily before its members. In
+childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who
+learn. The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering
+the way of the religious life and the art of its service. The fellowship
+grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child's relationship
+passes over from the passive to the active, from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span> the involuntary to the
+voluntary&mdash;just as it does in the home&mdash;and develops, as the child comes
+into social consciousness, into a recognition of himself as belonging to
+a social organization for specific purposes.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. CHILD UNITY WITH THE CHURCH</h4>
+
+<p>At some time every child of church-attending parents will want to know
+whether he "belongs to the church." One must be very careful here,
+regardless of the ecclesiastical practice, to show the child that he is
+essentially one with this body, this religious family. He may be too
+young to subscribe his name to its roll, but he belongs at least to the
+full measure of unity appreciable by his mind. He must not be permitted
+to think of himself as an outsider. Indeed, no matter what our theology
+may hold, every religious parent believes that his children belong to
+God. Do they not also belong to the church in at least the sense that
+the church is responsible for their spiritual welfare?</p>
+
+<p>The sense of unity must be developed. Writing the child's name on the
+"Cradle Roll" of the church school may help. Assuming, as he develops,
+that he is a part of this spiritual family, naturally expecting that he
+will have an increasing share in its life, will help more. Parents who
+dedicate their children to God pass on to them the stimulus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">208</a></span> of that
+dedication. A church service of dedication is likely to impress them
+with a feeling of unity with the church; seeing other children so
+dedicated they know that a similar occasion occurred in their own early
+lives.</p>
+
+<p>The forms of relationship must develop with the nature of the child. The
+church needs not only a graded curriculum of instruction but a graded
+series of relationships by which children, step by step, come into
+closer conscious social unity, each step determined by their developing
+needs and capacities.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to say that the responsibility lies with the church to
+provide these methods of attachment. But the church we have been
+sketching is a congeries of families, after all, and it will do just
+what these families, particularly the parents in them, stimulate it to
+do.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 5. INCIDENTAL DIFFICULTIES</h4>
+
+<p>But what of those instances in which parents are convinced that the
+church does not furnish a normal and healthy atmosphere for the child's
+spiritual life? There are churches where the Sunday school is simply a
+training school in insubordination, confusion, and irreverence, or where
+religion is so taught as to cultivate superstition and to lead
+eventually either to a painful intellectual reconstruction or to a
+barren denial of all faith.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">209</a></span> There are churches of one type so devoted
+to the entertainment of adults, to the ministry to the pride of the
+flesh and the lust of things, that a child is likely to be trained to
+pious pride and greed, or of another type, in which religion is a matter
+of verbiage, tradition, and unethical subterfuge.</p>
+
+<p>Parents must be true to their responsibilities. The family is the
+child's first religious institution. Fathers and mothers are not only
+the first and most potent quickeners and guides in the religious life,
+but they are primarily responsible for the selection of all other
+stimuli to that life. Under the drag of our own indifference we must not
+withhold from the child the good he would get even from the church we do
+not particularly enjoy; neither dare we, for fear of criticism or
+ostracism, force the child under influences which, in the name of
+religion, would chill and prevent his spiritual development, would
+twist, dwarf, or distort it. Responsibility to the spiritual purpose of
+the family is far higher than any responsibility to a church. The
+churches are ordered for the souls of men.</p>
+
+<p>What shall we do in the family when the sermon is always tediously dull?
+Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never
+get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for
+them parallel to the adult service of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span> worship.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">47</a> Next, try to
+overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church
+is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many
+criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher
+by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If
+that is essentially your attitude, you cannot complain if your children
+are dissatisfied unless they too are entertained according to their
+childish appetites. When the sermon is poor, put it where it belongs
+proportionately and enlarge on the many good features of church
+fellowship and service.</p>
+
+<p>In a word, let the church be to the family that larger home where
+families live together their life of fellowship and service in the
+spirit and purpose of religion and where there is a natural place for
+everyone.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>H.&nbsp;W. Hulbert, <i>The Church and Her Children</i>, chaps. i-v. Revell,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p>H.&nbsp;F. Cope, <i>Efficiency in the Sunday School</i>, chaps. xiv-xvi.
+Doran, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>George Hodges, <i>Training of Children in Religion</i>, chap. xiv.
+Appleton, $1.50.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>A. Hoben, <i>The Minister and the Boy</i>. The University of Chicago
+Press, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;C. Foster, <i>The Boy and the Church</i>. Sunday School Times Co.,
+$0.75.</p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;A. Coe, <i>Education in Religion and Morals</i>, Part II. Revell,
+$1.35.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What are the special common interests of church and family?</p>
+
+<p>2. What are the fundamental relationships of the two?</p>
+
+<p>3. What conception of the church ought to be fostered in the
+children's minds?</p>
+
+<p>4. When is criticism of the church unwise?</p>
+
+<p>5. What changes might be made in church life for the sake of the
+children?</p>
+
+<p>6. What changes would bring the church and the home closer
+together?</p>
+
+<p>7. What should be the children's conception of unity with the
+church?</p>
+
+<p>8. Should children attend, in family groups, the church service of
+worship?</p>
+
+<p>9. Does the plan of a short service for children meet the need?
+</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">46</span></a> See a pamphlet on <i>Church School Buildings</i> (free)
+published by the Religious Education Association; also H.&nbsp;F. Evans, <i>The
+Sunday-School Building and Its Equipment</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">47</span></a> See the author's suggestion for the Sunday school in
+<i>Efficiency in the Sunday School</i>, chap. xv.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>CHILDREN AND THE SCHOOL</h3>
+
+
+<p>Wise parents will know the character of the influences affecting their
+children at all times. At no time can their responsibility be delegated
+to others. There is a tendency to think that when children go to school
+the family has a release from responsibility. But the school is simply
+the community&mdash;the group of families&mdash;syndicating its efforts for the
+formal training of the young. Every family ought to know what the
+community is doing with its children. The school belongs to all; it is
+not the property of a board, nor a private machine belonging to the
+teaching force; it belongs to us and we owe a social duty as well as a
+family obligation to understand its work and its influence on the
+children.</p>
+
+<p>Parents ought to visit the school. Wise principals and teachers will
+welcome them, setting times when visits can best be made. The visitors
+come, not as critics, but as citizens and parents. The principal
+benefits will be an acquaintance with the teachers of our children and a
+better understanding of the conditions under which the children work for
+the greater part of the day. By far the larger number of teachers most
+earnestly desire char<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span>acter results from their work. It will help them
+to know that we are interested in what they are doing.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. HOME AND SCHOOL CO-OPERATION</h4>
+
+<p>Parents and teachers, both desiring spiritual results, can find means of
+co-operation. Parent-teacher clubs and associations have done much to
+bring the home and the school together. Meeting regularly in the
+evening, so that fathers, too, can attend, gives opportunity to work out
+a common understanding to raise the spiritual aims of the school, and to
+discover means by which the families may aid in securing better
+conditions for school work.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most important considerations relates to the moral effect of
+the school life and environment. We are committed in this country to the
+principle that the public school cannot teach religion, but this by no
+means relieves it of responsibility for moral character. The family
+needs this ally. Children expect instruction in the school and they feel
+keenly the power of its ideals and the standards established by its
+methods and requirements. The family and the school greatly need to
+co-ordinate their efforts here to the end that there may be under way in
+both an orderly program for the moral training of children.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE SCHOOL TEACHING PARENTS</h4>
+
+<p>The school may help the home if arrangements are made for parents to
+meet regularly and receive instruction in those forms of moral training
+which can best be given at home. This is one method of solving the vexed
+question of sex instruction. Many hesitate as to the wisdom of such
+instruction in schools; but no one doubts that it ought to be and could
+be given in families but for the fact that parents are both ignorant of
+what to tell and indifferent to the matter. It may be that some day the
+state will not only say that the child must go to school, but also that
+every parent intrusted with children must either prove ability to train
+and instruct in these and other matters or go to school to obtain the
+necessary training. The state would not go beyond its province if it
+required ignorant parents&mdash;and that means most of us in matters of moral
+training&mdash;to go to school and learn our business. And without waiting
+for such compulsion the school may now offer opportunity for all parents
+to obtain the desired information. Teachers are especially trained to an
+understanding of child-nature and to methods of pedagogy; they are
+prepared to teach many things we ought to know; why should not the
+family obtain the advantage of such expert knowledge?</p>
+
+<p>The school would also be within its province if it undertook to
+stimulate the indifferent parents,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span> both rich and poor, to an
+appreciation of the educational task and opportunity of the home. Each
+institution greatly needs the other. The school reaches all the children
+of all the people; might it not be made a larger means of helping all
+the parents of all the children to quickened moral responsibility and to
+greater educational efficiency?</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. CONTROLLING SCHOOL CONDITIONS</h4>
+
+<p>The family ought to know the conditions at the school outside the
+recitation or working hours. Few parents have any conception of the
+power of the playground over moral character. Perhaps a smaller number
+realize how dangerous are some of the elements at work there. Play of
+itself is immensely valuable, but play means playfellows, and some of
+these are simply purveyors of indecency and moral contagion in
+conversation and act. We are required to send our children to school; we
+have a right to demand freedom from moral contagion. Do you know what
+goes on in secret places on the grounds? Do you know that the vilest
+ideas and phrases are current in pictures, cards, on scraps of paper,
+and in handwriting on walls, not only in the high schools, but often
+among children of from six to twelve years of age? This is too large a
+subject to be developed properly here. It is one familiar to all
+wide-awake school<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span> men and women and ought to be equally so to the
+parents of children. Where the school combats this evil the home should
+intelligently aid; where the school is indifferent the family dare not
+rest until either the indifference is quite dispelled or the indifferent
+dismissed.</p>
+
+<p>Do not expect to get the facts concerning these suggested conditions by
+inquiry among your children. They are reticent, naturally, on such
+matters when talking with adults; besides, the sense of school honor
+holds them to silence. If they tell you voluntarily, you are happy in
+their free confidence. Do not betray it; simply let it lead you to make
+further inquiry at the school from the authorities and stimulate you to
+insist that, for the sake of the spiritual good of the young, the school
+must furnish conditions of moral health.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>Ella Lyman Cabot, <i>Voluntary Help to the Schools</i>, chaps. vii,
+viii. Houghton Mifflin Co., $0.60.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;A. Baldwin, "The Home and the Public Schools," <i>Religious
+Education</i>, February, 1912. $0.65.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>M. Sadler, <i>Moral Instruction and Training in Schools</i>. 2 vols.
+Longmans.</p>
+
+<p>John Dewey, <i>The School and Society</i>. The University of Chicago
+Press, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Smith, <i>All the Children of All the People</i>. Macmillan, $1.50.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217</a></span></p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;A. Coe, "Virtue and the Virtues," <i>Religious Education</i>,
+February, 1912.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What ought parents to know about public-school life?</p>
+
+<p>2. In visiting a school what may the parent do to acquire
+information in the proper way?</p>
+
+<p>3. How may the home co-operate with the school?</p>
+
+<p>4. What degree of instruction in morals ought the school to give?</p>
+
+<p>5. In what way does the school best help in moral training?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">218</a></span>6. What do you know about the conditions on the playgrounds of your
+own school?
+</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<h3>DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES</h3>
+
+
+<p>Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain
+an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness,
+occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our
+children&mdash;or of our neighbors' children&mdash;to a focus and throw them in
+high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual
+placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry passions rule,
+when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty
+wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we
+suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher
+life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly
+a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of
+development.</p>
+
+<p>A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such
+results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their
+inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual
+and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be
+valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">219</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to
+bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of
+getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to
+remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the
+crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one
+in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt,
+as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort
+of training.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION</h4>
+
+<p>The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins
+to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a
+child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the
+perfect tree in the sapling. <i>Character comes by development</i>; it is not
+born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore
+parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are
+pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time
+Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper,
+sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a
+psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the
+picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they
+are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the
+natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in
+which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The
+child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The
+powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call
+physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the
+development of those powers, their training-field and school.</p>
+
+<p>Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the
+grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more
+do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of
+difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other,
+in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a
+stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be
+learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and
+training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right
+to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him
+to be born six feet tall.</p>
+
+<p>A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent,
+then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his
+moral<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">221</a></span> upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition
+of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an
+occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to
+guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way
+for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is
+it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the
+organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not.
+And is it not to be the same with the child?</p>
+
+<p>We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that
+give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as
+isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational
+process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will
+watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE COLLISION OF WILLS</h4>
+
+<p>Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with
+temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The
+martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the
+subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the
+parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of
+will.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">222</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought
+to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in
+your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness
+will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the
+mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you
+will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice
+of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing entity, able to
+elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive,
+Godlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new
+personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle
+and adjust itself with all other persons.</p>
+
+<p>When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take
+time to think what it means. <i>Keep your temper.</i> Do not break before the
+other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied.
+From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from
+force and tradition to a moral plane.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request.
+You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more
+important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of
+the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his
+life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to
+consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of
+justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an
+unjust man.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic
+explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of
+simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by
+an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It
+may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience.
+Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own
+way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for
+instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circumstances it
+would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration&mdash;as a drop of
+acid on a finger tip&mdash;than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One
+such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in
+other cases.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must
+choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave
+responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of
+the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of
+the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not
+drift,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">224</a></span> is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of
+feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. ANGER</h4>
+
+<p>An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes
+justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of
+your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a
+spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of
+protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether
+unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly
+angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so
+near the surface that a pin-prick sets them loose. Usually a study of
+their cases will show either that the attitude of angry opposition to
+everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or
+that it was acquired in the adolescent period.</p>
+
+<p>The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person;
+there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home
+is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most
+directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school
+of normal social living.</p>
+
+<p>Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are
+negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character
+of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">225</a></span> child or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons,
+first, as furnishing the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control,
+to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace
+and interfere with the well-being of others.</p>
+
+<p>It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first
+instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded
+to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only
+route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in
+terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl
+will make a very tardy passage through the normal experience of social
+aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee
+from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner
+alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at
+thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pass quickly. A few allow this
+period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and
+soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at
+this period, or to a lack of healthful friendships.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. METHODS OF DEALING WITH ANGER</h4>
+
+<p>It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant
+will not help the case. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">226</a></span> may feel the emotion of your anger but
+misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an
+infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or
+affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby
+yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither
+possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural
+depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant
+fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department
+of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to
+the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and
+you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you
+yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its
+reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with
+anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first
+exercises in training character.</p>
+
+<p><i>Consider the future.</i> Each family is a social unit, a little world.
+Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and
+experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which
+prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are
+needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When
+young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality,
+under similar circum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">227</a></span>stances, serve in the business of mature life?
+Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character.
+Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional
+effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against
+evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be
+purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be
+confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must
+guide it.</p>
+
+<p>When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the
+feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the
+situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that
+not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of
+conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always
+help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he
+may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay
+with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own
+temper.</p>
+
+<p>Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, <i>train him in
+self-control</i>. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply
+our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the
+largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is
+the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">228</a></span> it is
+the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of
+society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a
+better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the
+immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike
+service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not
+acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson
+after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and
+school and street.</p>
+
+<p>Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to
+save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the
+rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There
+will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we
+must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the
+rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in
+the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing
+to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with
+strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he
+loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the
+misery of the life without friends, the joy of friendships.</p>
+
+<p>Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of
+forgiveness and, if the occasion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">229</a></span> warrants, the dignity and courage of
+the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment
+involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson
+of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be
+habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with
+suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how
+great is the victory of forgiveness.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">48</a></p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p><i>The Problem of Temper.</i> Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
+Life, Philadelphia, Pa.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;P. St. John, <i>Child Nature and Child Nurture</i>, chap. v. Pilgrim
+Press, $0.50.</p>
+
+<p>J. Sully, <i>Children's Ways</i>, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>Patterson Du Bois, <i>The Culture of Justice</i>, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead
+&amp; Co., $0.75.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;H. Abbott, <i>The Training of Parents</i>. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p>M. Wood-Allen, <i>Making the Best of Our Children</i>. 2 vols. McClurg,
+$1.00 each.</p>
+
+<p>H.&nbsp;Y. Campbell, <i>Practical Motherhood</i>. Longmans, $2.50.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral
+crises?</p>
+
+<p>2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in
+children?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">230</a></span></p>
+
+<p>3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?</p>
+
+<p>4. What constitutes the importance of early crises of the will?</p>
+
+<p>5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy
+authority?</p>
+
+<p>6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?</p>
+
+<p>7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?</p>
+
+<p>8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly
+developed life?
+</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">48</span></a> See Gow, <i>Good Morals and Gentle Manners</i>, chap. viii.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">231</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (<i>Continued</i>)</h3>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. QUARRELS</h4>
+
+<p>A child who never quarrels probably needs to be examined by a physician;
+a child who is always quarreling equally needs the physician. In the
+first there is a lack of sufficient energy so to move as to meet and
+realize some of life's oppositions; in the other there is probably some
+underlying cause for nervous irritability.</p>
+
+<p>It is perfectly natural for healthy people to differ; in childhood's
+realm, where the values and proportions of life are not clearly seen,
+where social adjustments have not been acquired, the differences in
+opinions, as in possessions, lead to the expression of feeling in sharp
+and emphatic terms. Rivalry and conflict are natural to the young
+animal. Children do not wilfully enter into conflicts any more than
+adults; they are only less diplomatic in their language, more direct,
+and more likely to follow the word with attempts at force.</p>
+
+<p>In few things do parents need more patience than in dealing with
+children's quarrels. First, seek to determine quietly the merits of the
+cause; but do not attempt to pronounce a verdict. It is seldom wise to
+act as judge unless you allow the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">232</a></span> children to act as a jury. But
+ascertain whether the quarrel is an expression somewhere of anger
+against injustice, wrong, or evil in some form. Sometimes their quarrels
+have as much virtue as our crusades. It is a sad mistake to quench the
+feeling of indignation against wrong or of hatred against evil. A boy
+will need that emotional backing in his fights against the base and the
+foes of his kind. While rejoicing in his feeling, show him how to direct
+it, train him to discriminate between hatred of wrong and bitterness
+toward the wrongdoer. Help him to see the good that comes from loving
+people, no matter what they do.</p>
+
+<p>Our methods of dealing with a quarrel will do more to develop their
+sense of justice than all our decisions can. Be sure to get each one to
+state all the facts; insist on some measure of calmness in the recital.
+Keep on sifting down the facts until by their own statements the quarrel
+is seen stripped of passion and standing clear in its own light. Usually
+that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the
+group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary
+acknowledgment of wrong. The boys&mdash;or girls&mdash;have for the first time
+seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without
+prejudice. They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we
+when convinced against our wishes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">233</a></span></p>
+
+<p>When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still
+not offer a verdict. Put the case to the contestants and let them settle
+it. Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to
+insist on exact statements of fact. That course should be excellent
+training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man's side,
+in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious
+quarrels of later life. Teach children to think through their
+differences.</p>
+
+<p>The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be
+taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is
+out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When
+the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in
+the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious
+dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life
+is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves
+petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find
+unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful
+living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A
+harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a
+matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own
+attitude.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">234</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the
+family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he
+occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes
+radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he
+quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new,
+self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each
+one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them.
+Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not
+try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he
+will have to live some day.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. FIGHTING</h4>
+
+<p>The best of men are likely to have a secret satisfaction in their boys'
+fights, and the bravest of mothers will deplore them. The fathers know
+how hard are the knocks that life is going to give; the mothers hope
+that the boys can be saved from blows. A man's life is often pretty much
+of a fight, every day struggling in competition and rivalry; we have not
+yet learned the lesson of co-operation, and we still tend to think of
+business as a battlefield. Something in us calls for fighting; we have
+to use the utmost strength at our command to fight the evil tendencies
+of our own hearts; often we rejoice in life as a conflict. It feels good
+to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">235</a></span> find causes worth fighting for. If all this is true of the man, it
+is not strange that the small boy, scarce more than a young savage, will
+find opportunities for conflict. He is more dependent on the weapons of
+force than is his father. He cannot cast out the enemy with a ballot,
+nor with a sneer or biting sarcasm, nor by some device or strategy of
+business or affairs. He can only hit back. Taken altogether, boys settle
+their differences as honestly at least as do men.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, children's fights are not as cruel as they seem to be; even
+the bloodshed means little either of pain or of injury. A boy may be
+badly banged up today and in full trim tomorrow; it is quite different
+with the wounds bloodlessly inflicted by men in their conflicts.</p>
+
+<p>Does all this mean that boys should be encouraged to fight? No; but it
+does mean that when Billy comes home with one eye apparently retired
+from business, we must not scold him as though he were the first
+wanderer from Eden. That fight may have been precisely the same thing as
+a croquet game to his sister, or any test of skill to his big brother,
+or a business transaction to his father; it was a mere contest of two
+healthy bodies at a time when the body was the outstanding fact of life.
+The fight may give us our chance, however, to aid him to a sense of the
+greatness of life's conflict, to a sense of the qualities that make the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">236</a></span>
+true fighter. It may leave him open to the appeal of true heroism. We
+must make light of the victory of brute strength, just as we may make
+light of his wounds and scars, and glorify the victory of the mind and
+will.</p>
+
+<p>The boy who fights because he lacks control of temper needs careful
+training. He gets a good deal of discipline on the playground and
+street, but it is not always effective; the beatings may only further
+undermine control. But the lack of self-control will manifest itself in
+many ways and must be remedied at all points. The discipline of daily
+living in the family must come into play here.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. SELF-CONTROL</h4>
+
+<p>The matter of self-control is not separable into special features; one
+cannot learn control under one set of moral circumstances without
+learning it for all. The boy who strikes without thinking is simply one
+who acts without thinking. He tends to throw away the brakes of the
+will. The regain of control comes only through training at every point
+in deliberation of action.</p>
+
+<p>Probably there is no other point at which children so frequently and
+readily learn control as in the matter of speech. The family where all
+speak at once, where a babel of sounds leads to a rivalry of vocal
+organs, is not only a nuisance to the neighbors, it is a school of
+uncontrolled action<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">237</a></span> to the children. Just to learn to wait, even after
+the thought is formed into words, until it shall be my turn or my
+opportunity to speak is a fine discipline of control. To do that every
+day, year after year, tends to break up the hair-trigger process of
+action.</p>
+
+<p>Control is gained also by the acquisition of the habit of thought
+regarding general courses of action. We can hardly expect meditation on
+the part of little children. But those who are older, those entering
+their teens, may and should be able to think things out, to plan out the
+day's actions, to determine their own ways of conduct. Children who have
+the custom of quiet, private prayer often develop ability to see their
+conduct in the calm of those moments. They get a mental elevation over
+the day and its deeds.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. GOOD FIGHTS</h4>
+
+<p>The evident danger of undue deliberation of action must be met by
+another cure of the personal-conflict spirit; that is, the substitution
+of games of rivalry and skill for the unorganized rivalry and "game" of
+fighting. The transition from the bloody arena to the excitement of a
+game is very easy and natural. But the game is the boy's great chance to
+learn life as a game to be played according to the rules. All that the
+fight calls for&mdash;courage, endurance, skill, quickness of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">238</a></span> action, and
+grim persistence&mdash;comes out in a good game. Here is a suitable youthful
+realization of the fight that is worth waging. Our participation in the
+youths' games, our appreciation of their points, our joy in honestly won
+success, is the best possible way to lead up to their taking life in
+terms of a good fight, a grand game, a real chance to call out the
+heroic qualities. Turn every fighting instinct into the good fight that
+will clarify and elevate them all.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;L. Sheldon, <i>Ethics in the Home</i>, chaps. xi, xii, xiii. Welch &amp;
+Co., $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;A. Abbott, <i>Training of Parents</i>, chap. v. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>Ella Lyman Cabot, <i>Every Day Ethics</i>. Holt, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>M. Wood-Allen, <i>Making the Best of Our Children</i>. 2 vols. McClurg,
+$1.00 each.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. Do all children quarrel? Should one punish for small quarrels?</p>
+
+<p>2. What are the facts which ought to be ascertained regarding any
+quarrel?</p>
+
+<p>3. What special opportunities do children's differences offer?</p>
+
+<p>4. What are the causes of habitual petulance? What are the dangers
+of this habit of mind?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">239</a></span></p>
+
+<p>5. Is fighting necessarily wrong? What part does it play in the
+lives of men?</p>
+
+<p>6. What are the dangerous elements in boys' fights?</p>
+
+<p>7. What special quality of character needs development in this
+connection?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">240</a></span>8. What are the valuable possibilities in the fighting tendency?
+</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<h3>DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (<i>Continued</i>)</h3>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. LYING</h4>
+
+<p>Parents are likely to be wilfully blind to the faults of their children.
+But some faults cannot be ignored; they must surely quicken the most
+indifferent parent to thought. We suffer a shock when our own child
+appears as a wilful liar.</p>
+
+<p>"What shall I do when I catch the child in an outright lie? Surely he
+knows that is wrong and that he is wilfully doing the wrong!"</p>
+
+<p>First, be sure whether he is "lying." Lying means a purposeful intent to
+deceive by word of mouth or written word. When Charles Dickens wrote
+<i>Oliver Twist</i> he described a burglary that never happened, so far as he
+knew. He intended the reader to feel that it was true. Was he lying? No;
+because he simply used his imagination to paint a scene which was part
+of a great lesson he desired to teach the English public. Even had he
+had no great moral purpose, it would still not have been a lie, just as
+we do not accuse the writer of even the most frivolous novel of lying.
+He is simply creating, or imitating, in the field of imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Imagination is the child's native world. When the little girl says, "My
+dolly is sick," she is saying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">241</a></span> that which is not so, but instead of
+reproving her for lying, you prepare an imaginary pill for the doll.
+Many children's lies are simply elaborations of their doll- and
+plaything-imaginings. When my little daughter told me, and insisted upon
+it, that she had seen seven bears, of varied colors, on the avenue,
+should I have reproved her for lying? Was it not better to humor her
+fancy, to draw it out, to give it free play, being careful gradually to
+let her know that I knew it was fancy? I entered into the game with her
+and enjoyed it so long as we all understood it was only fancy. It is a
+crime to crush a child's power of creating a world by imagination, a
+fair world, set in the midst of this world where things are imperfect,
+jarring, and disappointing, a world in which everything is always "just
+so."</p>
+
+<p>But one must also carefully aid the child in distinguishing between the
+world of fancy and the world of fact. This takes time and patience. We
+must not rob the life of fancy nor must we allow the habits of freedom
+with ideas to pass over into habits of carelessly handling realities.
+Along with the development of fancy we must train the powers of exact
+observation and statement of facts. The child who saw seven bears, red,
+green, yellow, etc., must go to see real bears and must tell me exactly
+their colors and forms. Daily training in exactitude of statements of
+real<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">242</a></span> facts is the best antidote for a fancy that has run out of its
+bounds. It establishes a habit of precision in thinking which is the
+essence of truth-telling.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. PROTECTIVE LYING</h4>
+
+<p>But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form.
+It may be called protective lying. Ask the little fellow with the
+jam-smeared face, "Have you been in the pantry?" and he is likely to do
+the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat
+that makes it easier to hide from their enemies. He valiantly answers
+"No, Mother." He would protect himself from your reproof. There has been
+awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires
+your approbation most of all. The moral struggle with him is very brief;
+he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his
+negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.</p>
+
+<p>What shall we do? First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for
+jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions. The jam was there and
+you were not. It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a
+wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things
+deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether
+your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and
+sufficient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">243</a></span> to establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask
+these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It
+would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too
+much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable
+idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with
+them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to
+establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow
+with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the
+acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others,
+and against his own good.</p>
+
+<p>Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the
+temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child
+that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there
+watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought
+of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of
+irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a
+reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel
+in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy
+feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his
+well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper,
+and confidant. I like better the God to whom a little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">244</a></span> fellow in Montana
+prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy
+Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help
+him to do and know the right.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. OLDER CHILDREN</h4>
+
+<p>But protective lying presents a more serious problem with older
+children. The school-teacher and parent meet it, just as the judge and
+the employer meet it in adults. The cure lies early in life.
+Truth-telling is as much a habit as lying is. Perhaps it is more easily
+practiced; its drafts are on the powers of observation and memory rather
+than on those of imagination. Along with the child's imaginative powers
+there must be developed the powers of exact observation and description.
+Exact observation and description or relation are but parts of the
+larger general virtue of precision. Help children at every turn of life
+to be right&mdash;right in doing things, right in thinking, in saying, and in
+execution. Precision at any point in life helps lift the life's whole
+level. Truth-telling is not a separable virtue. You cannot make a boy
+truthful in word if you let him lie in deed. You cannot expect he will
+speak the truth if you do not train him to do the truth, in his play, in
+ordering his room, in thinking through his school problems, and in
+thinking through his religious difficulties. Truth-telling is the verbal
+reaction of the life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">245</a></span> which habitually holds that nothing is right until
+it is just right.</p>
+
+<p>Two things would, ordinarily, make sure of a truthful statement, instead
+of a protective lie, in answer to your question: first, that the young
+person has been trained to the habit of seeing and stating things as
+they are&mdash;and that you really give him a chance so to state them, and,
+secondly, that to some degree there has been developed a recognition of
+considerations or values that are higher than either escape from
+punishment or the winning of your approbation. He will choose the course
+that offers what seems to him to be the greater good; he will choose
+between punishment, with rectitude, a good conscience, a sense of unity
+with the higher good, of peace with God his friend, a greater
+approximation to your ideal, on the one side, and, on the other, escape
+from punishment.</p>
+
+<p>Everything in that crisis will depend on how real you have made the good
+to be, how much the sense of the reality of God and his companionship
+has brought of joy and friendship, and how high are his values of the
+actual, the real, the true.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. AT THE CRISIS</h4>
+
+<p>But what shall we do as we meet the lie on the lips of the child? First,
+as already suggested, do not wait until you meet it. Train the child to
+the truthful life. Second, be sure you do not make<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">246</a></span> too heavy moral
+demands. Remember the instinct to protect himself from immediate
+punishment or disapprobation is stronger than any other just then. Do
+not ask him to do what the law says the prisoner may not do, incriminate
+himself. We have no right to put on our children tests harder than they
+can bear. Often we put those which are harder than we could face. What
+you will do just then depends on what you have been doing for the
+training of the child or youth. Do not expect him to solve problems in
+moral geometry if you have neglected simple addition in that realm.</p>
+
+<p>Punishment by the blow or the immediate sentence will be futile. The
+offender must know he has trespassed in a realm beyond your
+administration and rule; he has done more than commit an offense against
+you. Whatever consequences follow&mdash;such as your hesitation to accept his
+word&mdash;must evidently be a part of the operation of the entire moral law.
+Help him to see that lying strikes at the root of all social relations
+and would make all happy and prosperous living, all friendship, and all
+business impossible by destroying social confidence.</p>
+
+<p>Facing the crisis, do not demand more than your training gives you a
+right to expect. Often, instead of the direct categorical question as to
+guilt, we must gradually draw out a narrative of the events in question;
+we must patiently help<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">247</a></span> the child to state the facts and to see the
+values of exactitudes. Without preaching or posing we must bring the
+events into the light of larger areas of time and circles of life, help
+him to see them related to all his life and to all mankind and to the
+very fringes of existence, to God and the eternal. That cannot be done
+in a moment; it is part of a habit of our own minds or it is not really
+done at all. At the moment we can, however, make the deepest impression
+by insistence on the importance of the actual, the real, the exactly
+true.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;L. Cabot, <i>Every Day Ethics</i>, chaps. xix, xx. Holt, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;B. Forbush, <i>On Truth Telling</i>. Pamphlet. American Institute of
+Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.</p>
+
+<p>J. Sully, <i>Children's Ways</i>, pp. 124-33. Appleton, $1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>G.&nbsp;S. Hall, "A Study of Children's Lies," <i>Educational Problems</i>, I,
+chap. vi. Appleton, $2.50.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;P. St. John, <i>A Genetic Study of Veracity</i>. Pamphlet.</p>
+
+<p>J. Sully, <i>Studies in Childhood</i>.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;H. Griggs, <i>Moral Education</i>. Huebsch, $1.60.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. Are there degrees of lying?</p>
+
+<p>2. When is a lie not a lie?</p>
+
+<p>3. How can we discriminate among the statements of children?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">248</a></span></p>
+
+<p>4. How can we help them to recognize the qualities of truth?</p>
+
+<p>5. In what ways are parents to blame for forcing children to
+protective lying?</p>
+
+<p>6. What of the relation of the thought of God to the demands for
+truth?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">249</a></span>7. Would you punish a child for lying and, if so, in what way?
+</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<h3>DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (<i>Concluded</i>)</h3>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. DISHONESTY</h4>
+
+<p>Many parents appear to think that the child's concepts of property
+rights and of fair dealing are without importance. Habits of pilfering
+are permitted to develop and success in cheating wins admiration. Low
+standards are accepted and religion is divorced from moral questions.
+The family attitude practically assumes that all persons cheat more or
+less and that it is necessary only to use wisdom to insure freedom from
+conviction.</p>
+
+<p>Responsibility lies at home. We shall never have an honest generation
+until we have honest men and women to breed and train it. It is folly to
+think we can lay on the public schools the burden of the moral education
+of the young. Much is already being attempted there; yet little seems to
+be accomplished because the home, having the child before and after
+school and for a longer period each day, furnishes no adequate basis in
+habits, ideals, and instruction for the moral work of the school. If
+parents assume that one cannot succeed with absolute integrity, that
+dishonesty in some degree is necessary to prosperity, then children will
+learn that lesson despite all that may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">250</a></span> be said elsewhere. Honest
+children grow where, in answer to the false statement, "You will starve
+if you do business honestly," parents say, "Then we will starve."</p>
+
+<p>But the very home life itself can be a teacher of dishonesty. Is it
+largely a matter of sham and pretense for the sake of social glory? Does
+it prefer a cheap veneer to a slowly acquired genuine article? Is the
+front appearance that of a dandy while the backyard looks like a
+slattern? Is the home striving for more than it deserves? Is it trying
+to get more out of life than it puts in? Evading taxes, avoiding duties,
+a community parasite, does it commend to children the arts of social
+cheating and lying? Such homes teach so loudly that no voice could be
+heard in them.</p>
+
+<p>Given the atmosphere, ideals, and practices of the honest life in the
+home itself, the problems of conduct, in the realm of these rights, are
+more than half solved. Here in the home the real training for the life
+of business takes place. Not for an instant can we afford to lower
+standards here, nor to lose sight of the life-long power of our ideals,
+our habits, and our attitudes on the conduct of the next generation. Do
+parents know that the problems of lying, cheating, quarreling are the
+great, vital questions for their children, much more important than
+industrial or professional success in life; that on these all success is
+predicated? If<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">251</a></span> they do, surely they cannot regard the problems which
+arise as mere incidents; surely they will provide for the culture of the
+moral life as definitely as for the culture of the physical or the
+intellectual!</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. LESSONS IN HONESTY</h4>
+
+<p>But children also acquire habits from their playmates. Whenever the act
+of pilfering appears, the wrong must be made clear. Some sense of
+property rights is necessary; not the right, as some assume, to do what
+you will with a thing because you have it, but the right to enjoy and
+usefully employ it. Help children to see the difference between mine and
+thine. Slovenly moral thinking often comes from too great freedom in
+forgetful borrowing within the family. In this little social group the
+members must first acquire the habits of respect for the rights of
+others. Through toys, tools, and books the lesson may be learned so
+early that it becomes a part of the normal order of things.</p>
+
+<p>Children can learn that the game of life has its rules and that the
+breach of these rules spoils the game and prevents our own happiness.
+They can learn, too, that these are not arbitrary rules; they are like
+the laws of nature; they are the conditions under which alone it is
+possible for people to live together and to make life worth while.
+Gambling is wrong because it is unsocial; it is the attempt to gain
+without an equivalent giving.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">252</a></span> Cheating is wrong, no matter how many
+practice it, just as surely as cheating is wrong in the game on the
+playground.</p>
+
+<p>Children are really peculiarly sensitive to the social consciousness. In
+school under no circumstances will they do that which the school custom
+forbids or the older boys condemn. In the home, despite contrary
+appearances, the opinion of elders, brothers, sisters, and parents is
+the recognized law. Every small boy wants to be like his big brother.
+Children's conduct may be guided by an understanding of the social will
+outside the school and home. Help them to know that all people
+everywhere in organized society condemn cheating and dishonesty.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">49</a></p>
+
+<p>Sentiment and emotional feeling must back up all teaching of conduct.
+Your stories and readings should be selected with this in mind. The
+approbation of parents and of the great Father of all enters as an
+effectual motive.</p>
+
+<p>But parents seldom understand these problems; they attempt to deal with
+each one as it arises until they are weary of the seemingly endless
+procession and abandon the task. Their endeavors are based on faint
+memories of such problems in their own youth or on rule-of-thumb
+proverbial <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">253</a></span>philosophy about morals and children. Does not the
+development of moral ability and culture deserve at least as much
+attention as any other phase of the child's life? After all, what do we
+most of all desire for all our children&mdash;position, fame, ease? or is it
+not rather simply this, that, no matter what else they do, they may be
+good and useful men and women? Then what are we doing to make them good
+and useful?</p>
+
+<p>A clear view of the need for moral training, a belief that is possible,
+will surely lead to serious attempts to learn the art of moral training.
+In this they need not be without guidance. There is a number of good
+books on character development in the child.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">50</a> The foundation for all
+such training of parents ought to be laid in an understanding of what
+the moral nature is, and then of the laws of its development. Later the
+specific problems may be separately considered.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. TEASING AND BULLYING</h4>
+
+<p>Teasing is the child's crude method of experimentation in psychological
+reactions; the teaser desires to discover just how the teased will
+respond. It degenerates, by easy steps, into a thoughtless infliction of
+pain in sheer enjoyment of another's misery, and then into brutal
+bullying. When only two children are together mere teasing will not
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">254</a></span>last long; either the teaser will tire of his task or his teasing will
+turn to that lowest of all brutalities, delight in inflicting pain on
+weaker ones.</p>
+
+<p>But teasing is a serious problem in many families; the whole group
+sometimes lives in an atmosphere of ridicule, derision, and annoyance.
+Teasing is likely to appear at its worst wherever a group is gathered,
+for the guilty ones are under the stimulus of the praise of others; they
+inflict mental pain for the sake of winning approbation.</p>
+
+<p>Teasing has a pedagogical basis. A certain amount of ridicule acts
+healthfully on most persons. Even children need sometimes to see their
+weaknesses, and especially their faults of temper, in the light of other
+eyes, in the aspect of the ridiculous. But children are seldom to be
+trusted to discipline one another; freedom to do so is likely to develop
+hardness, indifference to the sufferings of others, and arrogance from
+the sense of lordship. The corrective of ridicule is safe only as it is
+a kindly expression of the sense of humor. The ability to see and to
+show just how foolish or funny some situations are will turn many a
+tragedy of childhood into a comedy. Whenever children laugh at the
+distresses or faults of others, help them to laugh at their own.
+Cultivate the habit of seeing the odd, the whimsical, the humorous side
+of things. A sound sense of kindly humor often will save us all from
+unkind teasing.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">255</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. SOME CURES FOR TEASING</h4>
+
+<p>Help the habitual and unkind teaser to see how cowardly the act is, to
+see how it is against the spirit of fair play. Call on him to help the
+weaker one. If he is teasing for some fault of temper or some habit,
+show him the chance that is afforded to do the nobler deed of helping
+another to overcome that fault.</p>
+
+<p>Let the cowardly teaser reap the consequences of his own act; he must
+bear the burden of the critic, the expectation of perfection. Teasing
+him for his own shortcomings will sometimes cure him, but usually he
+loses his temper quickly. Make him feel the injustice of the teaser's
+method. If he is a bully he needs bullying. If ever corporal punishment
+is wise it is in such a case. He who inflicts pain simply because he can
+deserves to endure pain inflicted by someone stronger. But one must be
+careful not to confirm him in the coward's code. The injustice of it he
+must see, see by smarting under it. If ever punishment before others is
+wise it is in this case; for surely he who delights in humiliating
+others must be humiliated. But though justice suggests this course,
+experience shows that it does not always work; the bully only bides his
+time, and, cherishing resentment, he wreaks it on the weaker ones.</p>
+
+<p>The best cure for brutal teasing will take a longer time than is
+involved in a thrashing. Besides,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">256</a></span> the teaser will get his thrashings
+very soon from other boys. It requires time to change the habits that
+make bullying possible. Try gradually helping him to see the beauty and
+pleasure of helpfulness. Give him a chance to give pleasure instead of
+pain. Help him to taste the joy of praise, the praise that helps more
+than all teasing criticism. Help him to see that it is more truly a mark
+of superiority to help, to cheer, to do good, than to oppress and tease.
+Take time to habituate him in helpfulness.</p>
+
+<p>In dealing with teasing in the family, two other things are worth
+remembering: First, the teased must be taught the protective power of
+indifference. Teasers stop as soon as their barbs fail to wound; the fun
+ends there. Laugh at those who laugh at you, and they will soon cease.
+Secondly, the atmosphere and habit of the family determine the course of
+teasing. Where carping criticism and unkindly ridicule abound, children
+cannot be blamed for like habits. Where the sense of humor lightens
+tense situations, where we sacrifice the pleasure of stinging criticism
+for the sake of encouraging those who most need it, children are quick
+to catch those habits too. The teasing child usually comes out of a
+family of similar habits. On seeing our children engaged in teasing
+others, our first thought ought to be as to the extent to which we may
+have been their example<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">257</a></span> in this respect. Constant watchfulness on our
+part against the temptations to tease will have an effect far more
+potent than all attempts to talk them out of the habit; it will lead
+them out.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">1. HONESTY</p>
+
+<p>P. Du Bois, <i>The Culture of Justice</i>, chaps. iii, x. Dodd, Mead &amp;
+Co., $0.75.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;P. St. John, <i>Child Nature and Child Nurture</i>, chap. viii.
+Pilgrim Press, $0.50.</p>
+
+<p>2. TEASING</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;L. Sheldon, <i>A Study of Habits</i>, chap. xvii. Welch &amp; Co.,
+Chicago, $1.25.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">ON GENERAL MORAL TRAINING</p>
+
+<p>Sneath &amp; Hodges, <i>Moral Training in School and Home</i>. Macmillan,
+$0.80.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;O. Sisson, <i>The Essentials of Character</i>. Macmillan, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>H. Thisleton Mark, <i>The Unfolding of Personality</i>. The University
+of Chicago Press, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Paul Carus, <i>Our Children</i>. Open Court Publishing Co., $1.00.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. Of what importance is the child's sense of possession?</p>
+
+<p>2. What are the first evidences of a consciousness of property
+rights?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">258</a></span></p>
+
+<p>3. How do homes train in dishonesty?</p>
+
+<p>4. What is the relation between cheating and dishonesty?</p>
+
+<p>5. What is a child seeking to do when he teases another?</p>
+
+<p>6. What are the unfortunate features of teasing?</p>
+
+<p>7. What is the relation of teasing to bullying?</p>
+
+<p>8. What cures would you suggest for either?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">49</span></a> Parents will be helped by the practical discussions of
+cheating, cribbing, and other boy problems in Johnson, <i>Problems of
+Boyhood</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">50</span></a> See "Book List" in Appendix.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">259</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>THE PERSONAL FACTORS IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION</h3>
+
+
+<p>Whoever will stop to review his early educational experience will be
+impressed with the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain
+teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living
+again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught,
+while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no
+recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many
+silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always
+greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says.
+The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of
+persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.</p>
+
+<p>There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart
+information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with
+subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a
+process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality.
+The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it
+is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the
+persons away you remove all educational potencies.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">260</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that
+provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you
+can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of
+machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working
+activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people.
+Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives.
+Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the
+family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take
+away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational
+agency, from its religious reality.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES</h4>
+
+<p>All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers,
+save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and,
+besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of
+fathers.</p>
+
+<p>There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers
+only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is
+nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood
+wholly in physiological terms, imagining&mdash;if they think about it at
+all&mdash;that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only
+they know how to bear, feed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">261</a></span> and clothe children properly. True, such
+duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good
+provider" who provides only <i>things</i> for his family, no matter with what
+generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves
+first of all.</p>
+
+<p>He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who
+willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with
+his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any
+father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that
+belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but
+who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best
+business in the world, the development of children's characters.</p>
+
+<p>Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to
+provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them
+those social advantages which he missed in youth.</p>
+
+<p>But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives
+itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for
+what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of
+bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality.
+It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home
+is left headless and soon heartless. If<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">262</a></span> we at all desire the fruits of
+character in the home we must give ourselves personally.</p>
+
+<p>It is not alone the habitu&eacute; of the saloon or the idler in clubs and
+fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share
+of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to
+give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of
+being worse than an infidel. <i>A father belongs to his home more than he
+belongs to his church.</i> There have been men, though probably their
+number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and
+obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only
+a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their
+children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly
+home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the
+smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy
+task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among
+their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or
+club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end
+if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE</h4>
+
+<p>The father owes it to his family <i>to give himself at his best</i>, that is,
+as far as possible, when his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">263</a></span> vitality is freshest and his powers
+keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family
+to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the
+wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children,
+time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have
+you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the
+mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and
+to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith,
+did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is
+often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some
+families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to
+the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is
+at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and
+reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for
+the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get
+at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public
+propaganda.</p>
+
+<p>Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families.
+Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are
+learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that
+two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic
+study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">264</a></span> so readily
+granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child
+psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we
+should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge?
+There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest
+radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical
+handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder
+if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal
+scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but
+they are not willing to learn how to grow them.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. FATHERING AS A MAN'S TASK</h4>
+
+<p>It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of
+your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you.
+Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor
+by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has
+to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the
+time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We
+keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in
+real touch with the boy's world.</p>
+
+<p>Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate
+between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">265</a></span>
+and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion.
+Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and
+look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy
+to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their
+problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while
+remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already
+accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what
+the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and
+legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we
+proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.</p>
+
+<p>Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our
+finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure
+of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be
+what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves.
+All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must
+mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that
+life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his
+world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than
+ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of
+home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come
+upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">266</a></span> as well as
+the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual
+self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of
+the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance
+to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to
+happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of
+peace.</p>
+
+<p>Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just
+as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its
+meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about
+divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or
+misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that
+divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the
+largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of
+our children.</p>
+
+<p>The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home
+have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is
+spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of
+your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious
+person to them.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>Hodges, <i>Training of Children in Religion</i>, chap. vii. Appleton,
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p>K.&nbsp;G. Busby, <i>Home Life in America</i>, chaps. i, ii. Macmillan,
+$2.00.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">267</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;A. Abbott, <i>On the Training of Parents</i>. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Allen, <i>Making the Most of Our Children</i>. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00
+each.</p>
+
+<p>Wilm, <i>The Culture of Religion</i>, chap. ii. Pilgrim Press, $0.75</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. Which do you remember best, your teachers or your lessons? Why?</p>
+
+<p>2. Describe, from your memory, some of the influences of
+personality?</p>
+
+<p>3. Are these influences greater or less with parents on children?</p>
+
+<p>4. What are the causes that separate parents and children?</p>
+
+<p>5. How shall we define duties to business, to society, and to the
+family?</p>
+
+<p>6. Under what circumstances is one justified in refusing time to
+the church for the sake of the family?</p>
+
+<p>7. What are the best times and opportunities for the strengthening
+of the personal bonds between children and parents?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">268</a></span>8. How shall we overcome the apparent difficulty of maintaining the
+confidence of children?</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+<h3>LOOKING TO THE FUTURE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Whether we can remedy the ills of family living today or not, we can
+determine the character of the family life of the future. The homes of
+tomorrow are being determined today. The children who swing their feet
+in schoolrooms and play in our gardens will control family living very
+soon. We can do little to reconstruct the old order; we can do
+everything to determine the new. When the mountain sides have been made
+bare, forest conservation cannot save the old trees, but it can prepare
+for new growths. Ours is the larger opportunity because we can determine
+the ideals of our children. Today we can determine that they shall not
+suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind
+ignorance that compelled us to find our own way. We shall see that,
+first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of
+tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first. If
+family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have
+submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of
+things, of materialism.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">269</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER</h4>
+
+<p>The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a
+conscience for character through all our thinking on the family. We are
+really half-ashamed to talk of character. We blush for ideals but we
+have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of
+the things of beauty and we love only the useful. So we have become
+ashamed of the ideals of the home. Not only do we passively acquiesce in
+the popular attitude of indifference or derision, but we voice it
+ourselves. We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital
+infelicities. We would be ashamed to be caught singing "Home, Sweet
+Home." What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less
+and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial
+affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic
+factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its
+heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary,
+culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that
+you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire,
+turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are
+places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and
+start out from for real living. They are private hotels.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">270</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of
+the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that
+people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that
+moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life.
+More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient
+right-doing. In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program
+of beginning today ourselves to set first things first, to conserve the
+human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in
+school and church and home count first of all for character. And that
+broader education we ourselves must test first of all by this, whether
+it makes youth competent to live aright, cultivates the love of worthy
+ideals, and makes him willing and able to pay the price of a trained
+life consecrated to the service of his world, to the love of his
+fellows, and to the making of a new world.</p>
+
+<p>We shall need, first, to safeguard the primary motives that enter into
+the founding of families. Those motives begin to develop early. They are
+in the making in childhood. Somehow we must plan the education of youths
+so that they will think of homes and of marriage in new terms. Possibly
+the public school will not only teach the physiology of marriage and the
+bare physical facts of sexual purity, but will teach new ideals of
+family<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">271</a></span> life; it will count it at least as much a duty to cultivate a
+love of home as it is to cultivate a love of country. It can set so
+clearly the final objective of character that even children shall see
+that life has higher ends than money-making and the family greater
+purposes than garish social display.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE CHURCH AIDING</h4>
+
+<p>Certainly the church must seek to quicken and develop new ideals of
+family life; it must bring religion to our hearths and homes; it must
+worry less about a "home over there," and show how truly heavenly homes
+may be made here. It must not only get youth ready to die, it must
+prepare them to live; to live together on religious terms. It will do
+this, not only by general discussions in the pulpit, but by special
+instruction in classes. No church has a clear conscience in regard to
+any young person contemplating the duties of a family whom it has not
+directly instructed in the duties of that life.</p>
+
+<p>It is a strange spectacle, if we would stop long enough to look at it,
+of the church proclaiming a way of life but scarcely ever teaching it.
+In any church there is a large number of young people under instruction;
+what are they learning? Usually a theological interpretation of an
+ancient religious literature. Some still are learning to hate all other
+persons whose religion differs from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">272</a></span> the brand carried in that
+institution. In a few years these youths will be bearing social burdens,
+facing temptations, taking up duties; does their teaching relate at all
+to these things? No, indeed, that would be "worldly"; it would seem to
+be sacrilegious to teach them how actually to be religious. The business
+of the church school is still largely that of filling minds with
+theological data rather than training young, trainable lives to become
+religious schoolboys, religious voters, religious parents. How many have
+been at all influenced by Sunday-school teaching when they stepped into
+a polling-booth, when they chose a life-mate, when they guided or
+disciplined their children? If religious education does not at all
+influence us in the great events of life, of what value is it to us?
+Must it not be counted a sheer waste of time?</p>
+
+<p>If we would conserve the human values of the family we must train youth
+to a religious interpretation of the home. If we cannot do that in the
+church we might as well confess that the church cannot touch the sources
+of human affairs.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. IDEALS AND METHODS</h4>
+
+<p>No matter what the breadth of the interests of the public school, youth
+will still need training for family living given under religious
+auspices and with the religious aim. The day school may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">273</a></span> give courses in
+domestic economy, but family living demands more than ability to sweep a
+room or cook an egg. In fact, no one can be competent to meet its higher
+demands unless at least two things are accomplished, first, that he, or
+she, is led to see the family as essentially a religious, spiritual
+institution because it is an association of persons for the purpose of
+developing other persons to spiritual fulness; secondly, that he, or
+she, is moved to willingness to count the work of the family, its
+purpose and aim, as the highest in life and that for which one is
+willing to pay any price of time, treasure, thought, and endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>This means that the fundamental need is that our young people shall grow
+up with a new vision and a new passion for the home and family. That
+passion is needed to give value to any training in the economics or
+mechanics of the home; and that training is precisely the contribution
+which the church should make to all departments of life today. It is the
+prophet, the interpreter, revealing the spiritual meanings of all daily
+affairs and quickening us to right feeling, to highly directed passion
+for worthy ideals.</p>
+
+<p>From the general teaching, the high message of the church, directed to
+this special problem, there must be formed in the mind of the coming
+generation a new picture of the family, a new ethics of its life, a new
+evaluation of its worth. That can come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">274</a></span> in part by the prophetic message
+from the pulpit, but it will come more naturally and readily by regular
+teaching directed to the actual experiences and the coming needs of the
+young people who are to be home-makers. The soaring ideals pass over
+their heads, but when you teach the practice, the details of the life of
+the family in the spirit of these ideals, as interpreted and determined
+by the higher conception, then they catch the vision through the
+details.</p>
+
+<p>We need two types of classes in church schools in relation to the life
+of the family: First, classes for young people in which their social
+duties as religious persons are carefully taught and discussed. Perhaps
+such courses should not be specifically on "The Family," but this
+institution ought, in the course, to occupy a place proportionate to
+that which belongs to it in life. The instruction should be specific and
+detailed, not simply a series of homilies on "The Christian Family,"
+"Love of Home," etc., but taking up the great problems of the economic
+place of the family today, its spiritual function, questions of choice
+of life-partners, types of dwelling, finances and money relations in the
+family, children and their training, and the actual duties and problems
+which arise in family living.</p>
+
+<p>All topics should be treated from the dominant viewpoint of the family
+as a religious institution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">275</a></span> for the development of the lives of
+religious persons. The courses should be so arranged as to be given to
+young people of about twenty years of age, or of twenty to twenty-five.
+They should be among the electives offered in the church school.</p>
+
+<p>The second type of class would be for those who are already parents and
+who desire help on their special problems. Many schools now conduct such
+classes, meeting either on Sunday or during the week.<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">51</a> Work on
+"Parents' Problems," "Family Religious Education," and similar topics is
+also being given in the city institutes for religious workers. No church
+can be satisfied with its service to the community unless it provides
+opportunity for parents to study their work of character development
+through the family and to secure greater efficiency therein. Such
+classes need only three conditions: a clear understanding of the purpose
+of meeting the actual problems of religious training in the family, a
+leader or instructor who is really qualified to lead and to instruct in
+this subject, and an invitation to parents to avail themselves of this
+opportunity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">276</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The value of such a class would be greatly enhanced if it should be held
+in close co-ordination with similar classes or clubs conducted by the
+public schools.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">52</a> Here all the parents of the community meet in the
+school building, not to discuss how the teachers may satisfy parental
+criticism, but to learn what the school has to teach on modern
+educational methods applied to the life of the child, especially in the
+family, and mutually to find ways of co-operation between the home and
+the school for the betterment of the child.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">References for Study</span></p>
+
+<p>Articles in <i>Religious Education</i>, April, 1911, VI, 1-77.</p>
+
+<p>Helen C. Putnam in <i>Religious Education</i>, June, 1911, VI, 159-66.</p>
+
+<p>George W. Dawson in <i>Religious Education</i>, June, 1911, VI, 167-74.</p>
+
+<p>Cabot, <i>Volunteer Help in the Schools</i>, chap. vii. Houghton Mifflin
+Co., $0.60.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Further Reading</span></p>
+
+<p>Forsyth, <i>Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion</i>. Hodder &amp; Stoughton,
+$1.25.</p>
+
+<p>Lovejoy, <i>Self-Training for Motherhood</i>. American Unitarian
+Association, $1.00.</p>
+
+<p>Pomeroy, <i>Ethics of Marriage</i>. Funk &amp; Wagnalls, $1.50.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">277</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Topics for Discussion</span></p>
+
+<p>1. In how far are home problems due to the ignorance of parents?</p>
+
+<p>2. What do you regard as the essentials in the training of parents?</p>
+
+<p>3. Where can the necessary subjects best be taught?</p>
+
+<p>4. What are the difficulties in the way of teaching these subjects
+to young people?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">278</a></span></p>
+
+<p>5. In how far can we direct the reading of young people toward sane
+and helpful knowledge of family life and duties?</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">51</span></a> Pamphlets on plans for parents' classes: <i>The Home and the
+Sunday School</i>, Pilgrim Press; <i>Plans for Mothers' and Parents'
+Meetings</i>, Sunday School Times Co.; <i>How to Start a Mothers'
+Department</i>, David C. Cook Co.; <i>The Parents' Department of the Sunday
+School</i>, Connecticut Sunday School Association, Hartford, Conn.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">52</span></a> See pamphlet published by the National Congress of
+Mothers: <i>How to Organize Parents' Associations and Mothers' Circles in
+Public Schools</i>.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">279</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">280</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="APPENDIXES" id="APPENDIXES"></a>APPENDIXES</h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">281</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_I" id="APPENDIX_I"></a>APPENDIX I</h2>
+
+<h3>SUGGESTIONS FOR CLASS WORK</h3>
+
+
+<p>This book is designed for individual reading or for use in classes. It
+is not a textbook of the same character as a textbook in mathematics or
+history, but the material is arranged so as to be both easily readable
+and of ready analysis for classes. There are two methods of following
+the course: one by work conducted under a regular teacher in a class,
+and the other by private or correspondence study.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 1. THE CLASS</h4>
+
+<p>The class should be composed of parents and other adults, inasmuch as
+the work is designed for them. It may be a class in connection with the
+Sunday school in a church, a class conducted by a mothers' club or
+congress or by a parent-teacher association, or it may be organized
+under other auspices. Or it might be organized by a group of parents in
+any community. The class need not consist of either fathers or mothers
+alone, as the work is planned for both. In any case the work of teaching
+will be facilitated if, in addition to the customary officers of the
+class, the teacher will appoint a librarian, whose duties would be to
+ascertain for the members of the class where the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">282</a></span> books for study and
+for reference may be obtained, that is, whether they are in the public
+library, church library, or in private collections, and also, whenever
+it is desired to purchase books, where they may best be secured.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 2. THE TEACHER</h4>
+
+<p>The primary requisite for the teacher will be an eagerness to learn, a
+sufficiently deep interest in the subject to lead to thorough study. No
+one can teach this class who already knows all about the subject. A
+spirit sympathetic with the child and the life of the family and a mind
+willing to study the subject will accomplish much more than facile
+rhetorical familiarity with it. The best teacher will not often be "an
+easy talker" on the family; class time is too precious to be occupied
+with a lecture. While, naturally, one who is a parent will speak with
+greater experience than another, the ability to teach this subject
+cannot be limited to fathers and mothers; physiological parenthood is
+less important than spiritual parenthood. The teacher must have, then,
+willingness to study the subject, ability to teach as contrasted with
+mere talking, sympathy with parenthood, and a passion for the religious
+personal values in life.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 3. GENERAL METHOD</h4>
+
+<p>The teacher's aim will be to make this course definitely practical. The
+book is not concerned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">283</a></span> so much with theories of the family as with the
+present problems of the family, and especially with those that relate to
+moral and religious education. There must be a sense of definite
+problems to be concretely treated in all lessons. The teacher will
+therefore encourage discussion, but will also avoid the tendency to
+drift into desultory conversation. Direct the discussion to avoid
+tedious d&eacute;tours on side issues. Direct the discussion to avoid the
+tendency to treat superficially all the subject at one session. It will
+be necessary frequently to insist that attention be focused upon the
+immediate problems suggested by the lesson for the day, and to ask the
+class to wait until the subjects which they in their eagerness suggest
+shall come in their due order.</p>
+
+<p>Encourage personal experiences as sidelights and criticisms on the text,
+but remember that no single experience is conclusive. Beware of the
+over-elaboration and detailed narration of experiences.</p>
+
+<p><i>Insist on a thorough study of the text.</i> Students should be so prepared
+as to make a lecture superfluous and to allow discussion to take the
+place of review and explanation. The greatest danger in parents' classes
+is that the members do not study; class work becomes indefinite and soon
+loses value. Again, the members of the class often are unwilling to be
+governed by the schedule of lessons, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">284</a></span> class drifts into aimless
+conversation. Adult students especially need to be turned from the
+tendency to regard educational experience as having come to an end with
+their school days. The members of this class will need encouragement;
+they must be stimulated patiently until they have re-formed some habits
+of study and rediscovered the pleasures of systematic thinking. The best
+stimulus will be a teacher so convinced of the supreme importance of the
+subject to be studied as to lead the members to recognize its importance
+and the insignificance of any price they may pay for efficient spiritual
+parenthood.</p>
+
+
+<h4>&sect; 4. CLASS WORK</h4>
+
+<p>At the first session teach chap. i, which is introductory. Draw out
+discussion on the points suggested therein, and assign this chapter and
+the one following for the next session. The first lesson will give the
+teacher opportunity to explain and illustrate the method of study,
+presentation, and discussion.</p>
+
+<p>Assign the work carefully each week, calling especial attention to the
+"References for Study." Secure promises from as many as possible to read
+at least one of these references and to prepare a written report, on one
+sheet of paper, for presentation at the next session. Ask others to look
+into the special points which will be found in the references given
+under the heading "Further Reading."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">285</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In beginning a lesson it will be wise to call to mind first the
+principle running through the book, that the great work of the family is
+the development of religious persons in the home; then call to mind the
+application of this principle in the last lesson. Make your review very
+brief.</p>
+
+<p>Next, bring out the leading topic of the lesson for the day. This should
+be done so as to present a vital issue and a live topic to the class.
+Very often the best way of doing this is to state a concrete case
+involving the issue discussed. The presentation of a definite set of
+circumstances or a fairly complete experience involving the fundamental
+principles under discussion is an instance of teaching by the "case
+method." If the teacher will consider how the law student is trained by
+the study of <i>particular cases</i>, the advantage of the method will be
+clear. Be sure that the "case" selected will include the principles to
+be taught. Prepare the statement of the case beforehand. This should be
+done in a very brief narrative, so giving the instance as to enable the
+class to see the reality of the question. Be sure that your instance is
+itself vital and probable. A class of adults will especially need such
+points of vital contact. By announcing the topic in advance the teacher
+will often be able to obtain definite cases in point from the members.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">286</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With the case thus presented take the points in the text and apply them,
+first to the special case alone, but with the purpose of developing the
+principles involved in that and similar cases. Beware of the special
+danger of the case method, namely, that the class may discuss the
+specific instances rather than the principles.</p>
+
+<p><i>Teaching is more than telling</i>; it is stimulating other minds to see
+and comprehend and state for themselves. Therefore the teacher must
+first comprehend and be able to state for himself. Avoid repeating the
+phrases of the text. Get them over into your own language and see that
+the class does the same. Do not fail to call for the brief reports on
+reading, and to make them a real part of the subject of discussion.</p>
+
+<p><i>Questioning</i> is the natural method of stimulating minds. Use the
+question method, but do not confine yourself to "What does the author
+say on this?" Direct your questions to the points stated and the issues
+raised so as to compel students to think on the topics and so as to draw
+out the results of their thinking. Form your own judgments and help the
+class to form theirs too. Remember that the purpose of the class is to
+get people thinking on the great subjects discussed. The text is not
+written in order that groups of students may learn the author's
+statements, but that they may be led to think seriously on all these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">287</a></span>
+matters and stimulated to do something about them.</p>
+
+<p>Use the "discussion topics" given at the end of each lesson. They are
+not designed to furnish a syllabus of the lesson, but to suggest
+important questions for discussion, some of which may barely be
+mentioned in the text. They may be used in assigning the advance work,
+giving topics to different students, and they may be used in your review
+of the previous lesson.</p>
+
+<p>A syllabus of each lesson will be helpful, provided it be prepared by
+the students themselves. Encourage the careful reading of the lesson by
+every member of the class, letting the syllabus grow out of this.</p>
+
+<p>Notebooks will have their largest value if used at home for two
+purposes: first, to set down the student's analysis of the book as he
+reads, secondly, to record the student's observations on definite
+problems and on practice in the home. Note-taking in the class will have
+very little value unless it is backed up by study at home.</p>
+
+<p><i>Generalization.</i> Have clearly in your own mind a definite concept of
+the general principle underlying each section. Read through each section
+until you can state the principle for yourself. Bring your teaching into
+a focus at the point of that principle before the lesson ends. Try to
+get the members of the class to state the principle in their own words.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">288</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>In action:</i> The principles will have little value unless translated
+into practical methods; direct your teaching to their actual use in
+families. Your generalization is for guidance into application. Urge
+that the plans described be actually tried. Expect this and call for
+reports on plans tested in the daily experience of families. If a number
+of students would try, for example, the plan of worship suggested for
+two or three weeks and report their experiences in writing, together
+with the accounts of any other plans tried, a valuable budget of helpful
+knowledge could thus be gathered.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">53</a></p>
+
+<p><i>Conference plan:</i> Some classes will be able to meet twice a week,
+taking the lesson at one session and at another spending the time in
+conference. At the conference period the program might provide for (1)
+brief papers by members of the class on topics personally assigned, (2)
+abstracts or summaries of assigned readings, (3) discussion on the
+particular points raised in the papers, and (4) conference on unsettled
+questions from the lesson for the class period preceding.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">289</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>Club work:</i> A parents' club might be organized, either in a church or
+in connection with a school, which would use this textbook, follow the
+study work with conferences, and would secure for its own use a library
+of the books listed after each chapter. Such a club would be able to put
+into practice some of the plans advocated and could encourage their
+application in groups of families.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes">
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">53</span></a> The teachers are especially invited to secure records of
+actual experiments of this character. Accounts of tried methods of
+family worship, especially those with new features, which should be
+given in some detail as to the exact plan, the circumstances, the
+material used, and the results, should be sent to the author in care of
+the publishers. Perhaps in this way material which may be valuable to
+large numbers may be gathered.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_II" id="APPENDIX_II"></a>APPENDIX II</h2><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">290</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>A BOOK LIST</h3>
+
+
+<p>The following books would be found useful for the working library of a
+class or club following the study of this text or for a section of the
+church library on the home and family. The books marked with an asterisk
+are the ones which may be regarded as of first practical value to
+parents and others studying the development of character in the life of
+the family.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to the titles mentioned below, the the references at the end
+of each chapter in this book will furnish a list of other sources of
+valuable material.</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="center">I. <span class="smcap">the Institution of the Family</span></p>
+
+<p>C.&nbsp;F. and C.&nbsp;B. Thwing, <i>The Family</i>. Lothrop, Lee &amp; Shepard, $1.60.
+A historical survey of the family with a special study of its
+modern dangers and needs.</p>
+
+<p>P.&nbsp;T. Forsyth, <i>Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion</i>. Hodder &amp;
+Stoughton, $1.25. An important, popular statement of the ethics of
+marriage as the foundation of family life.</p>
+
+<p>*W.&nbsp;F. Lofthouse, <i>Ethics and the Family</i>. Hodder &amp; Stoughton, $2.50
+net. The most important recent book on the family; traces its
+historical development, the ethical ideals involved in the
+institution, and discusses its present problems and perplexities.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">291</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Katherine G. Busby, <i>Home Life in America</i>. Macmillan, $2.00 net. A
+popular statement of the outstanding characteristics of life in
+American homes; entertaining and informing.</p>
+
+<p>*Clyde W. Votaw, <i>Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+American Home</i>. Religious Education Association, $0.25. A careful
+and comprehensive survey, of great value.</p>
+
+<p>Charles A.&nbsp;L. Reed, <i>Marriage and Genetics</i>. Galton Press,
+Cincinnati, Ohio, $1.00. A surgeon's message on eugenics,
+especially on the aspects indicated in the title. A study of the
+laws of human breeding.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">II. <span class="smcap">Child Nature</span></p>
+
+<p>*E.&nbsp;P. St. John, <i>Child Nature and Child Nurture</i>. Pilgrim Press,
+$0.50. A textbook dealing with the nature of the child and with
+problems of his training in the home.</p>
+
+<p>*Irving King, <i>The High School Age</i>. Bobbs-Merrill &amp; Co., $1.00
+net. A study of the nature and needs of boys and girls in the first
+period of adolescence. Written for all who are alive to the
+problems of this period as well as for school people; gives
+constructive suggestions for educational problems.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth Harrison, <i>A Study of the Child Nature</i>. Chicago
+Kindergarten College, $1.00. Long recognized as a standard for
+parents in the study of the development and functions of the
+child-life.</p>
+
+<p>George E. Dawson, <i>The Right of the Child to Be Well Born</i>. Funk &amp;
+Wagnalls, $0.75. A plain study of eugenics, non-technical and
+helpful; includes a chapter on eugenics and religion. To be
+commended to parents.</p>
+
+<p>George E. Dawson, <i>The Child and His Religion</i>. The University of
+Chicago Press, $0.75. The religious nature and needs of the child
+with some suggestions as to method.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">292</a></span></p>
+
+<p>*W. Arter Wright, <i>The Moral Conditions and Development of the
+Child</i>. Jennings &amp; Graham, $0.75. An important and valuable book on
+the newer views of the religious development of the child-life.</p>
+
+<p>Frederick Tracy and J. Stempfl, <i>The Psychology of Childhood</i>. D.&nbsp;C.
+Heath &amp; Co., $1.20. Gathers up the general results in the field of
+child psychology.</p>
+
+<p>*W.&nbsp;G. Koons, <i>The Child's Religious Life</i>. Jennings &amp; Graham,
+$1.00. From the modern point of view, dealing with some of the
+interesting problems of the relation of the child to religious life
+and the development of his religious ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Thomas Stephens, <i>The Child and Religion</i>. Putnam, $1.50. A series
+of short papers by English writers, particularly on the question of
+child conversion.</p>
+
+<p>George A. Hubbell, <i>Up through Childhood</i>. Putnam, $1.25. A good
+general review with special reference to religious problems and
+religious institutions.</p>
+
+<p>Edith E.&nbsp;R. Mumford, <i>The Dawn of Character</i>. Longmans, Green &amp; Co.,
+$1.20. A very important book, dealing especially with the moral
+development of young children.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">III. <span class="smcap">Training in the Home</span></p>
+
+<p>William B. Forbush (ed.), <i>Guide Book to Childhood</i>. American
+Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa. Very valuable as a guide
+to reading on the many problems of child-training.</p>
+
+<p>LeGrand Kerr, <i>The Care and Training of the Child</i>. Funk &amp;
+Wagnalls, $0.75. A good, general, brief study of the nature of the
+child and the method of education.</p>
+
+<p>William J. Shearer, <i>The Management and Training of the Child</i>.
+Richardson, Smith &amp; Co. A popular and practical statement of many
+problems and their treatment in the home and school.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">293</a></span></p>
+
+<p>John Wirt Dinsmore, <i>The Training of Children</i>. American Book Co.
+While written for school-teachers, this is one of the best studies
+which parents could possibly read.</p>
+
+<p>A.&nbsp;A. Berle, <i>The School in the Home</i>. Moffat, Yard &amp; Co., $1.00.
+Contains much valuable suggestion to parents who really desire to
+take advantage of the educational opportunities of the home.</p>
+
+<p>John Locke, <i>How to Train Up Your Children</i>. Sampson, Low, Marston
+&amp; Co., London. Written over two hundred years ago, and yet of very
+great value in many parts to day.</p>
+
+<p>*William B. Forbush, <i>The Coming Generation</i>. D. Appleton &amp; Co.,
+$1.50. Discusses the various aspects of child-training in the light
+of the social consciousness of today. Many of the public agencies
+for child betterment are carefully discussed.</p>
+
+<p>*William A. McKeever, <i>Training the Girl</i>. Macmillan, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>*&mdash;&mdash;, <i>Training the Boy</i>. Macmillan, $1.50. These two books
+constitute one of the best collections of material, most practical
+and helpful. They view girls and boys as active factors and all the
+phases of home and community life are studied with reference to
+their needs.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">IV. <span class="smcap">Special Religious Training in the Home</span></p>
+
+<p>*George Hodges, <i>The Training of the Child in Religion</i>. D.
+Appleton &amp; Co., $1.50. One of the few books dealing in any modern
+manner with the special problems of the religious life of the
+family.</p>
+
+<p>Rev. William Becker, <i>Christian Education or The Duties of
+Parents</i>. B. Herder, St. Louis, $1.00. Recent and interesting
+sermons on the duties of parents in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">294</a></span> religious education of the
+Catholic child; a striking example of messages that ought to be
+heard from every pulpit.</p>
+
+<p>John T. Faris, <i>Pleasant Sunday Afternoons for the Children</i>.
+Sunday School Times Co., $0.50. A number of practical plans are
+suggested.</p>
+
+<p>*George A. Coe, <i>Education in Religion and Morals</i>. Fleming H.
+Revell Co., $1.35. A book which all parents ought to read for its
+valuable guidance on the general principles of religious education.</p>
+
+<p>Elizabeth Grinnell, <i>How John and I Brought Up the Children</i>.
+American Sunday School Union, $0.70. A popular statement in a
+simple form of methods of dealing with many of the problems of
+religious training.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">V. <span class="smcap">Moral Training</span></p>
+
+<p>Edward H. Griggs, <i>Moral Education</i>. B.&nbsp;W. Huebsch, $1.60. One of
+the best-known books on this question, readable and helpful at many
+points.</p>
+
+<p>Ennis Richmond, <i>The Mind of the Child</i>. Longmans, Green &amp; Co.,
+$1.00. One of the most helpful books because of its new and
+refreshing point of view.</p>
+
+<p>*Edward O. Sisson, <i>The Essentials of Character</i>. Macmillan, $1.00.
+A book on the broad principles and ideals; one dealing with the
+outstanding elements of character.</p>
+
+<p>Ernest H. Abbott, <i>On the Training of Parents</i>. Houghton Mifflin
+Co., $1.00. A bright statement of some of the most perplexing
+problems of family life.</p>
+
+<p>*Mary Wood-Allen, <i>Making the Best of Our Children</i>. First and
+Second Series. A.&nbsp;C. McClurg &amp; Co., $1.00 each. Takes one after
+another of the different situations in child-training.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">295</a></span></p>
+
+<p>*Patterson DuBois, <i>The Culture of Justice</i>. Dodd, Mead &amp; Co.,
+$0.75. An important contribution, as it calls attention to some
+frequently neglected aspects of moral training especially
+applicable to the home.</p>
+
+<p>Walter L. Sheldon, <i>Duties in the Home</i>. W.&nbsp;M. Welch &amp; Co. A
+textbook, the thirty sections of which would furnish an excellent
+basis for parents' discussions of home discipline.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">VI. <span class="smcap">General Reading in the Home</span></p>
+
+<p>John Macy, <i>Child's Guide to Reading</i>. Baker &amp; Taylor Co., $1.25. A
+discussion of reading and the education of children thereby, with
+suggestions and criticisms of suitable books in different
+departments of reading.</p>
+
+<p>W.&nbsp;T. Taylor, <i>Finger Posts to Children's Reading</i>. A.&nbsp;C. McClurg &amp;
+Co., $1.00. A practical discussion of suitable reading for
+children, with a list of books.</p>
+
+<p>*G.&nbsp;W. Arnold, <i>A Mothers' List of Books for Children</i>. A.&nbsp;C. McClurg
+&amp; Co., $1.00. The books are arranged by ages and topics, making
+this one of the most useful collections available.</p>
+
+<p>Edward P. St. John, <i>Stories and Story Telling</i>. Eaton &amp; Mains,
+$0.35. A textbook, for parents' classes. It contains much valuable
+material.</p>
+
+<p>E.&nbsp;M. Partridge, <i>Story Telling in School and Home</i>. Sturgis &amp;
+Walton, $1.35. One of the best discussions of the principles and
+methods of story-telling, with a number of good stories.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">296</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">297</a></span>
+Activity in relation to character, <a href="#Page_75">75</a><br />
+<br />
+Amusement of young people, <a href="#Page_190">190</a><br />
+<br />
+Anger, Dealing with, <a href="#Page_224">224</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Bible, Methods of using the, <a href="#Page_121">121</a><br />
+<br />
+Bible, The, in the home, <a href="#Page_119">119</a><br />
+<br />
+Blessing at table, <a href="#Page_133">133</a><br />
+<br />
+Book list on the family, <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+<br />
+Books and reading, <a href="#Page_113">113</a><br />
+<br />
+Boy, The, in the family, <a href="#Page_173">173</a><br />
+<br />
+Boys' play, <a href="#Page_175">175</a><br />
+<br />
+Bullying, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Character, A constructive policy for, <a href="#Page_269">269</a><br />
+<br />
+Child nature, Books on, <a href="#Page_291">291</a><br />
+<br />
+Child unity with the church, <a href="#Page_207">207</a><br />
+<br />
+Child welfare, Religious meanings of, <a href="#Page_3">3</a><br />
+<br />
+Childhood characteristics, <a href="#Page_53">53</a><br />
+<br />
+Christian family, The, as a type, <a href="#Page_41">41</a><br />
+<br />
+Church, The, and the children, <a href="#Page_204">204</a><br />
+<br />
+Church, The, and the family, <a href="#Page_198">198</a><br />
+<br />
+Church, The, and the program of the home, <a href="#Page_271">271</a><br />
+<br />
+Citizenship, Training for, <a href="#Page_96">96</a><br />
+<br />
+Class work, Plans of, <a href="#Page_281">281</a><br />
+<br />
+Community, The, in relation to the home, <a href="#Page_88">88</a><br />
+<br />
+Community service, <a href="#Page_91">91</a><br />
+<br />
+Conversation, Religious, <a href="#Page_62">62</a><br />
+<br />
+Courtship, <a href="#Page_188">188</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Dishonesty, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Economic development of the home, <a href="#Page_13">13</a><br />
+<br />
+Educational function, The, of the family, <a href="#Page_46">46</a><br />
+<br />
+Educational process, The, <a href="#Page_49">49</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Factory system, The, and the home, <a href="#Page_14">14</a><br />
+<br />
+Family as an institution, Books on the, <a href="#Page_290">290</a><br />
+<br />
+"Family Book," <a href="#Page_155">155</a><br />
+<br />
+Family defined, <a href="#Page_5">5</a><br />
+<br />
+Family ideal in the church, <a href="#Page_202">202</a><br />
+<br />
+Family life, Dominating motive of, <a href="#Page_27">27</a><br />
+<br />
+Family worship, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+Family worship, Methods of, <a href="#Page_133">133</a><br />
+<br />
+Father, The, and the boy, <a href="#Page_177">177</a><br />
+<br />
+Father, The, and the family, <a href="#Page_263">263</a><br />
+<br />
+Fighting among children, <a href="#Page_234">234</a><br />
+<br />
+Function of the family, <a href="#Page_46">46</a><br />
+<br />
+Future of the family, <a href="#Page_268">268</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Girl, The, in the family, <a href="#Page_180">180</a><br />
+<br />
+God, The consciousness of, <a href="#Page_64">64</a><br />
+<br />
+Grace at table, <a href="#Page_133">133</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Hebrew family life, <a href="#Page_39">39</a><br />
+<br />
+Home and school co-operation, <a href="#Page_213">213</a><br />
+<br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">298</a></span>
+Home, is it passing? <a href="#Page_10">10</a><br />
+<br />
+Home, Religious interpretation of, <a href="#Page_1">1</a><br />
+<br />
+Home versus family, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a><br />
+<br />
+Honesty, Training in, <a href="#Page_249">249</a><br />
+<br />
+Hymns for children, <a href="#Page_102">102</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Jesus' teaching on the family, <a href="#Page_42">42</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Loyalty as the basic principle, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a><br />
+<br />
+Loyalty, The organization of, <a href="#Page_57">57</a><br />
+<br />
+Lying and the moral problem, <a href="#Page_240">240</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Meals, Conversation at, <a href="#Page_165">165</a><br />
+<br />
+Moral crises, Dealing with, <a href="#Page_218">218</a><br />
+<br />
+Moral life, religious roots in the family, <a href="#Page_31">31</a><br />
+<br />
+Moral teaching, <a href="#Page_70">70</a><br />
+<br />
+Moral training, Books on, <a href="#Page_294">294</a><br />
+<br />
+Motive, Religious, in the family, <a href="#Page_2">2</a><br />
+<br />
+Music in the family, <a href="#Page_105">105</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Organization of home, Purpose of, <a href="#Page_19">19</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Parental aversion, <a href="#Page_186">186</a><br />
+<br />
+Parenthood and religious training, <a href="#Page_260">260</a><br />
+<br />
+Parents' classes, <a href="#Page_274">274</a><br />
+<br />
+Parents trained in schools, <a href="#Page_214">214</a><br />
+<br />
+Petulancy in children, <a href="#Page_233">233</a><br />
+<br />
+Play activity, <a href="#Page_107">107</a><br />
+<br />
+Play, A policy of, <a href="#Page_150">150</a><br />
+<br />
+Play on Sunday, <a href="#Page_149">149</a><br />
+<br />
+Prayers, Children's, <a href="#Page_135">135</a><br />
+<br />
+Prayers, Family, <a href="#Page_137">137</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Quarrels of children, <a href="#Page_231">231</a><br />
+<br />
+Questions, Children's, <a href="#Page_69">69</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Reading, Developing taste for, <a href="#Page_115">115</a><br />
+<br />
+Religious character of the family, <a href="#Page_46">46</a><br />
+<br />
+Religious development of the child, <a href="#Page_52">52</a><br />
+<br />
+Religious education in the family, Books on, <a href="#Page_293">293</a><br />
+<br />
+Religious education, Meaning of, <a href="#Page_47">47</a><br />
+<br />
+Religious growth of the child, <a href="#Page_55">55</a><br />
+<br />
+Religious history of the family, <a href="#Page_37">37</a><br />
+<br />
+Religious ideas of children, <a href="#Page_60">60</a><br />
+<br />
+Religious service, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+School, The home as a, <a href="#Page_87">87</a><br />
+<br />
+Schools, Public, and the home, <a href="#Page_212">212</a><br />
+<br />
+Self-control, Developing, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a><br />
+<br />
+Social life of youth, <a href="#Page_189">189</a><br />
+<br />
+Social qualities to be developed, <a href="#Page_28">28</a><br />
+<br />
+Social training, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a><br />
+<br />
+Socialization of the home, <a href="#Page_16">16</a><br />
+<br />
+Song and story, <a href="#Page_101">101</a><br />
+<br />
+Spiritual values, Place of, <a href="#Page_30">30</a><br />
+<br />
+Stories and reading, <a href="#Page_110">110</a><br />
+<br />
+Story-telling, <a href="#Page_110">110</a><br />
+<br />
+Sunday afternoon problem, <a href="#Page_154">154</a><br />
+<br />
+Sunday in the home, <a href="#Page_145">145</a><br />
+<br />
+Sunday play, <a href="#Page_149">149</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Table, Ministry of the, <a href="#Page_164">164</a><br />
+<br />
+Table-talk, <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br />
+<br />
+Teasing and bullying, <a href="#Page_253">253</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Will, Training the, <a href="#Page_221">221</a><br />
+<br />
+Work and character, <a href="#Page_76">76</a><br />
+<br />
+Worship in the family, <a href="#Page_126">126</a><br />
+<br />
+Worship, Outlines of, <a href="#Page_139">139</a><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Youth in the home, <a href="#Page_183">183</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%; margin-bottom: .1em;" />
+
+<h4 style="margin-top: .1em; font-weight: normal;">PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.</h4>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">299</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_CONSTRUCTIVE_STUDIES" id="THE_CONSTRUCTIVE_STUDIES"></a>THE CONSTRUCTIVE STUDIES</h2>
+
+
+<p>The Constructive Studies comprise volumes suitable for all grades, from
+kindergarten to adult years, in schools or churches. In the production
+of these studies the editors and authors have sought to embody not only
+their own ideals but the best product of the thought of all who are
+contributing to the theory and practice of modern religious education.
+They have had due regard for fundamental principles of pedagogical
+method, for the results of the best modern biblical scholarship, and for
+those contributions to religious education which may be made by the use
+of a religious interpretation of all life-processes, whether in the
+field of science, literature, or social phenomena.</p>
+
+<p>Their task is not regarded as complete because of having produced one or
+more books suitable for each grade. There will be a constant process of
+renewal and change, and the possible setting aside of books which,
+because of changing conditions in the religious world or further advance
+in the science of religious education, no longer perform their function,
+and the continual enrichment of the series by new volumes so that it may
+always be adapted to those who are taking initial steps in modern
+religious education, as well as to those who have accepted and are ready
+to put into practice the most recent theories.</p>
+
+<p>As teachers profoundly interested in the problems of religious
+education, the editors have invited to co-operate with them authors
+chosen from a wide territory and in several instances already well known
+through practical experiments in the field in which they are asked to
+write.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">300</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The editors are well aware that those who are most deeply interested in
+religious education hold that churches and schools should be accorded
+perfect independence in their choice of literature regardless of
+publishing-house interests and they heartily sympathize with this
+standard. They realize that many schools will select from the
+Constructive Studies such volumes as they prefer, but at the same time
+they hope that the Constructive Studies will be most widely serviceable
+as a series. The following analysis of the series will help the reader
+to get the point of view of the editors and authors.</p>
+
+
+<h4>KINDERGARTEN, 4-6 YEARS</h4>
+
+<p>The kindergarten child needs most of all to gain those simple ideals of
+life which will keep him in harmony with his surroundings in the home,
+at play, and in the out-of-doors. He is most susceptible to a religious
+interpretation of all these, which can best be fostered through a
+program of story, play, handwork, and other activities as outlined in</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b><i>The Sunday Kindergarten</i></b> (Ferris). A teachers' manual giving
+directions for the use of a one- or two-hour period with story,
+song, play, and handwork. Permanent and temporary material for the
+children's table work, and story leaflets to be taken home.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>PRIMARY, 6-8 YEARS, GRADES I-III</h4>
+
+<p>At the age of six years when children enter upon a new era because of
+their recognition by the first grade in the public schools the
+opportunity for the cultivation of right social reactions is
+considerably increased. Their world still, however, comprises chiefly
+the home, the school, the playground, and the phenomena of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">301</a></span> nature. A
+normal religion at this time is one which will enable the child to
+develop the best sort of life in all these relationships, which now
+present more complicated moral problems than in the earlier stage.
+Religious impressions may be made through interpretations of nature,
+stories of life, song, prayer, simple scripture texts, and handwork. All
+of these are embodied in</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b><i>Child Religion in Song and Story</i></b> (Chamberlin and Kern). Three
+interchangeable volumes; only one of which is used at one time in
+all three grades. Each lesson presents a complete service, song,
+prayers, responses, texts, story, and handwork. Constructive and
+beautiful handwork books are provided for the pupil.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>JUNIOR, 9 YEARS, GRADE IV</h4>
+
+<p>When the children have reached the fourth grade they are able to read
+comfortably and have developed an interest in books, having a "reading
+book" in school and an accumulating group of story-books at home. One
+book in the household is as yet a mystery, the Bible, of which the
+parents speak reverently as God's Book. It contains many interesting
+stories and presents inspiring characters which are, however, buried in
+the midst of much that would not interest the children. To help them to
+find these stories and to show them the living men who are their heroes
+or who were the writers of the stories, the poems, or the letters, makes
+the Bible to them a living book which they will enjoy more and more as
+the years pass. This service is performed by</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b><i>An Introduction to the Bible for Teachers of Children</i></b>
+(Chamberlin). Story-reading from the Bible for the school and home,
+designed to utilize the growing interest in books and reading found
+in children of this age, in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">302</a></span> cultivating an attitude of intelligent
+interest in the Bible and enjoyment of suitable portions of it.
+Full instructions with regard to picturesque, historical, and
+social introductions are given the teacher. A pupil's homework
+book, designed to help him to think of the story as a whole and to
+express his thinking, is provided for the pupil.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>JUNIOR, 10-12 YEARS, GRADES V-VII</h4>
+
+<p>Children in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades are hero-worshipers. In
+the preceding grade they have had a brief introduction to the life of
+Jesus through their childish explorations of the gospels. His character
+has impressed them already as heroic and they are eager to know more
+about him, therefore the year is spent in the study of</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b><i>The Life of Jesus</i></b> (Gates). The story of Jesus graphically
+presented from the standpoint of a hero. A teacher's manual
+contains full instructions for preparation of material and
+presentation to the class. A partially completed story of Jesus
+prepared for the introduction of illustrations, maps, and original
+work, together with all materials required, is provided for the
+pupil.</p></div>
+
+<p>In the sixth grade a new point of approach to some of the heroes with
+whom the children are already slightly acquainted seems desirable. The
+Old Testament furnishes examples of men who were brave warriors,
+magnanimous citizens, loyal patriots, great statesmen, and champions of
+democratic justice. To make the discovery of these traits in ancient
+characters and to interpret them in the terms of modern boyhood and
+girlhood is the task of two volumes in the list. The choice between them
+will be made on the basis of preference for handwork or textbook work
+for the children.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">303</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b><i>Heroes of Israel</i></b> (Soares). Stories selected from the Old
+Testament which are calculated to inspire the imagination of boys
+and girls of the early adolescent period. The most complete
+instructions for preparation and presentation of the lesson are
+given the teacher in his manual. The pupil's book provides the full
+text of each story and many questions which will lead to the
+consideration of problems arising in the life of boys and girls of
+this age.</p>
+
+<p><i><b>Old Testament Stories</b></i> (Corbett). Also a series of stories
+selected from the Old Testament. Complete instructions for vivid
+presentation are given the teacher in his manual. The pupil's
+material consists of a notebook containing a great variety of
+opportunities for constructive handwork.</p></div>
+
+<p>Paul was a great hero. Most people know him only as a theologian. His
+life presents miracles of courage, struggle, loyalty, and
+self-abnegation. The next book in the series is intended to help the
+pupil to see such a man. The student is assisted by a wealth of local
+color.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b><i>Paul of Tarsus</i></b> (Atkinson). The story of Paul which is partially
+presented to the pupil and partially the result of his own
+exploration in the Bible and in the library. Much attention is
+given to story of Paul's boyhood and his adventurous travels,
+inspiring courage and loyalty to a cause. The pupil's notebook is
+similar in form to the one used in the study of Gates's "Life of
+Jesus," but more advanced in thought.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>HIGH SCHOOL, 13-17 YEARS</h4>
+
+<p>In the secular school the work of the eighth grade is tending toward
+elimination. It is, therefore, considered here as one of the high-school
+grades. In the high-school years new needs arise. There is necessary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">304</a></span> a
+group of books which will dignify the study of the Bible and give it as
+history and literature a place in education, at least equivalent to that
+of other histories and literatures which have contributed to the
+progress of the world. This series is rich in biblical studies which
+will enable young people to gain a historical appreciation of the
+religion which they profess. Such books are</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p><b><i>The Gospel According to Mark</i></b> (Burton). A study of the life of Jesus
+from this gospel. The full text is printed in the book, which is
+provided with a good dictionary and many interesting notes and questions
+of very great value to both teacher and pupil.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>The First Book of Samuel</i></b> (Willett). Textbook for teacher and pupil
+in which the fascinating stories of Samuel, Saul, and David are
+graphically presented. The complete text of the first book of Samuel is
+given, many interesting explanatory notes, and questions which will stir
+the interest of the pupil, not only in the present volume but in the
+future study of the Old Testament.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>The Life of Christ</i></b> (Burgess). A careful historical study of the life
+of Christ from the four gospels. A manual for teacher and pupil presents
+a somewhat exhaustive treatment, but full instructions for the selection
+of material for classes in which but one recitation a week occurs are
+given the teacher in a separate outline.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>The Hebrew Prophets</i></b> (Chamberlin). An inspiring presentation of the
+lives of some of the greatest of the prophets from the point of view of
+their work as citizens and patriots. In the manual for teachers and
+pupils the biblical text in a good modern translation is included.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>Christianity in the Apostolic Age</i></b> (Gilbert). A story of early
+Christianity chronologically presented, full of interest in the hands of
+a teacher who enjoys the historical point of view.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">305</a></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the high-school years also young people find it necessary to face the
+problem of living the Christian life in a modern world, both as a
+personal experience and as a basis on which to build an ideal society.
+To meet this need a number of books intended to inspire boys and girls
+to look forward to taking their places as home-builders and responsible
+citizens of a great Christian democracy and to intelligently choose
+their task in it are prepared or in preparation. The following are now
+ready:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b><i>Problems of Boyhood</i></b> (Johnson). A series of chapters discussing
+matters of supreme interest to boys and girls, but presented from
+the point of view of the boy. A splendid preparation for efficiency
+in all life's relationships.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>Lives Worth Living</i></b> (Peabody). A series of studies of important
+women, biblical and modern, representing different phases of life
+and introducing the opportunity to discuss the possibilities of
+effective womanhood in the modern world.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>The Third and Fourth Generation</i></b> (Downing). A series of studies in
+heredity based upon studies of phenomena in the natural world and
+leading up to important historical facts and inferences in the
+human world.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>ADULT GROUP</h4>
+
+<p>The Biblical studies assigned to the high-school period are in most
+cases adaptable to adult class work. There are other volumes, however,
+intended only for the adult group, which also includes the young people
+beyond the high-school age. They are as follows:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b><i>The Life of Christ</i></b> (Burton and Mathews). A careful historical
+study of the life of Christ from the four gospels, with copious
+notes, reading references, maps, etc.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">306</a></span></p>
+
+<p><b><i>What Jesus Taught</i></b> (Slaten). This book develops an unusual but
+stimulating method of teaching groups of students in colleges,
+Christian associations, and churches. After a swift survey of the
+material and spiritual environment of Jesus this book suggests
+outlines for <i>discussions</i> of his teaching on such topics as
+civilization, hate, war and non-resistance, democracy, religion,
+and similar topics. Can be effectively used by laymen as well as
+professional leaders.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>Great Men of the Christian Church</i></b> (Walker). A series of
+delightful biographies of men who have been influential in great
+crises in the history of the church.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>Christian Faith for Men of Today</i></b> (Cook). A re-interpretation of
+old doctrines in the light of modern attitudes.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>Social Duties from the Christian Point of View</i></b> (Henderson).
+Practical studies in the fundamental social relationships which
+make up life in the family, the city, and the state.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>Religious Education in the Family</i></b> (Cope). An illuminating study
+of the possibilities of a normal religious development in the
+family life. Invaluable to parents.</p>
+
+<p><b><i>Christianity and Its Bible</i></b> (Waring). A remarkably comprehensive
+sketch of the Old and the New Testament religion, the Christian
+church, and the present status of Christianity.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is needless to say that the Constructive Studies present no sectarian
+dogmas and are used by churches and schools of all denominational
+affiliations. In the grammar-and high-school years more books are
+provided than there are years in which to study them, each book
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+<h3 style="margin-bottom: .2em;">
+THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS</h3>
+<h4 style="margin-top: .2em;">
+CHICAGO&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ILLINOIS</h4>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY***</p>
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+eBook #17570 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17570)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Religious Education in the Family, by Henry
+F. Cope
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Religious Education in the Family
+
+
+Author: Henry F. Cope
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 21, 2006  [eBook #17570]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE
+FAMILY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Stacy Brown Thellend, Kevin Handy, John Hagerson, and
+the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PRESENT STATUS OF FAMILY LIFE
+
+
+§ 1. CONTRASTED TYPES
+
+In a beautiful village, in one of the farther western states, two men
+were discussing the possible future of the home and of family life.
+Sitting in the brilliant moonlight, looking through the leafy shades,
+watching the lights of a score of homes, each surrounded by lawn and
+shade trees, each with its group on the front porch, where vines trailed
+and flowers bloomed, listening to the hum of conversation and the
+strains of music in one home and another, it seemed, to at least one of
+these men, that this type of living could hardly pass away. The separate
+home, each family a complete social integer, each with its own circle of
+activities and interests, its own group, and its own table and fireside,
+seemed too fine and beautiful, too fair and helpful, to perish under
+economic pressure. Indeed, one felt that the village home furnished a
+setting for life and a soil for character development far higher and
+more efficient than could be afforded by any other domestic
+arrangement--that it approached the ideal.
+
+But two weeks later two men sat in an upper room, in the second largest
+city in America, discussing again the future of the family. Instead of
+the quiet music of the village, the clang of street cars filled the
+ears, trains rushed by, children shouted from the paved highway,
+families were seated by open windows in crowded apartments, seeking cool
+air; the total impression was that of being placed in a pigeonhole in a
+huge, heated, filing-case, where each separate space was occupied by a
+family. One felt the pressure of heated, crowded kitchens, suffocating
+little dining-rooms; one knew that the babies lay crying in their beds
+at night, gasping their very lives away, and that the young folks were
+wandering off to amusement parks and moving-picture shows. Here was an
+entirely different picture. How long could family life persist under
+these conditions where privacy was almost gone and comfort almost
+unknown?
+
+In the village separate home integers appear ideal; in the city they are
+possible only to the few. The many, at present, find them a crushing
+burden. Desirable as privacy is, it can be purchased at too high a
+price. It costs too much to maintain separate kitchens and dining-rooms
+under city conditions.
+
+
+§ 2. COMMUNAL TENDENCIES
+
+Present conditions spell waste, inefficiency, discomfort. The woman
+lives all day in stifling rooms, poorly lighted, with the nerve-racking
+life of neighbors pouring itself through walls and windows. The men
+come from crowded shops and the children from crowded schoolrooms to
+crowd themselves into these rooms, to snatch a meal, or to sleep. How
+can there be real family life? What joy can there be or what ideals
+created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes
+are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse
+and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.
+
+Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community living, that
+just as the social life of the separate house porches in the villages
+has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all the
+activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long could
+the family as a unit continue under these conditions?
+
+The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we
+apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the
+same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop large
+belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more
+and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words,
+highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as
+business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economically
+done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing
+prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.
+
+
+§ 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT
+
+It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are
+involved in the tendency toward communal living. At the beginning of the
+industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each family
+was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was little more than a
+nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such as
+workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home furnished
+nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own
+children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of
+effort except in the church.
+
+The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the
+factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and
+the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a
+living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger
+sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family
+educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually learned
+their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of the
+house, where they played as children in the shavings, or watched the
+glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's
+discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their
+tasks. The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of
+each day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a
+large share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system,
+to a large extent the family lost the father.
+
+When the workshop left the home its most efficient school was taken from
+it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical, but
+the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy seeks to
+realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing; schooling was
+perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the incalculable
+value of informality and reality. The father gone and the mother still
+fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical training
+for life which home industry had afforded. On the one hand, the young
+became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of the
+voracious factory system.
+
+This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to
+Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child.
+Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now
+they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place
+of the parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the
+father and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now
+loses the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six
+hours of the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The
+family, once living under one roof, now is found scattered; it has
+reached out into factory and school. Its hours of unified life have been
+markedly reduced.
+
+But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That
+which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in the
+form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made by the
+women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves, and meat--all
+formerly home products for the use of the family producing them--now
+were prepared in larger quantities, by mechanical processes, and were
+brought back into the home. Woman's labor was lightened; the older girls
+were liberated from the loom and they began to seek occupation,
+education, and diversion according to their opportunities in life.
+
+That last step made it possible for people to think of the communization
+of home industry, to think of eating food cooked in other ovens than
+their own, to think of one oven large enough for a whole village. Many
+interesting experiments in co-operative living immediately sprang up.
+But the next step came slowly and, even now, is only firmly established
+in the cities, in the actual abandonment of the family kitchen for the
+community kitchen in the form of the restaurant. In such families we
+have unity only in the hours of sleep and recreation.
+
+Along with abandonment of the separate kitchen there has proceeded
+the abandonment of the parlor in the homes of the middle classes.
+To lose the old, mournful front room may be no subject for tears,
+but the loss of the evening family group, about the fireside or
+the reading-lamp, is a real and sad loss. The commercialized amusements
+have offered greater attractions to vigorous youth. The theater and
+its lesser satellites, amusements, entertainments, lectures, the
+lyceum, and recreation-by-proxy in ball games and matches have taken
+the place of united family recreation. Of course this has been a
+natural development of the older village play-life and has been by
+no means an unmixed ill.
+
+Now, behold, what has become of the old-time home life! The family that
+spent nearly twenty-four hours together now spends a scarce seven or
+eight, and these are occupied in sleeping! Little wonder that the next
+step is taken--the abandonment of this remainder, the sleep period,
+under a domestic roof, as the family moves into a hotel!
+
+Along with the tendency toward communal working and eating we see the
+tendency to communal living by the development of the apartment
+building. Since roof-trees are so expensive, and since in a practical
+age, few of us can afford to pay for sentiment, why not put a dozen
+families under one roof-tree? True we sacrifice lawns, gardens, natural
+places for children to play; we lose birds and flowers and the charm of
+evening hours on porches, or galleries, but think of what we gain in
+bricks and mortar, in labor saved from splitting wood and shoveling
+coal, in janitor service! The transition is now complete; the home is
+simply that item in the economic machinery which will best furnish us
+storage for our sleeping bodies and our clothes!
+
+We are undoubtedly in a period of great changes in family life, and no
+family can count on escaping the influence of the change. The one single
+outstanding and most potent change, so far as the character of family
+life is concerned, is, in the United States, the rapid polarization of
+population in the cities. The United States Census Bureau counts all
+residents in cities of over 8,000 population as "urban." In 1800 the
+"urban" population was 4 per cent of the total population; in 1850 it
+was 12.5 per cent; in 1870, 20.9 per cent; in 1890, 29.2 per cent; in
+1900, 33.1 per cent; in 1910 it was estimated at 40 per cent.[2] Here
+is a trend so clearly marked that we cannot deny its reality, while its
+significance is familiar to everyone today.
+
+However, the village type remains; there are still many homes where a
+measure of family unity persists, where at least in one meal daily and,
+for purposes of sleeping and, occasionally, for the evening hours of
+recreation, there is a consciousness of home life. Yet the most remote
+village feels the pressure of change. The few homes conforming to the
+older ideals are recognized as exceptional. The city draws the village
+and rural family to itself, and the contagion of its customs and ideals
+spreads through the villages and affects the forms of living there.
+Youths become city dwellers and do not cease to scoff at the village
+unless later years give them wisdom to appreciate its higher values. The
+standard of domestic organization is established by the city; that type
+of living is the ideal toward which nearly all are striving.
+
+The important question for all persons is whether the changes now taking
+place in family life are good or ill. It is impossible to say whether
+the whole trend is for the better; the many elements are too diverse and
+often apparently conflicting. Faith in the orderly development of
+society gives ground for belief that these changes ultimately work for a
+higher type of family life. The city may be regarded as only a
+transition stage in social evolution--the compacting of masses of
+persons together that out of the new fusing and welding may arise new
+methods of social living. The larger numbers point to more highly
+developed forms of social organization. When these larger units discover
+their greater purposes, above factory and mill and store, and realize
+them in personal values, the city life will be a more highly developed
+mechanism for the higher life of man. The home life will develop along
+with that city life.
+
+
+§ 4. PURPOSEFUL ORGANIZATION
+
+At present the home is suffering, just as the city is suffering, from a
+lack of that purposeful organization which will order the parts aright
+and subject the processes to the most important and ultimate purposes.
+The city is simply an aggregation of persons, scarcely having any
+conscious organization, thrown together for purposes of industry. It
+will before very long organize itself for purposes of personal welfare
+and education. The family is usually a group bound in ties of struggle
+for shelter, food, and pleasure. Such consciousness as it possesses is
+that of being helplessly at the mercy of conflicting economic forces.
+The adjustment of those forces, their subjection to man's higher
+interests, must come in the future and will help the family to freedom
+to discover its true purpose.
+
+It is easy to insist on the responsibility of parents for the
+character-training of their children, but it is difficult to see how
+that responsibility can be properly discharged under industrial
+conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole
+day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to
+furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull
+monotony of labor to care for life's finer interests. The welfare of the
+family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be
+secured in one part progress in the whole ensues.
+
+There are those who raise the question whether family life is a
+permanent form of social organization for which we may wisely contend,
+or is but a phase from which the race is now emerging. Some see signs
+that the ties of marriage will be but temporary, that children will be
+born, not into families but into the life of the state, bearing only
+their mothers' names and knowing no brothers and sisters save in the
+brotherhood of the state. Whether the permanent elements in family life
+furnish a sufficiently worthy basis for its preservation is a subject
+for careful consideration.
+
+
+§ 5. THE HOME AND THE FAMILY
+
+The family is more important than the home, just as the man is more than
+his clothing. The form of the home changes; the life of the family
+continues unchanged in its essential characteristics. The family causes
+the home to be. Professor Arthur J. Todd insists that the family is the
+basis of marriage, rather than marriage the cause of the family.[3]
+Small groups for protection and social living would precede formal
+arrangements of monogamy. Westermarck concludes that it was "for the
+benefit of the young that male and female continued to live
+together."[4] The importance of this consideration for us lies in the
+thought of the overshadowing importance of this social group which we
+now call the family. The family is the primary cell of society, the
+first unit in social organization. Our thought must balance itself
+between the importance of this social group, to be preserved in its
+integrity, and the value of the home, with its varied forms of activity
+and ministry, as a means of preserving and developing this group, the
+family.
+
+One hears today many pessimistic utterances regarding the modern home.
+Some even tell us that it is doomed to become extinct. Without doubt
+great economic changes in society are producing profound changes in the
+organization and character of the home. But the home has always been
+subject to such changes; the factor which we need to watch with greater
+care is the family; the former is but the shell of the latter.
+
+The character of each home will depend largely on the economic condition
+of those who dwell in it. The homes of every age will reflect the social
+conditions of that age. The picture in historical romances of the home
+of the mediaeval period, where the factory, or shop, joined the
+dining-room, where the apprentices ate and roomed in the home, where one
+might be compelled to furnish and provision his home literally as his
+castle for defense, presents a marked difference to the home of this
+century tending to syndicate all its labors with all the other homes of
+the community. Since the home is simply the organization and mechanism
+of the family life, it is most susceptible to material and social
+changes. It varies as do the fashions of men.
+
+Much that we assume to be detrimental to the life of the home is simply
+due to the fact that in the evolution of society the family, as it were,
+puts on a new suit of clothes, adopts new forms of organization to meet
+the changing external conditions.
+
+
+§ 6. THE HOME CHANGING; THE FAMILY ABIDING
+
+The home is of importance only as a tool, a means to the final ends of
+the family life; the test of its efficiency is not whether it maintains
+traditional forms but whether it best serves the highest aims of family
+life. We may abandon all the older customs; our regret for them, as we
+look back on the days of home cooking, cannot be any greater than the
+regrets of our parents or grandparents looking back on the
+spinning-wheel and the hand loom that cumbered the kitchen of their
+childhood. Surely no one contends that family life has deteriorated,
+that human character is one whit the poorer, because we have discarded
+the family spinning-wheel. Through the changes of a developing
+civilization, as man has moved from the time when each one built his own
+house, worked with his own tools to make all his supplies, to these days
+of specialized service in community living, the home has changed with
+each step of industrial progress, but the family has remained
+practically unchanged.
+
+The family stands a practically unchanging factor of personal qualities
+at the center of our civilization; the family rather than the home
+determines the character of the coming days. In its social relationships
+are rooted the things that are best in all our lives. In its social
+training lie the solutions of more problems in social adjustment and
+development than we are willing to admit. The family is the soil of
+society, central to all its problems and possibilities.
+
+Before church or school the family stands potent for character. We are
+what we are, not by the ideals held before us for thirty minutes a week
+or once a month in a church, nor by the instructions given in the
+classroom; we are what parents, kin, and all the circumstances that have
+touched us daily and hourly for years have determined we should be.
+
+The sweetest memories of our lives cluster about the scenes of family
+life. The rose-embowered cottage of the poet is not the only spot that
+claims affectionate gratitude; many look back to a city house wedged
+into its monotonous row. But, wherever it might be, if it sheltered love
+and held a shrine where the altar fires of family sacrifice burned,
+earth has no fairer or more sacred spot. The people rather than the
+place made it potent.
+
+Stronger even than the memories that remain are the marks of habits,
+tendencies, tastes, and dispositions there acquired. Many a man who has
+left no fortune worth recording to his sons has left them something
+better, the aptitude for things good and honorable, the memory of a good
+name, and the heritage of a life that was worthy of honor. The personal
+life has been always the enduring thing. Our concern for the future
+should be not whether we can pass on intact the forms of home
+organization, but whether we can give to the next day the force of ideal
+family life. Perhaps like Mary we would do well to turn our eyes from
+the much serving, the mechanisms of the home, to set our minds on the
+better part, the personal values in the association of lives in the
+family.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. ii, xi, xii. Hodder
+     & Stoughton, $2.50.
+
+     Charles R. Henderson, _Social Duties from the Christian Point of
+     View_, chaps. ii, iii. The University of Chicago Press, $1.25.
+
+     C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Jacob A. Riis, _Peril and Preservation of the Home_. Jacobs,
+     Philadelphia, Pa., $1.00.
+
+     Charles R. Henderson, _Social Elements_. Scribner, $1.50.
+
+     Charles F. Thwing, _The Recovery of the Home_. American Baptist
+     Publication Society, $0.15.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. The tendency toward community life illustrated in the schools,
+     amusement parks, and hotel life. Remembering the ultimate purpose
+     of the family, how far is communal life desirable?
+
+     2. Does the apartment or tenement building furnish a suitable
+     condition for the higher purposes of the family?
+
+     3. Is it possible to restore to the home some of the benefits lost
+     by present factory consolidation of industry?
+
+     4. What can take the place of the old household arts and of those
+     which are now passing?
+
+     5. What steps should be taken to secure to the family a larger
+     measure of the time in terms of occupation of the parents?
+
+     6. What are the important things to contend for in this
+     institution? Why should we expect change in the form of the home
+     and what are the features which should not be changed?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Figures taken from C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious
+Education in the American Home_, 1911.
+
+[3] A.J. Todd, _Primitive Family and Education_, p. 21. A most valuable
+and suggestive book.
+
+[4] Cited by Todd, p. 21.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE PERMANENT ELEMENTS IN FAMILY LIFE
+
+
+§ 1. THE DOMINANT MOTIVE
+
+The chief end of society is to improve the race, to develop the higher
+and steadily improving type of human beings. We can test the life of the
+family and determine the values of its elements by asking whether and in
+what degree they minister to this end, the growth of better persons.
+This is more than a theoretical aim or one conceived in a search for
+ideals. It is written plain in our passions and strongest inclinations.
+That which parents supremely desire for their children is that they may
+become strong in body, capable and alert in mind, and animated by worthy
+principles and ideals. The parent desires a good man, fit to take his
+place, do his work, make his contribution to the social well-being, able
+to live to the fulness of his powers, to take life in all its reaches of
+meaning and heights of vision and beauty. In true parenthood all hopes
+of success, of riches, fame, and ease, are seen but as avenues to this
+end, as means of making the finer character, of growing the ideal
+person. If we were compelled to choose for our children we should elect
+poverty, pain, disgrace, toil, and suffering if we knew this was the
+only highway to full manhood and womanhood, to completeness of
+character. Indeed, we do constantly so choose, knowing that they must
+endure hardness, bear the yoke in their youth, and learn that
+
+    Love and joy are torches lit
+    At altar fires of sacrifice.
+
+With this dominating purpose clearly in mind we are prepared to ask,
+What are the elements of family life which among the changes of today we
+need most carefully to preserve in order to maintain efficiency in
+character development? In days when the outer shell of domestic
+arrangements changes, when readjustments are being made in the
+organization of the family, what is there too precious to lose, so
+worthy and essential that we waste no time when seeking to maintain it?
+
+
+§ 2. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--SOCIAL QUALITIES
+
+The first great element to be preserved in all family life is that of
+the power of the small group for purposes of character development. The
+infant's earliest world is the mother's arms. In order to grow into a
+man fitted for the wider world of social living, he must learn to live
+in a world within his comprehension. A child's life moves through the
+widening circles of mother-care, family group, neighborhood, school,
+city, state, and nation into world-living. He must take the first steps
+before he is able to take the next ones. He must learn to live with the
+few as preparation for living with the many. In earliest infancy he
+takes his first unconscious lessons in the fine art of living with other
+folks as he relates himself to parents and to brothers and sisters.
+
+Secondly, the family life affords the best agency for social training.
+The family is the ideal democracy into which the child-life is born.
+Here habits are formed, ideals are pictured, and life itself is
+interpreted. It is an ideal democracy, first, because it is a social
+organization existing for the sake of persons. The family comes nearer
+to fulfilling the true ideal of a democratic social order than does any
+other institution. It is founded to bring lives into this world; it is
+maintained for the sake of those lives; all its life, its methods, and
+standards are determined, ideally, by the needs of persons. It is an
+ideal democracy, secondly, because its guiding principle is that the
+greater lives must be devoted to the good of the lesser, the parent for
+the little child, the older members for the younger, in an attempt to
+extend to the very least the greatest good enjoyed by all. Thirdly,
+ideally it is a true democracy in that it gives to each member a share
+in its own affairs and develops the power to bear responsibilities and
+to carry each his own load in life. Thus the family group is the best
+possible training for the life and work of the larger group, the state,
+and for world-living.[5] The maintenance of the ideals of the state, as
+a democracy, depends on the continuance of this institution with its
+peculiar power to train life in infancy and childhood for the life of
+manhood in the state. Such training can be given only in the smaller
+group that is governed by the motives peculiar to home and family life.
+The power to impress these principles depends on the size of the group.
+The small social organization, the family circle of from three members
+to even a dozen, bound by ties of affection, is the one great, efficient
+school, training youth to live in social terms.
+
+Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first. Our age especially
+needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise
+above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal
+qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes
+most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures
+every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its
+riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal
+qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations,
+affection. The true home gives to every child-life the power to choose
+the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only
+the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the
+world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's
+spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No
+life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that
+lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.
+
+
+§ 3. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--THE MORAL LIFE
+
+Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be
+noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life.
+"The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."[6] Here
+the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins
+life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all
+virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them,
+"the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The
+moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived
+for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a
+matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions. Neither is it a matter
+of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this
+comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life
+which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the
+right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of
+rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society
+points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right
+thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner
+compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest
+possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of
+loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which
+begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in
+the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most
+potential school. Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are
+strengthened by the pleasurable emotions. It is a joy to be loyal to
+those we love. Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the
+loyalty, or the love?
+
+The power of this small social group of the family to develop the
+fundamental principle of loyalty, the root of all virtues, gives a
+position of great importance to the affections in the family. We do well
+to contend for the maintenance of conditions of family living which will
+strengthen the ties of affection. If children could be thrust into the
+care of the state, in large groups, separated from parental care and
+oversight, it is difficult to see what emotional stimulus toward
+affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would
+in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and
+mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in
+orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal
+care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents
+stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small
+children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the
+ideal--a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but
+these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds
+and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values of their
+affections and on them to build a wise discipline for childhood by
+providing adequate training of parents for their duties.
+
+Fifthly, there are some elements of the cost of family life, even its
+apparently unnecessary sacrifice and pain, that we do well to seek to
+keep. Character grows in paying the high price of maintaining a family.
+It is the most expensive form of living for adults. Marriages are now
+delayed because of the fear of the actual monetary cost; but far more
+serious is the cost in care, in nerves, in patience, in all the great
+elements of self-denial. No child ever knows what he has cost until he
+has children of his own. But this discipline of self-denial is that
+which saves us from selfishness. It is necessary to have some personal
+objects for which to give our lives if they are to be saved from
+centrifugation, from death through ingrowing affection. True, many
+bachelors and spinsters have learned the way of self-denying,
+fellow-serving love. But how can a true parent escape that lesson? Nor
+does it stop with parents; as children grow up together they, too, must
+learn mutual forbearance, conciliation, and, soon, the joy of service.
+One sees selfishness in the little child gradually fading in the
+practice of family service, helpfulness, consideration for others. The
+single child in a family misses something more important than playmates;
+he misses all the education of play and service. But who cannot remember
+many families that have grown to beauty of character under the
+discipline of home life, and especially when this has involved real
+sacrifices? The stories in the Pepper books illustrate the spirit that
+blossoms under the trials and hardships of the struggle of a family for
+a livelihood and for the maintenance of a home.
+
+A clear function becomes evident for this social group called the
+family. It is that of dealing with young lives, in groups bound by ties
+of blood and similarity, for purposes of the development of personal
+character. The family has an essentially educational function. Bearing
+in mind that "educational" means the orderly development of the powers
+of the life, we can think of our families as existing for this purpose
+and to be tested by their ability to do this work, especially by their
+ability to develop persons, young lives, that have the power, the
+vision, the acquired habits and experience to live as more than animals.
+The family is an educational institution dealing with child-life for its
+full growth and its self-realization, especially on character levels.
+The educational function suggests the features of family life which we
+do well to seek to preserve. Many incidental forms may pass, but the
+essential human relations and experiences that go to develop life and
+character must be maintained at any cost.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_, chap. vii. Lothrop, Lee &
+     Shepard, $1.60.
+
+     W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. iv, v. Hodder &
+     Stoughton, $2.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     "The Improvement of Religious Education," _Proceedings of the
+     Religious Education Association_, I, 119-23. $0.50.
+
+     _Religious Education_, April, 1911, VI, 1-48.
+
+     S.P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott, _The Delinquent Child and the
+     Home_. Russell Sage Foundation, $2.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the chief end of all forms of social organization?
+
+     2. What is in the last analysis the aim of every parent?
+
+     3. What advantage has the family over the school and larger groups
+     for educational purposes?
+
+     4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?
+
+     5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.
+
+     6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character
+     development? In what way do these come to the surface in the
+     family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?
+
+     7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain
+     or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial
+     advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent
+     disadvantages in the life of the family?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] See "Democracy in the Home," _American Journal of Sociology_,
+January, 1912.
+
+[6] Francis G. Peabody, _The Approach to the Social Question_, p. 94.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RELIGIOUS PLACE OF THE FAMILY
+
+
+§ 1. DEVELOPMENT AS A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION
+
+The family is the most important religious institution in the life of
+today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this
+place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain
+quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the
+children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their
+instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize
+as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those
+practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent
+care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we
+know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of
+responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious
+ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to
+separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this
+task. The higher the type of family life the more fully does it
+discharge its function in the education of the child.[7]
+
+It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three
+stages, or types, of relationship based on the breeding of children, or
+three stages of development toward family life. The first is a loose and
+indefinite relationship existing principally between the adults, or the
+males and females, under which children born when not desired are
+neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of
+either parent, or of neither. Since the group, associated through
+infancy with at least one parent, is as yet undeveloped, any instruction
+will be individual and usually incidental.
+
+The second form is that of a kind of family unity, either about the
+mother or the father, or both, or about a group of parents, in which the
+children live together and are sheltered and nurtured for their earlier
+years. Here, however, the real relationship of the child is to the
+tribe, the family is but his temporary guardian, and, at least by the
+age of puberty, he will be initiated into the tribal secrets. If he is a
+boy, he will cease to be a member of the family group and will go to
+live in the "men's house," becoming a part of the larger life of the
+tribe.[8] Such moral and religious instruction as he may acquire will
+come from the songs, traditions, and conversation which he hears as a
+child.
+
+The third type approaches the modern ideal, with a greater or less
+degree of permanent unity between the two parents and with permanence in
+the group of the offspring. The parental responsibility continues for a
+greater length of time and, since the tribe makes smaller claims, and
+the parents live in the common domestic group, much more instruction is
+possible and is given. The tribal ideals, the traditions, observances,
+and religious rites are imparted to children gradually in their homes.
+
+The last type brings us to the Hebrew conception of family life. It
+developed toward the Christian ideal. At first, polygamy was permitted;
+woman was the chattel of man and excluded from any part in the religious
+rites. But it included the ideal of monogamy in its tradition of the
+origin of the world, it denounced and punished adultery (Deut. 22: 22),
+and it gave especial attention to the training of the offspring. "And
+these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and
+thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of
+them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way,
+and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up ... and thou shalt
+write them upon the door-posts of thy house and upon thy gates" (Deut.
+6: 6, 7, 9).
+
+Much later, the messianic hope, the belief that in some Jewish family
+there should be born one divinely commissioned and endowed to liberate
+Israel and to give the Jews world-sovereignty, operated to elevate the
+conception of motherhood and, through that, of the family. It made
+marriage desirable and children a blessing; it rendered motherhood
+sacred. It tended to center national hopes and religious ideals about
+the family.[9]
+
+There are a few glimpses of ideal family life in the Old Testament. They
+are all summed up in the eloquent tribute to motherhood in the words of
+King Lemuel in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. It must be
+remembered, however, that such ideals did not belong to the Jews alone,
+that Plutarch shows many pictures of maternal fidelity and wifely
+devotion, that Greek and Roman history have their Cornelia, Iphigenia,
+and Mallonia.[10]
+
+The Jews are an excellent example of the power of the family life to
+maintain distinct characteristics and to secure marked development.
+Practically throughout all the Christian era they have been a people
+without a land, a constitution, or a government, and yet never without
+race consciousness, national unity, and separateness. Their unity has
+continued in spite of dispersion, persecution, and losses; they have
+remained a race in the face of political storms that have swept other
+peoples away. Their unity has continued about two great centers, the
+customs of religion and the life of the family.
+
+     The results of Jewish respect for family life can also be seen in
+     the health of their own children. In 1910, for instance, among poor
+     Jews in Manchester the mortality of infants under one year of age
+     was found to be 118 per thousand; among poor Gentiles, 300 per
+     thousand; and comparisons made some six years ago between Jewish
+     and Gentile children in schools in the poorer parts of Manchester
+     and Leeds (England) have shown that the Jewish children are
+     uniformly taller, they weigh more, and their bones and teeth are
+     superior.[11]
+
+
+§ 2. THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY
+
+The Christian family is a type peculiar to itself, not as a new
+institution, for it has developed out of earlier race experience, but as
+controlled by a new interpretation, the spirit and conception of the
+home and family given in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He did not
+give formal rules for the regulation of homes; rather he made a
+spiritual ideal of family life the basic thought of all his teaching. He
+said more about the family than concerning any other human institution,
+yet he established no family life of his own. He is called the founder
+of the church, yet he scarcely mentions that institution, while he
+frequently teaches concerning home duties and family relations. He
+glorifies the relations of the family by making them the figure by which
+men may understand the highest relations of life. He speaks more of
+fatherhood and sonship than of any other relations. He gives direction
+for living, using the family terms of brotherhood. He points forward to
+ideal living in a home beyond this life. He teaches men when they think
+of God and when they address him to take the family attitude and call
+him Father.
+
+If we sum up all the teachings of Jesus and separate them from our
+preconceptions of their theological content, we cannot but be impressed
+with the facts that he seized upon the family life as the best
+expression of the highest relationships; that he pointed to a purified
+family life, in which spiritual aims would dominate, as the best
+expression of ideal relationships among his followers; and that he
+glorified marriage and really made the family the great, divine,
+sacramental institution of human society.
+
+We can hardly overestimate the importance of such teaching to the
+character of the family. The early Christians not only accepted Jesus as
+their teacher and savior; they took their family life as the opportunity
+to show what the Kingdom of God, the ideal society, was like. Family
+life was consecrated. Men and women belonged to the new order with
+their whole households. Religion became largely a family matter. The
+worship that had been confined to the temple now made an altar in every
+home and a holy of holies in the midst of every family. The scriptures
+that belonged to the synagogue now belonged in the home. Above all, this
+family existed for the purposes taught by Jesus, that men might grow in
+brotherhood toward the likeness of the divine Fatherhood. It was an
+institution, not for economic purpose of food and shelter, not for
+personal ends of passion or pride, but for spiritual purpose, for the
+growth of persons, especially the young in the home, in character, into
+"the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."
+
+Christianity is essentially a religion of ideal family life. It
+conceives of human society, not in terms of a monarchy with a king and
+subjects, but in terms of a family with a great all-Father and his
+children, who live in brotherhood, who take life as their opportunity
+for those family joys of service and sacrifice. It hopes to solve the
+world's ills, not by external regulations, but by bringing all men into
+a new family life, a birth into this new family life with God, so
+securing a new personal environment, a new personality as the center and
+root of all social betterment. He who would come into this new social
+order must come into the divine family, must humble himself and become
+as a little child, must know his Father and love his brothers.
+
+Christianity, then, not only seeks an ideal family; it makes the family
+the ideal social institution and order. It makes family life holy,
+sacramental, religious in its very nature. This fact gives added
+importance to the preservation and development of the ideals of family
+life for the sake of their religious significance and influence. It not
+only makes religion a part of the life of the home but makes a religious
+purpose the very reason for the existence of the Christian type of home.
+It makes our homes essentially religious institutions, to be judged by
+religious products.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chap. xvi. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+     Article on "The Family," in Hastings, _Encyclopaedia of Religion
+     and Ethics_.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     On the educational function of the family: A.J. Todd, _The
+     Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_. Putnam, $2.00.
+
+     On the religious place of the family: C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The
+     Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.
+
+     I.J. Peritz, "Biblical Ideal of the Home," _Religious Education_,
+     VI, 322.
+
+     H. Hanson, _The Function of the Family_. American Baptist
+     Publication Society, $0.15.
+
+     W. Becker, _Christian Education, or the Duties of Parents_. Herder,
+     $1.00. A striking presentation of the Roman Catholic view; could be
+     read to advantage by all parents.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What place did religion hold in the primitive family? What
+     reference or allusion do we find in the Old Testament to the place
+     of religion in the family (Deut. 6:7-9, 20-25)? What in the New
+     Testament?
+
+     2. What has been the effect of purity of family life on the Jewish
+     race?
+
+     3. What place did the family hold in the teachings of Jesus?
+
+     4. What shall we think of the relations of the church and family as
+     to their comparative rights and our duty to them?
+
+     5. Do you agree that the family is the most important religious
+     institution?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] For a brief statement see Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_,
+Lecture 4, § 7; also Todd, _The Family as an Educational Agency_.
+
+[8] See Webster, _Primitive Secret Societies_, chaps. i, ii.
+
+[9] On the place of the family in different religious systems see the
+fine article under "Family" in Hastings, _Encyclopaedia of Religion and
+Ethics_.
+
+[10] See Lecky, _History of European Morals_, chap. ii.
+
+[11] Quoted by Lofthouse in _Ethics and the Family_, p. 8, from W. Hall,
+in _Progress_ (London), April, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY
+
+
+§ 1. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY
+
+With the brief statement of the history of the family and of its
+function in society which has already been given we are prepared to put
+together the two conclusions: first, that the family has an educational
+function, in that it exists as a social institution for the protection,
+nurture, development, and training of young lives, and, secondly, that
+it is a religious institution, the most influential and important of all
+religious institutions, whenever it realizes in any adequate degree its
+possibilities, because it is rooted in love and loyalty. It exists for
+personal and spiritual ideals and, in Christianity, it is inseparably
+connected with the teachings and the ideals of Jesus. It is educational
+in function and religious in character, so that it is essentially an
+institution for religious education. Religious education is not an
+occasional incident in its life; it is the very aim and dominating
+purpose of a high-minded family.
+
+
+§ 2. WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION?
+
+To make this the more clear we may need to clarify our minds as to
+certain popular conceptions of education. Education means much more
+than instruction; religious education means much more than instruction
+in religion. Many habitually think of an educational institution as
+necessarily a place where pupils sit at desks and teachers preside over
+classes, the teachers imparting information which is to be memorized by
+the pupils, so that, from this point of view, a Sunday school would be
+almost the only institution for the religious education of children in
+existence, because it is the only one exclusively devoted to imparting
+instruction to children in specifically religious subjects. Such a view
+would limit religious education in the home to the formal teaching of
+the Bible and religious dogma by parents. The memorizing of scriptural
+passages and of the different catechisms once constituted a regular duty
+in almost all well-ordered homes. Today it is rarely attempted. Does
+that mean that religious education has ceased in the home?
+
+But education means much more than instruction. Education is the whole
+process, of which instruction is only a part. Education is the orderly
+development of lives, according to scientific principles, into the
+fulness of their powers, the realization of all their possibilities, the
+joy of their world, the utmost rendering in efficiency of their service.
+It includes the training of powers of thought, feeling, willing, and
+doing; it includes the development of abilities to discern,
+discriminate, choose, determine, feel, and do. It prepares the life for
+living with other lives; it prepares the whole of the life, developing
+the higher nature, the life of the spirit, for living in a spiritual
+universe.
+
+Religious education, then, means much more than instruction in the
+literature, history, and philosophy of religion. It means the kind of
+directed development which regards the one who is developing as a
+religious person, which seeks to develop that one to fulness of
+religious powers and personality, and which uses, as means to that end,
+material of religious inspiration and significance and, indeed, regards
+all material in that light. Religious education seeks to direct a
+religious process of growth with a religious purpose for religious
+persons. Religious education is the spirit which characterizes the work
+of every educator who looks on the child as a spiritual nature, a
+religious person; it is the work of every educator who sees his aim as
+that of training this spiritual person to fulness of living in a society
+essentially spiritual.
+
+In simplest possible terms, religious education means the training of
+persons to live the religious life and to do their work in the world as
+religious persons. It must mean, then, the development of character; it
+includes the aim, in the parents' minds, to bring their children up to
+the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. It is evident that
+this is a much greater task, and yet more natural and beautiful, than
+mere instruction in formal ideas or words in the Bible or in a
+catechism; that it is not and cannot be accomplished in some single
+period, some set hour, but is continuous, through all the days; that it
+pervades not only the spoken words, but the actions, organization, and
+the very atmosphere of the home.
+
+
+§ 3. THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
+
+Normal persons never stop growing. Just as children grow all the time in
+their bodies, so do adults and all others grow all the time in mind and
+will and powers of the higher life whenever they live normally. We grow
+spiritually, not only in church and under the stimulus of song and
+prayer, but we grow when the beauty of the woods appeals to us, when the
+face lightens at the face of a friend, when we meet and master a
+temptation, when we brace up under a load, when we do faithfully the
+dreary, daily task, when we adjust our thoughts in sympathy to others,
+when we move in the crowd, when we think by ourselves. The educational
+process is continuous. The children in the home are being moved,
+stimulated, every instant, and they are being changed in minute but
+nevertheless real and important degrees by each impression. There is
+never a moment in which their character is not being developed either
+for good or for ill. Religious education--that is, the development of
+their lives as religious persons--goes on all the time in the home, and
+it is either for good or for ill.
+
+Next to the idea of the continuous and all-pervasive character of this
+process of religious development the most important thought for us is
+that religious education in the home may be determined by ourselves.
+This continuous, fateful process is not a blind, resistless one. It is
+our duty to direct it. It is possible for wise parents to determine the
+characters of their children. We must not forget this. It cannot be too
+strongly insisted on. The development of life is under law. This is an
+orderly world. Things do not just happen in it. We believe in a law that
+determines the type of a cabbage, the character of a weed. Do we believe
+that this universe is so ordered that there is a law for weeds and none
+for the higher life of man? Do we hold that cabbages grow by law but
+character comes by chance? If there is a law we may find it and must
+obey it. If we may know how to develop character, with as great
+certainty as we know how to do our daily work, will not this be our
+highest task, our greatest joy, the supreme thing to do in life?
+
+
+§ 4. THE CONSEQUENT OBLIGATION
+
+This is the first great obligation of parents and of those who are
+willing to accept the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. We have
+no right to bring into this world lives with all the possibilities that
+a religious nature involves unless we know how to develop those lives
+for the best and from the worst. When we picture what a little child may
+become, from the vile, depraved, despoiling beast or the despicable,
+sneaking hypocrite on one extreme, to the upright, God-loving,
+man-serving man or woman with the love of purity, honor, truth, and
+goodness speaking through the life, we may well pause, realizing we need
+more than a sentimental desire that the child may reach the heights of
+goodness: we must know the way there and the methods of leading the life
+in that way. True devotion to God and to childhood will mean more than
+petitions for the salvation of children; it will mean the prayer that is
+labor and the labor that is prayer to know how they may attain fulness
+of spiritual life; it will mean reverent searching into the divine ways
+of growth in grace. The study of the means and methods of religious
+education, especially of children, in the home and family, is one of the
+most evident and important religious duties resting on parents and all
+who contemplate marriage and family life.
+
+
+§ 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD?
+
+In discussing the development of character in children one hears often
+the question, "Which is the earliest virtue to appear in a child?"
+People will debate whether it is truthfulness, reverence, kindness, or
+some other virtue. All this implies a picture of the child as a tree
+that sends forth shoots of separate virtues one after another. But the
+character desired is not a series of branches, it is rather like a
+symmetrical tree; it is not certain parts, but it is the whole of a
+personality. The development of religious character is not a matter of
+consciously separable virtues, but is the determination of the trend and
+quality of the whole life. Moral training is not a matter of cultivating
+honesty today, purity tomorrow, and kindness the day after. Virtues have
+no separate value. Character cannot be disintegrated into a list of
+independent qualities. We seek a life that, as a whole life, loves and
+follows truth, goodness, and service.
+
+
+§ 6. EARLY TENDENCIES
+
+But it is wise to inquire as to those manifestations of a pure and
+spiritual life which will earliest appear. One does not need to look far
+for the answer. Children are always affectionate; they manifest the
+possibilities of love. True, this affection is rooted in physiological
+experience, based on relations to the mother and on daily propinquity to
+the rest of the family, but it is that which may be colored by devotion,
+elevated by unselfish service, and may become the first great, ideal
+loyalty of the child's life. Little boys will fight and girls will
+quarrel more readily over the question of the merits of their respective
+parents than over any other issue. Almost as soon as a child can talk he
+boasts of the valor of his father, the beauty of his mother. Here is
+loyalty at work. He stands for them; he resents the least doubt as to
+their superiority, not because they give him food and shelter, but
+because they are his, because to him they are worthy; in all things they
+have the worth, the highest good; they are, in person, the virtue of
+life. Therefore in fighting for the reputation of his parents he is
+practicing loyalty to an ideal.
+
+The principle of loyalty is the life-force of virtue; it is like the
+power that sends the tree toward the heavens, the upthrust of life. It
+may be cultivated in a thousand ways. Provided there is the outreach and
+upreach of loyalty within and that there is furnished without the worthy
+object, ideal, and aim, the life will grow upward and increase in
+character, beauty, and strength.
+
+Next to the affectionate idealization of parents and home-folk one of
+the earliest manifestations of the spirit of loyalty in the child is
+his desire to have a share in the activities of the home. He would not
+only look like those he admires; he would do what they do. This is more
+than mere imitation; it is loyalty at work again. The direction of this
+tendency is one of the largest opportunities before parents and can make
+the most important contribution to character.
+
+The religious life of the child is essentially a matter of loyalty. His
+faith, affections, aspirations, and endeavors turn toward persons,
+institutions, and concepts which are to him ideal. He does not analyze,
+he cannot describe, or even narrate, his religious experiences, but he
+affectionately moves, with a sense of pleasure, toward those things
+which seem to him ideal, toward parents, customs of the home or school,
+the church, his class, his teacher, toward characters in story-books. He
+is likely to think of Jesus in just that way, as the one person whom he
+would most of all like to know and be with. The life of virtue and the
+religious life then will be weak or strong in the measure that the child
+has the stimulating ideals which call forth his loyalty and in the
+measure that he has opportunity to express that loyalty. His religious
+life will consist, not so much in external forms perhaps, still less in
+intellectual statements about theology or even about his own
+experiences, as in a growing realization of the great ideals, an
+increasing sense of their meaning and reality within, and, on the
+objective side, a steady moving of his life toward them in action and
+habits and therefore in character and quality.
+
+
+§ 7. IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS
+
+It is worth while to insist upon two important considerations. Parents
+who stand as gardeners watching the growth of the tender plant of
+child-character may be looking for developments that never ought to come
+and will be disappointed because they were looking for the wrong thing.
+First, in watching for the beginnings of the religious life of the child
+in the family we are not expecting some new addition to the life, but
+rather the development of this whole life as a unity in a definite
+direction which we call religious. It is the first and most important
+consideration that religious education is not something added to the
+life as an extra subject of interest, but the development of the whole
+life into religious character and usefulness. Secondly, this growth of
+religious character is going on all the time. It is not separable into
+pious periods; it is a part of the very life of the family. Perhaps this
+increases the difficulty of our task, for it removes it from the realm
+of the mechanical, from that which is easily apprehended and estimated.
+It takes the task of the religious education of children out of the
+statistical into the vital, and reminds us that we are growing life
+every second, that there is never a moment when religious education is
+not in operation. This demands a consideration, not alone of lessons, of
+periods of worship and instruction, but of every influence, activity,
+and agency in all the family life that in any way affects the thinking,
+feeling, and action of the child. We are thinking of something more
+important than organizing instruction and exercises in religion in the
+home; we are thinking of organizing the family life for religious
+purposes, for the purpose of growing lives into their spiritual fulness.
+
+Perhaps the capital mistake in the religious education of the family is
+that we overemphasize this or the other method and mechanism instead of
+bending every effort to secure a real religious atmosphere and soil in
+which young souls can really grow while we leave the process of growth
+more largely to the great husbandman. And the second great mistake is
+that we are looking for mechanical evidence of a religious life instead
+of for the development of a whole person. We must reinterpret the family
+to ourselves and see it as the one great opportunity life affords us to
+grow other lives and to bring them to spiritual fulness by providing a
+social atmosphere of the spirit and a constant, normal presentation of
+social living in spiritual terms.
+
+
+§ 8. THE ORGANIZATION OF LOYALTY
+
+When parents conceive the family in these terms and so organize the life
+of the home, the child becomes conscious of the fact, and at once the
+life of the family furnishes him with his first, his nearest, and most
+satisfactory appeal to loyalty. He feels that which he cannot analyze or
+express, the spiritual beauty and loyalty of family life. That life
+furnishes a soil and atmosphere for his soul. It is an atmosphere made
+of many elements: the primary and dominating purpose of parents and
+older persons, the habitual life of service and love, the consciousness
+of the reality of the Divine Presence, the fragrance of chastened
+character and experience, the customs of worship and affections. These
+things are not easily created, they cannot be readily defined, nor can
+directions be given in a facile manner for their cultivation. They are
+the elements most difficult to describe, hardest of all to secure when
+lacking, least easily labeled, not to be purchased ready-made, and yet
+without them religious education is wholly impossible in the family.
+Without this immediate appeal to loyalty the loyalties of the child
+toward higher and divine aims do not develop early; they are retarded
+and often remain dormant. For us all scarcely any more important
+question can be presented than this: What appeals to spiritual idealism
+and loyalty does our family life present to the child? What quickening
+of love for goodness and purity, truth and service, is there in the home
+and its conduct?
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chaps. i, ii, xii,
+     xiii. Revell, $1.35.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. i, ii.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     J.T. McFarland, _Preservation versus Resurrection_. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.07.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children_, chaps. i, ii, xv. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chaps. i, iv, xvi.
+     Revell, $1.35.
+
+     E.C. Wilm, _Culture of Religion_, chaps. i, ii. Pilgrim Press,
+     $0.75.
+
+     C.W. Rischell, _The Child as God's Child_. Methodist Book Concern,
+     $0.75.
+
+     E.E. Read Mumford, _The Dawn of Character_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.20. See especially chap. xii on "The Dawn of Religion."
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. How would you define education?
+
+     2. What is the difference between education and religious
+     education?
+
+     3. What makes the home especially effective in education?
+
+     4. Is it true that it is possible to discover the laws of growth
+     and so determine the development of character?
+
+     5. Recall any very early manifestations of religious character in
+     small children. What would you regard as the best kind of
+     manifestation?
+
+     6. What is the essential principle of the right life? How may we
+     develop this in childhood?
+
+     7. What are the things which most of all impress children?
+
+     8. Would you think it wise to bring a child under the influence of
+     a religious revival?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CHILD'S RELIGIOUS IDEAS
+
+
+How shall I begin to talk with my child about religion? Even the most
+religious parents feel hesitancy here. It may not be at all due to the
+unfamiliarity of the subject, though that is often the case; hesitation
+is due principally to a conscious artificiality in the action. It seems
+unnatural to say, "My child, I want to talk with you about your
+religious life." And so it is. There is something wrong when that
+appears to be the only way. That situation indicates a lack of freedom
+of thought and intercourse with the child and a lack of naturalness in
+religion.
+
+
+§ 1. THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFICULTY
+
+The instinct is correct that tells us that we should be trespassing on a
+child's rights, or breaking down his proper reticence, in abruptly and
+formally questioning him about his religious life. The reserve of
+children in this matter must be respected. The inner life of aspiration,
+of conscious relationship to the divine, is too sacred for display, even
+to those who are near to us. He violates the child's reverence who tears
+away his reticence. Even though the child may not consciously object,
+the process leads him toward the irreverent, facile self-exposure of
+the soul that characterizes some prayer meetings. But we may, also, as
+easily err in the other direction and, by failing to invite the
+confidences of our children, lead them to suppose we have no interest in
+their higher life.
+
+
+§ 2. CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS
+
+First, we must be content to wait for the child to open his heart. We
+must not force the door. But we can invite him to open, and the one form
+of invitation that scarcely ever fails is for you to give him your
+confidence. Talk honestly, simply to him of the aspects of your
+religious life that he can understand. If he knows that you confide in
+him, he will confide in you. Here beware of sentimentality. Religion to
+the child will find expression in everyday experiences. Your philosophy
+of religion he cannot comprehend, and with your mature emotions he has
+no point of contact. Perhaps the best method of approach is to relate
+your memories of those experiences which you _now see_ to have had
+religious significance to you. At the time they may have had no such
+special meaning. You did not then analyze them. Your child will not and
+must not analyze them, either; he must simply feel them.
+
+Secondly, rid your mind of the "times and seasons" notion. There is no
+more reason why you should talk religion on Sunday than on Monday,
+unless the day's interests have quickened the child's questioning. There
+can be no set period; no times when you say, "This is the forty-five
+minutes of spiritual instruction and conversation." The time available
+may be very short, only a sentence may be possible, or it may be
+lengthened; everything will depend on the interest. It must be natural,
+a real part of the everyday thought and talk, lifted by its character
+and subject to its own level. Its value depends on its natural reality.
+
+
+§ 3. RELIGIOUS REALITY
+
+Thirdly, avoid the mistake of confounding conversation on "religion"
+with religious conversation, of thinking that the desired end has been
+attained when you have discussed the terminology of theology. To
+illustrate, in the family one hardly ever hears the word hygiene, but
+well-trained children learn much about the care of their bodies in
+health, and the family economy is directed consciously to that end. A
+good, nourishing meal always contributes more to health than many
+lectures on dietetics. Yet back, hidden away in the manager's mind, is
+the science of dietetics. So is it with quickening the child's power and
+thought in the spiritual life. We must avoid the abstract, the
+intellectually analytical. Religion should present itself concretely,
+practically, and as an atmosphere and ideal in the family. We parents
+must not look for theological interest in the child. A Timothy Dwight at
+ten or twelve, though once found in Sunday-school library books, is a
+monstrosity. The child's aspiration, his religious devotion, his love
+for God will find expression in almost every other way before it will be
+formulated into questions of a serious theological character. Nor ought
+we to force upon him the phrases of religion to which we are accustomed.
+He will live in another day and must speak its tongue. His faith must
+find itself in consciousness and then be permitted to clothe itself in
+appropriate garments of words. Those garments must be woven out of the
+realities of actual experiences in the child's life. We cannot prepare
+or make them for him. The expression of religion will be consonant with
+the stage of development. If his faith is to be real he must never be
+allowed or tempted to imagine that if only he can use the words, the
+verbal symbol, he has the fact, the life-experience. Try then to use
+words which are simple and meaningful to him and be content to wait for
+life to lead him to formulate vital verbal forms for himself.
+
+
+§ 4. PATIENCE AND COMMON-SENSE
+
+Fourthly, we must have faith in God's laws of growth. If we be but
+faithful, furnishing the soil, the seed, the nurture, we must wait for
+the increase. Many factors which we cannot control will determine
+whether it shall be early or late and what form it shall take. We must
+wait. It is high folly that pulls up the sprouting grain to see whether
+it is growing properly.
+
+Fifthly, manifestations of the religious life will vary in children and
+in families. The commonest error is to expect some one popular form
+alone, to imagine that all children must pass through some standardized
+experiences. Mrs. Brown's Willy may rise in prayer meeting. Do not be
+downhearted. Willy is only doing that which he has seen his parents do,
+and, usually, only because they do it. Your boy, or girl, is seeking
+health of life, of thought, of action; is growing in character. Let them
+grow, help them to grow. You know they love you even when they say
+little about it; you do not expect them to climb to the housetop and
+declare their affection. A flower does not sing about the sun, it grows
+toward it. That is the test of the child's religion: Is he growing
+Godward in life, action, character?
+
+
+§ 5. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD
+
+Sixthly, deal most carefully with the child's consciousness of God. The
+truth is that the child in the average home has a consciousness of God.
+It grows out of formal references in social rites and customs, informal
+allusions in conversation, and direct statements and instruction. But
+frequently the resultant mental picture is a misleading one, sometimes
+even vicious in its moral effect. Where superstitious servants take more
+interest in the child's religious ideas than do his parents, we have the
+child whose life is darkened by the fear of an omnipotent ogre.
+Nursemaids will slothfully scare small children into silence by threats
+of the awful presence of a bogey god. The life of the spirit cannot be
+trusted to the hireling. Parents must be sure of the character as well
+as the superficial competency of those who come closest to childhood. A
+child's ideas are formed before he goes to school. The family cannot
+delegate the formation of dominant ideas to persons trained only for
+nursery tasks.
+
+But frequently the mother is a misleading teacher. To her the child goes
+with all the big questions outside the immediate world of things. Is she
+prepared to answer the questions? Few dilemmas of our life today are
+more pathetic than this: the mother has outgrown the theology of her
+childhood; she remembers keenly the suffering and superstition, the
+struggle that followed the darkened pictures she received as a little
+one, but she has nothing better to offer the child. No one has taught
+her how to put the later, more spiritual concepts into language for the
+child of our day. Weakly she falls back on the forms of words she once
+abhorred.
+
+There are certainly two approaches of reality for the child-mind to the
+idea of God. Two immediate experiences are rich in meaning; they are the
+life of the family and the wonder of the everyday world, the life and
+variety of nature and human activities. The first is a very simple and
+rich approach. By every possible means help children in the family to
+think of God as the great and good Father of us all. Do this in the
+phrasing of prayers and graces, in the answers to their questions, in
+the casual word. Why should we assume that the Fatherhood of God is for
+the adult alone? And why should it be that this rich concept dawns on us
+like a new day of freedom in truth in later years instead of becoming
+ours in childhood and so determining the habit and attitude of our
+lives? The finest, the ideal person is, to the child, the father. God in
+terms of fatherhood is the sum and source of all that is ideal in
+personality.
+
+The child's keen interest in the world of nature is our opportunity to
+lead him to love the gracious source of all beauty and goodness. How
+keen is the child's enjoyment of the beauty of the world! Can we forever
+fix the general concept of all this beauty as the thought of God in the
+words of flower and leaf, mountain and stream? And might we not also
+connect the idea of God with the affairs of daily life? That depends on
+the parent's attitude of mind; if we think of the universal life that is
+behind all battles and business and affairs, there will be a difference
+in our answers to the thousand curious inquiries that rise in the
+child's mind.
+
+Nor must we leave the child to think of God as a separate, far-off
+person, on a throne somewhere in the skies. The child is finding his way
+into a universe. The God who is a minute fraction of that universe makes
+possible the religion that is no more than a negligible fraction of
+life. The child asks concerning clouds, the sea, the trees, the birds,
+and all the world about him; he tends to interpret it causally and
+ideally. Childhood affords the great opportunity for giving the color,
+the beauty and glory, the life of the divine to all this universe, to
+instil the feeling that God is everywhere, in all and through all, and
+that in him we live and move and have our being. The child's joy in this
+world can thus be given a religious meaning. He sings
+
+    My God, I thank thee thou hast made
+    This earth so bright....,
+
+and so beauty and joy become part of his religion. His faith becomes a
+gladsome thing; he knows that the trees of the forest clap their hands,
+the mountains and the hills sing, and the morning stars chant together
+in the gladness of the divine life.
+
+Such a view of the world comes not by prearranged and indoor interviews.
+One must walk out into the good outdoor world for the opportunity and
+the inspiration. The garden plot, the park, and, best of all, the open
+fields and woods speak to a child and furnish us an open book from which
+we may teach him to read. Recalling religious impressions, the writer
+would testify to feeling nothing deeper, as a result of church
+attendance in childhood, than the shapes of seats and the colors of
+walls; but there remain deep impressions of wonder, beauty, and the
+meaning of God from Sunday mornings spent with his father under the
+great beeches in Epping Forest, listening to the reading and singing of
+the old hymns, or joining in conversation on the woods and the flowers,
+and even on the legends of Robin Hood in the forest.
+
+
+§ 6. THE EVERYDAY OPPORTUNITIES
+
+Seventhly, natural conversation affords the best opportunity for direct
+instruction. A child is a peripatetic interrogation. His questions cover
+the universe; there are no doors which you desire to see opened that he
+will not approach at some time. There is great advantage when the
+religious question rises normally; when the child begins it and when the
+interest continues with the same naturalness as in conversation on any
+other subject. Then questions usually take one of three forms: mere
+childish, curious questions, questions on conduct, and questions on
+religion in its organized form.
+
+The child's curiosity is the basis of even those questions which have
+usually been credited to preternatural piety. The tiny youngster who
+asks strange questions about God asks equally startling ones about
+fairies or about his grandmother. But his questions give us the chance
+to direct him to right thoughts of God. Here we need to be sure of our
+own thoughts and to keep in mind our principal purpose, to quicken in
+this child loyalty to the highest and best. He must be shown a God whom
+he can love and, at the same time, one who will call for his growing
+loyalty, his courage, and devotion. Everything for the child's future
+depends on the pictures he now forms. We all carry to a large degree our
+childhood's view of God.
+
+Some of the child's questions probe deep; how shall we answer them? When
+you know the truth tell him the truth, being sure that it is told in
+language that really conveys truth to his mind. The danger is that
+parents will attempt to tell more than they know, to answer questions
+that cannot be answered, or that they will, in sloth or cowardice or
+ignorance, tell children untrue things. If a child asks, "Did God make
+the world?" the answer that will be true to the child may be a simple
+affirmative. If the child asks or his query implies, "Did God make the
+leaves, or the birds, with his fingers?" we had better take time to
+show the difference between man's making of things and the working of
+the divine energy through all the process of the development of the
+world. When the child asks, "Mother, if God made all things, why did he
+make the devil?" it would surely be wise and opportune to correct the
+child's mental picture of a personal anti-God and to take from him his
+bogey of a "devil." But the question of the relation of God to the
+existence of evil would remain, and the best a parent could do would be
+to illustrate the necessities of freedom of choice and will in life by
+similar freedom in the family.
+
+It must be remembered that children's curious questions are only their
+attempt to discover their world, that they have no peculiar religious
+significance, but that they afford the parent a vital opportunity for
+direct religious instruction. These questions must be treated seriously;
+something is missing in parental consciousness when the child's
+questions furnish only material for jesting relation to the family
+friends.
+
+
+§ 7. MORAL TEACHING
+
+_Questions on conduct_: Scores of times in the day the children come in
+from play or from school and tell of what has happened. Their more or
+less breathless recitals very often include vigorous accounts of
+"cheating," "naughtiness," unfair play, unkind words, discourtesies,
+all dependent as to their character on the age of the children and all
+opening doors for free conversation on duties and conduct. Here lies one
+of the large opportunities for moral instruction. There is no need to
+attempt to make formal occasions for this; so long as children play and
+live with others they are under the experience of learning the art of
+living with one another; this is the simple essence of morality. The
+parent's answers to their questions on conduct, the comments on their
+criticisms, and the conversation that may easily be directed on these
+subjects count tremendously with the child in establishing his ideals
+and modes of conduct. Returning to his play, there is no mightier
+authority he can quote than to say, "My mother says--," or "My father
+says--."
+
+Let no one say that instruction in moral living is not religious, for
+there can be no adequate guidance in morals without religion, nor can
+the religious quality of the life find expression adequately except
+through conduct in social living. Children need more than the rules for
+living; they must feel motives and see ideals. They do not live by rules
+any more than we do. Besides the rule that is known there must be a
+reason for following it and a strong desire to do so. All ethical
+teaching needs this imperative and motivation of religion, the
+quickening of loyalty to high ideals, the doing of the right for
+reasons of love as well as of duty and profit.
+
+The father's opportunity comes especially with the boys. They are sure
+to bring to him their ethical questions on games and sport; he knows
+more about boys' fights and struggles than does the mother. When the
+boys begin to discuss their games the father cannot afford to lack
+interest. Trivial as the question may seem to be, it is the most
+important one of the day to the boy and, for the interests of his
+character, it may be the most important for many a day to the father. If
+he answers with sympathy and interest this question on a "foul ball" or
+on marbles or peg-tops, he has opened a door that will always stay open
+so long as he approaches it with sincerity; if he slights it, if he is
+too busy with those lesser things that seem great to him, he has closed
+a door into the boy's life; it may never be opened again. Children learn
+life through the life they are now living. Real preparation for the
+world of business and larger responsibilities comes by the child's
+experiences of his present world of play and schooling and family
+living. To help him to live this present life aright is the best
+training that can be given for the right living of all life.
+
+_Questions on organized religion_: As children grow up, the church comes
+into their range of interests. Just as they often make the day school
+focal for conversation, as they recount their day's work there, so they
+retain impressions of the church school, of the services of the church,
+and will always ask many questions about this institution and its
+observances. Here is the opportunity, in free conversation, to tell the
+child the meaning of the church, the significance of membership therein,
+and to lead him to conscious relationship to the society of the
+followers of Jesus. (See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church.")
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Alice E. Fitts, "Consciousness of God in Children," _The Aims of
+     Religious Education_, pp. 330-38. Religious Education Association,
+     $1.00.
+
+     W.G. Koons, _Child's Religious Life_, sec. II. Eaton & Mains,
+     $1.00.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, chap. vi. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     George Hodges, _The Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. i-vi.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Child and His Religion_, chap. ii. The
+     University of Chicago Press, $0.75.
+
+     Edward Lyttleton, _The Corner-Stone of Education_, chap. viii.
+     Putnam, $1.50.
+
+     T. Stephens (ed.), _The Child and Religion_. Putnam, $1.50.
+
+     C.W. Richell, _The Child as God's Child_. Eaton & Mains, $0.75.
+
+     W.G. Koons, _The Child's Religious Nature_. Eaton & Mains, $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special difficulties which you feel about
+     introducing the topic of religion to children? Describe any methods
+     or modes of approach which have seemed successful?
+
+     2. Would you regard it as a fault if a child seems unwilling to
+     talk about religion? What do you think "religion" means to the
+     child-mind?
+
+     3. In what ways do children's aptitudes differ and what factors
+     probably determine the difference? What was your own childish
+     conception of God? Did you love God or fear him? Why?
+
+     4. Is it ever right to teach the child those conceptions which we
+     have outgrown? What about Santa Claus and fairies? How can you use
+     childish figures of speech as an avenue to more exact truth?
+
+     5. Does the child learn more through ears or eyes? Through which
+     agency do we seek to convey religious ideas?
+
+     6. Is it possible to make the child see the intimate relation
+     between conduct and religion? How would you do this?
+
+     7. Give some of the characteristics of a religious child of seven
+     years, of ten.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+DIRECTED ACTIVITY
+
+
+Probably all parents find themselves at some time thinking that the
+real, fundamental problem of training their children lies in dealing
+with their superabundant energy. "He is such an active child!" mothers
+complain. Were he otherwise a physician might properly be consulted. But
+the child's activity does seriously interfere with parental peace. It
+takes us all a long time to learn that we are not, after all, in our
+homes in order to enjoy peaceful rest, but in order to train children
+into fulness of life. That does not mean that the home should be without
+quiet and rest, but that we must not hope to repress the energy of
+childhood. One might as well hope to plug up a spring in the hillside.
+Our work is to direct that activity into glad, useful service.
+
+
+§ 1. VALUE OF ACTIVITY
+
+The things we do not only indicate character, they determine it. Our
+thoughts have value and power as they get into action. To bend our
+energies toward an ideal is to make it more real, to make it a part of
+ourselves. Children learn by doing--learn not only that which they are
+doing but life itself.
+
+It may be doubted whether a child ever grew who did not plead to have a
+share in the work he saw going on about him. That desire to help is part
+of that fundamental virtue of loyalty of which we have spoken above; it
+is his desire to be true to the tendency of the home, to give himself to
+the realization of its purposes. Of course he does not think this out at
+all. But this desire on the part of the child to have a hand in the
+day's work is the parent's fine opportunity for a most valuable and
+influential form of character direction.
+
+One of the tests of a worthy character is whether the life is
+contributory or parasitic, whether one carries his load, does his work,
+makes his contribution, or simply waits on the world for what he can
+get. A religious interpretation of and attitude toward life is
+essentially that of self-giving in service. "My Father worketh hitherto
+and I work." "I must be about my Father's business." How noticeable is
+the child's interest in the vivid word-picture of One who "went about
+doing good"!
+
+
+§ 2. THE BLESSING OF LABOR
+
+The home is the first place for life's habituation to service. The child
+is greatly to be pitied who has no duties, no share in the work. Where
+the hands are unsoiled the heart is the easier sullied. It is the height
+of mistaken kindness, one of the common errors of an unthinking,
+superficial affection, to protect our children from work. This is a
+world of the moral order and of the glory of work.
+
+When the child is very small it must learn this by having committed to
+it very simple duties. As soon as it is able to handle things it may
+learn to do that which is most helpful with those things, to care for
+its toys, to put them away neatly. A child can learn while very young to
+take care of its spoon, of certain clothes, of chair, and pencil and
+paper. True, it is much easier to "pick up" after the child; but to do
+so is to yield to our own sloth. The more tedious way is the one we must
+follow if we would train the child.
+
+Besides the care of his possessions the child will gladly take a share
+in the general work of the home. Let some daily duty be assigned to each
+one; such simple responsibilities as picking up all papers and magazines
+and seeing that they are properly stacked or disposed of may be given to
+one; another may sweep the stairs every day with a whisk broom (in one
+instance a boy of eight did this daily); another may be "librarian,"
+caring for all books; each one, after eight years of age, should make
+her own bed; each one should be entirely responsible for his own table
+in his room. Many homes permit of many other "chores," such as keeping
+up the supply of small kindling, caring for a pet or even a larger
+animal, keeping a little personal garden or vegetable plot. Under those
+normal conditions of living, which some day we may reach, where each
+family, or all families, have trees and flowers and ample space, the
+opportunities are increased for joyous child activities which
+consciously contribute to social well-being as a whole.
+
+
+§ 3. RELIGION IN ACTION
+
+Perhaps some will say, this is not religious education, it is everyday
+training. Yes, it is "everyday training," but it is the training of a
+religious person with the religious purpose of habituating the child to
+give his life in service to his world. That is precisely what we
+need--_religion in everyday action_. The atmosphere and habitual
+attitude and conversation of the family must be depended on to give a
+really religious meaning to these everyday acts, to make them as
+religious as going to church, perhaps more so, and so to make them a
+training for the life that is religious, not in word only, but in deed
+and in truth.
+
+Whatever we may say to children on the subject of religion, whether
+directly or in teaching by indirection through songs and worship, must
+pass over somehow into action in order to have meaning and reality. It
+must be realized in order to be real. The difficulty that appears is
+that of connecting the daily act with its spiritual significance. Yet
+that is not as difficult as it seems. If the act has religious
+significance to us, if we form the habit of really worshiping God with
+our work, seeking in it to do his will, the child will know it. We
+cannot keep that hidden. The spiritual life will never be more real to
+the child than it is to us, and no amount of moralizing or
+spiritualizing about our acts or his will give them religious
+significance.
+
+At least one person will testify that, after being brought up in a
+really religious home, the most strikingly religious memory of that home
+is an occasion when he delightedly carried a tray of food to a sick
+neighbor. It was doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing
+the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the
+life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are
+acts repeated until they pass from the volitional to the involuntary.
+The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the
+willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it
+becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the
+flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a
+share in all our ministries.[12]
+
+The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in
+forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social
+activities for students to carry out.[13] The parents ought to know what
+is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to
+co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of
+service suggested for the children, these activities lose all
+perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a
+normal part of life.
+
+Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we
+were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we
+were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a
+sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our
+thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for,
+and that joy will be their strength.
+
+
+§ 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE
+
+The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own
+activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may
+acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the
+chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life.
+Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or ride in private
+cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted
+life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have
+without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy
+remain the passive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he
+is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert
+him from the pauper habit.
+
+The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of
+passive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to
+shield them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The
+religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the
+days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and
+finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men.
+Vain is all family worship, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless
+we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the
+imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in
+heart. The family may make this the normal way to live.
+
+If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of
+the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see
+itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and
+helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people
+the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight in
+self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in
+relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial,
+and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a
+child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere
+is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.
+
+The whole attitude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of
+the family. The greedy family makes the grafting citizen. The grasping
+home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace. Greater than
+the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the
+ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizenship
+in your home. No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beatitudes or
+week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of
+envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home.
+Home action and attitude count for more than all besides.
+
+It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power
+of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective
+method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole
+social duty unselfishly.
+
+
+§ 5. FAMILY TRAINING FOR SOCIAL LIVING
+
+The supreme test of the religious life here is ability to live among men
+as brothers and to cause the conditions of the divine family to be
+realized on earth. If we can realize that the purpose of Jesus was to
+bring men into the family of God, that the aim of all religious endeavor
+is the family character in men and women and the conditions of that
+family in all society, we must surely appreciate the possibility of the
+human family as a training school for this larger family of humanity.
+
+The infant approaches social living by the pathway of the society of the
+family. We all go out into life through widening circles, first the
+mother's arms, then the family, the neighborhood, the city, the state,
+the nation, the world-life. Each circle prepares for the next. The
+family is the child's social order; its life is his training for the
+larger life of nation and human brotherhood.
+
+Just how men and women will live in society is determined principally by
+the bent of their characters in the social order of the family. Their
+attitude to the world follows the attitude of the family, especially of
+the parents. They interpret the larger world by the lesser. The home is
+the great school of citizenship and social living.
+
+All the moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the
+purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its
+cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and
+motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the
+coming generation to live in a religious society, in one which will
+steadily move toward the divine ideal of perfect family relations
+through brotherhood and fatherhood. Its business is not to get children
+ready for heaven, but to train them to make all life heavenly. Its aim
+is not alone children who will not tear down the parents' reputation,
+but men and women who will build up the actual worth and beauty of all
+lives.
+
+The realization, in the family, of the purpose of training youth to
+social living and service in the religious spirit depends on two things:
+a spirit and passion in the family for social justice and order, and the
+direction of the activities of the family toward training in social
+usefulness.
+
+Only the social spirit can give birth to the social spirit. True lovers
+of men, who set the values of life and of the spirit first, who give
+their lives that all men may have freedom and means to find more
+abundant life, come out of the families where the passion of human love
+burns high. The selfish family, self-centered, caring not at all in any
+deep sense for the well-being of others, existing to extract the juice
+of life and let who will be nourished on the rind, becomes effective to
+make the social highwayman, the oppressor. From such a family comes he
+who breaks laws for his pocketbook and impedes the enactment of laws
+lest human rights should prevent his acquisition of wealth; he who
+hates his brother man--unless that brother has more than he has; the foe
+of the kingdom of goodness and peace and brotherhood.
+
+And goodness is as contagious as badness. Children catch the spirit of
+social love and idealism in the family. Where men and women are deeply
+concerned with all that makes the world better for lives, better for
+babies and mothers, for workers, and, above all, for the values of the
+spirit gained through leisure, opportunities, and higher incentives;
+where the family is more concerned with folks than with furniture; where
+habitually it thinks of people as Jesus did, as the objects most of all
+worth seeking, worth investing in, there children receive direction,
+habituation, and motivation for the life of religion, the life that
+binds them in glad love to the service of their fellows, and makes them
+think of all their life as the one great chance to serve, to make a
+better world, and to bring God's great family closer together here.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, pp. 142-50. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+     W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_, pp. 85-102. Pilgrim Press,
+     $1.00.
+
+     G. Johnson, _Education by Plays and Games_, Part I. Ginn & Co.,
+     $0.90.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     E.D. Angell, _Play_. Little, Brown & Co., $1.50.
+
+     Fisher, Gulick, _et al._, "Ethical Significance of Play,"
+     _Materials for Religious Education_, pp. 197-215. Religious
+     Education Association, $0.50.
+
+     Publications of the Play Ground Association.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     PLAY
+
+     Forbush, _Manual of Play_. Jacobs, $1.00.
+
+     A. Newton, _Graded Games_. Barnes, $1.25.
+
+     Von Palm, _Rainy Day Pastimes_. Dana Estes, $1.00.
+
+     Johnson, _When Mother Lets Us Help_. Moffat, Yard & Co., $0.75.
+
+     WORK
+
+     Canfield, _What Shall We Do Now?_ Stokes, $1.50.
+
+     Beard, _Jack of All Trades_. Scribner, $2.00.
+
+     Beard, _Things Worth Doing_. Scribner, $2.00.
+
+     Bailey, _Garden Making_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     Bailey (ed.), _Something to Do_ (magazine). School Arts Publishing
+     Co.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Is the quiet child an ideal child? How far should we go in
+     restraining activity?
+
+     2. The relative advantages of work and leisure for children. What
+     of the value of chores to you; did you do them? Describe any forms
+     of children's service in the home which have come under your
+     observation.
+
+     3. What forms of community service can be done by children and by
+     young people?
+
+     4. Recall any lessons learned by activity in your early home life.
+
+     5. Give in their order, according to your judgment, the potencies
+     for religious character in the home.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] A short list of books on child activity in the home is appended at
+the end of this chapter; a fairly complete list, long enough for any
+family, will be found on p. 117 of _The Church School_, by W.S. Athearn.
+
+[13] See W.N. Hutchins, _Graded Social Service for the Sunday School_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE HOME AS A SCHOOL[14]
+
+
+The home is so mighty as a school because, requiring little time for
+formal instruction, it enlists its scholars so largely in informal
+activities. It trains for life by living; it trains as an institution,
+by a group of activities, a series of duties, a set of habits. If the
+home is to prepare for social living it will be most of all and best of
+all by its organization and conduct as a social institution.
+
+
+§ 1. AN IDEAL COMMUNITY
+
+For the purposes of society homes must be social-training centers; they
+must be conducted as communities if their members are to be fitted for
+communal living. No boy is likely to be ready for the responsibilities
+of free citizenship who has spent his years in a home under an absolute
+monarchy; or, as is today perhaps more frequently the case, in a
+condition of unmitigated anarchy. A free society cannot consist of units
+not free. The problems of parental discipline arise and appear as
+persistently irritating and perplexing stumbling-blocks in many a home
+simply because that home is organized altogether out of harmony and
+relation with the normal life in which it is set. Society environing the
+home gives its members the habits of twentieth-century autonomy,
+individual initiative and responsibility, together with collective
+living and working, while the home often seeks to perpetuate
+thirteenth-century absolutism, serfdom, and subjection. In social living
+outside the home we learn to do the will of all; in the home we attempt
+to compel children to do the will of one.
+
+
+§ 2. COMMUNITY INTERESTS
+
+The home organized as a social community will give to every member,
+according to his ability, a share in its guidance and will expect from
+every member the free contribution of his powers. Its rules will be made
+by the will of all, and its affairs governed, not by an executive board
+composed of the parents, but by the free participation and choice of
+all. The young will learn to choose by choosing; will learn both how to
+rule and to be ruled by a share in ruling.
+
+To be explicit, suppose a piece of furniture is desired for the home.
+Two plans at least are possible: first, the "head of the home" may go
+forth and purchase it without consulting anyone, or after advising with
+the other "head"; or, second, before a purchase is made, the wisdom of
+such an addition to the furniture may be suggested in the open council
+of the whole family and the purchase discussed and determined by all.
+Such councils, usually coming at or after the principal meal, freely
+participated in by all, give even to the youngest a sense of the cost of
+a home, of the care that goes into it, with, what is more important, a
+sense of a share in these cares and costs; they cultivate habits of
+prudence, of consideration of a matter, of steady judgments, of
+deference to the wishes and wisdom of others. Of still greater
+importance is another practical issue of such a plan--that every member
+of the household has a new sense of proprietorship with deepened
+responsibility. Instead of thinking of any household possession as
+father's or mother's, or even mine, it becomes _ours_. The parents no
+longer need to say, "Children, do not mar the furniture; it costs money
+to replace it." The children know that already, and they have the same
+pride in the home possessions and the same desire to preserve them as
+they have in that which is peculiarly their own. A habit of mind results
+from such a course so that, by thinking in terms of common possession of
+the best things of life, there is cultivated that respect for the rights
+of others which is simply right social thinking.
+
+The same plan could be pursued in relation to almost every interest of
+the family--as the planning of the annual vacation and outing, the
+holidays, picnics, and birthday celebrations, the church and religious
+exercises. Above all, in the last mentioned, this social spirit may be
+cultivated. The father may cease to be the "high priest" for his family
+and become a worshiper along with the other members. The effect will be
+that his children are more likely to stay as worshipers with him than if
+they gazed on him as on some lonely elevation, unrelated to them in his
+religious exercises. The reading, the song, the prayers, the comment and
+discussion, the story-telling, and all that may make up the regular
+specific religious activities of the family should be such that all may
+have a share in them. Nothing could be finer, diviner, and bring larger
+helpfulness for social living than the attempt of the least little
+lisping child to throw herself into the unified family act of prayer, as
+when one little tot, unable to say the Lord's Prayer, united in worship
+at the time of that act by saying, as reverently as possible, "One, two,
+three, four, five," etc., up to ten. The ability to count was her latest
+accomplishment; counting to ten was bringing the very best thing she
+then had and, in the act of family worship, offering her part to the
+Most High. A fine sense of worship and a desire to be one with the
+others in this united, communal service prompted the participation.
+
+
+§ 3. COMMUNITY SERVICE
+
+Community service may be cultivated in the home. Here is the ideal
+social community, where there are neither parasites nor paupers, where
+all give of their best for the best of all. No one doubts that the baby
+gives its full share of happiness and cheer, and the aged their offering
+of consolation and experience; but the difficulty is supposed to be with
+the lad and the girl who would rather play than work. Usually this is
+because the habits of co-operation in the life of this community have
+been too long neglected. The small boy or girl had no share in its work.
+Parents are too busy to think through the matter of finding suitable
+duties for all. It is so much easier to do things one's self, even
+though the child misses the benefits of participation. More frequently
+the blame lies in the fact that parents desire to shield children from
+labor. Some would have them grow up without knowing what they count as
+the degradation of toil. But a boy who knows nothing of the "chores" has
+missed half the joys of boyhood, and has a terribly hard lesson ahead of
+him when he goes out to relate himself to life. No matter what one's
+station may be, there is a part to be played, and one's piece of work to
+be done. The greatest unkindness we can do our children is to train them
+to lives that do not play their part. The home is our chance to train a
+man to harmonious usefulness in his world. Not only should the family
+train to social co-operation and service, but it should train to
+efficiency therein. Do not let your child's duties become a farce; let
+them exact as much of him as the world will exact also; that is,
+efficiency, accuracy, thoroughness, and fidelity.
+
+
+§ 4. A SCHOOL OF SOCIAL MINISTRY
+
+The family trains lives for social ministry. The unsocial lives come out
+of unsocial homes. The home that exists for itself alone trains lives
+that exist only for themselves; these are the homes that throw the sand
+of selfishness into the wheels of society; they ultimately effect social
+suicide through selfishness. The attitude and atmosphere of the home are
+of first importance here. As we think, so will our children act. If the
+home is to us a place without responsibilities for the neighborhood,
+without duties to neighbors, without social roots, then it is a school
+for industrial, commercial, and social greed and warfare. As we think in
+our hearts and talk at our table, so are we educating those who sit
+thereat.
+
+If we would have our homes really efficient and worthy agencies for
+education in social living, the first thing to do is to seek the social
+atmosphere, to cultivate all those influences which young lives
+unconsciously absorb. We all know that character comes through
+environment in large measure, and that the mental and spiritual
+environment is by far the most potent. Here is something that affects us
+more than the finest or poorest furniture and that gives the real zest
+and flavor to any meal. The choice of our own reading enters here, not
+only the matter of reading in sociology, but of all reading, as to
+whether it blinds with class prejudices, intensifies caste feeling, or
+atrophies social sympathy by pandering to selfishness and sensuousness.
+The control of our own feelings and judgment enters here. Do we
+sedulously cultivate charity for others? Do we stifle impatience,
+bitterness, class feeling? Do we guide the conversation of visitors and
+the family group so that antisocial passions are subdued and a spirit of
+brotherly love and compassion for all is cultivated? Here men and women
+have opportunity to give evidence of a change of heart; here they need
+that awakening to social consciousness which is a new birth, a
+regeneration into the life of the Son of Man who came to give his life.
+
+By its active ministry the family is training for social living. When a
+child carries a bowl of soup to some sick or needy one, he learns a
+lesson never to be forgotten. The memories of hours of planning and
+preparation for some neighborly service--the making of bread, the
+packing of a box, the preserves for the sick--shine out like sunshine
+spots along childhood's ways; they direct manhood's steps.
+
+We are gradually learning that social duties are not learned save
+through social deeds; that even the most carefully prepared and
+perfectly pedagogical systems of instruction fail, standing alone. The
+college student uses the laboratory method in his sociology--though we
+know that sociology may be as far from social living as the poles are
+apart. The Social Service Association of the Young Men's Christian
+Association has given up attempts to teach social duty in favor of the
+plan of undertaking specific pieces of social activity. The home must
+adopt the laboratory method. The important thing is, not what the father
+or mother may systematically teach about the social duties of the
+children, but what kinds of service, of ministry and normal activity
+they may lead the children to; that is, in what ways they may all
+together discharge their functions in society.
+
+
+§ 5. FAMILIES AS COMMUNITY FACTORS
+
+Each family must clearly see its normal relations to its community, to
+the social whole; first, as an association of social beings having
+social duties, obligations, and privileges; then, to see that the
+ordering of the daily life is the largest single factor in determining
+the value of the family to the development of the community, fitting
+harmoniously into the larger community, and rendering its share of
+service.
+
+The disorderly home spreads its immoral contagion beyond its walls, out
+into the front yard, out and up and down the street, and all through the
+village and city. The City Beautiful cannot come until we have the Home
+Beautiful. Training each one to play his part in keeping the house in
+order, picking up and setting in place his own tools and playthings,
+preventing and removing litter, scraps, and elements of disorder and
+discomfort, acquiring habits of neatness based on social motives--these
+things make more for the city of beauty and health than all our lectures
+on clean cities.
+
+No family lives to itself. Young people need to see clearly how their
+homes and their habits in the home impinge on other homes and lives.
+This is impressed upon us in an accentuated and acute degree in city
+living. One can hardly imagine a finer discipline of grace than
+apartment living, though one may well question whether it is not morally
+and hygienically flying in the face of the natural order. We may not
+have for a long time municipal ordinances forbidding boiled dinners,
+limburger, and phonographs in city apartments; but if, unfortunately, we
+are compelled to live in these modern abominations, we ought to
+cultivate a conscience that will not inflict our idiosyncrasies, either
+in culinary aromas or in musical taste, on our neighbors. But there are
+matters greater than these by which the home trains for social
+thoughtfulness. No man has a right to grow weeds at home, because the
+seeds never stay there. A howling dog, a disease-breeding sty, a
+fly-harboring stable, must be viewed, not from the point of the family's
+convenience, but from that of others' welfare.
+
+
+§ 6. TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP
+
+The family has a duty to train children for Christian citizenship. No
+other institution can take its place even here. Courses of lectures in
+churches and settlements effect excellent results, and the study of
+civics from the moral and ideal viewpoint should be encouraged in the
+schools; but the home is the place where, after all, citizens are
+trained and the value or menace of their citizenship determined. If we
+stop long enough to get a clear understanding of what we mean by
+citizenship this will be the more evident.
+
+Citizenship is the condition of full communal, social living in a
+democracy. It is not a special department or activity of a man's life
+which he exercises once in a while, as at the primary or at the polls or
+through the political campaign; it is a permanent condition, the
+condition of his social living in a democracy. It seems to be worth
+while to think of this enough to be quite sure of it, for we have
+thought too long of citizenship as a special aspect of one's life or as
+an occasional duty; we have called for good citizenship at times of
+election and have been content with dormant citizenship at other times;
+we have said that one was exercising his citizenship when he voted, and
+have forgotten that he was exercising it or abusing or neglecting it as
+he walked the streets, talked with his neighbors, or in any way lived
+the life that has relations to other lives.
+
+Matters of citizenship are simply matters of social living, as social
+living expresses itself through what we call government; that is,
+through communal, civic, national administration and regulation.
+Citizenship is social control in action, not through political activity
+alone, but through all that concerns civic and communal life. In view of
+this it may be worth while to look a little more closely into the
+relations of family life to this matter of the determination of the
+character of our citizenship.
+
+The family is an agency for religious training in citizenship. The
+family is the first, smallest, and still the most common and potent
+social group. It is the community in which we nearly all learn communal
+living. At first it is a child's world, then comes his city, and then
+his nation, but ere long again the family is his own kingdom. Its
+ideals, constantly interpreted in action, determine our ideals. Where
+the father is greedy, self-centered, regarding the home as solely for
+his convenience as his private boarding-house, where he is a despotic
+boss, why should not the son at least tolerate bossism in his city if he
+does not himself pattern after his father on a wider scale and regard
+the city or the state as his private boarding-house and the treasury as
+his private manger? Where the mother is a petty parasite, what wonder
+the children regard with indifference, if not even with admiration, the
+whole system of civic and social barnacles, leeches, and other
+parasites?
+
+The very organization of the home must prepare for civic duty by laying
+upon all appropriate duties and activities. It ought to be an ideal type
+of community. But that can never be until we take the training of
+parents seriously in hand; until we cease to delegate the pedagogy of
+courtship, marriage, and home-founding to the comic supplements of the
+Sunday papers and to the joke columns. Parents must themselves be
+trained for the business of the organization of homes as educational
+agencies.
+
+The life and work of the home ought to train religiously for
+citizenship, by causing each to bear his due share of the burdens of
+all. Where the child has been forced to do the indolent parent's share,
+to support the slothful father, he can only look forward to the time
+when he will be free to support only himself, and have no other than
+purely egoistic obligations; this is an utterly immoral conception, and
+one squarely opposed to good citizenship. Where the boy or the girl has
+been trained to regard all toil as dishonorable, where each has been
+taught scrupulously to avoid every burden, they come into social living
+with habits set against bearing their share and toward making others
+carry them. The indolent parent makes the tax-dodging citizen, as the
+indulgent parent often makes the place-hunting citizen who becomes a tax
+on the public.
+
+The ideals of the family determine the needs of citizens. Its
+conversation, its reading, its customs, set the standard of social
+needs. Where the father laughs at the smartness of the artful dodge in
+politics, where the mother sighs after the tinsel and toys that she
+knows others have bought with corrupt cash, where the conversation at
+the meal-table steadily, though often unconsciously, lifts up and lauds
+those who are out after the "real thing," the eager ears about that
+board drink it in and childish hearts resolve what they will do when
+they have a chance. Where no voice speaks for high things, where no tide
+of indignation against wrong sweeps into language, where the children
+never feel that the parents have great moral convictions--where no
+vision is, the people perish.
+
+Yet to realize this civic responsibility of the home would be, in the
+greater number of instances, to remedy it. In those other instances
+where there are no civic ideals, where the domestic conscience is dead,
+there rests upon the state, upon society, for its own sake, the
+responsibility to train those children so that, at any rate, they will
+not perpetuate homes of this type. We may do very much by the
+stimulation and direction of parents. Men need but to be reminded of
+their duty to make it a part of their business to train their children
+in social duty.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Taylor, _Religion in Social Action_, chaps. vii, viii. Dodd, Mead &
+     Co., $1.25.
+
+     E.J. Ward, _The Social Center_, chap. v. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Lofthouse, _Ethics in the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the special social importance of the family?
+
+     2. How do children acquire their social ideals from the home?
+
+     3. What are the advantages which the home has as a school?
+
+     4. How do homes train for the responsibilities of citizenship?
+
+     5. Can you describe any plans of community councils in the home?
+
+     6. How would you promote community service in the family?
+
+     7. What are the dangers of unsocial and selfish lives growing in
+     the home?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] This chapter is, with the publisher's kind permission, taken, with
+sundry minor changes, from the author's pamphlet, _The Home as a School
+for Social Living_, published by the American Baptist Publication
+Society in the "Social Service Series."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE CHILD'S IDEAL LIFE
+
+
+The modern child is likely to miss one of the great character enrichings
+which his parents had, in that he is in danger of growing up entirely
+ignorant of the poetic setting of religious thought in historic and
+dignified hymns. The great hymns have done more for religious thought
+and character than all the sermons that have ever been preached. Even in
+the adult of the purely intellectual cast the hymn, aided by rhythm,
+music, repetition, and emotion, is likely to become a more permanent
+part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of
+ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more
+than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a
+world of imagery!
+
+
+§ 1. SONG AND STORY
+
+Very early life's ideals are presented in poetic form; plays,
+school-life, love of country, friendships, all take or are given metric
+expression. So, for children, hymns have a perfectly natural place. The
+child sings as he plays, sings as he works, sings in school, and, as
+long as life and memory hold, these words of song will be his
+possession; in declining years, when eyes are failing and other
+interests may wane, fragments of childhood's songs and youth's poems
+will sing themselves over in his memory; while in the years between how
+often will some stanza or line spring into the focus of thought just at
+the moment when it can give brave and helpful direction!
+
+Those years of facile memorization should be like the ant's summer, a
+period of steady storing in mind of the world's treasures of thought. No
+man ever had too many good and beautiful thoughts in his memory. Few
+have failed to recall with gratitude some apparently long-forgotten word
+of cheer, light, and inspiration stored in childhood. The special virtue
+of the hymn, among all poetic forms of great thoughts, is that memory is
+strengthened by the music and the thought further idealized by it, while
+frequent repetition fixes it the more firmly and repetition in
+congregational song adds the high value of emotional association.
+
+But what kinds of memory treasures are being given to the modern child
+in the realm of religion? In by far the greater number of instances in
+the United States neither church nor Sunday school nor home brings to
+him any knowledge of the great hymns of religion.[15] In the churches
+that use these hymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday
+services; he is in the children's service or the school, while in the
+majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has
+substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified
+hymns. Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance,
+cavort, or drone through the frivolities of "popular" gospel songs is
+only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to
+divorce worship and thought, to make worship a matter of purely
+superficial emotions, and to form the habit of expressing religion, the
+highest experience of life, in language, often irreverent and almost
+always trivial, slangy, or ridiculous. It is an insult to the
+intelligence of children to ask them to sing
+
+    We're pilgrims o'er the sands of time,
+      We have not long to stay,
+    The lifeboat soon is coming,
+      To carry the pilgrims away.
+
+It is the duty of parents to know what their children are learning in
+the Sunday school. Not only are they often missing the opportunity to
+lay up the treasure of elevating, inspiring thoughts; they are acquiring
+crude, mistaken, misleading theological concepts in the hideous,
+revolting figures of "evangelistic songs"; they are storing their minds
+with atrocities in English and in figures of speech; they are acquiring
+the habits of sentimentality in religion and inhibiting the finer,
+higher feelings. They are blunting their higher feelings by repeating
+incongruous and nauseating figures of being "washed in blood," or they
+are carelessly singing sentiments they do not understand.
+
+What can the family do about this? It ought to assert its rights in the
+church. It ought to protest and rebel against the debauching of mind and
+the degrading of religion (all for the sake of selling trashy books at
+$25 per hundred). A parent would do better to keep his child from church
+and Sunday school than to permit his mind to be filled with the
+sanguinary pictures of God, the mediaeval theology of the modern
+songbook, and its offenses against truth in thought and form. But the
+family can work positively and more effectively by providing good hymns
+for children in the home.
+
+
+§ 2. TRAINING IN SONG
+
+Almost without exception all children will sing if encouraged early in
+life. In the family group one has only to start a familiar song and soon
+all will be singing. It is just as natural to sing "Abide with Me" when
+the family sits together in the evening as it is to start "My Alabama
+Choo-choo." Children like the swing of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" just
+as much as in the northern states they like "Marching through Georgia."
+If they do not know the hymns the home is the best of all places in
+which to learn them.
+
+A large section of real family life is missing in families that do not
+sing together. A home without song lacks one of the strongest bonds of
+family unity, and the after-years will be deprived of a memory dear
+indeed to many others. Days often come when the wheels of family life
+seem to develop friction, when little rifts seem to throw the members
+far apart, but the evening song brings them together. The unity of
+action, of feeling, the development of emotions above the day's
+irritation and strife, all help to new joys in family living.
+
+We may well think of the fine songs and the great hymns together. There
+is no fixed wall between "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," and "The Son
+of God Goes Forth," nor between "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Jerusalem
+the Golden." The modern home has the musical instruments to lead in
+song--though they are not always essential--and lacks only the planning
+and forethought to develop the joys of song. It must provide the thought
+that applies the simpler forms of musical expression to the sweetening
+and enriching of life.
+
+Let no one say, "My family is not musical." That simply means that your
+family does not take time for music and song. Build on the training in
+patriotic and folk-songs given in the schools; sing these same songs
+over in the home and then associate with the best of them the best of
+the hymns. Cultivate the habit of binding the whole realm of feeling in
+music together, the hymns and the songs, to make religion mean beauty
+and devotion and to make the finer sentiments of life truly religious.
+
+This costs time and thought. Someone must plan that the books of songs
+and hymns are provided, that the opportunity is given, and that wise,
+unobtrusive leadership is there. Have ready several copies of the book
+containing the best hymns. Think out your plan of procedure in advance,
+selecting the songs, or at least the first one. Then at the right time
+simply begin to play that song and you will scarcely need to invite the
+children to sing with you.
+
+Should anyone doubt whether children will enjoy singing good hymns, he
+may purchase a few records for the phonograph, for example, "O Come All
+Ye Faithful," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "O Zion Haste," "Holy,
+Holy, Holy," "Abide with Me." These will suit those of from ten upward;
+younger children will enjoy "Can a Little Child Like Me," "Brightly
+Gleams Our Banner," "Jesus Loves Me." "I Think When I Read That Sweet
+Story," and "For the Beauty of the Earth," though they will join gladly
+in the other hymns. Or, instead of using the phonograph, sit down
+quietly at the piano and play these hymns, with just enough emphasis for
+the children to catch the rhythm, and they will soon be standing at the
+piano singing with you.[16]
+
+
+§ 3. PLAY ACTIVITY
+
+The child is a playing animal. Play is not an invention of the devil,
+designed to plague parents and to lead children to waste their time. It
+is nature's best method of education, for when a child plays he is
+simply reaching forward in his activities to the realization of his
+ideals. Play is idealized experiences. There is always a significance of
+wider and maturer experience in children's play. Therefore the family
+must find space and time and adaptation of organization to the child's
+need of spontaneous, free activity in play.
+
+The special religious value of play lies in the fact that the child in
+his games is experimenting with life, learning its lessons; especially
+is he learning the art of living with other lives. It is our religious
+duty to see to it that our children become used to living in society by
+playing in social groups. Scarcely anyone is more to be pitied than the
+lonely child standing in the corner of the playground, able only to
+watch the games, because parental prohibition has already made him a
+solitary and unsocial creature.
+
+The educational potencies of play are so great that we dare not leave
+its activities to chance. Parents must study the power of play, its
+psychological and educational values, in order to direct its activity to
+the highest good.
+
+The adequate care of a child's play-life will involve, in addition to
+the trained intelligence of the parents, provision for space in the
+house and also outdoors, willingness to subordinate our peace and our
+pleasure to the child's play at times, a reasonable though not
+necessarily expensive provision of play materials, attention to the
+character of the plays and playmates. The home will not lose its harmony
+and beauty if it is filled with playing children. Its function has to do
+with their development rather than with the preservation of chairs.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.F. Cope, _Hymns You Ought to Know_, Introduction. Revell, $1.50.
+
+     W.F. Pratt, _Musical Ministries_. Revell, $1.00.
+
+     H.W. Hulbert, _The Church and Her Children_, chap. x. Revell,
+     $1.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     For a list of great hymns see _Hymns You Ought to Know_, edited by
+     Henry F. Cope, and mentioned above. It contains one hundred
+     standard hymns with a brief account of each hymn and of each
+     author.
+
+     E.D. Eaton, "Hymns for Youth," _Religious Education_, December,
+     1912, VII, 509.
+
+     See report of the Commission on Worship in the Sunday School, in
+     _Religious Education_, October, 1914.
+
+     Read especially the chapter on this subject in H.H. Hartshorne,
+     _Worship in the Sunday School_. Columbia University, $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What special advantages do songs and hymns have in their
+     pedagogical power?
+
+     2. What hymns do you remember from childhood? In what way are these
+     hymns valuable to you?
+
+     3. What changes would you like to see in the hymns the children
+     learn today?
+
+     4. What difficulties do you find in training children to sing in
+     the home?
+
+     5. Is it worth while to teach children to play? What games have
+     special educational value? What games have religious significance
+     or value? Give reasons for your opinions.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[15] One of the best collections of suitable religious songs is _Worship
+and Song_. Pilgrim Press, $0.40.
+
+[16] An excellent plan is worked out in _The Children's Hour of Story
+and Song_ by Moffat and Hidden, Unitarian Sunday School Society, in
+which children's stories are given and following them suitable songs and
+hymns with the music for each.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+STORIES AND READING
+
+
+If we would teach religion to our children we must adopt the method of
+Jesus; that of telling stories. The story has the advantage, first, of
+its natural interest, and, then, of the indirect manner of its
+presentation of the truth, together with the fact that that truth is
+embodied in a statement of life and experience. Besides, story-telling
+to any person of active interests is one of the easiest and most
+stimulating methods of teaching.
+
+
+§ 1. STORY-TELLING
+
+So much has already been written on the art of telling stories that only
+a few suggestions are needed here. First, understand why you tell the
+story. Normally a double motive enters in, namely, the conveyance of
+truth in life, at the same time affording real pleasure to the
+listeners. Either motive alone will be inadequate. You cannot convey the
+truth without the desire to give pleasure; you cannot make the pleasure
+worth while without the truth. But this is the place to insist that the
+truth which you desire to convey must find its way to the conviction of
+the child through the story and not through any moral or preface or
+particular statement which you may make. The moral or lesson must be
+clear to you but carefully held in reserve to direct the matter and
+manner of the story.
+
+Secondly, be prepared to pay the price of this most effective method of
+instruction. It will cost the reservation of a certain amount of time
+both for acquiring the story and for relating it. It will require
+careful thought and planning, especially to be sure that the story is
+told in sympathy with the child's world. People who are too busy to tell
+their children stories are, perhaps fortunately, coming to realize that
+they are too busy to have children. If it looks like a waste of time to
+turn off the lights and sit by the firelight for from twenty to thirty
+minutes, we shall need to revise our estimates of the value of
+child-character. Nor must we shrink from the investment of time in
+preparation for the narration of the story; if it is worth telling, it
+is worth telling well.
+
+Thirdly, keep a record of sources of stories. This may be preserved in a
+notebook. One parent used a card-index for this purpose. There are a few
+books published containing good collections.[17] You will find most
+valuable your own little book in which you have noted down the fugitive
+stories and short selections which are to be found in general
+literature.[18]
+
+Fourthly, do not tell a story so as to close the child's interest in the
+narrative. Stories ought to lead to inquiry and further reading in the
+book or other source from which they have been drawn; indeed,
+story-telling is one excellent method of quickening an interest in
+reading.
+
+Fifthly, allow the children to retell the stories to one another. Often
+the whole family will be entertained and helped by the explanation which
+a small child will give of the story he has learned by hearing it
+repeated a few times from his mother's lips.
+
+Sixthly, telling Bible stories to children in the quiet hour is the best
+of all methods to stimulate their interest in the Bible itself. It is
+much better to tell the story in your own language than to read it
+either in the Bible or in a paraphrase. For one reason, you will never
+tell it twice the same way, and children will watch with interest
+changes in the narration. As soon as they can read, secure some of the
+simple Bible narratives and put these in their hands.[19]
+
+
+§ 2. BOOKS AND READING
+
+A home without books is like a house with only one window; it can look
+out in only one direction, in that of the present. It knows only a
+limited world; its children have a short measure of the joy of life,
+they can know here only those whom they see today, their friends must be
+few, their world narrow and confined.
+
+If the books are not in your home the children will find them elsewhere.
+Unless the school kills the taste for reading, as it sometimes does, the
+young folks will open ways somehow into the ideal realm of books. As
+they grow up, the book takes the place of the story. The printed page is
+the child's key to all routes of travel, routes that lead to other times
+and lands, routes that lead to other people and into their hearts and
+minds. The child sees conduct and feels it as it is in action in lives
+before him, but he begins to discriminate and to analyze it only through
+reading; souls are revealed where the purpose of the writer is that the
+reader may see the springs of action in the character portrayed.
+Fiction, biography, travel, and adventure soon pass from the merely
+exterior happenings to the discovery of meanings in character.
+
+
+§ 3. DANGERS OF READING
+
+Since the book needs only one for its enjoyment, while the story
+requires two, there is less control over reading. There is only one way
+to be sure that children are not devouring vicious books and that is to
+make sure that they have an ample supply of healthful, helpful ones.
+This is especially necessary in a day that caters to sloth in reading.
+The tendency is for reading to take the facile decline from book to
+cheap magazine, from magazine to newspaper, and from the newspaper to
+skimming the headlines and the "funnies." The cheaper papers appeal to
+the lowest intelligence and strike at the line of least moral and mental
+resistance. Reading enriches the life but little and may impoverish it
+greatly unless there is developed the habit of drawing on the world's
+great treasures of thought and feeling. Open windows in your children's
+souls by giving them books; keep them open by encouraging the reading
+habit. Great souls wait for them, willing to converse and become their
+friends and teachers if they will but take down these books from the
+shelves and open them with an eager mind.
+
+
+§ 4. DEVELOPING GOOD TASTE
+
+_What can be done to quicken a love of good reading in children?_
+Recognize that not all children develop this appetite at the same age,
+that girls read more than boys, that boys usually have a period of
+decline in reading interest from seventeen to twenty-one or even later.
+But everything really depends on whether we ourselves love good books
+and keep them on hand. One of the life-centers of a family should be the
+bookshelf, while the picture of the evening lamp and the reading group
+will constitute one of its best memories. Where books are at hand and
+where they are used daily, the children need little urging to read. Now
+this does not mean that yards of choice editions make a book-loving
+family. There is a difference between bindings and books. It means books
+known and loved, familiar friends for daily converse, books on handy
+shelves and fit to be used as common food.
+
+_Do you know what your children read?_ Do you watch as carefully the
+food of mind and spirit as you do that of the body? Do you show an
+interest in the books they plan to draw from the public library? Can you
+guide them intelligently when they ask for suggestions of interesting
+books? Do you know the healthful, suitable ones?
+
+
+§ 5. PROMOTION OF THE READING INTEREST
+
+The Sunday school might aid greatly in promoting the habit of selecting
+and reading good books. Children often come home from day school
+clamoring for some book which the teacher has recommended as interesting
+and valuable. The Sunday-school teacher's recommendation would also
+carry weight. In every church, whether there exists a Sunday-school
+library or not, there ought to be a library or book committee which
+would watch for the right reading for the different grades and would
+cause the titles of good books to be placed on a bulletin board.
+Further, such a committee might very well place a copy of the book
+selected in the teacher's hand in order that the teacher might call the
+attention of the class directly to it. Of course the range of selection
+should be as wide as the world of books and should include fiction,
+romance, song, and story.[20] Parents could do the same sort of thing.
+Why not talk up the best books we remember? As to those old-time books,
+we need to realize that tastes change. Perhaps they owed much of their
+interest to their vivid descriptions of contemporary life. Therefore we
+must commend the new books, those that belong to the children's own
+days, too. This can be done, provided we really know the books, not by
+saying, "We should like you to read _Sandford and Merton_," but rather,
+"There is a capital story in _Captains Courageous_; have any of you read
+it?" Leave the matter there, or, at most, go only far enough to
+stimulate interest.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_, chaps. i-v. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.50.
+
+     Forbush, _The Coming Generation_, chap. viii. Appleton, $1.50
+
+     Winchester, "Good and Bad Books in the Home," in _The Bible in
+     Practical Life_, p. 38. Religious Education Association, $2.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_. Sturgis & Walton,
+     $1.25.
+
+     H.W. Mabie, _Books and Culture_. Dodd, Mead & Co., $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     ON STORY-TELLING
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_. Eaton & Mains, $0.50.
+
+     Wyche, _Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them_. Newson & Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     L.S. Houghton, _Telling Bible Stories_. Scribner, $1.25.
+
+     Bryant, _How to Tell Stories for Children_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     E.M. and G.E. Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_.
+     Sturgis & Walton, $1.25.
+
+     DIRECTING CHILDREN'S READING IN THE HOME
+
+     Macy, _A Children's Guide to Reading_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.25.
+
+     Field, _Finger Posts to Children's Reading_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     Arnold, _A Mother's List of Books for Children_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     For a short practical list see the different lists classified under
+     Sunday-School Departments in W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_,
+     particularly pp. 54, 83, 118, 169. Pilgrim Press, $1.00.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Do you remember any stories which especially impressed you as a
+     child? What were their qualities? What were the qualities of their
+     narration?
+
+     2. What are your difficulties in story-telling to children?
+
+     3. Is the habit of reading books passing among children? If so,
+     what are the reasons?
+
+     4. What responsibility has the public library toward the child's
+     selection of books? toward promoting book reading?
+
+     5. How many families co-operate with the library?
+
+     6. How might the church co-operate?
+
+     7. Does the reading of newspapers by children affect their general
+     habits of reading? In what ways?
+
+     8. What personal difference is there, if any, between the effect of
+     a borrowed book and of one the child owns?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] Laura E. Cragin, _Kindergarten Bible Stories_. Fifty-six of the Old
+Testament stories. There is also a companion volume of New Testament
+stories.
+
+James Baldwin, _Old Stories of the East_. Fresh and interesting versions
+of the familiar Old Testament stories.
+
+Kate Douglas Wiggin, _The Story Hour_. Good stories and a suggestive
+introduction on story-telling.
+
+_Half a Hundred Stories for the Little People_, by various authors.
+
+[18] _A List of Good Stories to Tell to Children under Twelve Years of
+Age_, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, $0.05. There are references to
+books in which the stories may be found, including 25 Bible stories, 16
+fables, 14 myths, 14 Christmas stories, 7 Thanksgiving stories, etc.
+
+[19] Such as O'Shea, _Old World Wonder Stories_; George Hodges, _The
+Garden of Eden_; Cragin, _Old Testament Stories_; Mary Stewart, _Tell Me
+a True Story_.
+
+[20] The H.W. Wilson Co., White Plains, New York, publishes a list of
+_Children's Books for Sunday-School Libraries_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE USE OF THE BIBLE IN THE HOME
+
+
+If we keep clearly in mind the aim of religious education in the family
+as that of the development of the lives of religious persons, the place
+and value of the Bible will be evident. It will be used as a means of
+developing and directing lives. This will be quite different from a
+perfunctory use because our fathers used it or a use under the
+compulsion of the fear lest some strange evil should befall us, some
+visitation of an offended deity.
+
+
+§ 1. THE CHILD'S NEED
+
+Children need the Bible as a part of their social heritage. Just as they
+get a larger life, inspired and stimulated by the realization of their
+connection with the past of their family and their country, so the Bible
+brings them into connection with the religious history of the race.
+General history brings heroic forefathers into the stream of
+consciousness; we feel the push of their lives. So the Bible reveals the
+stream farther back and makes us part of the process of life in unity
+with great characters and great movements.
+
+The child has a right to the Bible as his literary heritage. Here in the
+Bible is the precipitation of the ideals of a people unique in the
+place which religion held in their lives. Here is a literature which is
+the source of much of the best in the language and reading of the
+child's life. Its phrases are beautiful and convenient embodiments of
+religious ideals; they will have a steadily developing richness of
+meaning as life opens out to the child.[21]
+
+
+§ 2. DIFFICULTIES
+
+The difficulties in the way of the use of the Bible in the home are: the
+crowded programs, or a lack of time due to the absence of any program
+for the days; a feeling of unnaturalness in the special reading of this
+book; the decay of the custom of reading aloud; parental ignorance of
+the Bible and especially of its beauties for the young; and the
+excessive amount of task-reading frequently required by the schools. The
+Sunday school also sometimes offends in this respect by overemphasis on
+academic tasks for home work.
+
+
+§ 3. METHODS
+
+First, let parents use the Bible themselves. Use the books as you wish
+children to use them. This will be the longest step you can take toward
+the solution of the problem.
+
+Secondly, use the Bible naturally. When children have an aversion to the
+Bible it is due usually to two causes: the peculiar place and use of
+the book which makes it a thing apart from life, and often an object of
+dread; and the practice of using it as a task-book, to be opened only in
+order to prepare Sunday-school lessons. Just as it takes years to
+overcome the aversion set up against English literature by its
+analytical study in the schools, so that the child becomes a man before
+he voluntarily reads Dickens, Thackeray, the poets, and essayists, in
+the same manner we have succeeded in making the Bible undesirable to
+youth. If you read passages aloud, use the tone of voice which would be
+appropriate if this was a new book not bound in leather. Read it for
+pleasure as one would read a literary masterpiece--not because opinion
+might frown on you if you had not read the classic. Does someone object
+that that would be to degrade the Bible to the level of secular
+writings? You cannot degrade a literature; it makes its own level and
+our labels do not affect it. Certain it is that a pious tone of voice
+will not protect the Bible from the secular level. But to use it
+unnaturally will degrade it in the opinion of those who hear us.
+
+Thirdly, make its use a pleasure. All children enjoy story-telling and
+listening to reading. Many parents practice the children's hour, some
+period in the day when they will, alone with the children, read and talk
+with them. Let the Bible story be the reward of a good day, something
+promised as an incentive to good behavior. Children delight, not alone
+in the story itself, but in rhythmic passages, in the poetic flights of
+Isaiah and the beautiful imagery of the Psalms. To them it is natural
+and pleasant to think of the hills that skipped and the stars that sang
+and the trees that gave forth praise. They know the song of nature and
+are happy to find it put into words.
+
+Fourthly, use the Bible as a book of life. How many times a day do
+questions of conduct arise in the family! How often do children ask what
+is right, and freely discuss the question! Here is a book rich in
+precept and example on at least many of the questions. There are
+pictures of actual lives meeting real temptations; there are the
+epigrammatic precepts of Proverbs and of the teachings of Jesus. Call
+attention to them, not as settling the question out of hand, but as
+testimony to the point. Accustom children to getting the light of the
+Bible on their lives, remembering that this book is a light and not a
+fence nor a code of laws.
+
+Fifthly, use the Bible in worship. This does not conflict with the plea
+for its use naturally, for worship should be as natural as any of the
+social pleasures of the family. Here select those passages for reading
+which count most for the spirit of worship. It is a good plan to read a
+short passage, suitable for memorizing, so frequently that children
+learn it and are able to repeat it in concert. Be sure that all the
+passages read or recited are short. It will often be wise to preface the
+reading with a brief account of its original circumstances, so that all
+may hear the words as the actual utterances of a real man living in real
+life.
+
+Sixthly, provide material which helps to make the Bible interesting, and
+which helps children to see its pictures through the eyes of geography
+and history.[22]
+
+Seventhly, make the use of the Bible possible at all times for all. See
+that as soon as the child can read he has his own Bible, that it is in
+large, readable type, as much like any other book as possible. It is no
+evidence of grace to ruin the eyes over diamond-text Bibles. If
+possible, also provide separate books of the Bible, in modern literary
+form and some in the idiom of our day.[23]
+
+
+§ 4. DOUBTFUL METHODS
+
+It is doubtful whether good comes from the use of the Bible as a
+riddle-book, nor do the "Bible games" tend to develop a natural
+appreciation of the book. There is no new light but rather a confusing
+shadow thrown on the character of Joseph by the foolish conundrum
+concerning Pharaoh making a ruler out of him. Sending a child to the
+Bible to discover the shortest verse, the longest, the middle one, etc.,
+trains him to regard it as an odd kind of book, to think of it as a
+dictionary, and to use it less.
+
+We assume too readily that a knowledge of the separate details of
+biblical information, such as the date of the Flood, the age of
+Methuselah, the names of the twelve tribes, the twelve apostles, the
+books of the two Testaments, is the desired end. But one might know all
+these things and many more and be not one whit the better. For the child
+surely the desirable end is that he may feel deeply the attractiveness
+of the character of Joseph or of Jesus, may say within himself, "What a
+fine man; I want to be like him." Be sure the persons are real, that you
+see them living their lives in their times, just as you live your life
+now.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     T.G. Soares, "Making the Bible Real to Boys," in _Boy Training_,
+     pp. 117-40. Association Press, $0.75.
+
+     W.T. Lhamon, "Bible in the Home," _Religious Education_, December,
+     1912, p. 486.
+
+     G. Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. x. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     _The Bible in Practical Life._ Religious Education Association.
+     Numerous references to the use of the Bible in the home in this
+     volume.
+
+     Patterson Dubois, _The Natural Way_, sec. iv. Revell, $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     "Passages of Bible for Memorization," _Religious Education_,
+     August, 1906.
+
+     Louise S. Houghton, _Telling Bible Stories_. Scribner, $1.25.
+
+     Johnson, _The Narrative Bible_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.50.
+
+     Hall and Wood, _The Bible Story_, 5 vols. King, $2.00 by
+     subscription.
+
+     Courtney, _The Literary Man's Bible_. Crowell, $1.25.
+
+     The above are but a few of the many collections of biblical
+     material.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the conditions which seem to make the reading of the
+     Bible different from other reading? Is there a sense of unreality
+     about it as a book? What are the causes?
+
+     2. Try the experiment of reading the story of Joseph at one
+     sitting. Try to retell this to children.
+
+     3. What biblical material stands out in your memory of childhood?
+     In what degree is this due to the art of the story-teller or the
+     reader? to the character of the material?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] See M.J.C. Foster, _The Mother the Child's First Bible Teacher_.
+
+[22] Mackie, _Bible Manners and Customs_.
+
+Chamberlin, _Introduction to the Bible for Teachers of Children_.
+
+Worcester, _On Holy Ground_, 2 vols.
+
+[23] For example, Moulton, _Modern Reader's Bible_. The new Jewish
+renderings of Old Testament books are good, especially the Psalms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+FAMILY WORSHIP
+
+
+Family worship has declined until, at least in the United States, the
+percentage of families practicing daily worship in the home is so small
+as to be negligible. If this meant that a general institution of
+religion had passed out of existence the fact would be highly
+significant. But it is well to remember that family worship has never
+been a general institution. We have generalized the picture of the
+"Cotter's Saturday Night" so eloquently drawn by Burns; it has been
+applied to every night and to every fireside. Daily family worship was
+observed in practically all the Puritan homes of New England; but there
+is no evidence for it as a uniform custom, either in other parts of this
+country or in other parts of the world, save perhaps in sections of
+Scotland. True, there were many families which observed the custom; but
+there were also many families of church members and doubtless of truly
+religious people in which family worship as a regular institution was
+unknown. This has been especially true in the type of family life which
+has developed under modern social conditions. Further, even so simple an
+exercise as grace at meals has not always been a general custom.
+
+
+§ 1. PAST CUSTOMS
+
+But the fact today is that family worship is so rare as to be counted
+phenomenal wherever found. The instances, though not general, were
+common a generation ago. Many are living to whom family worship afforded
+the largest part of their conscious and formal religious education.
+Following the morning meal, or, occasionally, the evening meal, the
+family waited while the father, or the mother in his absence, read a
+portion of the Scriptures and offered prayer. In other families the act
+of worship would be the closing one of the day, perhaps participated in
+by the older members only, the younger children having repeated their
+prayers at bedside on retiring. A thousand happy and sacred associations
+gather about the memories of these occasions: the sense of reverence,
+the feeling that the home was a sacred place, the impression of noble
+words and elevating thoughts, the reflex influence of the prayer that
+committed all to the keeping and guidance of God.[24]
+
+
+§ 2. WHY FAMILY WORSHIP?
+
+Parents need to see the values in family worship. We have been insisting
+on the primary importance of the religious interpretation of the family
+as an institution, on the power of the religious motive, and the
+atmosphere of religion. But wherever there is a truly religious motive
+and a permanent religious atmosphere these will find definite expression
+in acts easily recognized as religious. Love is the motive and
+atmosphere of the true home, but love blossoms into words and bears
+fruit in a thousand deeds. The life of love dies without reality in act.
+Ideals are precipitated in expressive acts. So is it with religion in
+the home; it must not only be real in its sincerity, it must be
+realized, must pass over into conduct and action, as suggested above in
+chaps. vii and viii. And it must do this in ways so sharply defined and
+readily recognized as to leave no doubt as to their meaning. True, all
+acts may be religious and thus full of worship--this is most important
+of all--but worship expressly unites all such acts in a spirit of
+loyalty and aspiration.
+
+Worship is a necessity for the sake of the ideal unity of the family
+life. Just as the individual must not only feel the religious emotion
+but must also do the thing called for, so must this united personality
+of the family give expression to its faith and aspiration, its motives
+and emotions, in such a manner that, acting as a social unit, all can
+together put the inner life into the outer form. The social value of
+family worship is the strongest reason for its maintenance. It is the
+united act of the family group, the one in which group consciousness is
+expressly directed to the highest possible aims. Every period of worship
+brings the family into unity at an ideal level.
+
+The expression of religion in definite forms is necessary for children,
+too, as furnishing a means by which they can manifest their feeling of
+the higher meaning of family life. The reality of that feeling is
+stimulated in the daily, common life of the right family; the hour of
+worship is one out of many definite forms of its concrete expression. It
+is the form which gathers up the totality of feeling and aspiration into
+an act of worship and praise toward God, the Father of all families. It
+is evident there cannot be true worship in the family that is
+irreligious in its essential qualities, in its character, in its ideals
+and atmosphere.
+
+
+§ 3. ADVANTAGES
+
+The period of worship is a necessity in interpreting to all the spirit
+and meaning of a religious family. It objectifies the inner life. It
+makes definite, tangible, and easily remembered the general impressions
+of religion. It precipitates the atmosphere of religion into
+definiteness. In the chemical laboratory of a university there is
+usually a decided atmosphere of chemistry, but no one expects to become
+a chemical engineer by absorbing that atmosphere, nor even to attain a
+simple working knowledge by merely general impressions. Definiteness
+aids in gathering up our knowledge, our impressions.
+
+The reading of the Bible in the home will give, when the passages are
+wisely chosen, forms of language into which the often chaotic but
+nevertheless valuable and potential emotions of youth fall as into a
+beautiful mold; they become remembered forms of beauty thereafter.
+
+Family worship furnishes opportunity for direct religious instruction.
+When the home life has its regular institution, as regular as meals and
+play, the formality, the apparent abnormality of conversation about
+religion, is absent. Children expect and look forward to the period when
+the family will lay other things aside to think on the eternal values.
+Their questions in the breathing-space that always ought to follow
+worship become perfectly natural and sincere.
+
+Family worship lifts the whole level of family life. Ideally conceived,
+it simply means the family unity consciously coming into its highest
+place. Children may not understand all the reading nor enter into the
+motives for all parts of the petition, but they do feel that this moment
+is the one in which the family enters a holy place. They feel that God
+is real and that their family life is a part of his whole care and of
+his life. One short period of natural reverence sends light and calm
+all through the day. Where the home is the place where true prayer is
+offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship; here
+and into this group there cannot easily enter strife, bickerings, or
+baseness. One short period, five minutes or even less, of quietness, of
+united turning toward the eternal, gives tone to the day and finer
+atmosphere to the home.
+
+What our community life might be like without the churches, faulty or
+incompetent as we may know some of them to be, what that life would lose
+and miss without them is precisely, and perhaps in larger degree, what
+the family life misses without its own institution of regular devotion
+and worship.
+
+
+§ 4. THE DIFFICULTIES
+
+We can always afford to do that which is most worth while doing; our
+essential difficulty is to shake off the delusion of the lesser values,
+the lower prizes, to realize that, of all the good of life, the
+characters of our children, the gain we can all make in the eternal
+values of the spirit, in love and joy and truth and goodness, is the
+gain most worth while. We tend to set the making of a living before the
+making of lives. We need to see the development of the powers of
+personality, the riches of character, as the ultimate, dominant purpose
+of all being. Once grasp that, and hold to it, and we shall not allow
+lesser considerations, such as the pressure of business, the desire for
+gain, for ease, for pleasure, for social life, to come before this first
+and highest good; we shall make time for definite conscious religion in
+the life of the family.[25]
+
+
+§ 5. TYPES OF WORSHIP
+
+There are three simple forms which worship takes in the family: first,
+grace offered at the meals; secondly, the prayers of children on
+retiring and, occasionally, on rising; thirdly, the daily gathering of
+the family for an act of the spirit. The statement of the three forms
+reads so as to give them a formal character, but the most important
+point to remember is that wherever they are true acts of worship they
+are formal only in that they occur at definite, determined times and
+places. The acts have no merit in themselves. Merely to institute their
+observance will not secure religious feeling and life in the home. These
+three observances have arisen because at these times there is the best
+and most natural opportunity for the expression of aspiration, desire,
+and feeling.
+
+
+§ 6. METHODS OF FAMILY WORSHIP
+
+1. _Grace at meals._--Shall we say grace at meals? To assent because it
+is the custom, or because it was so done in our childhood's home, may
+make an irreligious mockery of the act. Perhaps, too, there are some who
+even hesitate to omit the grace from an unspoken fear that the food
+might harm them without it. All have heard grace so muttered, or
+hurriedly and carelessly spoken, void of all feeling and thought, that
+the act was almost unconscious, a species of "vain repetition."
+
+There are two outstanding aspects of the asking of a blessing--the
+desire to express gratitude for the common benefits of life, and the
+expression of a wish, with the recognition of its realization, that at
+each meal the family group might include the Unseen Guest, the Infinite
+Spirit of God. That wish lifts the meal above the dull level of
+satisfying appetites. Just as, in good society, we seek to make the meal
+much more than an eating of food, "a feast of reason and a flow of
+soul," so does this act make each meal a social occasion lifted toward
+the spiritual. The one thought at the beginning, the thought of the
+reality of the presence of God, and of the nearness of the divine to us
+in our daily pleasures, gives a new level to all our thinking.
+
+How shall we say grace, or "ask a blessing"? First, with simplicity and
+sincerity. Avoid long, elaborate, ornate phrases. It is better to err
+in rhetoric than in feeling and reality. The sonorous grace may soon
+become stilted and offensive. It is better to say in your own words just
+what you mean, for that will help all, even to the youngest, to mean
+what they say with you.
+
+Vary the form of petition. Sometimes let it be the silent grace of the
+Quakers; sometimes children will enjoy singing one of the old four-line
+stanzas, as
+
+    Be present at our table, Lord,
+    Be here and everywhere adored;
+    These mercies bless and grant that we
+    May feast in Paradise with thee.
+
+One might use the first three of the following lines for breakfast and
+the last three at another meal:
+
+    For the new morning with its light,
+    For rest and shelter of the night,
+      We thank the heavenly Father.
+
+    For rest and food, for love and friends,
+    For everything his goodness sends,
+      We thank the heavenly Father.[26]
+
+or
+
+    When early in the morning the birds lift up their songs,
+    We bring our praise to Jesus to whom all praise belongs.
+
+One especially needs to guard against the purely dietetic grace, the one
+that only asks that the deity will aid digestion, as that form so often
+heard, "Bless these mercies to our use."[27]
+
+Should we say grace on all occasions of meals? What shall we do at the
+social dinner in the home? The answer depends on the purpose of the
+grace. Is it not that in our own group we may have the consciousness of
+the presence of God? When the meal is that of our own group with a
+friend or two, we bring the friends into the group and the act of family
+worship is maintained. Usually this is the case. So it will be when the
+group is entirely at one in this desire: the asking of grace will be
+perfectly natural. But when the group is a large one, when the sense of
+family unity is lost, or when the observance would seem unnatural, it is
+better to omit it. Grace in large gatherings often seems an uncovering
+of the sacred aspects of the home life.
+
+2. _Bedtime prayers._--What of children's bedtime prayers? Many can
+remember them. To many the most natural, helpful time for formal periods
+of prayer is in the quiet of the bedroom just before retiring. But there
+is a grave danger in establishing a regular custom of bedside prayers
+for children, a danger manifest in the very form of certain of these
+prayers, as
+
+    Now I lay me down to sleep,
+    I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
+
+It is as though the child were saying, "The day is ended during which I
+have been able to take care of myself, the hours of helpless sleep
+begin, and I ask God to take care of me through the terrors of the
+night." For some children, at least, the night has been made terrible by
+that thought; they have been led to feel that the day was safe and
+beautiful, but that the night was so dangerous and fearful that only the
+great God could keep them through it, and it was an open question
+whether their prayer for that keeping would be heard.
+
+One must avoid also the notion that such prayers are part of a price
+paid, a system of daily taxation in return for which heaven furnishes us
+police protection.
+
+The best plan seems to be to encourage children to pray, to establish in
+them the habit of closing the day with quiet, grateful thoughts, to
+watch especially that the prayers learned in early life do not distort
+the child's thoughts of God, and to make the evening prayer an
+opportunity for the child to express his desires to God his Father and
+Friend. Having done this, as the children grow up it is best to leave
+them free to pray when and where they will. One may properly encourage
+the evening, private prayer; but the child ought to have the feeling
+that it is not obligatory, that it must grow out of his desire to talk
+with God, and, above all, that it has no special connection with the
+hour and act of retiring for sleep but rather, so far as time is
+concerned, with the closing of the day. Mothers must see far beyond the
+charm of the picture formed by the little white-robed figure at her
+knee. There is no hour so rich in possibilities for this growing life.
+It is one of the great opportunities to guide its consciousness of
+God.[28]
+
+3. _General family prayers._--It is true that, in many homes, under
+modern conditions of business, it is almost impossible for the family to
+be united at the hour when worship used to be customary, following
+breakfast. However, that is not the only hour available. In many
+respects it is a poor one for the purpose of social worship; it lacks
+the sense of leisure. But there are few families where the members do
+not all gather for the evening meal. It is not difficult to plan at its
+close for ten minutes in which all shall remain. Without leaving the
+table it is possible to spend a short time in united, social worship.
+Or, by establishing the custom and steadily following it, it is possible
+to leave the table and in less than ten minutes find ample time for
+worship in another room.
+
+Really everything depends at first on how much we desire to have family
+worship, whether we see its beauty and value in the knitting of home
+ties, in the elevation of the family spirit, and in the quickening of
+the religious ideas. We find time to eat simply because we must; when
+the necessity of the spirit is upon us we shall find time also to
+worship and to pray.
+
+Next to the will to make time comes the question of method. First,
+determine to be simple, natural, and informal. A stilted exercise soon
+becomes a burden and a source of pain to all. In whatever you do, seek
+to make it possible for all to have a share by seeing that every thought
+is expressed within the intelligence of even the younger members, that
+is, of those who desire to have a share. This does not mean descending
+to "baby-talk." Just read the Twenty-third Psalm; that is not baby talk,
+but a child of seven can understand what is meant up to the measure of
+his experience; the language is essentially simple though the ideas are
+sublime.
+
+Secondly, insure brevity. For that part of worship in which all are
+expected regularly to unite, ten minutes should be ample. Some excellent
+programs will not take more than half this time. Family worship is not a
+diminutive facsimile of church worship. Doubtless the experiment has
+failed in many families because the father has attempted to preach to a
+congregation which could not escape. Keep in mind the thought that this
+is to be a high moment in each day in which every member will have an
+equal share.
+
+Thirdly, plan for the largest possible amount of common participation.
+This is to be the expression of the unity of the family life. Children
+enjoy doing things co-operatively and in concert.
+
+Fourthly, treat the occasion naturally in relation to other affairs.
+Proceed to the worship without formal notice, without change of voice,
+and without apology to visitors. Take this for granted. At the close
+move on into other duties without the sense of coming back into the
+world. You have not been out of it; you have only recognized the eternal
+life and love everywhere in it.
+
+4. _Suggestions of plans._--There are given below seven outlines of
+plans of worship. They are plans which have been in use and have been
+tried for years. Their only merit is simplicity and practicability; but
+they are at least worthy of trial. There is no special significance in
+the arrangement of the days and this may be changed in any way
+desirable. Further, all plans should be elastic; there will come special
+days, such as festivals and birthdays, when the program should be
+varied. For example, on a birthday the child whose anniversary then
+occurs should have the privilege of making the choice of recitation or
+reading or of determining the order of all the parts of this brief
+period of worship.
+
+
+     MONDAY
+
+     1. A short psalm repeated in concert.
+
+     2. A brief, informal petition by father or mother.
+
+     3. The Lord's Prayer, in which all join.
+
+     Before attempting even this simple plan, prepare for it by first
+     selecting several suitable psalms. The following should be
+     included: the 1st, 19th, 23d, 24th, 100th, 117th, 121st, and a part
+     of the 103d. You would do well to memorize one of these yourself,
+     so as to be able to lead without reading from the book. Next, think
+     over with some care the things for which you may pray, the
+     aspirations which your children can share with you. Few things are
+     more difficult than this, so to pray that all can make the prayer
+     their own. Let it also be a prayer of love and joy, not a craven
+     begging off from punishments, nor a cowardly plea for protection
+     and provision. We can pray over all these things with gratitude and
+     with confidence toward the God of love. Do not try to preach in
+     your prayers. Many prayers have been ruined by preaching, just as
+     some preaching has been spoiled by praying to the people. Usually
+     four or five sentences will do for the one day. Better a single
+     thought simply expressed than the most brilliant attempt to inform
+     the Almighty on all the events of the world that day.
+
+     A prayer in which all can join is always desirable. The Lord's
+     Prayer never wearies us nor grows old. Children enter into it with
+     some new meaning every day; it covers all our great, common, daily
+     needs.
+
+
+     TUESDAY
+
+     1. A few favorite memory verses repeated by all (from either the
+     Bible or other literature).
+
+     2. Read a very brief passage from the Bible.
+
+     3. Prayer, ending with the Lord's Prayer.
+
+     Many excellent selections will be found in Dr. Dole's book
+     mentioned at the end of this chapter. Encourage children, however,
+     to make their selections from the poems and passages they already
+     know.
+
+     The passage of the Bible selected to be read should be one which
+     first of all incites to worship, and should be chosen for its
+     inspiration and literary beauty. A few lines from the great
+     chapters of Isaiah (e.g., chaps. 35 and 55), from the Psalms (e.g.,
+     Pss. 61, 65, 145), from the Sermon on the Mount, from 1 Cor., chap.
+     13, from the parables of Jesus, will be suitable.
+
+     The closing prayer may be extemporaneous or may be read from one of
+     the books of prayers. Many of the prayers in the Episcopal Prayer
+     Book are especially beautiful and quite suitable. Of course in
+     families of the Episcopal church the collect for the day would be
+     the right prayer to use. It is sometimes necessary to use prayers
+     prepared beforehand; some persons never acquire the ability to pray
+     aloud, even in their own families. But halting sentences that are
+     your own, that your children recognize as yours, may mean more to
+     them than the finest flowing phrases from a book. Use the prayers
+     from the book, not as a substitute, but as an addition.
+
+
+     WEDNESDAY
+
+     1. A good poem from general literature.
+
+     2. Prayer.
+
+     There are so many good collections of the great and inspiring poems
+     that one hesitates to recommend any collection. Remember that a
+     poem may be religious and imbued with the spirit of worship,
+     helpful to the purpose of this occasion, even though it contains no
+     allusions to Scripture and makes no direct references to religious
+     belief. "A House by the Side of the Road"[29] is thoroughly human,
+     popular, and could not even be accused of being a classic; but it
+     has a helpful motive and is likely to lead the will toward the life
+     of service and brotherhood. Some would prefer to read a part of one
+     of the great hymns.
+
+
+     THURSDAY
+
+     1. A brief reading or recitation from the New Testament.
+
+     2. A few moments' conversation on the reading.
+
+     3. A very brief prayer followed by a song.
+
+     The only apparent difficulty here is in starting the conversation.
+     Do not ask formal questions; rather put them something like this:
+     "I wonder whether people would do just the same on our street
+     today." Make the conversation as general as possible; do not
+     slight, nor scoff at, the contribution of even the least in the
+     group.
+
+
+     FRIDAY
+
+     1. A few verses in concert.
+
+     2. Read a parable or very brief narrative.
+
+     3. The Lord's Prayer.
+
+     The reading had better be from one of the paraphrases if it is a
+     narrative from the Old Testament.[30] Even in reading the New
+     Testament one can at times use with advantage the
+     _Twentieth-Century Bible_ or the _Modern Reader's Bible_.
+
+
+     SATURDAY
+
+     1. A period of song.
+
+     2. Closing prayer, with the Lord's Prayer.
+
+     Perhaps only one song can be sung. It need not be a hymn; that
+     should depend on the choice of the children. Help them to put
+     together all the good songs, including the hymns, in one category
+     in their minds.
+
+
+     SUNDAY
+
+     1. Ask: "What has been the best we have read or repeated in our
+     worship this week?"
+
+     2. Ask: "What shall we learn for memory repetition this week, what
+     psalm or other passage for our concerted worship?"
+
+     3. Read the psalm selected.
+
+     4. Closing prayer.
+
+     5. Period of song, lasting as long as desired.
+
+     This exercise evidently permits of extension in time and should be
+     arranged in accordance with the program for the day.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     George Hodges, _The Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. viii,
+     ix. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     _The Improvement of Religious Education_, pp. 108 to 123. Religious
+     Education Association, $0.50.
+
+     Mrs. B.S. Winchester, "Methods and Materials Available," _Religious
+     Education_, October, 1911. $0.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Koons, _The Child's Religious Life_. Eaton & Mains, $1.00.
+
+     Hartshorne, _Worship in the Sunday School_. Columbia University,
+     $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     A.R. Wells, _Grace before Meat_. U.S.C.E., $0.25.
+
+     C.F. Dole, _Choice Verses_. Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts.
+     Privately printed.
+
+     F.A. Hinckley (ed.), _Readings for Sunday School and Home_.
+     American Unitarian Association, $0.35.
+
+     J. Martin, _Prayers for Little Men and Women_. Harper, $1.25.
+
+     S. Hart (ed.), _Short Daily Prayers for Families_. Longmans, $0.60.
+
+     G.A. Miller, _Some Out-Door Prayers_. Crowell, $0.35.
+
+     Oxenden, _Family Prayers_. Longmans, $1.50.
+
+     George Skene, _Morning Prayers for Home Worship_. Methodist Book
+     Concern, $1.50.
+
+     W.E. Barton, _Four Weeks of Family Prayer_. Puritan Press, Oak
+     Park, Ill.
+
+     Abbott, _Family Prayers_. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.50.
+
+     _Prayers for Parents and Children._ Young Churchman Co., Milwaukee,
+     Wisconsin, $0.15.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the causes for the decay of the custom of family
+     worship?
+
+     2. What influences us most: public opinion, popular custom,
+     economic pressure?
+
+     3. How have the changes affected the religious influence of the
+     home?
+
+     4. What features of the older customs are most worth preserving?
+
+     5. Recall any of childhood's prayers which you remember. How many
+     maintain the custom of bedtime prayers in mature life?
+
+     6. What should be the central motive of "grace" at meals?
+
+     7. Would there be advantage in occasionally omitting the "grace"?
+
+     8. Give reasons for and against "grace."
+
+     9. Criticize the proposed plan of evening family prayers.
+
+     10. Describe any plans which have been tried.
+
+     11. Why is it desirable to maintain family worship?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[24] For a study of children's worship see H.H. Hartshorne, _Worship in
+the Sunday School_; "Report of Commission on Graded Worship," _Religious
+Education_, October, 1914.
+
+[25] "Parents who give up such a practice as family prayers mainly
+because they know of many other people who have done the same are
+just as much the slaves of public opinion and ignorant cant as the
+narrowest Lowlander who forbids his children secular history on
+Sunday."--Lyttleton, _Corner-Stone of Education_, pp. 207-8.
+
+[26] Quoted by W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_.
+
+[27] A number of good poems are given in A.R. Wells, _Grace before
+Meat_.
+
+[28] W.B. Forbush gives a number of poetic forms of prayer for children
+in _The Religious Nurture of a Little Child_, pp. 12, 13.
+
+[29] By Samuel Walter Foss.
+
+[30] One handy form is _The Heart of the Bible_, prepared by E.A.
+Broadus; another, _The Children's Bible_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+SUNDAY IN THE HOME
+
+
+Almost every family finds Sunday a problem. Other days are well occupied
+with full programs; this one has a program for only part of its time.
+Other days are rich with the liberty of happy action, but this one is
+frequently marked by inaction, repression, and limitations. As soon as
+the evanescent pleasure of Sunday clothes has passed, for those for whom
+it existed at all, the children settle down to endure the day.
+
+
+§ 1. THE MEANING OF THE DAY
+
+Fathers and mothers who vent a sigh of relief when Sunday is over must
+marvel at the strains of "O day of joy and gladness." Yet this day
+defeats its purpose when it is of any other character. We have no right
+to rob it of its joy and its healing balm. On the day made for man,
+sacred to his highest good, whatever hinders the real happiness of the
+child ought to be set aside.
+
+Instead of accepting traditions regarding the method of observing the
+Sunday, would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, For what use of
+the day can we properly be held responsible? Here are so many--fifty-two
+a year--days of special opportunity. To us who complain that business
+interferes with the personal education of our children through the week,
+what ought this day to mean? To us who lament the little time we can
+spend with our families, what ought this day to mean? And what ought we
+to try to make it mean to children?
+
+We call this God's day; what must some children think of a God who robs
+his day of all pleasure? If this is the kind of day he makes, then how
+unattractive would be his years and eternity! It is the day when we have
+our best opportunity to show them what God is like, to interpret his
+world and his works in terms of beauty, kindness, riches of thought, and
+love.
+
+It ought to be the day reserved for the best in life, for the treasures
+of affection, for the uses of the spirit. Whatever is done this day must
+come to this test, Is this a ministry to the life of goodness, truth,
+and loving service? Does this enrich lives? In other words, we may put
+the broad educational test to the day and its program and determine all
+by ministry to growing lives.
+
+
+§ 2. CONSERVING THE VALUES
+
+The family faces the problem of the opposition between the rights of man
+on this day and the greed of commerce, the fight between a day of rest
+and a day of work. Man's right to rest is assured, legally, but
+commerce in the name of amusement and in the guise of petty and
+unnecessary trading constantly maintains its fight to invade the day of
+rest, to turn it from ministry to man as a person to the dull level of
+the week of ministry to things. The home has much at stake in this
+struggle. It needs one day free from the life that tears its members
+apart, free from the toil that engrosses thought, free for its members
+to live together as spiritual beings.
+
+In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to
+the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use
+of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious
+opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life. It is
+devoted to personality, to man's rights as a religious being.
+
+Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one
+another, shall look into faces of friends and companions! And this
+opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an
+act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one
+family. That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our
+Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that
+makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's
+service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the
+church family. If we think of the day as affording us the pleasure of
+social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning
+will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. Of
+course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and
+school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.[31]
+
+Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all
+the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the
+presence of one another which is the essential life of the family. It
+has always been a good custom for friends to visit on this day, for
+families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather
+again for a few hours. It is the day when we have time to discover how
+much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when,
+looking into the eyes of those we love, we see "the light that never was
+on sea or land," the ultimate good!
+
+The hours of being together are the hours of real education. Children
+cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives
+need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for
+real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere
+with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church.
+
+
+§ 3. THE PROBLEM OF PLAY
+
+What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday? Is there
+any other kind of child? They all want to. It is as natural for a child
+to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary. A child is a
+growing person learning life by play. Because play seems trivial to us
+we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day
+devoted to the higher life. In some families play is forbidden because
+children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate
+piety and pleasure.
+
+Shall we then throw down all barriers and make this day the same as all
+others? No, rather make the day different by throwing down barriers that
+stand on other days. Let this be the day when the barriers between
+father and sons, parents and children, are let down and all can enter
+into the joy of living.
+
+Play is to a child the idealization of life's experiences and the
+realization of its ideals. That is why he plays at school, idealizing
+the everyday life; that is why he plays at housekeeping, at being in
+church, at being a railway engineer, even a highwayman or an outlaw. The
+traditional games are the game of life itself in terms of childhood.
+Play as idealized experience and realized ideals is to the child what
+the church, worship, and the reading of fiction and essays are to the
+adult. Play is the child's method of reaching forward into life's
+meaning. Some games as old as history carry a weight of human tradition
+and experience as rich for a child as the adult obtains from historical
+review and from association with the past. There is a sense in which the
+child playing these games opens the Bible of the race.[32]
+
+We cannot make children over into our pattern; we have to learn from
+them. Indeed, we come to life through their ways. We must become as
+little children. Before we settle the question of play on Sunday we do
+well to be sure that we know what play means to children, that we really
+grasp something of its educational value and its religious potency. Then
+we can proceed to a family policy in Sunday play.
+
+
+§ 4. A POLICY ON PLAY
+
+_Keep the day as one of family unity._ Help the child to think of it as
+a day protected for the sake of family togetherness. You can play that
+for this day the ideal is already realized of a family life
+uninterrupted by the demands of labor and business.
+
+_Maintain the unity by doing the ideal things together._ Go to the place
+of worship together, provided it is the place where the child can find
+expression for spiritual ideals. If the Sunday school does not really
+lift the child-life and really teach the child, if it is not honest with
+him and makes no suitable provision for his developing nature, he will
+be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at
+home. That means the application of parents to this hour.[33] It
+banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing
+pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud
+of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at
+times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the better type of
+Sunday school is more and more to be found; children are more and more
+receiving a ministry actually determined by their needs. So far as the
+church service is concerned the ideal situation is found when a parallel
+service is provided for children, based on their needs and capacities.
+As to attendance, under other circumstances, in the family pew, that
+depends on whether the child is gaining an aversion to the church by the
+torture and tedium often involved. Without doubt many adults acquired
+the settled habit of sleeping in church because that was the only
+possible relief in childhood.[34]
+
+_Maintain the family unity by stepping into the child's ideal life.
+Expect activity and use it._ Why should we assume that because the adult
+finds a Sunday nap enjoyable the child will be blessed by enforced
+silence? I would rather see a father playing catch with his boys on
+Sunday than see the boys cowed into silence while he slept a Sabbath
+sleep. Children will play. Their play is innocent; more, it may be
+helpful and educative; we can insure these values in it by our
+participation. That is the parent's opportunity for a closer sympathy
+with his children. Playing together is the closest living, thinking, and
+feeling together. Where games are shared, confidences, secrets, and
+aspirations are shared, too. Besides, the participation of the adult may
+tend to tone up the game and to moderate boisterousness.
+
+_Seek the beautiful._ Speaking as one who has been under both the
+puritanical regulation and the so-called "continental" freedom of Sunday
+observance, nothing seems much more beautiful than the sight of an
+entire family playing at home, in the park, or off in the woods or the
+fields of the country. Life is strengthened, ideals are lifted, family
+ties knit closer, gratitude is quickened, and courage stimulated by play
+of this kind.
+
+
+§ 5. POINTS OF DIFFERENCE
+
+But because it is evidently most important that this day should be
+different from other days, it is well to mark that difference in our
+plays and pleasures and to follow some simple principles for Sunday
+play.
+
+First, make it the day of the _best_ plays. The participation of parents
+will tend to have this effect. Sometimes some forms of play may be
+reserved for this day.
+
+Secondly, our play should never interfere with the rights of those who
+desire to be quiet or to observe the day in ways differing from ours. We
+must respect the rights of all.
+
+Thirdly, our play must not cause additional or unnecessary labor.
+
+Fourthly, our play must not interfere with the pleasures of others. For
+instance, in the city children who can use the public tennis courts
+every day should keep off them on Sunday in order to give opportunity to
+those who can use them only on that day.
+
+Having said so much on play on Sundays, we must not leave the impression
+that play is the principal thing. It would be the principal thing for
+children compelled to work or confined in crowded tenements on all other
+days. This is a day of rest. Play should not be carried beyond the rest
+and refreshment stage.
+
+Nor must we assume that a recognition of play involves neglect of
+worship and instruction. Both should be cherished among the delights of
+the day. Every attempt to make the day a happy one, by normal play,
+associates the emphasis on worship with increased happiness in the
+child's mind.
+
+
+§ 6. THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON PROBLEM
+
+"What shall we do?" the children ask restlessly on Sunday afternoons,
+and it is by no means a strange question. All the week they have their
+school work, on Saturdays their play. No wonder Sunday afternoon seems
+dull. Yet if we older ones use it aright this is our opportunity to give
+them the best time of all the week. We can make this part of the day
+really a holiday if we just take time to plan it right. There is
+something wrong in the home in which the child, as he grows up, does not
+look forward happily to his Sunday afternoons.
+
+Sunday afternoon should be a family festival time. Keep it sacred to the
+family. Business and social life claim us all the week, and the church
+claims its share of this day; but these afternoon hours we can, if we
+will, reserve for our own home life, for the closer drawing together of
+children and parents. To hold this time sacred for the children and
+their interests will help to solve "the Sunday afternoon problem."
+
+1. _The child's question, "What shall I do next?"_--Children are
+dynamic, perpetually active. They grow in the direction toward which
+their activities are turned. Repression is impossible. We must either
+find the best things for them to do, or let them chance on things good
+or bad. The following outline for Sunday afternoon is given in the hope
+that it may help to answer the "what next."
+
+
+     1. Begin to make _The Family Book_.
+
+     2. Give "festival name" to the day, and take an excursion in honor
+     of the one for whom the day is named.
+
+     3. Organize an exploring party to discover peoples and scenes of
+     long, long ago.
+
+     4. Get acquainted with some beautiful home thoughts.
+
+     5. Enjoy an evening hour of song and praise.
+
+
+2. _"The Family Book."_--To start _The Family Book_, mother or father
+raises the question at dinner: "What was the best Sunday of all last
+year, and why was it the best?" Everyone, from the oldest down to the
+least, should have a chance to tell. The statements of the older ones
+will encourage the younger.
+
+That question will start another: What is the very best thing we can
+remember about the year past? Let everyone take a pencil and paper and
+in just ten minutes decide on and write down the one thing best worth
+remembering. Perhaps the baby cannot write yet, but he or she will want
+paper and pencil, too. Now, instead of making our answers known to one
+another, we fold the papers and keep them till the evening meal. We will
+open them then and talk it all over. Afterward we are going to copy the
+answers into a new book we are going to make.
+
+This new book is to be called _The Family Book_, and we expect to put
+into it all the pleasant things we wish to record about our home and
+family. Any blank book with ruled lines will do. Some time today we will
+elect a keeper of the book, and before we go to bed we will see the
+first entry in that book under the title, "Happy Memories of 1915." That
+will make a good beginning for _The Family Book_. Next Sunday we will
+discuss and set down in the book the happy memories of the intervening
+week.
+
+3. _The festival name._--Now, we have been sitting, talking, and writing
+as long as the children will care to be still. Suppose we all go
+outdoors together, every one of us. What if the weather is bad? It is
+seldom truly bad, and there is so much real happiness in going out in
+all weathers together.
+
+But where shall we go? There is no fun in walking simply for exercise or
+health. Well, says father, we can decide where to go by naming the day.
+How? We will find the most interesting birthday or anniversary that
+falls today or during the next week. If one of the family has a birthday
+then, that one shall choose our walk for us. If not, then when we have
+chosen the national hero or heroine whose birthday falls near this time,
+or the event the anniversary of which comes nearest, we will go, if
+possible, where something will remind us of that person or event.
+
+So we fall to discussing the possibilities. We search through almanacs
+until we find the anniversary that suits us all. Perhaps one of the
+parents has anticipated all this by looking up the matter, and has a
+good name to suggest. Or the older ones may consult a dictionary of
+dates. It may turn out to be the birthday of a national hero. In the
+city he may have a statue; in the country may be found the kinds of
+woods, flowers, or animals he loved.
+
+4. _The exploring party._--But even after the walk it will not be long
+before the little ones are asking, "What can we do next?" So we organize
+the exploring party. Our object is to discover the countries, scenes,
+strange peoples, and most interesting persons we have heard of in the
+Bible. We are to find them in the advertising sections of old magazines.
+Let each one take a magazine and go through it, looking for oriental
+scenes, for pictures of incidents and of men and women that will remind
+him of Bible scenes and characters. These are to be cut out, explained,
+and arranged in the order of time, as they happened, every member of the
+family helping. The same plan may be applied to scenes of missionary
+work, using blank books for stories of heroism which children will
+illustrate with the magazine pictures.
+
+5. _Home thoughts._--"Home, sweet home," is just a corner of the
+afternoon saved for the discovery and reading of selections that are
+worth keeping in our memories and are also likely to help us hold our
+homes in some measure of the love and reverence they deserve. There are
+songs of home that ought never to be forgotten.
+
+6. _Religious reading and songs close the day happily._--Children love
+religious reading and songs, provided they are offered for their worth
+and not as an exercise, or to be learned as an empty duty. Take down
+your Bible and read Psalm 100, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all
+ye lands"; see whether they do not all enjoy the music and majesty of
+those lines. You will not find it difficult to secure their co-operation
+in learning that by heart.
+
+Then close the day with an hour of song. The children will remember
+songs learned thus all their lives; therefore those worth remembering
+should be chosen. For one, there is that dear old song many of us
+learned at mother's knee, "Jesus loves me, this I know." That and others
+that are appropriate can be found in almost every hymnbook. Many books
+of school songs also have a few hymns and Sunday songs that children
+like.
+
+Parents are puzzled, perhaps most of all, to choose appropriate stories
+to read to the children on Sunday. Youngsters prefer, of course, the
+told story to the read one, but if you wish to read you will make no
+mistake in selecting _Christie's Old Organ_; _Aunt Abbey's Neighbors_,
+by Annie T. Slosson; _The Book of Golden Deeds_, by Charlotte M. Yonge;
+and _Telling Bible Stories_, by Louise S. Houghton. _Some Great Stories
+and How to Tell Them_, by Richard Wyche, and _Story Telling_, by Edna
+Lyman, will serve as good guides to what to tell, and how to tell it.
+
+7. _Naming the day._--From week to week variety should enter into the
+Sunday program. On the Sunday following the one described above we can
+begin at the dinner table the happy task of "naming the day." We can
+decide whether it shall be called after one of our own number, whose
+birthday falls near this date, or after one of the anniversaries of the
+week following.
+
+Perhaps someone suggests calling it after the feast day of the church
+year observed by certain churches. That should lead to discussion and
+investigation of the meaning of the day.
+
+When all are agreed on a name, write it under its date on your wall
+calendar. It will be a convenient suggestion for next year, unless the
+decision is for a different name when the day again comes round. It will
+also call to mind some of the interesting discussions which it aroused.
+
+After this we might call for _The Family Book_, which now contains, you
+will recall, the family's decision as to the best Sunday and the
+happiest occurrences of the year before. The keeper, appointed last
+week, must bring it out. We can read what we wrote a week ago and decide
+on the things worth entering this week. Records of birthdays, special
+happenings to each of the family, the bright sayings of little ones, and
+the visits of friends and relatives all should go in.
+
+8. _"I remember" stories._--While _The Family Book_ is open is the
+psychological moment for father and mother to tell stories of their
+childhood. Every child likes to hear the story that begins, "I
+remember," and feels a thrill of pride in belonging to something that
+goes back and has a history. The old family album is a never-failing
+source of delight, not so much because of the pictures as because of
+what they suggest of family traditions.
+
+Now is a good time to select some certain thing which shall be used only
+on this day, such as a festival lamp or candlestick, some festival
+plates or dishes--just one thing or set of things toward the use of
+which we can look forward during the week. This helps to make Sunday
+what we used to call "a treat."
+
+9. _Golden deeds._--Last week we started _The Family Book_ in which to
+keep a record of all the happy experiences that belong to our family.
+This week we begin another book. In it we expect to place every week
+just one splendid story, the account of a golden deed, some piece of
+everyday kindness or heroism of which we have read or heard or which we
+have witnessed. Everyone is to have a chance to contribute to this book,
+all the family deciding by vote each week as to which story should be
+placed on its pages.
+
+Did you read in the paper this week of some brave or kindly deed done by
+a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? Did you see someone do an act of
+kindness? Cut out the account or write out the story and have it ready
+for your own _Golden Deed Book_. Everyone must watch all the week for
+the right kind of stories. It is wonderful how much good you will find
+in the world when you are looking for it.
+
+Sunday afternoons all the family can hear each story and talk over its
+fine points of virtue and goodness. Thus may be developed an
+appreciation of the human qualities that are really admirable. We can
+discuss also the probability of certain of the stories and the
+righteousness of the deeds.
+
+Any blank book will do, or even a composition book. It will help to keep
+hands happily occupied if you make your own covers and cut out gilt
+letters for the title. Often you can find pictures to illustrate the
+stories chosen; sometimes you may prefer to draw the illustrations. Keep
+_The Golden Deed Book_ in a safe and convenient place, because there
+ought to be something to go into it every week. For instance, did you
+read the other day of the young man who jumped in front of a train to
+save a young girl? He lost his life, but he saved hers. Can you find
+that story and put it in the book? Perhaps you have found one that seems
+even more fitting.
+
+10. _Various plans._--Giving happiness creates it. Plan something every
+Sunday for the happiness of others. Occasionally go in a body to call on
+someone who will be made happy by the visit.
+
+If you walk in the park or elsewhere, see how many things you can
+discover that you have read about in the Bible or know to be mentioned
+there.
+
+Try the game of "guessing hymns." While someone plays the familiar
+tunes, each takes a turn at identifying them and the hymns to which they
+belong.
+
+Set aside twenty minutes for each one to write a letter to send to the
+brother or sister, relative or friend, at a distance. Even the baby can
+scratch something which he thinks is a "real enough" letter in penciled
+scribbles.
+
+Close the day with quiet reading and song, or with the memory exercise
+in which all endeavor to repeat some simple psalm or a few verses, like
+the Beatitudes. All children like to repeat the Lord's Prayer in family
+concert.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Emilie Poulsson, _Love and Law in Child Training_, chaps. i-iv.
+     Milton Bradley, $1.00.
+
+     _Happy Sundays for Children_ and _Sunday in the Home_. Pamphlets.
+     American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     _Sunday Play._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life,
+     Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. xiii. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     _A Year of Good Sundays._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
+     Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the real problem of Sunday in the family? Is it that of
+     securing quiet or of wisely directing the action of the young?
+
+     2. Recall your childhood's Sundays. Were they for good or ill?
+
+     3. What are the arguments against children playing on Sunday? Is
+     there any essential relation between the play of children and the
+     wide-open Sunday of commercialized amusements?
+
+     4. Can you describe forms of play in which practically all the
+     family might unite?
+
+     5. What characteristics should distinguish play on Sundays from
+     other days? Is it wise to attempt thus to distinguish this day?
+
+     6. Criticize the suggestions on occupations for Sunday afternoons.
+
+     7. Recall any especially helpful forms of the use of this day in
+     your childhood, or coming under your observation.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church."
+
+[32] See chap. vii on "Directed Activity," and the references for study
+at its end.
+
+[33] Much may be learned by a study of Primary plans in a modern Sunday
+school. See Athearn, _The Church School_, chap. vi.
+
+[34] Since we are dealing here especially with religious education in
+the family, the author refers to his more extended treatment of the
+question of children in church services in _Efficiency in the Sunday
+School_, chap. xv.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE MINISTRY OF THE TABLE
+
+
+Shall the periods for meals be for the body only or shall we see in them
+happy occasions for the enriching of the higher life? Upon the answer
+depends whether the table shall be little more than a feeding-trough or
+the scene of constant mental and character development. In some memories
+the meals stand out only in terms of food, while pictures of dishes and
+fragments of food fill the mind; in others there are borne through all
+life pictures of happy faces and thoughts of cheer, of knowledge gained
+and ideals created in the glow of conversation.
+
+
+§ 1. THE OPPORTUNITY
+
+The family is together as a united group at the table more than anywhere
+besides. Table-talk, by its informality and by the aid of the pleasures
+of social eating, is one of the most influential means of education.
+Depend upon it, children are more impressed by table-talk than by
+teacher-talk or by pulpit-talk. They expect moralizing on the other
+occasions, but here the moral lessons throw out no warning; they meet no
+opposition; they are--or ought to be, if they would be effective--a
+natural part of ordinary conversation and, by being part and parcel of
+everyday affairs, they become normally related to life. The table is the
+best opportunity for informal, indirect teaching, and this is for
+children the natural and only really effective form of moral
+instruction.
+
+The child comes to these social occasions with a hungry mind as well as
+with an empty stomach. His mind is always receptive--even more so than
+his stomach; at the table he is absorbing that which will stay with him
+much longer than his food. Even if we were thinking of his food alone,
+we should still do well to see that the table is graced by happy and
+helpful conversation; nothing will aid digestion more than good cheer of
+the spirit; it stimulates the organs and, by diverting attention from
+the mere mechanics of eating, it tends to that most desirable end, a
+leisurely consumption of food.
+
+The general conversation of the family group has more to do with
+character development in children than we are likely to realize, and the
+table is peculiarly the opportunity for general conversation. Here, most
+of all, we need to watch its character and consider its teaching
+effects. Where father scolds or mother complains the children grow
+fretful and quarrelsome. Where father spends the time in reciting the
+sharp dealing of the market or the political ring, where mother
+delights in dilating on the tinsel splendors of her social rivalries,
+they teach the children that life's object is either gain at any cost or
+social glory. But it is just as easy to do precisely the opposite, to
+speak of the pleasures found in simpler ways, to glory in goodness and
+kindness, and to teach, by relating the worthy things of the day, the
+worth of love and truth and high ideals. The news of the day may be
+discussed so as to make this world a game of grab, inviting youth to
+cast conscience and honor to the winds and to plunge into the greedy
+struggle, or so as to make each day a book of beautiful pictures of
+life's best pleasures and enduring prizes.
+
+
+§ 2. DIRECTING TABLE-TALK
+
+But table-talk, helpful, cheerful, and educative, does not occur by
+accident. It comes, first, from our own constant and habitual thought of
+the meals in social and spiritual, as well as in physical, terms. And it
+reaches its possibilities as we endeavor to create and direct the kind
+of conversation that is desired. "Let all your speech be seasoned with
+salt," wrote the apostle, and we might add, let your salt be seasoned
+with good speech. That is the quality we must seek, the seasoning of
+healthful, saving, and not insipid, speech.
+
+One of the great advantages of "grace before meat" lies in this: it
+gives a tone to the occasion. Its chief meaning is surely that we
+remind ourselves of the ever-present guest who is also the giver of all
+good. Where the grace is not a perfunctory act, but rather the welcoming
+of such a guest, the meal has started on a high level. We cannot do
+better than so to act and speak as those who take the divine presence
+for granted. We need not preach about it; we need only to assume it and
+move on the level of that friendship. Children will feel it; they will
+seek to answer to it, and will find pleasure in the very thought which
+they have perhaps never expressed in words.
+
+The central idea of the grace suggests another means of helpful
+influences at the table, by bringing into our homes, for the meals, the
+friends whose lives will lift these younger ones. It is worth everything
+to live even for an hour with good and broadening lives. There are
+obligations to our guests to be considered, and their wishes should be
+consulted, but one always feels that children are being cheated when
+they are sent to eat at another table and deprived of the peculiar
+intimate touch with lives that bring the benefits of travel and
+experience. Ask your own memory what some persons who ate at the table
+with you in childhood meant to you.
+
+The wise hostess knows that even when she brings together the group of
+mature folks, and even when they are wise and witty, she must be
+prepared adroitly to inspire the conversation or it may flag at times.
+How much more does the conversation need direction where we have the
+same group every day composed largely of immature persons! When you have
+thought of all the portions and all the plates, have you thought of the
+food for the spirit?
+
+Before suggesting methods of selection and direction, let a word of
+explanation be said: food for the spirit is not confined to theology, to
+hymns and the Bible; it is whatever will help us to feel and think of
+life as an affair of the spirit. And this must come in very simple
+terms, by the elementary steps, for young folks. It will be whatever
+will in any way help us to live more kindly, more cheerfully, more as
+though this really were God's world and all folks his family. Whatever
+does this is truly religious.
+
+
+§ 3. METHODS
+
+Plan for the food of the spirit as seriously at least as for the food of
+the body. Learn to recognize poisons and also indigestibles. The first
+are subjects of scandal, bitterness of spirit, malice, impatience,
+tale-bearing, unkindly criticism, and discontent. The second are
+subjects too heavy for children: your formal theology would be one of
+them, your judgments on some intricate subjects may be among them. It is
+seldom wise to announce negative injunctions, but we can make up our
+own minds to avoid the conversational poisons and, when they appear, it
+is always easy to push them out. Even when the unpleasant subject is so
+common to all and has been so impressive in the day's experience that it
+threatens to become the sole, absorbing topic, we can say, "We won't
+talk of it at table! Let's find something better." But we must then have
+ready the something better; that will be possible only by forethought.
+
+First, save up during the day, or between the meals, the best thoughts,
+the cheering, kind, ideal, and amusing incidents. Cultivate the habit of
+saying to yourself, "This is something for us all to enjoy tonight at
+the table."
+
+Secondly, expect the other members to bring their best. Ask for "the
+best news of the day" from one and another. Encourage them to tell of
+good things seen and done and of pleasant and ideal things heard and
+spoken.
+
+Thirdly, use the incidents as the basis of discussion. Let children tell
+what they think of moral situations. Often they will quote the opinions
+of teachers and others. Always you will secure under these circumstances
+the unreserved expression of what they actually think. A free, informal
+conversation of this sort where opinions are kindly examined and
+compared is the finest kind of teaching.
+
+Fourthly, do not forget the grace of humor. To see the odd, whimsical,
+startling side of the incident or experience trains one to see the
+interplay of life, to catch a ray of light from all things, and to
+moderate our tendency to permit our tragedies to pull the heavens down.
+
+Fifthly, use this period to strengthen the consciousness of family unity
+by recounting past happy experiences and discussing plans of family
+life. In one family there are few meals from October to Christmas that
+do not include reminiscences of the summer in the woods and by the
+water, or from Christmas to June without plans for the next summer in
+the same place. Then, too, if you are contemplating something new, a
+piano, a chair, an automobile, talk it all over here. Let each one have
+his share in the planning. The effect is most important for character;
+the children acquire the sense of a share in the family community life.
+They get their first lessons in citizenship in this group, and they thus
+learn social living. Then when the chair, or what not, is bought, it is
+not alone the parents' possession; it belongs to all and all treat it as
+the property of all.
+
+Sixthly, introduce great guests who cannot come in person. It is fine
+fun to say, "We have with us tonight a man who loved bees and wrote
+books." Let them guess who it was; help, if necessary, by an allusion
+to _The Life of the Bee_ and _The Blue Bird_. They will want to know
+more about Maeterlinck and they will joyously imagine what they would
+say to him and how he would answer, what he would eat and how he would
+behave. In this way we may enjoy knowing better Lincoln, Whittier,
+Florence Nightingale, and an innumerable company.
+
+Seventhly, this is the place to remind ourselves that table-manners are
+no small part of the moral life. By the habituation of custom we can
+establish lives in attitudes of everyday thoughtfulness for others, in
+the underlying consideration of others which is the basis of all
+courtesy. Children's questions on table-etiquette must be met, not only
+by the formal rules, but also by their explanation in the intent of
+every gentle life to give pleasure and not pain to others, so to live in
+all things as to find helpful harmony with other lives and to help them
+to find and be the best. It is not only impolite to grab and guzzle, it
+is unsocial and so unmoral, because it is both a bad example and a
+distressing sight to others. It is irreligious, because whatever tends
+to make this life less beautiful must be offensive to the God who made
+all things good.
+
+If we ourselves seek to maintain beauty, order, and kindliness in the
+conduct of the table, our children acquire a love of all that makes for
+beauty and order and kindliness, for righteousness in the little things
+of life. A clean tablecloth may be a means of grace. You have to try to
+live up to it. Order and quietness in eating are not separable from the
+rest of the life. To lift up life at any point is to raise the whole
+level. To let it down at any point is to let all down. But to lift up
+the level of conversation at the table is to raise the level of the
+entire occasion and to make it more than a period of eating, to convert
+it into a festival, a joyous occasion of the spirit. The meal should be
+in all things worthy of the unseen guest.
+
+How near we all come together at the table! In its freedom how clearly
+are we seen by our children! Here they know us for what we are and so
+learn to interpret life.
+
+
+     I. Reference for Study
+
+     _Table Talk._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life,
+     Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     II. Topics Tor Discussion
+
+     1. The relation of mental conditions to digestion.
+
+     2. The relation of table-etiquette to life-habits.
+
+     3. The table as an opportunity for the grace of courtesy, and the
+     relation of this grace to Christian character.
+
+     4. Training children in listening as well as in talking at table.
+
+     5. Do you regard table-talk and table-manners as having any
+     directly religious values? Why?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE BOY AND GIRL IN THE FAMILY
+
+
+Much that has been said so far has had in mind only the problems of
+dealing with younger children in the life of the home. Indeed, almost
+all literature on education in the family is devoted to the years prior
+to adolescence. But older boys and girls need the family and the family
+needs them. Many of the more serious problems of youth with which
+society is attempting to deal are due to the fact that from the age of
+thirteen on boys have no home life and girls, especially in the cities,
+are deprived of the home influences.
+
+
+§ 1. THE GROWING BOY
+
+The life of the family must have a place for the growing boy. It must
+make provision for his physical needs; these are food, activity, rest,
+and shelter. Youth is a period of physical crisis. Health is the basis
+of a sound moral life. Many of the lad's apparently strange propensities
+are due to the physical changes taking place in his body and, often, to
+the fact that it is assumed that his rugged frame needs no care or
+attention.[35]
+
+It will take more than tearful pleading to hold him to his home; he can
+be held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most
+attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering
+boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded
+quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makeshift bed, and
+the general home organization which long ago assumed that a boy could be
+left out of the reckoning.
+
+The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to
+that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree
+that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him
+about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a
+chance to do part of the work, not only its "chores," but also its forms
+of service. But even a boy's attitude to the "chores" will depend on
+whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of
+unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be
+responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does
+regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services
+which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his
+training for the larger citizenship and society of service.[36]
+
+The boy is a playing animal. Not all homes can be fully equipped with
+play apparatus. But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as
+though children needed nothing but meals and beds. The shame of the
+modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for passive
+adults. To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human
+creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are
+shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to
+force him out to the life of the streets. The thoughtless
+self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical
+effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.[37]
+
+But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the grass and
+among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation. For
+the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary,
+and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or
+pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off
+the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof. If
+possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his
+friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of
+home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.[38]
+
+A workbench in the attic or basement has saved many a boy from the
+street. Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a
+home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but
+families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the
+home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the
+purpose of a salon.[39]
+
+
+§ 2. RELIGIOUS SERVICE
+
+In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to
+one form of participation in the religious life. Whatever the family
+gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the
+support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of
+one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending
+itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world. The
+form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family
+conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the
+means of determining his share in such extension. The child's gifts to
+the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the
+threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own
+account--partly his own direct earnings--appropriated for this or for
+other purposes by himself and with the advice of his parents. Family
+councils on forms of participation in ideal activities, by gifts and by
+service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the
+child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.[40]
+
+The boy needs friendship. Not all his needs can be met by the schoolboys
+whom he may bring into his room, nor can they all be met by his mother's
+affection. He needs a father. The most serious obstacle to the religious
+education of boys is that most of them are half-orphans; intellectually
+and spiritually they have no fathers. The American ideal seems to be
+that the man shall be the money-maker, the woman the social organizer,
+and the children shall be committed to hired shepherds or left to shift
+for themselves.
+
+
+§ 3. THE FATHER AND THE BOY
+
+No one else can be quite the teacher for the boy that his father ought
+to be. No man can ever commit to another, still less to some tract or
+book, the duty of guiding his boy to sanity and consecration in the
+matter of the sex problems.
+
+The first word that needs to be said on this subject is that such
+problems receive safe and sufficient guidance only in the atmosphere of
+affection and reverence. Do not attempt to teach this boy of yours as
+though you were dealing with a class in physiology. The largest thing
+you can do for him is to quicken a reverence for the body and for the
+functions of life. By your own attitude, by your own expressions and
+opinions, lead him to a hatred and abhorrence of the base, filthy, and
+bestial, to a healthy fear and detestation of all that despoils and
+degrades manhood, and to a reverence for purity, beauty, and life.[41]
+
+Be prepared to give him, on the basis of reverence, the clean, clear
+facts. Be sure you have the facts. Do not think he is ignorant; he is in
+a world seething with conversation, stories, pictures, and experiences
+of evil. The trouble is that his facts are partial, distorted, and
+unbalanced by positive errors; his knowledge is gained from the street
+and the school-yard. Only a personal teacher can help him unravel the
+good from the bad, the true from the false. Do not trust to your own
+general knowledge; take time to read one of the simple and sane books on
+this subject.[42] Be ready to lead him aright. Remember this subject has
+provoked a large number of books, many of which are foolish and others
+unwholesome. Do not try to deputize your duty to some doubtful book.
+
+
+§ 4. FATHERING THE BOY
+
+But the boy needs more than instruction on a special subject; he needs
+personality, he needs the time and thought of, and _personal contact_
+with, his father. Men who do not live with boys never know what they
+lose. And alas, see what the boy misses! He has been his mother's boy up
+to school age when school takes him and gives him a woman's guidance,
+while the Sunday school is likely to keep him--for a while only--under
+the eye of some dear sister who "just loves boys." The system is a
+vicious one. The lad needs developed masculinity. If he gets it neither
+in school nor in the home he will find it on the street corner, through
+the vicious boy-leader of the degrading poolroom or the alleys.
+
+The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the
+merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as
+simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious
+questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with
+the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering
+your young men if you lost your boys.[43]
+
+
+§ 5. THE GROWING GIRL
+
+Almost all that has been said about the boy applies to the girl of the
+same years. Let _a special plea_ be entered here against the notion that
+girls are favored when sheltered from a share in the activities of the
+home. They desire to express their ideals as much as do boys. Much of
+the so-called craze for amusements is due to the fact that the family is
+so organized that there is no vent to the ideals there, no chance to
+have a share in the business of life. Young folks with the sense that
+"this is our home," not "our parents', but _ours_" bend their energies
+to its adorning, and find in it the chance to realize some of their
+passion for beauty and for service.[44]
+
+Mothers usually do better than do fathers in the matter of sex
+instruction. Yet they usually begin too late, long after the little girl
+has acquired much misleading information in the school. Here, too, the
+first aim must be to quicken reverence for life, to set up the
+conception of the beauty and dignity of sex functions before the baser
+mind of the street has had an opportunity to interpret them in terms of
+the dirt.[45]
+
+Above all, with boys and girls, the whole subject, including marriage
+and the founding of a family, must ever be treated with dignity and
+reverence. Foolish parents jest with their girls about their beaux and
+boast that their little ones are playing at courtship. If they could
+realize the wonder awakened, followed by pain and then by hardened
+sensibilities and coarsened ideals, they would sacrifice their jests for
+the sake of the child's soul. We wonder that youth treats lightly the
+matter of social purity when we have treated the sacred relations of
+life as a jest. If this family in which they now live is to be a place
+of sacred associations, of real religious life, the whole matter of
+marriage and the family must be treated with reverence. Their practice
+will not rise above our everyday ideals as expressed in casual
+conversation and in our own practice.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     THE BOY
+
+     W.A. McKeever, _Training the Boy_, Part III. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     _Boy Training_, Part IV. A Symposium. Associated Press.
+
+     Johnson, _The Problems of Boyhood_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     THE GIRL
+
+     Margaret Slattery, _The Girl in Her Teens_, chaps. iv, vii. Sunday
+     School Times Co., $0.50.
+
+     Wayne, _Building Your Girl_. McClurg, $0.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation_. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     Puffer, _The Boy and His Gang_. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.
+
+     Irving King, _The High School Age_. Bobbs-Merrill, $1.00.
+
+     _Building Childhood_, A Symposium. Sunday School Times Co., $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special needs of the growing boy?
+
+     2. What are the things that a boy enjoys in his home?
+
+     3. In what way does city life interfere with the natural
+     development of the child?
+
+     4. What are some of the natural expressions of religion for a boy?
+
+     5. How early should the sex instruction begin?
+
+     6. What does a father owe to the boy, and what are the best methods
+     of meeting the duty?
+
+     7. What are the normal activities for girls in the home?
+
+     8. What are their especial needs?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[35] A good brief book on the problem of the adolescent is E.T. Swift,
+_Youth and the Race_; another, from the school point of view, is Irving
+King, _The High-School Age_, which has much material of great value to
+parents.
+
+[36] On the various activities of boys see W.A. McKeever, _Training the
+Boy_.
+
+[37] See the notable report by Breckinridge and Abbott, _The Delinquent
+Child and the Home_.
+
+[38] On the gregarious instincts see J.A. Puffer, _The Boy and His
+Gang_.
+
+[39] See the books on manual work given in chap. vii, "Directed
+Activity."
+
+[40] On the religious life of the boy in relation to society and the
+church see Allan Hoben, _The Minister and the Boy_, and the author's
+treatment of boys and the Sunday school in _Efficiency in the Sunday
+School_, chap. xiv; also J. Alexander _et al._, _Training the Boy_, a
+symposium.
+
+[41] On the attitude of reverence in this question read Dr. Cabot's fine
+essay, _The Christian Approach to Social Morality_.
+
+[42] The works of Dr. W.S. Hall, _From Boyhood to Manhood_, for parents'
+guidance with boys of thirteen to eighteen; E. Lyttleton, _Training of
+the Young in Laws of Sex_, is excellent for fathers; _Reproduction and
+Sexual Hygiene_ is a text for older youth to be recommended; also, for
+reading, N.E. Richardson, _Sex Culture Talks_, D.S. Jordan, _The
+Strength of Being Clean_.
+
+[43] For further studies of the problem of the boy parents would do well
+to read: _Building Boyhood_, a symposium; W.A. McKeever, _Training the
+Boy;_ W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation;_ W.D. Hyde, _The Quest of
+the Best_.
+
+[44] On activities see W.A. McKeever, _Training the Girl_.
+
+[45] On the problem with young children see M. Morley, _The Renewal of
+Life_; in connection with older girls see K.H. Wayne, _Building Your
+Girl_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE NEEDS OF YOUTH
+
+
+Families are for the spiritual development of youth as well as of
+childhood. The home is for the young people as well as for the younger
+ones. But the very period when they slip from church school is also the
+period when they are often lost to the real life of the family. In some
+measure this is due to the natural development of the social life. The
+youths go out to work, move forward into enlarging social groups which
+demand more of their free time. They are learning the life of the larger
+world of which they are now a part.
+
+
+§ 1. THE SCHOOL OF YOUTH
+
+But the family is still the home of these young people; normally it is
+still the most vital educational influence for them. Yet there is no
+problem more baffling than that of family ministry for, and leadership
+of, the higher life of youth.
+
+It is a short-measure interpretation of the home which thinks of it as
+only for young children and old folks. The young men and women from
+sixteen to twenty and over still need training and direction; they need
+close touch with other lives in affection and in an ideal atmosphere. In
+a few years they, too, will be home-makers, and here in the home they
+are very directly learning the art of family life.
+
+For youth there are few effective schools, outside the home, other than
+the streets and the places of commercialized amusement. Even where the
+other agencies of training are used, such as college, classes, and
+associations (such as the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A.), life, at that
+period, needs the restraints on selfishness that come from family life,
+the refining and socializing power of the family group.
+
+
+§ 2. SPECIAL NEEDS OF YOUTH
+
+What are the special needs of youth upon which the family may base a
+reasonable program for their higher needs?
+
+First, the need of sound physical health. This is a period of physical
+adjustment. Rapid bodily growth is nearly or quite at an end; new
+functions are asserting themselves. The new demands for directed
+activity may, under the ambitious impulses of youth, make undue drafts
+on the energies. The apparent moodiness that at times characterizes this
+period may be due to poor health. The moral strain of the period will
+need sound muscles and good health. Parents who would sit up all
+night--perhaps involuntarily--when the baby has the colic treat with
+indifference sickness in youth and too readily assume that the young
+man or the young woman will outgrow these physical ills. But bodily
+maladjustment or incapacity has most serious character effects. To live
+the right life and render high service one needs to be a whole person,
+with opportunity to give undivided attention and undiminished powers to
+the struggle of life.
+
+Secondly, this is peculiarly the period of the joy of friendships. The
+social nature must have its food. This young man has discovered that the
+world consists of something besides things; it is full of people. He is
+just learning that they are all persons like himself. He enters the era
+of conscious personal relationships. He would explore the realm of
+personality. He touches great heights of happiness as other lives are
+opened to him. It is all new and wonderful, this realm of personality,
+with its aspects of feeling, thinking, willing, and longing.
+
+
+§ 3. MAINTAINING FRIENDSHIP WITH YOUTH
+
+Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their
+friendship? They will never tell us, for this world is too new and
+strange for facile description; they are always bashful about their
+hunger for persons until they find the same hunger and joy in us. We
+imagine that they are indifferent to us; the trouble is we are hidden
+from them. We seldom give them a chance to talk as friend to friend,
+not about trifling things, but about life itself and what it means.
+Perhaps at no point do parents exhibit less ability for sympathetic
+reconstruction and interpretation of their own lives than here. They
+recall the pleasures of childhood and provide those pleasures for the
+children. Why not recall the hunger of eighteen years of age and give
+these youths the very bread of our own inner selves? Or do we, when they
+ask this bread, give them the stone of mere provision for their physical
+needs or the scorpion of careless indulgence in things that debase the
+tastes?
+
+One perplexing phenomenon must not be overlooked: it will often happen
+that young people pass through a period of what appears to be parental
+aversion. There will sometimes seem to be suspicion, violent opposition,
+and even hatred of parents. This is no occasion for despair. It is a
+stage of development. It is due to the attempt of a will now realizing
+its freedom under social conditions to adapt itself to the will that has
+hitherto directed it. To some degree the sex consciousness, which leads
+to viewing the parents in a new light, may enter in. It may be easily
+made permanent, however, if parents do not do two things: first, adjust
+themselves and their methods to the new social freedom of the youth,
+and, secondly, fling open the doors into their true selves now fully
+understandable by these men and women.
+
+But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of
+youth. Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will
+feed. Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere. If
+they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere. You can
+scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they
+are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when
+home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth. If you
+are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but
+you will lose a life or lives. Here is the opportunity of the home to
+enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many
+lives.
+
+
+§ 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD
+
+As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful
+realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than
+others. Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel
+him to make a selection. The same law is operative with the young woman.
+Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities;
+it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther. But father
+and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as
+they see their children taking their first evident steps toward
+home-making. What an opportunity is theirs!
+
+Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just
+where some of the most serious mistakes are made. This is no time for
+teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule. If you treat this
+essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young
+people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke. The home is
+the place where the home is treated most irreverently. Of course one
+must not take too seriously those "calf" courtships, prematurely
+fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school
+tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here
+jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what
+would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or
+kindly, simple advice will help most of all.
+
+To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when
+they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth's
+idealism, make high vows and stand on high places. Give them at least
+the opportunity to enter your inmost self, to find there all the light
+you can give them and all the memory of your own joys and hopes. Make
+them feel, though you need not say it, that they are at the threshold of
+a temple. If to you this is an affair of the spirit it will be a matter
+of religion to them.
+
+Approached in such a temper, many of the practical problems of courtship
+settle themselves. Take the case of the young man at home. If he knows
+that you think with him of the high meaning of this experience he will
+not hesitate to bring the young woman to the home. She will feel your
+attitude. Upon this level questions of times and seasons, hours in the
+parlor, and all the matters of their relations will settle themselves.
+If you treat courtship as a matter of the spirit he will do just what he
+most of all wants to do, treat this woman who is to be his mate as a
+person, a spirit, with reverence and love that lifts itself above lust.
+This is the only ground upon which you can appeal to either in matters
+of conduct at this time. The conventions of society they will despise;
+but the inner law speaks to them when the outer letter has no meaning.
+
+
+§ 5. THE SOCIAL LIFE
+
+We must expect our children to go out into their larger world. The
+beginning of adolescence is the normal time of their social awakening,
+their conversion from a nature that turns in upon itself to one that
+moves out into a world of persons. For them, now, the home group ought
+to be seen as a society as well as a family, as the social group
+gathering about a definite ideal and mission into which they should
+delight to project themselves. The appeal of religion is peculiarly
+vivid just now, for it involves a recognition of one's self as a person
+with the power of personal choices and with the opportunity to find
+association with other persons. The family must aid its young people to
+see the opportunity which the church offers for ideal social
+relationships which direct themselves to high and attractive service.
+
+
+§ 6. AMUSEMENTS
+
+What should the family do about the question of the amusements of young
+people?
+
+Healthy young persons must have recreation. They will seek it on its
+highest level first and find their way down the facile descent of
+commercialized amusements only as the higher opportunities are denied
+them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would
+rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than
+sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the
+idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this
+need the home must minister by the provision of space, time,
+opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth,
+selfishness, preoccupation, or a mistaken idea of an empty innocence of
+life you make recreation and social intercourse impossible in the
+family, the young people will find it on the street or in the crowd. In
+the family that plans for recreation and provides facilities and time
+for young people to play the problem is a minor one.
+
+But young people will naturally desire to project themselves into the
+social amusements of the larger groups. Then we ought to know what those
+amusements are; we must be able to advise, from actual knowledge, not
+from hearsay or prejudice, as to the healthful and worth while. The home
+must insist on the provision in the community for the safe socialization
+of amusements. The thousands of young girls in the cities, who tramp the
+pavements down to dance halls, primarily are only seeking the
+satisfaction of a normal craving; and they, on their way to the dance
+halls, pass the splendid plants of the schools and the churches,
+standing dark and idle. Families must develop a public opinion that will
+demand, for the sake of their young people, a provision for amusement
+and recreation that, instead of poisoning the life, shall strengthen,
+dignify, and elevate it. If the demand for clean drinking-water is a
+proper one, is the demand for healthful food for the life of ideals less
+so?
+
+There can be no doubt of the attitude of any home with the least
+conscience for character toward all forms of public amusements in which
+young people are herded promiscuously for the mere purpose of killing
+time in trivialities. The "white cities" with their glittering lights
+and baubles are often moral plague colonies. The amusements debase the
+intellect, blunt the moral sensibilities, and appeal to the baser
+passions. They are the low-water mark, we may hope, of commercialized
+amusement. But they remind us that young people demand company and
+change from the monotony of the day's toil. They ask us as to the
+provision we are making for young people and challenge us to use their
+inclinations for good.
+
+But besides these "shows" there are many dignified forms of social
+recreation. Good music is to be heard and good plays are to be seen.
+
+The theater, whether of the regular drama or of the motion-picture type,
+offers a perplexing problem, principally because, in the first place,
+American people have been too busy conquering a new soil and making a
+living to give careful thought to the social side of aesthetics and
+recreation, and, secondly, because the ministry of social recreation has
+fallen almost entirely under the dominance of the same trend; it has
+been thoroughly commercialized. We cannot cut the puzzling knot by
+simply prohibiting all forms of public theatrical entertainment. For one
+reason, these forms shade off imperceptibly from the church service to
+the extremes of the vaudeville. But the simple fact is that we no longer
+indiscriminately class all theaters as baneful and immoral; we are
+coming to see their potentialities for good. If the young will go, as
+they will--and ought--to the theater, and if the theater can lift their
+ideals, parents would do well to guide their children in this matter and
+to enlist the aid of the theater.
+
+It is worth while to come to a sympathetic understanding of the place of
+the drama and the opera, to see what they have meant in the education of
+the race and what is the significance, to us, of the fact of the strong
+dramatic instinct in childhood. Naturally the subject can only be
+mentioned here and the suggestion be offered that parents take time to
+cultivate an appreciation of good orchestral and concert music and of
+the drama.
+
+The social life will find outlet in other directions. Young people need
+our aid to find social groups which will inspire and develop them,
+especially groups that are serviceful.
+
+
+§ 7. THE CALL TO SERVICE
+
+This is the period when ideals begin to give direction to the hitherto
+undirected activity of childhood and youth. Young people are idealists.
+They see no height too giddy, no task too hard, no dream too roseate,
+and no hope unattainable. If the times are out of joint they believe
+they were "born to set them right." Whatever is wrong or imperfect they
+would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we
+are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so
+the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth.
+Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blasé view of the
+world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead
+of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those
+ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the
+songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your
+Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's passion and let it
+breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and
+conversation the life of ideals.
+
+Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is
+surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the
+period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in
+the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do
+something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We
+know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of
+others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and
+active minds--not with sleepy fatalism--believe in their boys, have boys
+who believe in them.
+
+They wait for leadership. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of
+indifference to social reform and other types of ideal service, get
+back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.
+
+They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their
+service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.
+
+They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It
+will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be
+merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life
+in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of
+the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange
+from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else
+goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to
+today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to
+give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to
+make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious
+person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find
+the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God's world.
+The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are
+interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his
+high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to
+you--as you have been doing all along--by your daily attitude; you will
+have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly
+discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the
+life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to
+realize the God-vision of the world.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.C. King, _Personal and Ideal Elements in Education_, pp. 105-27.
+     Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     E.D. Starbuck, _The Psychology of Religion_, chaps., xvi-xxi.
+     Scribner, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     1. ON YOUTH
+
+     C.R. Brown, _The Young Man's Affairs_. Crowell, $1.00.
+
+     Wayne, _Building the Young Man_. McClurg, $0.50.
+
+     Swift, _Youth and the Race_. Scribner, $1.50.
+
+     Wilson, _Making the Most of Ourselves_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     2. ON RECREATIONS
+
+     L.C. Lillie, _The Story of Music and the Musicians_. Harper, $0.60.
+
+     Gustav Kobbe, _How to Appreciate Music_. Moffat, $1.50.
+
+     P. Chubb, _Festivals and Plays_. Harper, $2.00.
+
+     _Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of
+     Dramatic Plays_, monographs published by the American Institute of
+     Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     L.H. Gulick, _Popular Recreation and Public Morality_. American
+     Unitarian Association. Free.
+
+     M. Fowler, _Morality of Social Pleasures_. Longmans, $1.00.
+
+     Addams, _The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets_. Macmillan,
+     $1.25.
+
+     The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see
+     Herbert A. Jump, _The Religious Possibilities of the Motion
+     Picture_ (a pamphlet) and _Vaudeville and Moving Pictures_, a
+     report of an investigation in Portland, Ore. _Reed College Record,
+     No. 16._
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?
+
+     2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their
+     evenings? Why is this the case?
+
+     3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.
+
+     4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friendship of our
+     young people?
+
+     5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion
+     to parents?
+
+     6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of
+     courtship?
+
+     7. What are the special social needs of young people?
+
+     8. What is the religious significance of the period of social
+     awakening?
+
+     9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amusements?
+
+     10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?
+
+     11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?
+
+     12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE FAMILY AND THE CHURCH
+
+
+If the family is engaged in the development of religious character
+through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close
+relations with the other great social institution engaged in precisely
+the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of
+religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and
+the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained,
+these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.
+
+As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should
+be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home constitutes the
+first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives
+prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of
+social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives
+together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of
+life.
+
+
+§ 1. RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME
+
+Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an
+institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the
+developing relations of children to the church, would be largely solved
+if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these
+two institutions. The institutional difficulties occur because these
+relations appear to be competitive. Here is the family with its
+interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on
+the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time,
+interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture
+unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that
+money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it
+to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from
+the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of
+the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.
+
+But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The
+home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems
+of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the
+opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions. We carelessly
+think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be
+persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests
+of which are in a different sphere. We think of the church as an
+independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or
+shortcomings and to criticize it if it fails to meet our standards,
+just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to
+our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the
+homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.
+
+This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence
+independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and
+makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the
+church and the children. If the church is a thing apart we can analyze
+its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw
+recruits. It marches by while we stand on the curb. But here, surely, is
+one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms: the church is no
+more than our own selves associated for certain purposes. If the church
+fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we
+would a bridge that failed to carry a reasonable load? We do but condemn
+ourselves. If my church is not fit to send my children to, then I must
+help to make it fit. Before falling back on the lazy man's salve of
+caustic ridicule, before taking the seat of the scornful, before setting
+in the child's mind an aversion to this institution, based on my
+opinion, let me be sure I have done all that lies in my power to better
+it. True, I am only one; but surely, where so many family tables are
+each Sunday devoted to finding fault with the church and its services,
+I can find many others who will aid in at least stimulating a sense of
+personal responsibility for any incompleteness in the church.
+
+The family cannot afford to take the attitude of hostile criticism, for
+it is thus fighting its first and most natural ally, the one other
+institution engaged in its own special work. If the forces for spiritual
+character be divided, how easily do the opposing forces enter in and
+occupy! The family needs the support of the wider public opinion of the
+church, insisting on the supremacy of righteousness. The family needs
+the co-operation of the church in its task of developing religious
+lives. The family needs the power of this larger social body controlling
+social conditions and making them contributory to character purposes.
+The family needs the stimulus which a larger group can give to children
+and young people.
+
+This does not mean that we must never criticize the church. It is not
+set off in a niche protected from the acid of secular tongues and minds.
+Ministers of the gospel are unduly resentful of criticism, perhaps
+because, after they leave the seminary, no one has a fair opportunity to
+controvert their publicly stated opinions. But the church needs the
+cleansing powers of kindly, wise, creative criticism. Anyone can find
+fault, but he is wise who can show us a better way. This church is the
+family's ally; it is our business to aid her to greater effectiveness.
+The new church for our own day awaits the services of the men of today.
+
+The purpose of the family is the basis of alliance with the church. As
+in every other relation and purpose of the home, so here: the dominant
+factor is the conscious function of the home and family. If the home is
+really a religious institution it will seek natural alliance with all
+other truly religious institutions. Ideally, what is a church but a
+group of families associated for religious purposes? Is not the church
+simply a number of families co-operating in the ideal purposes of each
+family, the development of the lives of religious persons and the
+control of social conditions for the sake of that purpose? Without
+entering into disputation as to the relationship of little children to
+the church, is there not just this relation to the human society called
+the church, that it is a grouping of families for the purpose of the
+divine family?
+
+
+§ 2. THE FAMILY IDEAL IN THE CHURCH
+
+Would there be any question as to the naturalness of the relation of our
+children to the church if the family ideal so controlled our thinking as
+to saturate theirs? Is not this the present need, that both family and
+church shall conceive the latter in family terms? By this is meant, not
+simply that we shall think of what is called "a family church," a church
+into which we succeed in projecting our families in a fair degree of
+integrity, but that we shall think of the organization and mission of
+the church in terms of family life and of the ideal of the divine
+family. Keeping in mind the general definition already given of a family
+as persons associated for the development of spiritual persons, let us
+hold the church to that same ideal; the lives of persons associated in
+the broadest fellowship that includes both God and man for the purposes
+of spiritual personality. The church then should be the expression of
+that family of which Jesus often spoke, the family that calls God Father
+and man brother.
+
+Closer and more helpful relations between family and church follow where
+the principles of the family prevail in the latter. The family is an
+ideal democracy because it exists primarily for persons. It places the
+value of persons first of all. So with the true church; it will exist to
+grow lives to spiritual fulness, and to this end all buildings,
+adornments, exercises, teachings, and organizations will be but as
+tools, as means serving that purpose. As the family sees its house,
+table, and activities designed to personal ends, so will the church. In
+an institution existing to grow lives, the great principle of democracy
+and of the family will prevail, viz., that to the least we owe the most.
+Just as the home gives its best to the little child, so will the church
+place the child in the midst. Just as the home exists for the child and
+thus holds to itself all other lives, so will the church some day exist
+for the little ones and so hold and use all other lives.
+
+The prime difficulty of relating the children in our families to the
+average church lies in the fact that they are children, while the church
+is an adult institution. Its buildings are designed for adults--save in
+rare and happy exceptions;[46] its services are designed for adults; it
+has a more or less extraneous institution called a school for the
+children. The church spends its money for adults; it compasses sea and
+land to make one proselyte and coerce him back in old age, and allows
+the many that already as children are its own to drift away. It often
+fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the
+growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted
+from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving
+service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the
+development of such lives through childhood and youth. They must hear
+again the Master's voice regarding "these little ones," regarding the
+significance of the child. And all must be loyal to his picture of his
+Kingdom as a family and must, therefore, do what all true families do,
+become child-centric. A church in which children occupy the same place
+that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a
+place for the children. It will be a natural and unnoticed transition
+from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.
+
+
+§ 3. A PLACE FOR ALL IN THE CHURCH
+
+The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an
+insistence on the family conception and the family program in the
+church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there
+a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the
+church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the
+name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let
+the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and
+specially designed worship for child-life--suitable forms of service and
+activity. Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be
+carried over to provide them in the church.
+
+Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church
+by their attitude toward it as the larger family group. To think and act
+toward this institution as our home, the wider home of the families, is
+to establish similar habits of thought in children. Such a concept is
+not always easy to maintain; the church includes many of different
+habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general
+life. Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility
+toward the weaker and immature. This family, the church, just like our
+own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all
+minister to others.
+
+The principal service which the family may render to the church is,
+then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will
+relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural
+for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for
+religious culture and service. Surely this should be the attitude toward
+membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically
+in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church
+as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in
+which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service. The family
+may well hold that relationship steadily before its members. In
+childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who
+learn. The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering
+the way of the religious life and the art of its service. The fellowship
+grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child's relationship
+passes over from the passive to the active, from the involuntary to the
+voluntary--just as it does in the home--and develops, as the child comes
+into social consciousness, into a recognition of himself as belonging to
+a social organization for specific purposes.
+
+
+§ 4. CHILD UNITY WITH THE CHURCH
+
+At some time every child of church-attending parents will want to know
+whether he "belongs to the church." One must be very careful here,
+regardless of the ecclesiastical practice, to show the child that he is
+essentially one with this body, this religious family. He may be too
+young to subscribe his name to its roll, but he belongs at least to the
+full measure of unity appreciable by his mind. He must not be permitted
+to think of himself as an outsider. Indeed, no matter what our theology
+may hold, every religious parent believes that his children belong to
+God. Do they not also belong to the church in at least the sense that
+the church is responsible for their spiritual welfare?
+
+The sense of unity must be developed. Writing the child's name on the
+"Cradle Roll" of the church school may help. Assuming, as he develops,
+that he is a part of this spiritual family, naturally expecting that he
+will have an increasing share in its life, will help more. Parents who
+dedicate their children to God pass on to them the stimulus of that
+dedication. A church service of dedication is likely to impress them
+with a feeling of unity with the church; seeing other children so
+dedicated they know that a similar occasion occurred in their own early
+lives.
+
+The forms of relationship must develop with the nature of the child. The
+church needs not only a graded curriculum of instruction but a graded
+series of relationships by which children, step by step, come into
+closer conscious social unity, each step determined by their developing
+needs and capacities.
+
+It is easy to say that the responsibility lies with the church to
+provide these methods of attachment. But the church we have been
+sketching is a congeries of families, after all, and it will do just
+what these families, particularly the parents in them, stimulate it to
+do.
+
+
+§ 5. INCIDENTAL DIFFICULTIES
+
+But what of those instances in which parents are convinced that the
+church does not furnish a normal and healthy atmosphere for the child's
+spiritual life? There are churches where the Sunday school is simply a
+training school in insubordination, confusion, and irreverence, or where
+religion is so taught as to cultivate superstition and to lead
+eventually either to a painful intellectual reconstruction or to a
+barren denial of all faith. There are churches of one type so devoted
+to the entertainment of adults, to the ministry to the pride of the
+flesh and the lust of things, that a child is likely to be trained to
+pious pride and greed, or of another type, in which religion is a matter
+of verbiage, tradition, and unethical subterfuge.
+
+Parents must be true to their responsibilities. The family is the
+child's first religious institution. Fathers and mothers are not only
+the first and most potent quickeners and guides in the religious life,
+but they are primarily responsible for the selection of all other
+stimuli to that life. Under the drag of our own indifference we must not
+withhold from the child the good he would get even from the church we do
+not particularly enjoy; neither dare we, for fear of criticism or
+ostracism, force the child under influences which, in the name of
+religion, would chill and prevent his spiritual development, would
+twist, dwarf, or distort it. Responsibility to the spiritual purpose of
+the family is far higher than any responsibility to a church. The
+churches are ordered for the souls of men.
+
+What shall we do in the family when the sermon is always tediously dull?
+Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never
+get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for
+them parallel to the adult service of worship.[47] Next, try to
+overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church
+is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many
+criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher
+by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If
+that is essentially your attitude, you cannot complain if your children
+are dissatisfied unless they too are entertained according to their
+childish appetites. When the sermon is poor, put it where it belongs
+proportionately and enlarge on the many good features of church
+fellowship and service.
+
+In a word, let the church be to the family that larger home where
+families live together their life of fellowship and service in the
+spirit and purpose of religion and where there is a natural place for
+everyone.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.W. Hulbert, _The Church and Her Children_, chaps. i-v. Revell,
+     $1.00.
+
+     H.F. Cope, _Efficiency in the Sunday School_, chaps. xiv-xvi.
+     Doran, $1.00.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. xiv.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     A. Hoben, _The Minister and the Boy_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     E.C. Foster, _The Boy and the Church_. Sunday School Times Co.,
+     $0.75.
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, Part II. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special common interests of church and family?
+
+     2. What are the fundamental relationships of the two?
+
+     3. What conception of the church ought to be fostered in the
+     children's minds?
+
+     4. When is criticism of the church unwise?
+
+     5. What changes might be made in church life for the sake of the
+     children?
+
+     6. What changes would bring the church and the home closer
+     together?
+
+     7. What should be the children's conception of unity with the
+     church?
+
+     8. Should children attend, in family groups, the church service of
+     worship?
+
+     9. Does the plan of a short service for children meet the need?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[46] See a pamphlet on _Church School Buildings_ (free) published by the
+Religious Education Association; also H.F. Evans, _The Sunday-School
+Building and Its Equipment_.
+
+[47] See the author's suggestion for the Sunday school in _Efficiency in
+the Sunday School_, chap. xv.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CHILDREN AND THE SCHOOL
+
+
+Wise parents will know the character of the influences affecting their
+children at all times. At no time can their responsibility be delegated
+to others. There is a tendency to think that when children go to school
+the family has a release from responsibility. But the school is simply
+the community--the group of families--syndicating its efforts for the
+formal training of the young. Every family ought to know what the
+community is doing with its children. The school belongs to all; it is
+not the property of a board, nor a private machine belonging to the
+teaching force; it belongs to us and we owe a social duty as well as a
+family obligation to understand its work and its influence on the
+children.
+
+Parents ought to visit the school. Wise principals and teachers will
+welcome them, setting times when visits can best be made. The visitors
+come, not as critics, but as citizens and parents. The principal
+benefits will be an acquaintance with the teachers of our children and a
+better understanding of the conditions under which the children work for
+the greater part of the day. By far the larger number of teachers most
+earnestly desire character results from their work. It will help them
+to know that we are interested in what they are doing.
+
+
+§ 1. HOME AND SCHOOL CO-OPERATION
+
+Parents and teachers, both desiring spiritual results, can find means of
+co-operation. Parent-teacher clubs and associations have done much to
+bring the home and the school together. Meeting regularly in the
+evening, so that fathers, too, can attend, gives opportunity to work out
+a common understanding to raise the spiritual aims of the school, and to
+discover means by which the families may aid in securing better
+conditions for school work.
+
+One of the most important considerations relates to the moral effect of
+the school life and environment. We are committed in this country to the
+principle that the public school cannot teach religion, but this by no
+means relieves it of responsibility for moral character. The family
+needs this ally. Children expect instruction in the school and they feel
+keenly the power of its ideals and the standards established by its
+methods and requirements. The family and the school greatly need to
+co-ordinate their efforts here to the end that there may be under way in
+both an orderly program for the moral training of children.
+
+
+§ 2. THE SCHOOL TEACHING PARENTS
+
+The school may help the home if arrangements are made for parents to
+meet regularly and receive instruction in those forms of moral training
+which can best be given at home. This is one method of solving the vexed
+question of sex instruction. Many hesitate as to the wisdom of such
+instruction in schools; but no one doubts that it ought to be and could
+be given in families but for the fact that parents are both ignorant of
+what to tell and indifferent to the matter. It may be that some day the
+state will not only say that the child must go to school, but also that
+every parent intrusted with children must either prove ability to train
+and instruct in these and other matters or go to school to obtain the
+necessary training. The state would not go beyond its province if it
+required ignorant parents--and that means most of us in matters of moral
+training--to go to school and learn our business. And without waiting
+for such compulsion the school may now offer opportunity for all parents
+to obtain the desired information. Teachers are especially trained to an
+understanding of child-nature and to methods of pedagogy; they are
+prepared to teach many things we ought to know; why should not the
+family obtain the advantage of such expert knowledge?
+
+The school would also be within its province if it undertook to
+stimulate the indifferent parents, both rich and poor, to an
+appreciation of the educational task and opportunity of the home. Each
+institution greatly needs the other. The school reaches all the children
+of all the people; might it not be made a larger means of helping all
+the parents of all the children to quickened moral responsibility and to
+greater educational efficiency?
+
+
+§ 3. CONTROLLING SCHOOL CONDITIONS
+
+The family ought to know the conditions at the school outside the
+recitation or working hours. Few parents have any conception of the
+power of the playground over moral character. Perhaps a smaller number
+realize how dangerous are some of the elements at work there. Play of
+itself is immensely valuable, but play means playfellows, and some of
+these are simply purveyors of indecency and moral contagion in
+conversation and act. We are required to send our children to school; we
+have a right to demand freedom from moral contagion. Do you know what
+goes on in secret places on the grounds? Do you know that the vilest
+ideas and phrases are current in pictures, cards, on scraps of paper,
+and in handwriting on walls, not only in the high schools, but often
+among children of from six to twelve years of age? This is too large a
+subject to be developed properly here. It is one familiar to all
+wide-awake school men and women and ought to be equally so to the
+parents of children. Where the school combats this evil the home should
+intelligently aid; where the school is indifferent the family dare not
+rest until either the indifference is quite dispelled or the indifferent
+dismissed.
+
+Do not expect to get the facts concerning these suggested conditions by
+inquiry among your children. They are reticent, naturally, on such
+matters when talking with adults; besides, the sense of school honor
+holds them to silence. If they tell you voluntarily, you are happy in
+their free confidence. Do not betray it; simply let it lead you to make
+further inquiry at the school from the authorities and stimulate you to
+insist that, for the sake of the spiritual good of the young, the school
+must furnish conditions of moral health.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Ella Lyman Cabot, _Voluntary Help to the Schools_, chaps. vii,
+     viii. Houghton Mifflin Co., $0.60.
+
+     W.A. Baldwin, "The Home and the Public Schools," _Religious
+     Education_, February, 1912. $0.65.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     M. Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in Schools_. 2 vols.
+     Longmans.
+
+     John Dewey, _The School and Society_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     Smith, _All the Children of All the People_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     G.A. Coe, "Virtue and the Virtues," _Religious Education_,
+     February, 1912.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What ought parents to know about public-school life?
+
+     2. In visiting a school what may the parent do to acquire
+     information in the proper way?
+
+     3. How may the home co-operate with the school?
+
+     4. What degree of instruction in morals ought the school to give?
+
+     5. In what way does the school best help in moral training?
+
+     6. What do you know about the conditions on the playgrounds of your
+     own school?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES
+
+
+Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain
+an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness,
+occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our
+children--or of our neighbors' children--to a focus and throw them in
+high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual
+placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry passions rule,
+when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty
+wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we
+suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher
+life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly
+a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of
+development.
+
+A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such
+results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their
+inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual
+and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be
+valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.
+
+Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to
+bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of
+getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to
+remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the
+crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one
+in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt,
+as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort
+of training.
+
+
+§ 1. THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION
+
+The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins
+to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a
+child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the
+perfect tree in the sapling. _Character comes by development_; it is not
+born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore
+parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are
+pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time
+Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper,
+sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a
+psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the
+picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?
+
+When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they
+are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the
+natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in
+which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The
+child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The
+powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call
+physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the
+development of those powers, their training-field and school.
+
+Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the
+grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more
+do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of
+difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other,
+in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a
+stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be
+learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and
+training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right
+to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him
+to be born six feet tall.
+
+A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent,
+then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his
+moral upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition
+of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an
+occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to
+guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way
+for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is
+it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the
+organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not.
+And is it not to be the same with the child?
+
+We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that
+give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as
+isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational
+process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will
+watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.
+
+
+§ 2. THE COLLISION OF WILLS
+
+Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with
+temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The
+martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the
+subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the
+parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of
+will.
+
+When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought
+to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in
+your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness
+will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the
+mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you
+will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice
+of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing entity, able to
+elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive,
+Godlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new
+personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle
+and adjust itself with all other persons.
+
+When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take
+time to think what it means. _Keep your temper._ Do not break before the
+other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied.
+From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from
+force and tradition to a moral plane.
+
+Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request.
+You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more
+important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of
+the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his
+life.
+
+Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to
+consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of
+justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an
+unjust man.
+
+Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic
+explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of
+simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by
+an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It
+may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience.
+Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own
+way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for
+instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circumstances it
+would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration--as a drop of
+acid on a finger tip--than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One
+such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in
+other cases.
+
+Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must
+choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave
+responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of
+the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of
+the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not
+drift, is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of
+feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.
+
+
+§ 3. ANGER
+
+An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes
+justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of
+your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a
+spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of
+protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether
+unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly
+angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so
+near the surface that a pin-prick sets them loose. Usually a study of
+their cases will show either that the attitude of angry opposition to
+everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or
+that it was acquired in the adolescent period.
+
+The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person;
+there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home
+is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most
+directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school
+of normal social living.
+
+Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are
+negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character
+of the child or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons,
+first, as furnishing the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control,
+to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace
+and interfere with the well-being of others.
+
+It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first
+instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded
+to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only
+route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in
+terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.
+
+In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl
+will make a very tardy passage through the normal experience of social
+aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee
+from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner
+alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at
+thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pass quickly. A few allow this
+period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and
+soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at
+this period, or to a lack of healthful friendships.
+
+
+§ 4. METHODS OF DEALING WITH ANGER
+
+It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant
+will not help the case. He may feel the emotion of your anger but
+misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an
+infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or
+affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby
+yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither
+possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural
+depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant
+fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department
+of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to
+the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and
+you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you
+yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its
+reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with
+anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first
+exercises in training character.
+
+_Consider the future._ Each family is a social unit, a little world.
+Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and
+experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which
+prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are
+needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When
+young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality,
+under similar circumstances, serve in the business of mature life?
+Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character.
+Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional
+effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against
+evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be
+purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be
+confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must
+guide it.
+
+When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the
+feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the
+situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that
+not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of
+conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always
+help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he
+may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay
+with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own
+temper.
+
+Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, _train him in
+self-control_. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply
+our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the
+largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is
+the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but it is
+the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of
+society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a
+better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the
+immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike
+service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not
+acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson
+after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and
+school and street.
+
+Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to
+save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the
+rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There
+will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we
+must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the
+rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in
+the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing
+to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with
+strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he
+loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the
+misery of the life without friends, the joy of friendships.
+
+Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of
+forgiveness and, if the occasion warrants, the dignity and courage of
+the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment
+involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson
+of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be
+habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with
+suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how
+great is the victory of forgiveness.[48]
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     _The Problem of Temper._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
+     Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_, chap. v. Pilgrim
+     Press, $0.50.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Patterson Du Bois, _The Culture of Justice_, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead
+     & Co., $0.75.
+
+     E.H. Abbott, _The Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     M. Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg,
+     $1.00 each.
+
+     H.Y. Campbell, _Practical Motherhood_. Longmans, $2.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral
+     crises?
+
+     2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in
+     children?
+
+     3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?
+
+     4. What constitutes the importance of early crises of the will?
+
+     5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy
+     authority?
+
+     6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?
+
+     7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?
+
+     8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly
+     developed life?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[48] See Gow, _Good Morals and Gentle Manners_, chap. viii.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Continued_)
+
+
+§ 1. QUARRELS
+
+A child who never quarrels probably needs to be examined by a physician;
+a child who is always quarreling equally needs the physician. In the
+first there is a lack of sufficient energy so to move as to meet and
+realize some of life's oppositions; in the other there is probably some
+underlying cause for nervous irritability.
+
+It is perfectly natural for healthy people to differ; in childhood's
+realm, where the values and proportions of life are not clearly seen,
+where social adjustments have not been acquired, the differences in
+opinions, as in possessions, lead to the expression of feeling in sharp
+and emphatic terms. Rivalry and conflict are natural to the young
+animal. Children do not wilfully enter into conflicts any more than
+adults; they are only less diplomatic in their language, more direct,
+and more likely to follow the word with attempts at force.
+
+In few things do parents need more patience than in dealing with
+children's quarrels. First, seek to determine quietly the merits of the
+cause; but do not attempt to pronounce a verdict. It is seldom wise to
+act as judge unless you allow the children to act as a jury. But
+ascertain whether the quarrel is an expression somewhere of anger
+against injustice, wrong, or evil in some form. Sometimes their quarrels
+have as much virtue as our crusades. It is a sad mistake to quench the
+feeling of indignation against wrong or of hatred against evil. A boy
+will need that emotional backing in his fights against the base and the
+foes of his kind. While rejoicing in his feeling, show him how to direct
+it, train him to discriminate between hatred of wrong and bitterness
+toward the wrongdoer. Help him to see the good that comes from loving
+people, no matter what they do.
+
+Our methods of dealing with a quarrel will do more to develop their
+sense of justice than all our decisions can. Be sure to get each one to
+state all the facts; insist on some measure of calmness in the recital.
+Keep on sifting down the facts until by their own statements the quarrel
+is seen stripped of passion and standing clear in its own light. Usually
+that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the
+group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary
+acknowledgment of wrong. The boys--or girls--have for the first time
+seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without
+prejudice. They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we
+when convinced against our wishes.
+
+When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still
+not offer a verdict. Put the case to the contestants and let them settle
+it. Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to
+insist on exact statements of fact. That course should be excellent
+training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man's side,
+in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious
+quarrels of later life. Teach children to think through their
+differences.
+
+The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be
+taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is
+out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When
+the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in
+the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious
+dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life
+is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves
+petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find
+unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful
+living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A
+harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a
+matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own
+attitude.
+
+Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the
+family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he
+occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes
+radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he
+quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new,
+self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each
+one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them.
+Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not
+try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he
+will have to live some day.
+
+
+§ 2. FIGHTING
+
+The best of men are likely to have a secret satisfaction in their boys'
+fights, and the bravest of mothers will deplore them. The fathers know
+how hard are the knocks that life is going to give; the mothers hope
+that the boys can be saved from blows. A man's life is often pretty much
+of a fight, every day struggling in competition and rivalry; we have not
+yet learned the lesson of co-operation, and we still tend to think of
+business as a battlefield. Something in us calls for fighting; we have
+to use the utmost strength at our command to fight the evil tendencies
+of our own hearts; often we rejoice in life as a conflict. It feels good
+to find causes worth fighting for. If all this is true of the man, it
+is not strange that the small boy, scarce more than a young savage, will
+find opportunities for conflict. He is more dependent on the weapons of
+force than is his father. He cannot cast out the enemy with a ballot,
+nor with a sneer or biting sarcasm, nor by some device or strategy of
+business or affairs. He can only hit back. Taken altogether, boys settle
+their differences as honestly at least as do men.
+
+Moreover, children's fights are not as cruel as they seem to be; even
+the bloodshed means little either of pain or of injury. A boy may be
+badly banged up today and in full trim tomorrow; it is quite different
+with the wounds bloodlessly inflicted by men in their conflicts.
+
+Does all this mean that boys should be encouraged to fight? No; but it
+does mean that when Billy comes home with one eye apparently retired
+from business, we must not scold him as though he were the first
+wanderer from Eden. That fight may have been precisely the same thing as
+a croquet game to his sister, or any test of skill to his big brother,
+or a business transaction to his father; it was a mere contest of two
+healthy bodies at a time when the body was the outstanding fact of life.
+The fight may give us our chance, however, to aid him to a sense of the
+greatness of life's conflict, to a sense of the qualities that make the
+true fighter. It may leave him open to the appeal of true heroism. We
+must make light of the victory of brute strength, just as we may make
+light of his wounds and scars, and glorify the victory of the mind and
+will.
+
+The boy who fights because he lacks control of temper needs careful
+training. He gets a good deal of discipline on the playground and
+street, but it is not always effective; the beatings may only further
+undermine control. But the lack of self-control will manifest itself in
+many ways and must be remedied at all points. The discipline of daily
+living in the family must come into play here.
+
+
+§ 3. SELF-CONTROL
+
+The matter of self-control is not separable into special features; one
+cannot learn control under one set of moral circumstances without
+learning it for all. The boy who strikes without thinking is simply one
+who acts without thinking. He tends to throw away the brakes of the
+will. The regain of control comes only through training at every point
+in deliberation of action.
+
+Probably there is no other point at which children so frequently and
+readily learn control as in the matter of speech. The family where all
+speak at once, where a babel of sounds leads to a rivalry of vocal
+organs, is not only a nuisance to the neighbors, it is a school of
+uncontrolled action to the children. Just to learn to wait, even after
+the thought is formed into words, until it shall be my turn or my
+opportunity to speak is a fine discipline of control. To do that every
+day, year after year, tends to break up the hair-trigger process of
+action.
+
+Control is gained also by the acquisition of the habit of thought
+regarding general courses of action. We can hardly expect meditation on
+the part of little children. But those who are older, those entering
+their teens, may and should be able to think things out, to plan out the
+day's actions, to determine their own ways of conduct. Children who have
+the custom of quiet, private prayer often develop ability to see their
+conduct in the calm of those moments. They get a mental elevation over
+the day and its deeds.
+
+
+§ 4. GOOD FIGHTS
+
+The evident danger of undue deliberation of action must be met by
+another cure of the personal-conflict spirit; that is, the substitution
+of games of rivalry and skill for the unorganized rivalry and "game" of
+fighting. The transition from the bloody arena to the excitement of a
+game is very easy and natural. But the game is the boy's great chance to
+learn life as a game to be played according to the rules. All that the
+fight calls for--courage, endurance, skill, quickness of action, and
+grim persistence--comes out in a good game. Here is a suitable youthful
+realization of the fight that is worth waging. Our participation in the
+youths' games, our appreciation of their points, our joy in honestly won
+success, is the best possible way to lead up to their taking life in
+terms of a good fight, a grand game, a real chance to call out the
+heroic qualities. Turn every fighting instinct into the good fight that
+will clarify and elevate them all.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     W.L. Sheldon, _Ethics in the Home_, chaps. xi, xii, xiii. Welch &
+     Co., $1.25.
+
+     E.A. Abbott, _Training of Parents_, chap. v. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Ella Lyman Cabot, _Every Day Ethics_. Holt, $1.25.
+
+     M. Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg,
+     $1.00 each.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Do all children quarrel? Should one punish for small quarrels?
+
+     2. What are the facts which ought to be ascertained regarding any
+     quarrel?
+
+     3. What special opportunities do children's differences offer?
+
+     4. What are the causes of habitual petulance? What are the dangers
+     of this habit of mind?
+
+     5. Is fighting necessarily wrong? What part does it play in the
+     lives of men?
+
+     6. What are the dangerous elements in boys' fights?
+
+     7. What special quality of character needs development in this
+     connection?
+
+     8. What are the valuable possibilities in the fighting tendency?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Continued_)
+
+
+§ 1. LYING
+
+Parents are likely to be wilfully blind to the faults of their children.
+But some faults cannot be ignored; they must surely quicken the most
+indifferent parent to thought. We suffer a shock when our own child
+appears as a wilful liar.
+
+"What shall I do when I catch the child in an outright lie? Surely he
+knows that is wrong and that he is wilfully doing the wrong!"
+
+First, be sure whether he is "lying." Lying means a purposeful intent to
+deceive by word of mouth or written word. When Charles Dickens wrote
+_Oliver Twist_ he described a burglary that never happened, so far as he
+knew. He intended the reader to feel that it was true. Was he lying? No;
+because he simply used his imagination to paint a scene which was part
+of a great lesson he desired to teach the English public. Even had he
+had no great moral purpose, it would still not have been a lie, just as
+we do not accuse the writer of even the most frivolous novel of lying.
+He is simply creating, or imitating, in the field of imagination.
+
+Imagination is the child's native world. When the little girl says, "My
+dolly is sick," she is saying that which is not so, but instead of
+reproving her for lying, you prepare an imaginary pill for the doll.
+Many children's lies are simply elaborations of their doll- and
+plaything-imaginings. When my little daughter told me, and insisted upon
+it, that she had seen seven bears, of varied colors, on the avenue,
+should I have reproved her for lying? Was it not better to humor her
+fancy, to draw it out, to give it free play, being careful gradually to
+let her know that I knew it was fancy? I entered into the game with her
+and enjoyed it so long as we all understood it was only fancy. It is a
+crime to crush a child's power of creating a world by imagination, a
+fair world, set in the midst of this world where things are imperfect,
+jarring, and disappointing, a world in which everything is always "just
+so."
+
+But one must also carefully aid the child in distinguishing between the
+world of fancy and the world of fact. This takes time and patience. We
+must not rob the life of fancy nor must we allow the habits of freedom
+with ideas to pass over into habits of carelessly handling realities.
+Along with the development of fancy we must train the powers of exact
+observation and statement of facts. The child who saw seven bears, red,
+green, yellow, etc., must go to see real bears and must tell me exactly
+their colors and forms. Daily training in exactitude of statements of
+real facts is the best antidote for a fancy that has run out of its
+bounds. It establishes a habit of precision in thinking which is the
+essence of truth-telling.
+
+
+§ 2. PROTECTIVE LYING
+
+But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form.
+It may be called protective lying. Ask the little fellow with the
+jam-smeared face, "Have you been in the pantry?" and he is likely to do
+the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat
+that makes it easier to hide from their enemies. He valiantly answers
+"No, Mother." He would protect himself from your reproof. There has been
+awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires
+your approbation most of all. The moral struggle with him is very brief;
+he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his
+negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.
+
+What shall we do? First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for
+jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions. The jam was there and
+you were not. It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a
+wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things
+deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether
+your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and
+sufficient to establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask
+these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It
+would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too
+much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable
+idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with
+them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to
+establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow
+with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the
+acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others,
+and against his own good.
+
+Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the
+temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child
+that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there
+watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought
+of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of
+irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a
+reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel
+in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy
+feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his
+well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper,
+and confidant. I like better the God to whom a little fellow in Montana
+prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy
+Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help
+him to do and know the right.
+
+
+§ 3. OLDER CHILDREN
+
+But protective lying presents a more serious problem with older
+children. The school-teacher and parent meet it, just as the judge and
+the employer meet it in adults. The cure lies early in life.
+Truth-telling is as much a habit as lying is. Perhaps it is more easily
+practiced; its drafts are on the powers of observation and memory rather
+than on those of imagination. Along with the child's imaginative powers
+there must be developed the powers of exact observation and description.
+Exact observation and description or relation are but parts of the
+larger general virtue of precision. Help children at every turn of life
+to be right--right in doing things, right in thinking, in saying, and in
+execution. Precision at any point in life helps lift the life's whole
+level. Truth-telling is not a separable virtue. You cannot make a boy
+truthful in word if you let him lie in deed. You cannot expect he will
+speak the truth if you do not train him to do the truth, in his play, in
+ordering his room, in thinking through his school problems, and in
+thinking through his religious difficulties. Truth-telling is the verbal
+reaction of the life which habitually holds that nothing is right until
+it is just right.
+
+Two things would, ordinarily, make sure of a truthful statement, instead
+of a protective lie, in answer to your question: first, that the young
+person has been trained to the habit of seeing and stating things as
+they are--and that you really give him a chance so to state them, and,
+secondly, that to some degree there has been developed a recognition of
+considerations or values that are higher than either escape from
+punishment or the winning of your approbation. He will choose the course
+that offers what seems to him to be the greater good; he will choose
+between punishment, with rectitude, a good conscience, a sense of unity
+with the higher good, of peace with God his friend, a greater
+approximation to your ideal, on the one side, and, on the other, escape
+from punishment.
+
+Everything in that crisis will depend on how real you have made the good
+to be, how much the sense of the reality of God and his companionship
+has brought of joy and friendship, and how high are his values of the
+actual, the real, the true.
+
+
+§ 4. AT THE CRISIS
+
+But what shall we do as we meet the lie on the lips of the child? First,
+as already suggested, do not wait until you meet it. Train the child to
+the truthful life. Second, be sure you do not make too heavy moral
+demands. Remember the instinct to protect himself from immediate
+punishment or disapprobation is stronger than any other just then. Do
+not ask him to do what the law says the prisoner may not do, incriminate
+himself. We have no right to put on our children tests harder than they
+can bear. Often we put those which are harder than we could face. What
+you will do just then depends on what you have been doing for the
+training of the child or youth. Do not expect him to solve problems in
+moral geometry if you have neglected simple addition in that realm.
+
+Punishment by the blow or the immediate sentence will be futile. The
+offender must know he has trespassed in a realm beyond your
+administration and rule; he has done more than commit an offense against
+you. Whatever consequences follow--such as your hesitation to accept his
+word--must evidently be a part of the operation of the entire moral law.
+Help him to see that lying strikes at the root of all social relations
+and would make all happy and prosperous living, all friendship, and all
+business impossible by destroying social confidence.
+
+Facing the crisis, do not demand more than your training gives you a
+right to expect. Often, instead of the direct categorical question as to
+guilt, we must gradually draw out a narrative of the events in question;
+we must patiently help the child to state the facts and to see the
+values of exactitudes. Without preaching or posing we must bring the
+events into the light of larger areas of time and circles of life, help
+him to see them related to all his life and to all mankind and to the
+very fringes of existence, to God and the eternal. That cannot be done
+in a moment; it is part of a habit of our own minds or it is not really
+done at all. At the moment we can, however, make the deepest impression
+by insistence on the importance of the actual, the real, the exactly
+true.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     E.L. Cabot, _Every Day Ethics_, chaps. xix, xx. Holt, $1.25.
+
+     W.B. Forbush, _On Truth Telling_. Pamphlet. American Institute of
+     Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, pp. 124-33. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     G.S. Hall, "A Study of Children's Lies," _Educational Problems_, I,
+     chap. vi. Appleton, $2.50.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _A Genetic Study of Veracity_. Pamphlet.
+
+     J. Sully, _Studies in Childhood_.
+
+     E.H. Griggs, _Moral Education_. Huebsch, $1.60.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Are there degrees of lying?
+
+     2. When is a lie not a lie?
+
+     3. How can we discriminate among the statements of children?
+
+     4. How can we help them to recognize the qualities of truth?
+
+     5. In what ways are parents to blame for forcing children to
+     protective lying?
+
+     6. What of the relation of the thought of God to the demands for
+     truth?
+
+     7. Would you punish a child for lying and, if so, in what way?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Concluded_)
+
+
+§ 1. DISHONESTY
+
+Many parents appear to think that the child's concepts of property
+rights and of fair dealing are without importance. Habits of pilfering
+are permitted to develop and success in cheating wins admiration. Low
+standards are accepted and religion is divorced from moral questions.
+The family attitude practically assumes that all persons cheat more or
+less and that it is necessary only to use wisdom to insure freedom from
+conviction.
+
+Responsibility lies at home. We shall never have an honest generation
+until we have honest men and women to breed and train it. It is folly to
+think we can lay on the public schools the burden of the moral education
+of the young. Much is already being attempted there; yet little seems to
+be accomplished because the home, having the child before and after
+school and for a longer period each day, furnishes no adequate basis in
+habits, ideals, and instruction for the moral work of the school. If
+parents assume that one cannot succeed with absolute integrity, that
+dishonesty in some degree is necessary to prosperity, then children will
+learn that lesson despite all that may be said elsewhere. Honest
+children grow where, in answer to the false statement, "You will starve
+if you do business honestly," parents say, "Then we will starve."
+
+But the very home life itself can be a teacher of dishonesty. Is it
+largely a matter of sham and pretense for the sake of social glory? Does
+it prefer a cheap veneer to a slowly acquired genuine article? Is the
+front appearance that of a dandy while the backyard looks like a
+slattern? Is the home striving for more than it deserves? Is it trying
+to get more out of life than it puts in? Evading taxes, avoiding duties,
+a community parasite, does it commend to children the arts of social
+cheating and lying? Such homes teach so loudly that no voice could be
+heard in them.
+
+Given the atmosphere, ideals, and practices of the honest life in the
+home itself, the problems of conduct, in the realm of these rights, are
+more than half solved. Here in the home the real training for the life
+of business takes place. Not for an instant can we afford to lower
+standards here, nor to lose sight of the life-long power of our ideals,
+our habits, and our attitudes on the conduct of the next generation. Do
+parents know that the problems of lying, cheating, quarreling are the
+great, vital questions for their children, much more important than
+industrial or professional success in life; that on these all success is
+predicated? If they do, surely they cannot regard the problems which
+arise as mere incidents; surely they will provide for the culture of the
+moral life as definitely as for the culture of the physical or the
+intellectual!
+
+
+§ 2. LESSONS IN HONESTY
+
+But children also acquire habits from their playmates. Whenever the act
+of pilfering appears, the wrong must be made clear. Some sense of
+property rights is necessary; not the right, as some assume, to do what
+you will with a thing because you have it, but the right to enjoy and
+usefully employ it. Help children to see the difference between mine and
+thine. Slovenly moral thinking often comes from too great freedom in
+forgetful borrowing within the family. In this little social group the
+members must first acquire the habits of respect for the rights of
+others. Through toys, tools, and books the lesson may be learned so
+early that it becomes a part of the normal order of things.
+
+Children can learn that the game of life has its rules and that the
+breach of these rules spoils the game and prevents our own happiness.
+They can learn, too, that these are not arbitrary rules; they are like
+the laws of nature; they are the conditions under which alone it is
+possible for people to live together and to make life worth while.
+Gambling is wrong because it is unsocial; it is the attempt to gain
+without an equivalent giving. Cheating is wrong, no matter how many
+practice it, just as surely as cheating is wrong in the game on the
+playground.
+
+Children are really peculiarly sensitive to the social consciousness. In
+school under no circumstances will they do that which the school custom
+forbids or the older boys condemn. In the home, despite contrary
+appearances, the opinion of elders, brothers, sisters, and parents is
+the recognized law. Every small boy wants to be like his big brother.
+Children's conduct may be guided by an understanding of the social will
+outside the school and home. Help them to know that all people
+everywhere in organized society condemn cheating and dishonesty.[49]
+
+Sentiment and emotional feeling must back up all teaching of conduct.
+Your stories and readings should be selected with this in mind. The
+approbation of parents and of the great Father of all enters as an
+effectual motive.
+
+But parents seldom understand these problems; they attempt to deal with
+each one as it arises until they are weary of the seemingly endless
+procession and abandon the task. Their endeavors are based on faint
+memories of such problems in their own youth or on rule-of-thumb
+proverbial philosophy about morals and children. Does not the
+development of moral ability and culture deserve at least as much
+attention as any other phase of the child's life? After all, what do we
+most of all desire for all our children--position, fame, ease? or is it
+not rather simply this, that, no matter what else they do, they may be
+good and useful men and women? Then what are we doing to make them good
+and useful?
+
+A clear view of the need for moral training, a belief that is possible,
+will surely lead to serious attempts to learn the art of moral training.
+In this they need not be without guidance. There is a number of good
+books on character development in the child.[50] The foundation for all
+such training of parents ought to be laid in an understanding of what
+the moral nature is, and then of the laws of its development. Later the
+specific problems may be separately considered.
+
+
+§ 3. TEASING AND BULLYING
+
+Teasing is the child's crude method of experimentation in psychological
+reactions; the teaser desires to discover just how the teased will
+respond. It degenerates, by easy steps, into a thoughtless infliction of
+pain in sheer enjoyment of another's misery, and then into brutal
+bullying. When only two children are together mere teasing will not
+last long; either the teaser will tire of his task or his teasing will
+turn to that lowest of all brutalities, delight in inflicting pain on
+weaker ones.
+
+But teasing is a serious problem in many families; the whole group
+sometimes lives in an atmosphere of ridicule, derision, and annoyance.
+Teasing is likely to appear at its worst wherever a group is gathered,
+for the guilty ones are under the stimulus of the praise of others; they
+inflict mental pain for the sake of winning approbation.
+
+Teasing has a pedagogical basis. A certain amount of ridicule acts
+healthfully on most persons. Even children need sometimes to see their
+weaknesses, and especially their faults of temper, in the light of other
+eyes, in the aspect of the ridiculous. But children are seldom to be
+trusted to discipline one another; freedom to do so is likely to develop
+hardness, indifference to the sufferings of others, and arrogance from
+the sense of lordship. The corrective of ridicule is safe only as it is
+a kindly expression of the sense of humor. The ability to see and to
+show just how foolish or funny some situations are will turn many a
+tragedy of childhood into a comedy. Whenever children laugh at the
+distresses or faults of others, help them to laugh at their own.
+Cultivate the habit of seeing the odd, the whimsical, the humorous side
+of things. A sound sense of kindly humor often will save us all from
+unkind teasing.
+
+
+§ 4. SOME CURES FOR TEASING
+
+Help the habitual and unkind teaser to see how cowardly the act is, to
+see how it is against the spirit of fair play. Call on him to help the
+weaker one. If he is teasing for some fault of temper or some habit,
+show him the chance that is afforded to do the nobler deed of helping
+another to overcome that fault.
+
+Let the cowardly teaser reap the consequences of his own act; he must
+bear the burden of the critic, the expectation of perfection. Teasing
+him for his own shortcomings will sometimes cure him, but usually he
+loses his temper quickly. Make him feel the injustice of the teaser's
+method. If he is a bully he needs bullying. If ever corporal punishment
+is wise it is in such a case. He who inflicts pain simply because he can
+deserves to endure pain inflicted by someone stronger. But one must be
+careful not to confirm him in the coward's code. The injustice of it he
+must see, see by smarting under it. If ever punishment before others is
+wise it is in this case; for surely he who delights in humiliating
+others must be humiliated. But though justice suggests this course,
+experience shows that it does not always work; the bully only bides his
+time, and, cherishing resentment, he wreaks it on the weaker ones.
+
+The best cure for brutal teasing will take a longer time than is
+involved in a thrashing. Besides, the teaser will get his thrashings
+very soon from other boys. It requires time to change the habits that
+make bullying possible. Try gradually helping him to see the beauty and
+pleasure of helpfulness. Give him a chance to give pleasure instead of
+pain. Help him to taste the joy of praise, the praise that helps more
+than all teasing criticism. Help him to see that it is more truly a mark
+of superiority to help, to cheer, to do good, than to oppress and tease.
+Take time to habituate him in helpfulness.
+
+In dealing with teasing in the family, two other things are worth
+remembering: First, the teased must be taught the protective power of
+indifference. Teasers stop as soon as their barbs fail to wound; the fun
+ends there. Laugh at those who laugh at you, and they will soon cease.
+Secondly, the atmosphere and habit of the family determine the course of
+teasing. Where carping criticism and unkindly ridicule abound, children
+cannot be blamed for like habits. Where the sense of humor lightens
+tense situations, where we sacrifice the pleasure of stinging criticism
+for the sake of encouraging those who most need it, children are quick
+to catch those habits too. The teasing child usually comes out of a
+family of similar habits. On seeing our children engaged in teasing
+others, our first thought ought to be as to the extent to which we may
+have been their example in this respect. Constant watchfulness on our
+part against the temptations to tease will have an effect far more
+potent than all attempts to talk them out of the habit; it will lead
+them out.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     1. HONESTY
+
+     P. Du Bois, _The Culture of Justice_, chaps. iii, x. Dodd, Mead &
+     Co., $0.75.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_, chap. viii.
+     Pilgrim Press, $0.50.
+
+     2. TEASING
+
+     W.L. Sheldon, _A Study of Habits_, chap. xvii. Welch & Co.,
+     Chicago, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     ON GENERAL MORAL TRAINING
+
+     Sneath & Hodges, _Moral Training in School and Home_. Macmillan,
+     $0.80.
+
+     E.O. Sisson, _The Essentials of Character_. Macmillan, $1.00.
+
+     H. Thisleton Mark, _The Unfolding of Personality_. The University
+     of Chicago Press, $1.00.
+
+     Paul Carus, _Our Children_. Open Court Publishing Co., $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Of what importance is the child's sense of possession?
+
+     2. What are the first evidences of a consciousness of property
+     rights?
+
+     3. How do homes train in dishonesty?
+
+     4. What is the relation between cheating and dishonesty?
+
+     5. What is a child seeking to do when he teases another?
+
+     6. What are the unfortunate features of teasing?
+
+     7. What is the relation of teasing to bullying?
+
+     8. What cures would you suggest for either?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[49] Parents will be helped by the practical discussions of cheating,
+cribbing, and other boy problems in Johnson, _Problems of Boyhood_.
+
+[50] See "Book List" in Appendix.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE PERSONAL FACTORS IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
+
+
+Whoever will stop to review his early educational experience will be
+impressed with the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain
+teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living
+again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught,
+while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no
+recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many
+silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always
+greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says.
+The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of
+persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.
+
+There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart
+information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with
+subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a
+process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality.
+The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it
+is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the
+persons away you remove all educational potencies.
+
+The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that
+provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you
+can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of
+machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working
+activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people.
+Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives.
+Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the
+family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take
+away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational
+agency, from its religious reality.
+
+
+§ 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES
+
+All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers,
+save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and,
+besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of
+fathers.
+
+There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers
+only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is
+nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood
+wholly in physiological terms, imagining--if they think about it at
+all--that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only
+they know how to bear, feed, and clothe children properly. True, such
+duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good
+provider" who provides only _things_ for his family, no matter with what
+generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves
+first of all.
+
+He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who
+willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with
+his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any
+father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that
+belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but
+who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best
+business in the world, the development of children's characters.
+
+Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to
+provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them
+those social advantages which he missed in youth.
+
+But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives
+itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for
+what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of
+bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality.
+It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home
+is left headless and soon heartless. If we at all desire the fruits of
+character in the home we must give ourselves personally.
+
+It is not alone the habitué of the saloon or the idler in clubs and
+fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share
+of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to
+give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of
+being worse than an infidel. _A father belongs to his home more than he
+belongs to his church._ There have been men, though probably their
+number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and
+obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only
+a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their
+children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly
+home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the
+smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy
+task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among
+their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or
+club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end
+if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.
+
+
+§ 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE
+
+The father owes it to his family _to give himself at his best_, that is,
+as far as possible, when his vitality is freshest and his powers
+keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family
+to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the
+wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children,
+time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have
+you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the
+mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and
+to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith,
+did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is
+often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some
+families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to
+the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is
+at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and
+reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for
+the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get
+at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public
+propaganda.
+
+Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families.
+Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are
+learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that
+two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic
+study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, while so readily
+granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child
+psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we
+should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge?
+There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest
+radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical
+handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder
+if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal
+scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but
+they are not willing to learn how to grow them.
+
+
+§ 3. FATHERING AS A MAN'S TASK
+
+It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of
+your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you.
+Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor
+by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has
+to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the
+time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We
+keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in
+real touch with the boy's world.
+
+Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate
+between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home
+and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion.
+Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and
+look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy
+to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their
+problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while
+remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already
+accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what
+the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and
+legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we
+proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.
+
+Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our
+finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure
+of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be
+what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves.
+All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must
+mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that
+life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his
+world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than
+ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of
+home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come
+upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as
+the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual
+self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of
+the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance
+to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to
+happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of
+peace.
+
+Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just
+as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its
+meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about
+divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or
+misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that
+divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the
+largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of
+our children.
+
+The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home
+have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is
+spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of
+your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious
+person to them.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. vii. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+     K.G. Busby, _Home Life in America_, chaps. i, ii. Macmillan,
+     $2.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     E.A. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     Allen, _Making the Most of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00
+     each.
+
+     Wilm, _The Culture of Religion_, chap. ii. Pilgrim Press, $0.75
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Which do you remember best, your teachers or your lessons? Why?
+
+     2. Describe, from your memory, some of the influences of
+     personality?
+
+     3. Are these influences greater or less with parents on children?
+
+     4. What are the causes that separate parents and children?
+
+     5. How shall we define duties to business, to society, and to the
+     family?
+
+     6. Under what circumstances is one justified in refusing time to
+     the church for the sake of the family?
+
+     7. What are the best times and opportunities for the strengthening
+     of the personal bonds between children and parents?
+
+     8. How shall we overcome the apparent difficulty of maintaining the
+     confidence of children?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
+
+
+Whether we can remedy the ills of family living today or not, we can
+determine the character of the family life of the future. The homes of
+tomorrow are being determined today. The children who swing their feet
+in schoolrooms and play in our gardens will control family living very
+soon. We can do little to reconstruct the old order; we can do
+everything to determine the new. When the mountain sides have been made
+bare, forest conservation cannot save the old trees, but it can prepare
+for new growths. Ours is the larger opportunity because we can determine
+the ideals of our children. Today we can determine that they shall not
+suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind
+ignorance that compelled us to find our own way. We shall see that,
+first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of
+tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first. If
+family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have
+submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of
+things, of materialism.
+
+
+§ 1. A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER
+
+The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a
+conscience for character through all our thinking on the family. We are
+really half-ashamed to talk of character. We blush for ideals but we
+have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of
+the things of beauty and we love only the useful. So we have become
+ashamed of the ideals of the home. Not only do we passively acquiesce in
+the popular attitude of indifference or derision, but we voice it
+ourselves. We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital
+infelicities. We would be ashamed to be caught singing "Home, Sweet
+Home." What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less
+and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial
+affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic
+factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its
+heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary,
+culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that
+you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire,
+turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are
+places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and
+start out from for real living. They are private hotels.
+
+If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of
+the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that
+people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that
+moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life.
+More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient
+right-doing. In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program
+of beginning today ourselves to set first things first, to conserve the
+human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in
+school and church and home count first of all for character. And that
+broader education we ourselves must test first of all by this, whether
+it makes youth competent to live aright, cultivates the love of worthy
+ideals, and makes him willing and able to pay the price of a trained
+life consecrated to the service of his world, to the love of his
+fellows, and to the making of a new world.
+
+We shall need, first, to safeguard the primary motives that enter into
+the founding of families. Those motives begin to develop early. They are
+in the making in childhood. Somehow we must plan the education of youths
+so that they will think of homes and of marriage in new terms. Possibly
+the public school will not only teach the physiology of marriage and the
+bare physical facts of sexual purity, but will teach new ideals of
+family life; it will count it at least as much a duty to cultivate a
+love of home as it is to cultivate a love of country. It can set so
+clearly the final objective of character that even children shall see
+that life has higher ends than money-making and the family greater
+purposes than garish social display.
+
+
+§ 2. THE CHURCH AIDING
+
+Certainly the church must seek to quicken and develop new ideals of
+family life; it must bring religion to our hearths and homes; it must
+worry less about a "home over there," and show how truly heavenly homes
+may be made here. It must not only get youth ready to die, it must
+prepare them to live; to live together on religious terms. It will do
+this, not only by general discussions in the pulpit, but by special
+instruction in classes. No church has a clear conscience in regard to
+any young person contemplating the duties of a family whom it has not
+directly instructed in the duties of that life.
+
+It is a strange spectacle, if we would stop long enough to look at it,
+of the church proclaiming a way of life but scarcely ever teaching it.
+In any church there is a large number of young people under instruction;
+what are they learning? Usually a theological interpretation of an
+ancient religious literature. Some still are learning to hate all other
+persons whose religion differs from the brand carried in that
+institution. In a few years these youths will be bearing social burdens,
+facing temptations, taking up duties; does their teaching relate at all
+to these things? No, indeed, that would be "worldly"; it would seem to
+be sacrilegious to teach them how actually to be religious. The business
+of the church school is still largely that of filling minds with
+theological data rather than training young, trainable lives to become
+religious schoolboys, religious voters, religious parents. How many have
+been at all influenced by Sunday-school teaching when they stepped into
+a polling-booth, when they chose a life-mate, when they guided or
+disciplined their children? If religious education does not at all
+influence us in the great events of life, of what value is it to us?
+Must it not be counted a sheer waste of time?
+
+If we would conserve the human values of the family we must train youth
+to a religious interpretation of the home. If we cannot do that in the
+church we might as well confess that the church cannot touch the sources
+of human affairs.
+
+
+§ 3. IDEALS AND METHODS
+
+No matter what the breadth of the interests of the public school, youth
+will still need training for family living given under religious
+auspices and with the religious aim. The day school may give courses in
+domestic economy, but family living demands more than ability to sweep a
+room or cook an egg. In fact, no one can be competent to meet its higher
+demands unless at least two things are accomplished, first, that he, or
+she, is led to see the family as essentially a religious, spiritual
+institution because it is an association of persons for the purpose of
+developing other persons to spiritual fulness; secondly, that he, or
+she, is moved to willingness to count the work of the family, its
+purpose and aim, as the highest in life and that for which one is
+willing to pay any price of time, treasure, thought, and endeavor.
+
+This means that the fundamental need is that our young people shall grow
+up with a new vision and a new passion for the home and family. That
+passion is needed to give value to any training in the economics or
+mechanics of the home; and that training is precisely the contribution
+which the church should make to all departments of life today. It is the
+prophet, the interpreter, revealing the spiritual meanings of all daily
+affairs and quickening us to right feeling, to highly directed passion
+for worthy ideals.
+
+From the general teaching, the high message of the church, directed to
+this special problem, there must be formed in the mind of the coming
+generation a new picture of the family, a new ethics of its life, a new
+evaluation of its worth. That can come in part by the prophetic message
+from the pulpit, but it will come more naturally and readily by regular
+teaching directed to the actual experiences and the coming needs of the
+young people who are to be home-makers. The soaring ideals pass over
+their heads, but when you teach the practice, the details of the life of
+the family in the spirit of these ideals, as interpreted and determined
+by the higher conception, then they catch the vision through the
+details.
+
+We need two types of classes in church schools in relation to the life
+of the family: First, classes for young people in which their social
+duties as religious persons are carefully taught and discussed. Perhaps
+such courses should not be specifically on "The Family," but this
+institution ought, in the course, to occupy a place proportionate to
+that which belongs to it in life. The instruction should be specific and
+detailed, not simply a series of homilies on "The Christian Family,"
+"Love of Home," etc., but taking up the great problems of the economic
+place of the family today, its spiritual function, questions of choice
+of life-partners, types of dwelling, finances and money relations in the
+family, children and their training, and the actual duties and problems
+which arise in family living.
+
+All topics should be treated from the dominant viewpoint of the family
+as a religious institution for the development of the lives of
+religious persons. The courses should be so arranged as to be given to
+young people of about twenty years of age, or of twenty to twenty-five.
+They should be among the electives offered in the church school.
+
+The second type of class would be for those who are already parents and
+who desire help on their special problems. Many schools now conduct such
+classes, meeting either on Sunday or during the week.[51] Work on
+"Parents' Problems," "Family Religious Education," and similar topics is
+also being given in the city institutes for religious workers. No church
+can be satisfied with its service to the community unless it provides
+opportunity for parents to study their work of character development
+through the family and to secure greater efficiency therein. Such
+classes need only three conditions: a clear understanding of the purpose
+of meeting the actual problems of religious training in the family, a
+leader or instructor who is really qualified to lead and to instruct in
+this subject, and an invitation to parents to avail themselves of this
+opportunity.
+
+The value of such a class would be greatly enhanced if it should be held
+in close co-ordination with similar classes or clubs conducted by the
+public schools.[52] Here all the parents of the community meet in the
+school building, not to discuss how the teachers may satisfy parental
+criticism, but to learn what the school has to teach on modern
+educational methods applied to the life of the child, especially in the
+family, and mutually to find ways of co-operation between the home and
+the school for the betterment of the child.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Articles in _Religious Education_, April, 1911, VI, 1-77.
+
+     Helen C. Putnam in _Religious Education_, June, 1911, VI, 159-66.
+
+     George W. Dawson in _Religious Education_, June, 1911, VI, 167-74.
+
+     Cabot, _Volunteer Help in the Schools_, chap. vii. Houghton Mifflin
+     Co., $0.60.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Forsyth, _Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion_. Hodder & Stoughton,
+     $1.25.
+
+     Lovejoy, _Self-Training for Motherhood_. American Unitarian
+     Association, $1.00.
+
+     Pomeroy, _Ethics of Marriage_. Funk & Wagnalls, $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. In how far are home problems due to the ignorance of parents?
+
+     2. What do you regard as the essentials in the training of parents?
+
+     3. Where can the necessary subjects best be taught?
+
+     4. What are the difficulties in the way of teaching these subjects
+     to young people?
+
+     5. In how far can we direct the reading of young people toward sane
+     and helpful knowledge of family life and duties?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[51] Pamphlets on plans for parents' classes: _The Home and the Sunday
+School_, Pilgrim Press; _Plans for Mothers' and Parents' Meetings_,
+Sunday School Times Co.; _How to Start a Mothers' Department_, David C.
+Cook Co.; _The Parents' Department of the Sunday School_, Connecticut
+Sunday School Association, Hartford, Conn.
+
+[52] See pamphlet published by the National Congress of Mothers: _How to
+Organize Parents' Associations and Mothers' Circles in Public Schools_.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIXES
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+SUGGESTIONS FOR CLASS WORK
+
+
+This book is designed for individual reading or for use in classes. It
+is not a textbook of the same character as a textbook in mathematics or
+history, but the material is arranged so as to be both easily readable
+and of ready analysis for classes. There are two methods of following
+the course: one by work conducted under a regular teacher in a class,
+and the other by private or correspondence study.
+
+
+§ 1. THE CLASS
+
+The class should be composed of parents and other adults, inasmuch as
+the work is designed for them. It may be a class in connection with the
+Sunday school in a church, a class conducted by a mothers' club or
+congress or by a parent-teacher association, or it may be organized
+under other auspices. Or it might be organized by a group of parents in
+any community. The class need not consist of either fathers or mothers
+alone, as the work is planned for both. In any case the work of teaching
+will be facilitated if, in addition to the customary officers of the
+class, the teacher will appoint a librarian, whose duties would be to
+ascertain for the members of the class where the books for study and
+for reference may be obtained, that is, whether they are in the public
+library, church library, or in private collections, and also, whenever
+it is desired to purchase books, where they may best be secured.
+
+
+§ 2. THE TEACHER
+
+The primary requisite for the teacher will be an eagerness to learn, a
+sufficiently deep interest in the subject to lead to thorough study. No
+one can teach this class who already knows all about the subject. A
+spirit sympathetic with the child and the life of the family and a mind
+willing to study the subject will accomplish much more than facile
+rhetorical familiarity with it. The best teacher will not often be "an
+easy talker" on the family; class time is too precious to be occupied
+with a lecture. While, naturally, one who is a parent will speak with
+greater experience than another, the ability to teach this subject
+cannot be limited to fathers and mothers; physiological parenthood is
+less important than spiritual parenthood. The teacher must have, then,
+willingness to study the subject, ability to teach as contrasted with
+mere talking, sympathy with parenthood, and a passion for the religious
+personal values in life.
+
+
+§ 3. GENERAL METHOD
+
+The teacher's aim will be to make this course definitely practical. The
+book is not concerned so much with theories of the family as with the
+present problems of the family, and especially with those that relate to
+moral and religious education. There must be a sense of definite
+problems to be concretely treated in all lessons. The teacher will
+therefore encourage discussion, but will also avoid the tendency to
+drift into desultory conversation. Direct the discussion to avoid
+tedious détours on side issues. Direct the discussion to avoid the
+tendency to treat superficially all the subject at one session. It will
+be necessary frequently to insist that attention be focused upon the
+immediate problems suggested by the lesson for the day, and to ask the
+class to wait until the subjects which they in their eagerness suggest
+shall come in their due order.
+
+Encourage personal experiences as sidelights and criticisms on the text,
+but remember that no single experience is conclusive. Beware of the
+over-elaboration and detailed narration of experiences.
+
+_Insist on a thorough study of the text._ Students should be so prepared
+as to make a lecture superfluous and to allow discussion to take the
+place of review and explanation. The greatest danger in parents' classes
+is that the members do not study; class work becomes indefinite and soon
+loses value. Again, the members of the class often are unwilling to be
+governed by the schedule of lessons, and the class drifts into aimless
+conversation. Adult students especially need to be turned from the
+tendency to regard educational experience as having come to an end with
+their school days. The members of this class will need encouragement;
+they must be stimulated patiently until they have re-formed some habits
+of study and rediscovered the pleasures of systematic thinking. The best
+stimulus will be a teacher so convinced of the supreme importance of the
+subject to be studied as to lead the members to recognize its importance
+and the insignificance of any price they may pay for efficient spiritual
+parenthood.
+
+
+§ 4. CLASS WORK
+
+At the first session teach chap. i, which is introductory. Draw out
+discussion on the points suggested therein, and assign this chapter and
+the one following for the next session. The first lesson will give the
+teacher opportunity to explain and illustrate the method of study,
+presentation, and discussion.
+
+Assign the work carefully each week, calling especial attention to the
+"References for Study." Secure promises from as many as possible to read
+at least one of these references and to prepare a written report, on one
+sheet of paper, for presentation at the next session. Ask others to look
+into the special points which will be found in the references given
+under the heading "Further Reading."
+
+In beginning a lesson it will be wise to call to mind first the
+principle running through the book, that the great work of the family is
+the development of religious persons in the home; then call to mind the
+application of this principle in the last lesson. Make your review very
+brief.
+
+Next, bring out the leading topic of the lesson for the day. This should
+be done so as to present a vital issue and a live topic to the class.
+Very often the best way of doing this is to state a concrete case
+involving the issue discussed. The presentation of a definite set of
+circumstances or a fairly complete experience involving the fundamental
+principles under discussion is an instance of teaching by the "case
+method." If the teacher will consider how the law student is trained by
+the study of _particular cases_, the advantage of the method will be
+clear. Be sure that the "case" selected will include the principles to
+be taught. Prepare the statement of the case beforehand. This should be
+done in a very brief narrative, so giving the instance as to enable the
+class to see the reality of the question. Be sure that your instance is
+itself vital and probable. A class of adults will especially need such
+points of vital contact. By announcing the topic in advance the teacher
+will often be able to obtain definite cases in point from the members.
+
+With the case thus presented take the points in the text and apply them,
+first to the special case alone, but with the purpose of developing the
+principles involved in that and similar cases. Beware of the special
+danger of the case method, namely, that the class may discuss the
+specific instances rather than the principles.
+
+_Teaching is more than telling_; it is stimulating other minds to see
+and comprehend and state for themselves. Therefore the teacher must
+first comprehend and be able to state for himself. Avoid repeating the
+phrases of the text. Get them over into your own language and see that
+the class does the same. Do not fail to call for the brief reports on
+reading, and to make them a real part of the subject of discussion.
+
+_Questioning_ is the natural method of stimulating minds. Use the
+question method, but do not confine yourself to "What does the author
+say on this?" Direct your questions to the points stated and the issues
+raised so as to compel students to think on the topics and so as to draw
+out the results of their thinking. Form your own judgments and help the
+class to form theirs too. Remember that the purpose of the class is to
+get people thinking on the great subjects discussed. The text is not
+written in order that groups of students may learn the author's
+statements, but that they may be led to think seriously on all these
+matters and stimulated to do something about them.
+
+Use the "discussion topics" given at the end of each lesson. They are
+not designed to furnish a syllabus of the lesson, but to suggest
+important questions for discussion, some of which may barely be
+mentioned in the text. They may be used in assigning the advance work,
+giving topics to different students, and they may be used in your review
+of the previous lesson.
+
+A syllabus of each lesson will be helpful, provided it be prepared by
+the students themselves. Encourage the careful reading of the lesson by
+every member of the class, letting the syllabus grow out of this.
+
+Notebooks will have their largest value if used at home for two
+purposes: first, to set down the student's analysis of the book as he
+reads, secondly, to record the student's observations on definite
+problems and on practice in the home. Note-taking in the class will have
+very little value unless it is backed up by study at home.
+
+_Generalization._ Have clearly in your own mind a definite concept of
+the general principle underlying each section. Read through each section
+until you can state the principle for yourself. Bring your teaching into
+a focus at the point of that principle before the lesson ends. Try to
+get the members of the class to state the principle in their own words.
+
+_In action:_ The principles will have little value unless translated
+into practical methods; direct your teaching to their actual use in
+families. Your generalization is for guidance into application. Urge
+that the plans described be actually tried. Expect this and call for
+reports on plans tested in the daily experience of families. If a number
+of students would try, for example, the plan of worship suggested for
+two or three weeks and report their experiences in writing, together
+with the accounts of any other plans tried, a valuable budget of helpful
+knowledge could thus be gathered.[53]
+
+_Conference plan:_ Some classes will be able to meet twice a week,
+taking the lesson at one session and at another spending the time in
+conference. At the conference period the program might provide for (1)
+brief papers by members of the class on topics personally assigned, (2)
+abstracts or summaries of assigned readings, (3) discussion on the
+particular points raised in the papers, and (4) conference on unsettled
+questions from the lesson for the class period preceding.
+
+_Club work:_ A parents' club might be organized, either in a church or
+in connection with a school, which would use this textbook, follow the
+study work with conferences, and would secure for its own use a library
+of the books listed after each chapter. Such a club would be able to put
+into practice some of the plans advocated and could encourage their
+application in groups of families.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[53] The teachers are especially invited to secure records of actual
+experiments of this character. Accounts of tried methods of family
+worship, especially those with new features, which should be given in
+some detail as to the exact plan, the circumstances, the material used,
+and the results, should be sent to the author in care of the publishers.
+Perhaps in this way material which may be valuable to large numbers may
+be gathered.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+A BOOK LIST
+
+
+The following books would be found useful for the working library of a
+class or club following the study of this text or for a section of the
+church library on the home and family. The books marked with an asterisk
+are the ones which may be regarded as of first practical value to
+parents and others studying the development of character in the life of
+the family.
+
+In addition to the titles mentioned below, the the references at the end
+of each chapter in this book will furnish a list of other sources of
+valuable material.
+
+
+     I. the Institution of the Family
+
+     C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.
+     A historical survey of the family with a special study of its
+     modern dangers and needs.
+
+     P.T. Forsyth, _Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion_. Hodder &
+     Stoughton, $1.25. An important, popular statement of the ethics of
+     marriage as the foundation of family life.
+
+     *W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50
+     net. The most important recent book on the family; traces its
+     historical development, the ethical ideals involved in the
+     institution, and discusses its present problems and perplexities.
+
+     Katherine G. Busby, _Home Life in America_. Macmillan, $2.00 net. A
+     popular statement of the outstanding characteristics of life in
+     American homes; entertaining and informing.
+
+     *Clyde W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25. A careful
+     and comprehensive survey, of great value.
+
+     Charles A.L. Reed, _Marriage and Genetics_. Galton Press,
+     Cincinnati, Ohio, $1.00. A surgeon's message on eugenics,
+     especially on the aspects indicated in the title. A study of the
+     laws of human breeding.
+
+
+     II. Child Nature
+
+     *E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_. Pilgrim Press,
+     $0.50. A textbook dealing with the nature of the child and with
+     problems of his training in the home.
+
+     *Irving King, _The High School Age_. Bobbs-Merrill & Co., $1.00
+     net. A study of the nature and needs of boys and girls in the first
+     period of adolescence. Written for all who are alive to the
+     problems of this period as well as for school people; gives
+     constructive suggestions for educational problems.
+
+     Elizabeth Harrison, _A Study of the Child Nature_. Chicago
+     Kindergarten College, $1.00. Long recognized as a standard for
+     parents in the study of the development and functions of the
+     child-life.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Right of the Child to Be Well Born_. Funk &
+     Wagnalls, $0.75. A plain study of eugenics, non-technical and
+     helpful; includes a chapter on eugenics and religion. To be
+     commended to parents.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Child and His Religion_. The University of
+     Chicago Press, $0.75. The religious nature and needs of the child
+     with some suggestions as to method.
+
+     *W. Arter Wright, _The Moral Conditions and Development of the
+     Child_. Jennings & Graham, $0.75. An important and valuable book on
+     the newer views of the religious development of the child-life.
+
+     Frederick Tracy and J. Stempfl, _The Psychology of Childhood_. D.C.
+     Heath & Co., $1.20. Gathers up the general results in the field of
+     child psychology.
+
+     *W.G. Koons, _The Child's Religious Life_. Jennings & Graham,
+     $1.00. From the modern point of view, dealing with some of the
+     interesting problems of the relation of the child to religious life
+     and the development of his religious ideas.
+
+     Thomas Stephens, _The Child and Religion_. Putnam, $1.50. A series
+     of short papers by English writers, particularly on the question of
+     child conversion.
+
+     George A. Hubbell, _Up through Childhood_. Putnam, $1.25. A good
+     general review with special reference to religious problems and
+     religious institutions.
+
+     Edith E.R. Mumford, _The Dawn of Character_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.20. A very important book, dealing especially with the moral
+     development of young children.
+
+
+     III. Training in the Home
+
+     William B. Forbush (ed.), _Guide Book to Childhood_. American
+     Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa. Very valuable as a guide
+     to reading on the many problems of child-training.
+
+     LeGrand Kerr, _The Care and Training of the Child_. Funk &
+     Wagnalls, $0.75. A good, general, brief study of the nature of the
+     child and the method of education.
+
+     William J. Shearer, _The Management and Training of the Child_.
+     Richardson, Smith & Co. A popular and practical statement of many
+     problems and their treatment in the home and school.
+
+     John Wirt Dinsmore, _The Training of Children_. American Book Co.
+     While written for school-teachers, this is one of the best studies
+     which parents could possibly read.
+
+     A.A. Berle, _The School in the Home_. Moffat, Yard & Co., $1.00.
+     Contains much valuable suggestion to parents who really desire to
+     take advantage of the educational opportunities of the home.
+
+     John Locke, _How to Train Up Your Children_. Sampson, Low, Marston
+     & Co., London. Written over two hundred years ago, and yet of very
+     great value in many parts to day.
+
+     *William B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation_. D. Appleton & Co.,
+     $1.50. Discusses the various aspects of child-training in the light
+     of the social consciousness of today. Many of the public agencies
+     for child betterment are carefully discussed.
+
+     *William A. McKeever, _Training the Girl_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     *----, _Training the Boy_. Macmillan, $1.50. These two books
+     constitute one of the best collections of material, most practical
+     and helpful. They view girls and boys as active factors and all the
+     phases of home and community life are studied with reference to
+     their needs.
+
+
+     IV. Special Religious Training in the Home
+
+     *George Hodges, _The Training of the Child in Religion_. D.
+     Appleton & Co., $1.50. One of the few books dealing in any modern
+     manner with the special problems of the religious life of the
+     family.
+
+     Rev. William Becker, _Christian Education or The Duties of
+     Parents_. B. Herder, St. Louis, $1.00. Recent and interesting
+     sermons on the duties of parents in the religious education of the
+     Catholic child; a striking example of messages that ought to be
+     heard from every pulpit.
+
+     John T. Faris, _Pleasant Sunday Afternoons for the Children_.
+     Sunday School Times Co., $0.50. A number of practical plans are
+     suggested.
+
+     *George A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_. Fleming H.
+     Revell Co., $1.35. A book which all parents ought to read for its
+     valuable guidance on the general principles of religious education.
+
+     Elizabeth Grinnell, _How John and I Brought Up the Children_.
+     American Sunday School Union, $0.70. A popular statement in a
+     simple form of methods of dealing with many of the problems of
+     religious training.
+
+
+     V. Moral Training
+
+     Edward H. Griggs, _Moral Education_. B.W. Huebsch, $1.60. One of
+     the best-known books on this question, readable and helpful at many
+     points.
+
+     Ennis Richmond, _The Mind of the Child_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.00. One of the most helpful books because of its new and
+     refreshing point of view.
+
+     *Edward O. Sisson, _The Essentials of Character_. Macmillan, $1.00.
+     A book on the broad principles and ideals; one dealing with the
+     outstanding elements of character.
+
+     Ernest H. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin
+     Co., $1.00. A bright statement of some of the most perplexing
+     problems of family life.
+
+     *Mary Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. First and
+     Second Series. A.C. McClurg & Co., $1.00 each. Takes one after
+     another of the different situations in child-training.
+
+     *Patterson DuBois, _The Culture of Justice_. Dodd, Mead & Co.,
+     $0.75. An important contribution, as it calls attention to some
+     frequently neglected aspects of moral training especially
+     applicable to the home.
+
+     Walter L. Sheldon, _Duties in the Home_. W.M. Welch & Co. A
+     textbook, the thirty sections of which would furnish an excellent
+     basis for parents' discussions of home discipline.
+
+
+     VI. General Reading in the Home
+
+     John Macy, _Child's Guide to Reading_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.25. A
+     discussion of reading and the education of children thereby, with
+     suggestions and criticisms of suitable books in different
+     departments of reading.
+
+     W.T. Taylor, _Finger Posts to Children's Reading_. A.C. McClurg &
+     Co., $1.00. A practical discussion of suitable reading for
+     children, with a list of books.
+
+     *G.W. Arnold, _A Mothers' List of Books for Children_. A.C. McClurg
+     & Co., $1.00. The books are arranged by ages and topics, making
+     this one of the most useful collections available.
+
+     Edward P. St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.35. A textbook, for parents' classes. It contains much valuable
+     material.
+
+     E.M. Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_. Sturgis &
+     Walton, $1.35. One of the best discussions of the principles and
+     methods of story-telling, with a number of good stories.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Activity in relation to character, 75
+
+Amusement of young people, 190
+
+Anger, Dealing with, 224
+
+
+Bible, Methods of using the, 121
+
+Bible, The, in the home, 119
+
+Blessing at table, 133
+
+Book list on the family, 290
+
+Books and reading, 113
+
+Boy, The, in the family, 173
+
+Boys' play, 175
+
+Bullying, 253
+
+
+Character, A constructive policy for, 269
+
+Child nature, Books on, 291
+
+Child unity with the church, 207
+
+Child welfare, Religious meanings of, 3
+
+Childhood characteristics, 53
+
+Christian family, The, as a type, 41
+
+Church, The, and the children, 204
+
+Church, The, and the family, 198
+
+Church, The, and the program of the home, 271
+
+Citizenship, Training for, 96
+
+Class work, Plans of, 281
+
+Community, The, in relation to the home, 88
+
+Community service, 91
+
+Conversation, Religious, 62
+
+Courtship, 188
+
+
+Dishonesty, 249
+
+
+Economic development of the home, 13
+
+Educational function, The, of the family, 46
+
+Educational process, The, 49
+
+
+Factory system, The, and the home, 14
+
+Family as an institution, Books on the, 290
+
+"Family Book," 155
+
+Family defined, 5
+
+Family ideal in the church, 202
+
+Family life, Dominating motive of, 27
+
+Family worship, 126
+
+Family worship, Methods of, 133
+
+Father, The, and the boy, 177
+
+Father, The, and the family, 263
+
+Fighting among children, 234
+
+Function of the family, 46
+
+Future of the family, 268
+
+
+Girl, The, in the family, 180
+
+God, The consciousness of, 64
+
+Grace at table, 133
+
+
+Hebrew family life, 39
+
+Home and school co-operation, 213
+
+Home, is it passing? 10
+
+Home, Religious interpretation of, 1
+
+Home versus family, 18, 22
+
+Honesty, Training in, 249
+
+Hymns for children, 102
+
+
+Jesus' teaching on the family, 42
+
+
+Loyalty as the basic principle, 31, 54
+
+Loyalty, The organization of, 57
+
+Lying and the moral problem, 240
+
+
+Meals, Conversation at, 165
+
+Moral crises, Dealing with, 218
+
+Moral life, religious roots in the family, 31
+
+Moral teaching, 70
+
+Moral training, Books on, 294
+
+Motive, Religious, in the family, 2
+
+Music in the family, 105
+
+
+Organization of home, Purpose of, 19
+
+
+Parental aversion, 186
+
+Parenthood and religious training, 260
+
+Parents' classes, 274
+
+Parents trained in schools, 214
+
+Petulancy in children, 233
+
+Play activity, 107
+
+Play, A policy of, 150
+
+Play on Sunday, 149
+
+Prayers, Children's, 135
+
+Prayers, Family, 137
+
+
+Quarrels of children, 231
+
+Questions, Children's, 69
+
+
+Reading, Developing taste for, 115
+
+Religious character of the family, 46
+
+Religious development of the child, 52
+
+Religious education in the family, Books on, 293
+
+Religious education, Meaning of, 47
+
+Religious growth of the child, 55
+
+Religious history of the family, 37
+
+Religious ideas of children, 60
+
+Religious service, 78, 80
+
+
+School, The home as a, 87
+
+Schools, Public, and the home, 212
+
+Self-control, Developing, 227, 236
+
+Social life of youth, 189
+
+Social qualities to be developed, 28
+
+Social training, 29, 82, 92
+
+Socialization of the home, 16
+
+Song and story, 101
+
+Spiritual values, Place of, 30
+
+Stories and reading, 110
+
+Story-telling, 110
+
+Sunday afternoon problem, 154
+
+Sunday in the home, 145
+
+Sunday play, 149
+
+
+Table, Ministry of the, 164
+
+Table-talk, 169
+
+Teasing and bullying, 253
+
+
+Will, Training the, 221
+
+Work and character, 76
+
+Worship in the family, 126
+
+Worship, Outlines of, 139
+
+
+Youth in the home, 183
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONSTRUCTIVE STUDIES
+
+
+The Constructive Studies comprise volumes suitable for all grades, from
+kindergarten to adult years, in schools or churches. In the production
+of these studies the editors and authors have sought to embody not only
+their own ideals but the best product of the thought of all who are
+contributing to the theory and practice of modern religious education.
+They have had due regard for fundamental principles of pedagogical
+method, for the results of the best modern biblical scholarship, and for
+those contributions to religious education which may be made by the use
+of a religious interpretation of all life-processes, whether in the
+field of science, literature, or social phenomena.
+
+Their task is not regarded as complete because of having produced one or
+more books suitable for each grade. There will be a constant process of
+renewal and change, and the possible setting aside of books which,
+because of changing conditions in the religious world or further advance
+in the science of religious education, no longer perform their function,
+and the continual enrichment of the series by new volumes so that it may
+always be adapted to those who are taking initial steps in modern
+religious education, as well as to those who have accepted and are ready
+to put into practice the most recent theories.
+
+As teachers profoundly interested in the problems of religious
+education, the editors have invited to co-operate with them authors
+chosen from a wide territory and in several instances already well known
+through practical experiments in the field in which they are asked to
+write.
+
+The editors are well aware that those who are most deeply interested in
+religious education hold that churches and schools should be accorded
+perfect independence in their choice of literature regardless of
+publishing-house interests and they heartily sympathize with this
+standard. They realize that many schools will select from the
+Constructive Studies such volumes as they prefer, but at the same time
+they hope that the Constructive Studies will be most widely serviceable
+as a series. The following analysis of the series will help the reader
+to get the point of view of the editors and authors.
+
+
+KINDERGARTEN, 4-6 YEARS
+
+The kindergarten child needs most of all to gain those simple ideals of
+life which will keep him in harmony with his surroundings in the home,
+at play, and in the out-of-doors. He is most susceptible to a religious
+interpretation of all these, which can best be fostered through a
+program of story, play, handwork, and other activities as outlined in
+
+     _The Sunday Kindergarten_ (Ferris). A teachers' manual giving
+     directions for the use of a one- or two-hour period with story,
+     song, play, and handwork. Permanent and temporary material for the
+     children's table work, and story leaflets to be taken home.
+
+
+PRIMARY, 6-8 YEARS, GRADES I-III
+
+At the age of six years when children enter upon a new era because of
+their recognition by the first grade in the public schools the
+opportunity for the cultivation of right social reactions is
+considerably increased. Their world still, however, comprises chiefly
+the home, the school, the playground, and the phenomena of nature. A
+normal religion at this time is one which will enable the child to
+develop the best sort of life in all these relationships, which now
+present more complicated moral problems than in the earlier stage.
+Religious impressions may be made through interpretations of nature,
+stories of life, song, prayer, simple scripture texts, and handwork. All
+of these are embodied in
+
+     _Child Religion in Song and Story_ (Chamberlin and Kern). Three
+     interchangeable volumes; only one of which is used at one time in
+     all three grades. Each lesson presents a complete service, song,
+     prayers, responses, texts, story, and handwork. Constructive and
+     beautiful handwork books are provided for the pupil.
+
+
+JUNIOR, 9 YEARS, GRADE IV
+
+When the children have reached the fourth grade they are able to read
+comfortably and have developed an interest in books, having a "reading
+book" in school and an accumulating group of story-books at home. One
+book in the household is as yet a mystery, the Bible, of which the
+parents speak reverently as God's Book. It contains many interesting
+stories and presents inspiring characters which are, however, buried in
+the midst of much that would not interest the children. To help them to
+find these stories and to show them the living men who are their heroes
+or who were the writers of the stories, the poems, or the letters, makes
+the Bible to them a living book which they will enjoy more and more as
+the years pass. This service is performed by
+
+     _An Introduction to the Bible for Teachers of Children_
+     (Chamberlin). Story-reading from the Bible for the school and home,
+     designed to utilize the growing interest in books and reading found
+     in children of this age, in cultivating an attitude of intelligent
+     interest in the Bible and enjoyment of suitable portions of it.
+     Full instructions with regard to picturesque, historical, and
+     social introductions are given the teacher. A pupil's homework
+     book, designed to help him to think of the story as a whole and to
+     express his thinking, is provided for the pupil.
+
+
+JUNIOR, 10-12 YEARS, GRADES V-VII
+
+Children in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades are hero-worshipers. In
+the preceding grade they have had a brief introduction to the life of
+Jesus through their childish explorations of the gospels. His character
+has impressed them already as heroic and they are eager to know more
+about him, therefore the year is spent in the study of
+
+     _The Life of Jesus_ (Gates). The story of Jesus graphically
+     presented from the standpoint of a hero. A teacher's manual
+     contains full instructions for preparation of material and
+     presentation to the class. A partially completed story of Jesus
+     prepared for the introduction of illustrations, maps, and original
+     work, together with all materials required, is provided for the
+     pupil.
+
+In the sixth grade a new point of approach to some of the heroes with
+whom the children are already slightly acquainted seems desirable. The
+Old Testament furnishes examples of men who were brave warriors,
+magnanimous citizens, loyal patriots, great statesmen, and champions of
+democratic justice. To make the discovery of these traits in ancient
+characters and to interpret them in the terms of modern boyhood and
+girlhood is the task of two volumes in the list. The choice between them
+will be made on the basis of preference for handwork or textbook work
+for the children.
+
+     _Heroes of Israel_ (Soares). Stories selected from the Old
+     Testament which are calculated to inspire the imagination of boys
+     and girls of the early adolescent period. The most complete
+     instructions for preparation and presentation of the lesson are
+     given the teacher in his manual. The pupil's book provides the full
+     text of each story and many questions which will lead to the
+     consideration of problems arising in the life of boys and girls of
+     this age.
+
+     _Old Testament Stories_ (Corbett). Also a series of stories
+     selected from the Old Testament. Complete instructions for vivid
+     presentation are given the teacher in his manual. The pupil's
+     material consists of a notebook containing a great variety of
+     opportunities for constructive handwork.
+
+Paul was a great hero. Most people know him only as a theologian. His
+life presents miracles of courage, struggle, loyalty, and
+self-abnegation. The next book in the series is intended to help the
+pupil to see such a man. The student is assisted by a wealth of local
+color.
+
+     _Paul of Tarsus_ (Atkinson). The story of Paul which is partially
+     presented to the pupil and partially the result of his own
+     exploration in the Bible and in the library. Much attention is
+     given to story of Paul's boyhood and his adventurous travels,
+     inspiring courage and loyalty to a cause. The pupil's notebook is
+     similar in form to the one used in the study of Gates's "Life of
+     Jesus," but more advanced in thought.
+
+
+HIGH SCHOOL, 13-17 YEARS
+
+In the secular school the work of the eighth grade is tending toward
+elimination. It is, therefore, considered here as one of the high-school
+grades. In the high-school years new needs arise. There is necessary a
+group of books which will dignify the study of the Bible and give it as
+history and literature a place in education, at least equivalent to that
+of other histories and literatures which have contributed to the
+progress of the world. This series is rich in biblical studies which
+will enable young people to gain a historical appreciation of the
+religion which they profess. Such books are
+
+     _The Gospel According to Mark_ (Burton). A study of the life of
+     Jesus from this gospel. The full text is printed in the book, which
+     is provided with a good dictionary and many interesting notes and
+     questions of very great value to both teacher and pupil.
+
+     _The First Book of Samuel_ (Willett). Textbook for teacher and
+     pupil in which the fascinating stories of Samuel, Saul, and David
+     are graphically presented. The complete text of the first book of
+     Samuel is given, many interesting explanatory notes, and questions
+     which will stir the interest of the pupil, not only in the present
+     volume but in the future study of the Old Testament.
+
+     _The Life of Christ_ (Burgess). A careful historical study of the
+     life of Christ from the four gospels. A manual for teacher and
+     pupil presents a somewhat exhaustive treatment, but full
+     instructions for the selection of material for classes in which but
+     one recitation a week occurs are given the teacher in a separate
+     outline.
+
+     _The Hebrew Prophets_ (Chamberlin). An inspiring presentation of
+     the lives of some of the greatest of the prophets from the point of
+     view of their work as citizens and patriots. In the manual for
+     teachers and pupils the biblical text in a good modern translation
+     is included.
+
+     _Christianity in the Apostolic Age_ (Gilbert). A story of early
+     Christianity chronologically presented, full of interest in the
+     hands of a teacher who enjoys the historical point of view.
+
+In the high-school years also young people find it necessary to face the
+problem of living the Christian life in a modern world, both as a
+personal experience and as a basis on which to build an ideal society.
+To meet this need a number of books intended to inspire boys and girls
+to look forward to taking their places as home-builders and responsible
+citizens of a great Christian democracy and to intelligently choose
+their task in it are prepared or in preparation. The following are now
+ready:
+
+     _Problems of Boyhood_ (Johnson). A series of chapters discussing
+     matters of supreme interest to boys and girls, but presented from
+     the point of view of the boy. A splendid preparation for efficiency
+     in all life's relationships.
+
+     _Lives Worth Living_ (Peabody). A series of studies of important
+     women, biblical and modern, representing different phases of life
+     and introducing the opportunity to discuss the possibilities of
+     effective womanhood in the modern world.
+
+     _The Third and Fourth Generation_ (Downing). A series of studies in
+     heredity based upon studies of phenomena in the natural world and
+     leading up to important historical facts and inferences in the
+     human world.
+
+
+ADULT GROUP
+
+The Biblical studies assigned to the high-school period are in most
+cases adaptable to adult class work. There are other volumes, however,
+intended only for the adult group, which also includes the young people
+beyond the high-school age. They are as follows:
+
+     _The Life of Christ_ (Burton and Mathews). A careful historical
+     study of the life of Christ from the four gospels, with copious
+     notes, reading references, maps, etc.
+
+     _What Jesus Taught_ (Slaten). This book develops an unusual but
+     stimulating method of teaching groups of students in colleges,
+     Christian associations, and churches. After a swift survey of the
+     material and spiritual environment of Jesus this book suggests
+     outlines for _discussions_ of his teaching on such topics as
+     civilization, hate, war and non-resistance, democracy, religion,
+     and similar topics. Can be effectively used by laymen as well as
+     professional leaders.
+
+     _Great Men of the Christian Church_ (Walker). A series of
+     delightful biographies of men who have been influential in great
+     crises in the history of the church.
+
+     _Christian Faith for Men of Today_ (Cook). A re-interpretation of
+     old doctrines in the light of modern attitudes.
+
+     _Social Duties from the Christian Point of View_ (Henderson).
+     Practical studies in the fundamental social relationships which
+     make up life in the family, the city, and the state.
+
+     _Religious Education in the Family_ (Cope). An illuminating study
+     of the possibilities of a normal religious development in the
+     family life. Invaluable to parents.
+
+     _Christianity and Its Bible_ (Waring). A remarkably comprehensive
+     sketch of the Old and the New Testament religion, the Christian
+     church, and the present status of Christianity.
+
+It is needless to say that the Constructive Studies present no sectarian
+dogmas and are used by churches and schools of all denominational
+affiliations. In the grammar-and high-school years more books are
+provided than there are years in which to study them, each book
+representing a school year's work. Local conditions, and the preference
+of the Director of Education or the teacher of the class will be the
+guide in choosing the courses desired, remembering that in the preceding
+list the approximate place given to the book is the one which the
+editors and authors consider most appropriate.
+
+For prices consult the latest price list. Address
+
+The University of Chicago Press
+Chicago    Illinois
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Religious Education in the Family, by Henry
+F. Cope
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Religious Education in the Family
+
+
+Author: Henry F. Cope
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 21, 2006  [eBook #17570]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE
+FAMILY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Stacy Brown Thellend, Kevin Handy, John Hagerson, and
+the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(http://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+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
+
+
+Sec. 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.
+
+
+Sec. 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.
+
+
+Sec. 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.
+
+
+Sec. 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]
+
+
+Sec. 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PRESENT STATUS OF FAMILY LIFE
+
+
+Sec. 1. CONTRASTED TYPES
+
+In a beautiful village, in one of the farther western states, two men
+were discussing the possible future of the home and of family life.
+Sitting in the brilliant moonlight, looking through the leafy shades,
+watching the lights of a score of homes, each surrounded by lawn and
+shade trees, each with its group on the front porch, where vines trailed
+and flowers bloomed, listening to the hum of conversation and the
+strains of music in one home and another, it seemed, to at least one of
+these men, that this type of living could hardly pass away. The separate
+home, each family a complete social integer, each with its own circle of
+activities and interests, its own group, and its own table and fireside,
+seemed too fine and beautiful, too fair and helpful, to perish under
+economic pressure. Indeed, one felt that the village home furnished a
+setting for life and a soil for character development far higher and
+more efficient than could be afforded by any other domestic
+arrangement--that it approached the ideal.
+
+But two weeks later two men sat in an upper room, in the second largest
+city in America, discussing again the future of the family. Instead of
+the quiet music of the village, the clang of street cars filled the
+ears, trains rushed by, children shouted from the paved highway,
+families were seated by open windows in crowded apartments, seeking cool
+air; the total impression was that of being placed in a pigeonhole in a
+huge, heated, filing-case, where each separate space was occupied by a
+family. One felt the pressure of heated, crowded kitchens, suffocating
+little dining-rooms; one knew that the babies lay crying in their beds
+at night, gasping their very lives away, and that the young folks were
+wandering off to amusement parks and moving-picture shows. Here was an
+entirely different picture. How long could family life persist under
+these conditions where privacy was almost gone and comfort almost
+unknown?
+
+In the village separate home integers appear ideal; in the city they are
+possible only to the few. The many, at present, find them a crushing
+burden. Desirable as privacy is, it can be purchased at too high a
+price. It costs too much to maintain separate kitchens and dining-rooms
+under city conditions.
+
+
+Sec. 2. COMMUNAL TENDENCIES
+
+Present conditions spell waste, inefficiency, discomfort. The woman
+lives all day in stifling rooms, poorly lighted, with the nerve-racking
+life of neighbors pouring itself through walls and windows. The men
+come from crowded shops and the children from crowded schoolrooms to
+crowd themselves into these rooms, to snatch a meal, or to sleep. How
+can there be real family life? What joy can there be or what ideals
+created in daily discomfort and distress? Little wonder that such homes
+are sleeping-places only, that there is no sense of family intercourse
+and unity. Little wonder that restaurant life has succeeded family life.
+
+Many hold that we are ready for a movement into community living, that
+just as the social life of the separate house porches in the villages
+has become communized into the amusement parks in the cities, so all the
+activities of the family will move in the same direction. How long could
+the family as a unit continue under these conditions?
+
+The village life will persist for a long time; it may be that, when we
+apply scientific methods to the transportation of human beings in the
+same measure as we have to the moving of pig iron, we can develop large
+belts of real village life all around our industrial centers. But more
+and more the village tends to become like the city; in other words,
+highly organized communal life is the dominant trend today. Just as
+business tends to do on a large scale all that can be more economically
+done in larger units, so does the home. We must look for the increasing
+prevalence of the city type of life for men and women and for families.
+
+
+Sec. 3. THE ECONOMICAL DEVELOPMENT
+
+It is worth while to note, in some brief detail, just what changes are
+involved in the tendency toward communal living. At the beginning of the
+industrial revolution which ushered in the factory period, each family
+was a fairly complete unit in itself. The village was little more than a
+nucleus of farmhouses, with a few differing types of units, such as
+workers in wood, in wearing apparel, and in tools. The home furnished
+nearly all its own food, spun and made its clothes, trained its own
+children, and knew scarcely any community endeavor or any syndication of
+effort except in the church.
+
+The industrial revolution took labor largely out of the home into the
+factory. Except for farm life, the husband became an outside worker and
+the older boys followed him to the distant shop or factory. Earning a
+living ceased to be a family act and became a social act in a larger
+sphere. But in this change it ceased to be a part of the family
+educational process. Boys who, from childhood up, had gradually learned
+their father's trade in the shop or workroom, which was part of the
+house, where they played as children in the shavings, or watched the
+glowing sparks in the smithy, now missed the process of a father's
+discipline and guidance as their hands acquired facility for their
+tasks. The home lost the male adults for from nine to twelve hours of
+each day, more than two-thirds of the waking period, and thus it lost a
+large share of disciplinary guidance. In the rise of the factory system,
+to a large extent the family lost the father.
+
+When the workshop left the home its most efficient school was taken from
+it. The lessons may have been limited, crude, and deadly practical, but
+the method approximated to the ideals which modern pedagogy seeks to
+realize. Among the shavings children learned by doing; schooling was
+perfectly natural; it involved all the powers; it had the incalculable
+value of informality and reality. The father gone and the mother still
+fully occupied with her tasks, the children lost that practical training
+for life which home industry had afforded. On the one hand, the young
+became the victims of idleness and, on the other, the prey of the
+voracious factory system.
+
+This condition gave rise to the public-school system. It appealed to
+Robert Raikes and others. The school appeared and took over the child.
+Of course schools had existed, here and there, long before this, but now
+they had an enlarged responsibility; they must act almost in the place
+of the parents for the formal training of children. Having lost the
+father and older males for the greater portion of the day, the home now
+loses the children of from seven to the "'teen" years for five or six
+hours of the day. The mother is left at home with the babies. The
+family, once living under one roof, now is found scattered; it has
+reached out into factory and school. Its hours of unified life have been
+markedly reduced.
+
+But the factory system soon had a reflex influence on the home. That
+which was made in the factory came back into the home, not only in the
+form of the articles formerly made by the men, but in those made by the
+women. Clothes, candles, butter, cheese, preserves, and meat--all
+formerly home products for the use of the family producing them--now
+were prepared in larger quantities, by mechanical processes, and were
+brought back into the home. Woman's labor was lightened; the older girls
+were liberated from the loom and they began to seek occupation,
+education, and diversion according to their opportunities in life.
+
+That last step made it possible for people to think of the communization
+of home industry, to think of eating food cooked in other ovens than
+their own, to think of one oven large enough for a whole village. Many
+interesting experiments in co-operative living immediately sprang up.
+But the next step came slowly and, even now, is only firmly established
+in the cities, in the actual abandonment of the family kitchen for the
+community kitchen in the form of the restaurant. In such families we
+have unity only in the hours of sleep and recreation.
+
+Along with abandonment of the separate kitchen there has proceeded
+the abandonment of the parlor in the homes of the middle classes.
+To lose the old, mournful front room may be no subject for tears,
+but the loss of the evening family group, about the fireside or
+the reading-lamp, is a real and sad loss. The commercialized amusements
+have offered greater attractions to vigorous youth. The theater and
+its lesser satellites, amusements, entertainments, lectures, the
+lyceum, and recreation-by-proxy in ball games and matches have taken
+the place of united family recreation. Of course this has been a
+natural development of the older village play-life and has been by
+no means an unmixed ill.
+
+Now, behold, what has become of the old-time home life! The family that
+spent nearly twenty-four hours together now spends a scarce seven or
+eight, and these are occupied in sleeping! Little wonder that the next
+step is taken--the abandonment of this remainder, the sleep period,
+under a domestic roof, as the family moves into a hotel!
+
+Along with the tendency toward communal working and eating we see the
+tendency to communal living by the development of the apartment
+building. Since roof-trees are so expensive, and since in a practical
+age, few of us can afford to pay for sentiment, why not put a dozen
+families under one roof-tree? True we sacrifice lawns, gardens, natural
+places for children to play; we lose birds and flowers and the charm of
+evening hours on porches, or galleries, but think of what we gain in
+bricks and mortar, in labor saved from splitting wood and shoveling
+coal, in janitor service! The transition is now complete; the home is
+simply that item in the economic machinery which will best furnish us
+storage for our sleeping bodies and our clothes!
+
+We are undoubtedly in a period of great changes in family life, and no
+family can count on escaping the influence of the change. The one single
+outstanding and most potent change, so far as the character of family
+life is concerned, is, in the United States, the rapid polarization of
+population in the cities. The United States Census Bureau counts all
+residents in cities of over 8,000 population as "urban." In 1800 the
+"urban" population was 4 per cent of the total population; in 1850 it
+was 12.5 per cent; in 1870, 20.9 per cent; in 1890, 29.2 per cent; in
+1900, 33.1 per cent; in 1910 it was estimated at 40 per cent.[2] Here
+is a trend so clearly marked that we cannot deny its reality, while its
+significance is familiar to everyone today.
+
+However, the village type remains; there are still many homes where a
+measure of family unity persists, where at least in one meal daily and,
+for purposes of sleeping and, occasionally, for the evening hours of
+recreation, there is a consciousness of home life. Yet the most remote
+village feels the pressure of change. The few homes conforming to the
+older ideals are recognized as exceptional. The city draws the village
+and rural family to itself, and the contagion of its customs and ideals
+spreads through the villages and affects the forms of living there.
+Youths become city dwellers and do not cease to scoff at the village
+unless later years give them wisdom to appreciate its higher values. The
+standard of domestic organization is established by the city; that type
+of living is the ideal toward which nearly all are striving.
+
+The important question for all persons is whether the changes now taking
+place in family life are good or ill. It is impossible to say whether
+the whole trend is for the better; the many elements are too diverse and
+often apparently conflicting. Faith in the orderly development of
+society gives ground for belief that these changes ultimately work for a
+higher type of family life. The city may be regarded as only a
+transition stage in social evolution--the compacting of masses of
+persons together that out of the new fusing and welding may arise new
+methods of social living. The larger numbers point to more highly
+developed forms of social organization. When these larger units discover
+their greater purposes, above factory and mill and store, and realize
+them in personal values, the city life will be a more highly developed
+mechanism for the higher life of man. The home life will develop along
+with that city life.
+
+
+Sec. 4. PURPOSEFUL ORGANIZATION
+
+At present the home is suffering, just as the city is suffering, from a
+lack of that purposeful organization which will order the parts aright
+and subject the processes to the most important and ultimate purposes.
+The city is simply an aggregation of persons, scarcely having any
+conscious organization, thrown together for purposes of industry. It
+will before very long organize itself for purposes of personal welfare
+and education. The family is usually a group bound in ties of struggle
+for shelter, food, and pleasure. Such consciousness as it possesses is
+that of being helplessly at the mercy of conflicting economic forces.
+The adjustment of those forces, their subjection to man's higher
+interests, must come in the future and will help the family to freedom
+to discover its true purpose.
+
+It is easy to insist on the responsibility of parents for the
+character-training of their children, but it is difficult to see how
+that responsibility can be properly discharged under industrial
+conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole
+day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to
+furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull
+monotony of labor to care for life's finer interests. The welfare of the
+family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be
+secured in one part progress in the whole ensues.
+
+There are those who raise the question whether family life is a
+permanent form of social organization for which we may wisely contend,
+or is but a phase from which the race is now emerging. Some see signs
+that the ties of marriage will be but temporary, that children will be
+born, not into families but into the life of the state, bearing only
+their mothers' names and knowing no brothers and sisters save in the
+brotherhood of the state. Whether the permanent elements in family life
+furnish a sufficiently worthy basis for its preservation is a subject
+for careful consideration.
+
+
+Sec. 5. THE HOME AND THE FAMILY
+
+The family is more important than the home, just as the man is more than
+his clothing. The form of the home changes; the life of the family
+continues unchanged in its essential characteristics. The family causes
+the home to be. Professor Arthur J. Todd insists that the family is the
+basis of marriage, rather than marriage the cause of the family.[3]
+Small groups for protection and social living would precede formal
+arrangements of monogamy. Westermarck concludes that it was "for the
+benefit of the young that male and female continued to live
+together."[4] The importance of this consideration for us lies in the
+thought of the overshadowing importance of this social group which we
+now call the family. The family is the primary cell of society, the
+first unit in social organization. Our thought must balance itself
+between the importance of this social group, to be preserved in its
+integrity, and the value of the home, with its varied forms of activity
+and ministry, as a means of preserving and developing this group, the
+family.
+
+One hears today many pessimistic utterances regarding the modern home.
+Some even tell us that it is doomed to become extinct. Without doubt
+great economic changes in society are producing profound changes in the
+organization and character of the home. But the home has always been
+subject to such changes; the factor which we need to watch with greater
+care is the family; the former is but the shell of the latter.
+
+The character of each home will depend largely on the economic condition
+of those who dwell in it. The homes of every age will reflect the social
+conditions of that age. The picture in historical romances of the home
+of the mediaeval period, where the factory, or shop, joined the
+dining-room, where the apprentices ate and roomed in the home, where one
+might be compelled to furnish and provision his home literally as his
+castle for defense, presents a marked difference to the home of this
+century tending to syndicate all its labors with all the other homes of
+the community. Since the home is simply the organization and mechanism
+of the family life, it is most susceptible to material and social
+changes. It varies as do the fashions of men.
+
+Much that we assume to be detrimental to the life of the home is simply
+due to the fact that in the evolution of society the family, as it were,
+puts on a new suit of clothes, adopts new forms of organization to meet
+the changing external conditions.
+
+
+Sec. 6. THE HOME CHANGING; THE FAMILY ABIDING
+
+The home is of importance only as a tool, a means to the final ends of
+the family life; the test of its efficiency is not whether it maintains
+traditional forms but whether it best serves the highest aims of family
+life. We may abandon all the older customs; our regret for them, as we
+look back on the days of home cooking, cannot be any greater than the
+regrets of our parents or grandparents looking back on the
+spinning-wheel and the hand loom that cumbered the kitchen of their
+childhood. Surely no one contends that family life has deteriorated,
+that human character is one whit the poorer, because we have discarded
+the family spinning-wheel. Through the changes of a developing
+civilization, as man has moved from the time when each one built his own
+house, worked with his own tools to make all his supplies, to these days
+of specialized service in community living, the home has changed with
+each step of industrial progress, but the family has remained
+practically unchanged.
+
+The family stands a practically unchanging factor of personal qualities
+at the center of our civilization; the family rather than the home
+determines the character of the coming days. In its social relationships
+are rooted the things that are best in all our lives. In its social
+training lie the solutions of more problems in social adjustment and
+development than we are willing to admit. The family is the soil of
+society, central to all its problems and possibilities.
+
+Before church or school the family stands potent for character. We are
+what we are, not by the ideals held before us for thirty minutes a week
+or once a month in a church, nor by the instructions given in the
+classroom; we are what parents, kin, and all the circumstances that have
+touched us daily and hourly for years have determined we should be.
+
+The sweetest memories of our lives cluster about the scenes of family
+life. The rose-embowered cottage of the poet is not the only spot that
+claims affectionate gratitude; many look back to a city house wedged
+into its monotonous row. But, wherever it might be, if it sheltered love
+and held a shrine where the altar fires of family sacrifice burned,
+earth has no fairer or more sacred spot. The people rather than the
+place made it potent.
+
+Stronger even than the memories that remain are the marks of habits,
+tendencies, tastes, and dispositions there acquired. Many a man who has
+left no fortune worth recording to his sons has left them something
+better, the aptitude for things good and honorable, the memory of a good
+name, and the heritage of a life that was worthy of honor. The personal
+life has been always the enduring thing. Our concern for the future
+should be not whether we can pass on intact the forms of home
+organization, but whether we can give to the next day the force of ideal
+family life. Perhaps like Mary we would do well to turn our eyes from
+the much serving, the mechanisms of the home, to set our minds on the
+better part, the personal values in the association of lives in the
+family.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. ii, xi, xii. Hodder
+     & Stoughton, $2.50.
+
+     Charles R. Henderson, _Social Duties from the Christian Point of
+     View_, chaps. ii, iii. The University of Chicago Press, $1.25.
+
+     C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Jacob A. Riis, _Peril and Preservation of the Home_. Jacobs,
+     Philadelphia, Pa., $1.00.
+
+     Charles R. Henderson, _Social Elements_. Scribner, $1.50.
+
+     Charles F. Thwing, _The Recovery of the Home_. American Baptist
+     Publication Society, $0.15.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. The tendency toward community life illustrated in the schools,
+     amusement parks, and hotel life. Remembering the ultimate purpose
+     of the family, how far is communal life desirable?
+
+     2. Does the apartment or tenement building furnish a suitable
+     condition for the higher purposes of the family?
+
+     3. Is it possible to restore to the home some of the benefits lost
+     by present factory consolidation of industry?
+
+     4. What can take the place of the old household arts and of those
+     which are now passing?
+
+     5. What steps should be taken to secure to the family a larger
+     measure of the time in terms of occupation of the parents?
+
+     6. What are the important things to contend for in this
+     institution? Why should we expect change in the form of the home
+     and what are the features which should not be changed?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Figures taken from C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious
+Education in the American Home_, 1911.
+
+[3] A.J. Todd, _Primitive Family and Education_, p. 21. A most valuable
+and suggestive book.
+
+[4] Cited by Todd, p. 21.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE PERMANENT ELEMENTS IN FAMILY LIFE
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE DOMINANT MOTIVE
+
+The chief end of society is to improve the race, to develop the higher
+and steadily improving type of human beings. We can test the life of the
+family and determine the values of its elements by asking whether and in
+what degree they minister to this end, the growth of better persons.
+This is more than a theoretical aim or one conceived in a search for
+ideals. It is written plain in our passions and strongest inclinations.
+That which parents supremely desire for their children is that they may
+become strong in body, capable and alert in mind, and animated by worthy
+principles and ideals. The parent desires a good man, fit to take his
+place, do his work, make his contribution to the social well-being, able
+to live to the fulness of his powers, to take life in all its reaches of
+meaning and heights of vision and beauty. In true parenthood all hopes
+of success, of riches, fame, and ease, are seen but as avenues to this
+end, as means of making the finer character, of growing the ideal
+person. If we were compelled to choose for our children we should elect
+poverty, pain, disgrace, toil, and suffering if we knew this was the
+only highway to full manhood and womanhood, to completeness of
+character. Indeed, we do constantly so choose, knowing that they must
+endure hardness, bear the yoke in their youth, and learn that
+
+    Love and joy are torches lit
+    At altar fires of sacrifice.
+
+With this dominating purpose clearly in mind we are prepared to ask,
+What are the elements of family life which among the changes of today we
+need most carefully to preserve in order to maintain efficiency in
+character development? In days when the outer shell of domestic
+arrangements changes, when readjustments are being made in the
+organization of the family, what is there too precious to lose, so
+worthy and essential that we waste no time when seeking to maintain it?
+
+
+Sec. 2. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--SOCIAL QUALITIES
+
+The first great element to be preserved in all family life is that of
+the power of the small group for purposes of character development. The
+infant's earliest world is the mother's arms. In order to grow into a
+man fitted for the wider world of social living, he must learn to live
+in a world within his comprehension. A child's life moves through the
+widening circles of mother-care, family group, neighborhood, school,
+city, state, and nation into world-living. He must take the first steps
+before he is able to take the next ones. He must learn to live with the
+few as preparation for living with the many. In earliest infancy he
+takes his first unconscious lessons in the fine art of living with other
+folks as he relates himself to parents and to brothers and sisters.
+
+Secondly, the family life affords the best agency for social training.
+The family is the ideal democracy into which the child-life is born.
+Here habits are formed, ideals are pictured, and life itself is
+interpreted. It is an ideal democracy, first, because it is a social
+organization existing for the sake of persons. The family comes nearer
+to fulfilling the true ideal of a democratic social order than does any
+other institution. It is founded to bring lives into this world; it is
+maintained for the sake of those lives; all its life, its methods, and
+standards are determined, ideally, by the needs of persons. It is an
+ideal democracy, secondly, because its guiding principle is that the
+greater lives must be devoted to the good of the lesser, the parent for
+the little child, the older members for the younger, in an attempt to
+extend to the very least the greatest good enjoyed by all. Thirdly,
+ideally it is a true democracy in that it gives to each member a share
+in its own affairs and develops the power to bear responsibilities and
+to carry each his own load in life. Thus the family group is the best
+possible training for the life and work of the larger group, the state,
+and for world-living.[5] The maintenance of the ideals of the state, as
+a democracy, depends on the continuance of this institution with its
+peculiar power to train life in infancy and childhood for the life of
+manhood in the state. Such training can be given only in the smaller
+group that is governed by the motives peculiar to home and family life.
+The power to impress these principles depends on the size of the group.
+The small social organization, the family circle of from three members
+to even a dozen, bound by ties of affection, is the one great, efficient
+school, training youth to live in social terms.
+
+Thirdly, the family sets spiritual values first. Our age especially
+needs men and women who think in terms of spiritual values, who rise
+above the measures of pounds and dollars and weigh life by personal
+qualities and worth. That is precisely what the home does. It prizes
+most highly the helpless, economically worthless infant; it measures
+every member by his personal character, his affectional worth. Its
+riches do not depend on that which money can buy, but on the personal
+qualities of love, goodness, kindness; on memories, associations,
+affection. The true home gives to every child-life the power to choose
+the things of the world on the basis of their worth in personality. Only
+the mistaken judgments of later years, the short-minded wisdom of the
+world, make youth gradually lose the habit of preferring the home's
+spiritual benefits to the material rewards of the world of business. No
+life can be furnished for the strain of our modern materialism that
+lacks the basis of idealism furnished in the true family.
+
+
+Sec. 3. POTENCIES TO BE PRESERVED--THE MORAL LIFE
+
+Fourthly, the power of family living to develop love as loyalty is to be
+noted. In this small group is laid the foundation of the moral life.
+"The family is the primer in the moral education of the race."[6] Here
+the new-born life begins to relate itself to other lives. Here it begins
+life in an atmosphere saturated by love, the central principle of all
+virtue, eventually loyalty to ideals in persons and devotion to them,
+"the greatest of these," because it is the parent of all virtue. The
+moral life, that life which is adjusted, capable, and adequately motived
+for helpful, efficient, enriching living with all other lives, is not a
+matter of rules, regulations, and restrictions. Neither is it a matter
+of separate habits as to this or the other kind of behavior, though this
+comes nearer to it than do rules and prescriptions. The character-life
+which parents desire for their children is not that which will do the
+right thing when it has discovered that right thing in some book of
+rules, nor that life which will do the right thing because society
+points that way, nor even that life which automatically does the right
+thing, but it is the life which, constantly moved by some high inner
+compulsion, some imperative of vision and ideal, moves to the highest
+possible plane of action in every situation. This is the life of
+loyalty. It begins with loyalty to persons, with that devotion which
+begins with affection. In no other place is this so well developed as in
+the relations of the family. This is the child's first and most
+potential school. Here the lessons are wholly unconscious; here they are
+strengthened by the pleasurable emotions. It is a joy to be loyal to
+those we love. Indeed, who can tell which comes first, the joy, the
+loyalty, or the love?
+
+The power of this small social group of the family to develop the
+fundamental principle of loyalty, the root of all virtues, gives a
+position of great importance to the affections in the family. We do well
+to contend for the maintenance of conditions of family living which will
+strengthen the ties of affection. If children could be thrust into the
+care of the state, in large groups, separated from parental care and
+oversight, it is difficult to see what emotional stimulus toward
+affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would
+in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and
+mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in
+orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal
+care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents
+stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small
+children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the
+ideal--a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but
+these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds
+and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values of their
+affections and on them to build a wise discipline for childhood by
+providing adequate training of parents for their duties.
+
+Fifthly, there are some elements of the cost of family life, even its
+apparently unnecessary sacrifice and pain, that we do well to seek to
+keep. Character grows in paying the high price of maintaining a family.
+It is the most expensive form of living for adults. Marriages are now
+delayed because of the fear of the actual monetary cost; but far more
+serious is the cost in care, in nerves, in patience, in all the great
+elements of self-denial. No child ever knows what he has cost until he
+has children of his own. But this discipline of self-denial is that
+which saves us from selfishness. It is necessary to have some personal
+objects for which to give our lives if they are to be saved from
+centrifugation, from death through ingrowing affection. True, many
+bachelors and spinsters have learned the way of self-denying,
+fellow-serving love. But how can a true parent escape that lesson? Nor
+does it stop with parents; as children grow up together they, too, must
+learn mutual forbearance, conciliation, and, soon, the joy of service.
+One sees selfishness in the little child gradually fading in the
+practice of family service, helpfulness, consideration for others. The
+single child in a family misses something more important than playmates;
+he misses all the education of play and service. But who cannot remember
+many families that have grown to beauty of character under the
+discipline of home life, and especially when this has involved real
+sacrifices? The stories in the Pepper books illustrate the spirit that
+blossoms under the trials and hardships of the struggle of a family for
+a livelihood and for the maintenance of a home.
+
+A clear function becomes evident for this social group called the
+family. It is that of dealing with young lives, in groups bound by ties
+of blood and similarity, for purposes of the development of personal
+character. The family has an essentially educational function. Bearing
+in mind that "educational" means the orderly development of the powers
+of the life, we can think of our families as existing for this purpose
+and to be tested by their ability to do this work, especially by their
+ability to develop persons, young lives, that have the power, the
+vision, the acquired habits and experience to live as more than animals.
+The family is an educational institution dealing with child-life for its
+full growth and its self-realization, especially on character levels.
+The educational function suggests the features of family life which we
+do well to seek to preserve. Many incidental forms may pass, but the
+essential human relations and experiences that go to develop life and
+character must be maintained at any cost.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_, chap. vii. Lothrop, Lee &
+     Shepard, $1.60.
+
+     W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. iv, v. Hodder &
+     Stoughton, $2.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     "The Improvement of Religious Education," _Proceedings of the
+     Religious Education Association_, I, 119-23. $0.50.
+
+     _Religious Education_, April, 1911, VI, 1-48.
+
+     S.P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott, _The Delinquent Child and the
+     Home_. Russell Sage Foundation, $2.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the chief end of all forms of social organization?
+
+     2. What is in the last analysis the aim of every parent?
+
+     3. What advantage has the family over the school and larger groups
+     for educational purposes?
+
+     4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?
+
+     5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.
+
+     6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character
+     development? In what way do these come to the surface in the
+     family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?
+
+     7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain
+     or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial
+     advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent
+     disadvantages in the life of the family?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] See "Democracy in the Home," _American Journal of Sociology_,
+January, 1912.
+
+[6] Francis G. Peabody, _The Approach to the Social Question_, p. 94.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE RELIGIOUS PLACE OF THE FAMILY
+
+
+Sec. 1. DEVELOPMENT AS A RELIGIOUS INSTITUTION
+
+The family is the most important religious institution in the life of
+today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this
+place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain
+quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the
+children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their
+instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize
+as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those
+practices range from common promiscuous relationships, without apparent
+care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we
+know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of
+responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious
+ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to
+separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this
+task. The higher the type of family life the more fully does it
+discharge its function in the education of the child.[7]
+
+It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three
+stages, or types, of relationship based on the breeding of children, or
+three stages of development toward family life. The first is a loose and
+indefinite relationship existing principally between the adults, or the
+males and females, under which children born when not desired are
+neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of
+either parent, or of neither. Since the group, associated through
+infancy with at least one parent, is as yet undeveloped, any instruction
+will be individual and usually incidental.
+
+The second form is that of a kind of family unity, either about the
+mother or the father, or both, or about a group of parents, in which the
+children live together and are sheltered and nurtured for their earlier
+years. Here, however, the real relationship of the child is to the
+tribe, the family is but his temporary guardian, and, at least by the
+age of puberty, he will be initiated into the tribal secrets. If he is a
+boy, he will cease to be a member of the family group and will go to
+live in the "men's house," becoming a part of the larger life of the
+tribe.[8] Such moral and religious instruction as he may acquire will
+come from the songs, traditions, and conversation which he hears as a
+child.
+
+The third type approaches the modern ideal, with a greater or less
+degree of permanent unity between the two parents and with permanence in
+the group of the offspring. The parental responsibility continues for a
+greater length of time and, since the tribe makes smaller claims, and
+the parents live in the common domestic group, much more instruction is
+possible and is given. The tribal ideals, the traditions, observances,
+and religious rites are imparted to children gradually in their homes.
+
+The last type brings us to the Hebrew conception of family life. It
+developed toward the Christian ideal. At first, polygamy was permitted;
+woman was the chattel of man and excluded from any part in the religious
+rites. But it included the ideal of monogamy in its tradition of the
+origin of the world, it denounced and punished adultery (Deut. 22: 22),
+and it gave especial attention to the training of the offspring. "And
+these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and
+thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of
+them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way,
+and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up ... and thou shalt
+write them upon the door-posts of thy house and upon thy gates" (Deut.
+6: 6, 7, 9).
+
+Much later, the messianic hope, the belief that in some Jewish family
+there should be born one divinely commissioned and endowed to liberate
+Israel and to give the Jews world-sovereignty, operated to elevate the
+conception of motherhood and, through that, of the family. It made
+marriage desirable and children a blessing; it rendered motherhood
+sacred. It tended to center national hopes and religious ideals about
+the family.[9]
+
+There are a few glimpses of ideal family life in the Old Testament. They
+are all summed up in the eloquent tribute to motherhood in the words of
+King Lemuel in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. It must be
+remembered, however, that such ideals did not belong to the Jews alone,
+that Plutarch shows many pictures of maternal fidelity and wifely
+devotion, that Greek and Roman history have their Cornelia, Iphigenia,
+and Mallonia.[10]
+
+The Jews are an excellent example of the power of the family life to
+maintain distinct characteristics and to secure marked development.
+Practically throughout all the Christian era they have been a people
+without a land, a constitution, or a government, and yet never without
+race consciousness, national unity, and separateness. Their unity has
+continued in spite of dispersion, persecution, and losses; they have
+remained a race in the face of political storms that have swept other
+peoples away. Their unity has continued about two great centers, the
+customs of religion and the life of the family.
+
+     The results of Jewish respect for family life can also be seen in
+     the health of their own children. In 1910, for instance, among poor
+     Jews in Manchester the mortality of infants under one year of age
+     was found to be 118 per thousand; among poor Gentiles, 300 per
+     thousand; and comparisons made some six years ago between Jewish
+     and Gentile children in schools in the poorer parts of Manchester
+     and Leeds (England) have shown that the Jewish children are
+     uniformly taller, they weigh more, and their bones and teeth are
+     superior.[11]
+
+
+Sec. 2. THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY
+
+The Christian family is a type peculiar to itself, not as a new
+institution, for it has developed out of earlier race experience, but as
+controlled by a new interpretation, the spirit and conception of the
+home and family given in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He did not
+give formal rules for the regulation of homes; rather he made a
+spiritual ideal of family life the basic thought of all his teaching. He
+said more about the family than concerning any other human institution,
+yet he established no family life of his own. He is called the founder
+of the church, yet he scarcely mentions that institution, while he
+frequently teaches concerning home duties and family relations. He
+glorifies the relations of the family by making them the figure by which
+men may understand the highest relations of life. He speaks more of
+fatherhood and sonship than of any other relations. He gives direction
+for living, using the family terms of brotherhood. He points forward to
+ideal living in a home beyond this life. He teaches men when they think
+of God and when they address him to take the family attitude and call
+him Father.
+
+If we sum up all the teachings of Jesus and separate them from our
+preconceptions of their theological content, we cannot but be impressed
+with the facts that he seized upon the family life as the best
+expression of the highest relationships; that he pointed to a purified
+family life, in which spiritual aims would dominate, as the best
+expression of ideal relationships among his followers; and that he
+glorified marriage and really made the family the great, divine,
+sacramental institution of human society.
+
+We can hardly overestimate the importance of such teaching to the
+character of the family. The early Christians not only accepted Jesus as
+their teacher and savior; they took their family life as the opportunity
+to show what the Kingdom of God, the ideal society, was like. Family
+life was consecrated. Men and women belonged to the new order with
+their whole households. Religion became largely a family matter. The
+worship that had been confined to the temple now made an altar in every
+home and a holy of holies in the midst of every family. The scriptures
+that belonged to the synagogue now belonged in the home. Above all, this
+family existed for the purposes taught by Jesus, that men might grow in
+brotherhood toward the likeness of the divine Fatherhood. It was an
+institution, not for economic purpose of food and shelter, not for
+personal ends of passion or pride, but for spiritual purpose, for the
+growth of persons, especially the young in the home, in character, into
+"the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."
+
+Christianity is essentially a religion of ideal family life. It
+conceives of human society, not in terms of a monarchy with a king and
+subjects, but in terms of a family with a great all-Father and his
+children, who live in brotherhood, who take life as their opportunity
+for those family joys of service and sacrifice. It hopes to solve the
+world's ills, not by external regulations, but by bringing all men into
+a new family life, a birth into this new family life with God, so
+securing a new personal environment, a new personality as the center and
+root of all social betterment. He who would come into this new social
+order must come into the divine family, must humble himself and become
+as a little child, must know his Father and love his brothers.
+
+Christianity, then, not only seeks an ideal family; it makes the family
+the ideal social institution and order. It makes family life holy,
+sacramental, religious in its very nature. This fact gives added
+importance to the preservation and development of the ideals of family
+life for the sake of their religious significance and influence. It not
+only makes religion a part of the life of the home but makes a religious
+purpose the very reason for the existence of the Christian type of home.
+It makes our homes essentially religious institutions, to be judged by
+religious products.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chap. xvi. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+     Article on "The Family," in Hastings, _Encyclopaedia of Religion
+     and Ethics_.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     On the educational function of the family: A.J. Todd, _The
+     Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_. Putnam, $2.00.
+
+     On the religious place of the family: C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The
+     Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.
+
+     I.J. Peritz, "Biblical Ideal of the Home," _Religious Education_,
+     VI, 322.
+
+     H. Hanson, _The Function of the Family_. American Baptist
+     Publication Society, $0.15.
+
+     W. Becker, _Christian Education, or the Duties of Parents_. Herder,
+     $1.00. A striking presentation of the Roman Catholic view; could be
+     read to advantage by all parents.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What place did religion hold in the primitive family? What
+     reference or allusion do we find in the Old Testament to the place
+     of religion in the family (Deut. 6:7-9, 20-25)? What in the New
+     Testament?
+
+     2. What has been the effect of purity of family life on the Jewish
+     race?
+
+     3. What place did the family hold in the teachings of Jesus?
+
+     4. What shall we think of the relations of the church and family as
+     to their comparative rights and our duty to them?
+
+     5. Do you agree that the family is the most important religious
+     institution?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[7] For a brief statement see Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_,
+Lecture 4, Sec. 7; also Todd, _The Family as an Educational Agency_.
+
+[8] See Webster, _Primitive Secret Societies_, chaps. i, ii.
+
+[9] On the place of the family in different religious systems see the
+fine article under "Family" in Hastings, _Encyclopaedia of Religion and
+Ethics_.
+
+[10] See Lecky, _History of European Morals_, chap. ii.
+
+[11] Quoted by Lofthouse in _Ethics and the Family_, p. 8, from W. Hall,
+in _Progress_ (London), April, 1907.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE MEANING OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY
+
+With the brief statement of the history of the family and of its
+function in society which has already been given we are prepared to put
+together the two conclusions: first, that the family has an educational
+function, in that it exists as a social institution for the protection,
+nurture, development, and training of young lives, and, secondly, that
+it is a religious institution, the most influential and important of all
+religious institutions, whenever it realizes in any adequate degree its
+possibilities, because it is rooted in love and loyalty. It exists for
+personal and spiritual ideals and, in Christianity, it is inseparably
+connected with the teachings and the ideals of Jesus. It is educational
+in function and religious in character, so that it is essentially an
+institution for religious education. Religious education is not an
+occasional incident in its life; it is the very aim and dominating
+purpose of a high-minded family.
+
+
+Sec. 2. WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EDUCATION?
+
+To make this the more clear we may need to clarify our minds as to
+certain popular conceptions of education. Education means much more
+than instruction; religious education means much more than instruction
+in religion. Many habitually think of an educational institution as
+necessarily a place where pupils sit at desks and teachers preside over
+classes, the teachers imparting information which is to be memorized by
+the pupils, so that, from this point of view, a Sunday school would be
+almost the only institution for the religious education of children in
+existence, because it is the only one exclusively devoted to imparting
+instruction to children in specifically religious subjects. Such a view
+would limit religious education in the home to the formal teaching of
+the Bible and religious dogma by parents. The memorizing of scriptural
+passages and of the different catechisms once constituted a regular duty
+in almost all well-ordered homes. Today it is rarely attempted. Does
+that mean that religious education has ceased in the home?
+
+But education means much more than instruction. Education is the whole
+process, of which instruction is only a part. Education is the orderly
+development of lives, according to scientific principles, into the
+fulness of their powers, the realization of all their possibilities, the
+joy of their world, the utmost rendering in efficiency of their service.
+It includes the training of powers of thought, feeling, willing, and
+doing; it includes the development of abilities to discern,
+discriminate, choose, determine, feel, and do. It prepares the life for
+living with other lives; it prepares the whole of the life, developing
+the higher nature, the life of the spirit, for living in a spiritual
+universe.
+
+Religious education, then, means much more than instruction in the
+literature, history, and philosophy of religion. It means the kind of
+directed development which regards the one who is developing as a
+religious person, which seeks to develop that one to fulness of
+religious powers and personality, and which uses, as means to that end,
+material of religious inspiration and significance and, indeed, regards
+all material in that light. Religious education seeks to direct a
+religious process of growth with a religious purpose for religious
+persons. Religious education is the spirit which characterizes the work
+of every educator who looks on the child as a spiritual nature, a
+religious person; it is the work of every educator who sees his aim as
+that of training this spiritual person to fulness of living in a society
+essentially spiritual.
+
+In simplest possible terms, religious education means the training of
+persons to live the religious life and to do their work in the world as
+religious persons. It must mean, then, the development of character; it
+includes the aim, in the parents' minds, to bring their children up to
+the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. It is evident that
+this is a much greater task, and yet more natural and beautiful, than
+mere instruction in formal ideas or words in the Bible or in a
+catechism; that it is not and cannot be accomplished in some single
+period, some set hour, but is continuous, through all the days; that it
+pervades not only the spoken words, but the actions, organization, and
+the very atmosphere of the home.
+
+
+Sec. 3. THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
+
+Normal persons never stop growing. Just as children grow all the time in
+their bodies, so do adults and all others grow all the time in mind and
+will and powers of the higher life whenever they live normally. We grow
+spiritually, not only in church and under the stimulus of song and
+prayer, but we grow when the beauty of the woods appeals to us, when the
+face lightens at the face of a friend, when we meet and master a
+temptation, when we brace up under a load, when we do faithfully the
+dreary, daily task, when we adjust our thoughts in sympathy to others,
+when we move in the crowd, when we think by ourselves. The educational
+process is continuous. The children in the home are being moved,
+stimulated, every instant, and they are being changed in minute but
+nevertheless real and important degrees by each impression. There is
+never a moment in which their character is not being developed either
+for good or for ill. Religious education--that is, the development of
+their lives as religious persons--goes on all the time in the home, and
+it is either for good or for ill.
+
+Next to the idea of the continuous and all-pervasive character of this
+process of religious development the most important thought for us is
+that religious education in the home may be determined by ourselves.
+This continuous, fateful process is not a blind, resistless one. It is
+our duty to direct it. It is possible for wise parents to determine the
+characters of their children. We must not forget this. It cannot be too
+strongly insisted on. The development of life is under law. This is an
+orderly world. Things do not just happen in it. We believe in a law that
+determines the type of a cabbage, the character of a weed. Do we believe
+that this universe is so ordered that there is a law for weeds and none
+for the higher life of man? Do we hold that cabbages grow by law but
+character comes by chance? If there is a law we may find it and must
+obey it. If we may know how to develop character, with as great
+certainty as we know how to do our daily work, will not this be our
+highest task, our greatest joy, the supreme thing to do in life?
+
+
+Sec. 4. THE CONSEQUENT OBLIGATION
+
+This is the first great obligation of parents and of those who are
+willing to accept the joys and responsibilities of parenthood. We have
+no right to bring into this world lives with all the possibilities that
+a religious nature involves unless we know how to develop those lives
+for the best and from the worst. When we picture what a little child may
+become, from the vile, depraved, despoiling beast or the despicable,
+sneaking hypocrite on one extreme, to the upright, God-loving,
+man-serving man or woman with the love of purity, honor, truth, and
+goodness speaking through the life, we may well pause, realizing we need
+more than a sentimental desire that the child may reach the heights of
+goodness: we must know the way there and the methods of leading the life
+in that way. True devotion to God and to childhood will mean more than
+petitions for the salvation of children; it will mean the prayer that is
+labor and the labor that is prayer to know how they may attain fulness
+of spiritual life; it will mean reverent searching into the divine ways
+of growth in grace. The study of the means and methods of religious
+education, especially of children, in the home and family, is one of the
+most evident and important religious duties resting on parents and all
+who contemplate marriage and family life.
+
+
+Sec. 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILD?
+
+In discussing the development of character in children one hears often
+the question, "Which is the earliest virtue to appear in a child?"
+People will debate whether it is truthfulness, reverence, kindness, or
+some other virtue. All this implies a picture of the child as a tree
+that sends forth shoots of separate virtues one after another. But the
+character desired is not a series of branches, it is rather like a
+symmetrical tree; it is not certain parts, but it is the whole of a
+personality. The development of religious character is not a matter of
+consciously separable virtues, but is the determination of the trend and
+quality of the whole life. Moral training is not a matter of cultivating
+honesty today, purity tomorrow, and kindness the day after. Virtues have
+no separate value. Character cannot be disintegrated into a list of
+independent qualities. We seek a life that, as a whole life, loves and
+follows truth, goodness, and service.
+
+
+Sec. 6. EARLY TENDENCIES
+
+But it is wise to inquire as to those manifestations of a pure and
+spiritual life which will earliest appear. One does not need to look far
+for the answer. Children are always affectionate; they manifest the
+possibilities of love. True, this affection is rooted in physiological
+experience, based on relations to the mother and on daily propinquity to
+the rest of the family, but it is that which may be colored by devotion,
+elevated by unselfish service, and may become the first great, ideal
+loyalty of the child's life. Little boys will fight and girls will
+quarrel more readily over the question of the merits of their respective
+parents than over any other issue. Almost as soon as a child can talk he
+boasts of the valor of his father, the beauty of his mother. Here is
+loyalty at work. He stands for them; he resents the least doubt as to
+their superiority, not because they give him food and shelter, but
+because they are his, because to him they are worthy; in all things they
+have the worth, the highest good; they are, in person, the virtue of
+life. Therefore in fighting for the reputation of his parents he is
+practicing loyalty to an ideal.
+
+The principle of loyalty is the life-force of virtue; it is like the
+power that sends the tree toward the heavens, the upthrust of life. It
+may be cultivated in a thousand ways. Provided there is the outreach and
+upreach of loyalty within and that there is furnished without the worthy
+object, ideal, and aim, the life will grow upward and increase in
+character, beauty, and strength.
+
+Next to the affectionate idealization of parents and home-folk one of
+the earliest manifestations of the spirit of loyalty in the child is
+his desire to have a share in the activities of the home. He would not
+only look like those he admires; he would do what they do. This is more
+than mere imitation; it is loyalty at work again. The direction of this
+tendency is one of the largest opportunities before parents and can make
+the most important contribution to character.
+
+The religious life of the child is essentially a matter of loyalty. His
+faith, affections, aspirations, and endeavors turn toward persons,
+institutions, and concepts which are to him ideal. He does not analyze,
+he cannot describe, or even narrate, his religious experiences, but he
+affectionately moves, with a sense of pleasure, toward those things
+which seem to him ideal, toward parents, customs of the home or school,
+the church, his class, his teacher, toward characters in story-books. He
+is likely to think of Jesus in just that way, as the one person whom he
+would most of all like to know and be with. The life of virtue and the
+religious life then will be weak or strong in the measure that the child
+has the stimulating ideals which call forth his loyalty and in the
+measure that he has opportunity to express that loyalty. His religious
+life will consist, not so much in external forms perhaps, still less in
+intellectual statements about theology or even about his own
+experiences, as in a growing realization of the great ideals, an
+increasing sense of their meaning and reality within, and, on the
+objective side, a steady moving of his life toward them in action and
+habits and therefore in character and quality.
+
+
+Sec. 7. IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS
+
+It is worth while to insist upon two important considerations. Parents
+who stand as gardeners watching the growth of the tender plant of
+child-character may be looking for developments that never ought to come
+and will be disappointed because they were looking for the wrong thing.
+First, in watching for the beginnings of the religious life of the child
+in the family we are not expecting some new addition to the life, but
+rather the development of this whole life as a unity in a definite
+direction which we call religious. It is the first and most important
+consideration that religious education is not something added to the
+life as an extra subject of interest, but the development of the whole
+life into religious character and usefulness. Secondly, this growth of
+religious character is going on all the time. It is not separable into
+pious periods; it is a part of the very life of the family. Perhaps this
+increases the difficulty of our task, for it removes it from the realm
+of the mechanical, from that which is easily apprehended and estimated.
+It takes the task of the religious education of children out of the
+statistical into the vital, and reminds us that we are growing life
+every second, that there is never a moment when religious education is
+not in operation. This demands a consideration, not alone of lessons, of
+periods of worship and instruction, but of every influence, activity,
+and agency in all the family life that in any way affects the thinking,
+feeling, and action of the child. We are thinking of something more
+important than organizing instruction and exercises in religion in the
+home; we are thinking of organizing the family life for religious
+purposes, for the purpose of growing lives into their spiritual fulness.
+
+Perhaps the capital mistake in the religious education of the family is
+that we overemphasize this or the other method and mechanism instead of
+bending every effort to secure a real religious atmosphere and soil in
+which young souls can really grow while we leave the process of growth
+more largely to the great husbandman. And the second great mistake is
+that we are looking for mechanical evidence of a religious life instead
+of for the development of a whole person. We must reinterpret the family
+to ourselves and see it as the one great opportunity life affords us to
+grow other lives and to bring them to spiritual fulness by providing a
+social atmosphere of the spirit and a constant, normal presentation of
+social living in spiritual terms.
+
+
+Sec. 8. THE ORGANIZATION OF LOYALTY
+
+When parents conceive the family in these terms and so organize the life
+of the home, the child becomes conscious of the fact, and at once the
+life of the family furnishes him with his first, his nearest, and most
+satisfactory appeal to loyalty. He feels that which he cannot analyze or
+express, the spiritual beauty and loyalty of family life. That life
+furnishes a soil and atmosphere for his soul. It is an atmosphere made
+of many elements: the primary and dominating purpose of parents and
+older persons, the habitual life of service and love, the consciousness
+of the reality of the Divine Presence, the fragrance of chastened
+character and experience, the customs of worship and affections. These
+things are not easily created, they cannot be readily defined, nor can
+directions be given in a facile manner for their cultivation. They are
+the elements most difficult to describe, hardest of all to secure when
+lacking, least easily labeled, not to be purchased ready-made, and yet
+without them religious education is wholly impossible in the family.
+Without this immediate appeal to loyalty the loyalties of the child
+toward higher and divine aims do not develop early; they are retarded
+and often remain dormant. For us all scarcely any more important
+question can be presented than this: What appeals to spiritual idealism
+and loyalty does our family life present to the child? What quickening
+of love for goodness and purity, truth and service, is there in the home
+and its conduct?
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chaps. i, ii, xii,
+     xiii. Revell, $1.35.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. i, ii.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     J.T. McFarland, _Preservation versus Resurrection_. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.07.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     C.W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children_, chaps. i, ii, xv. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chaps. i, iv, xvi.
+     Revell, $1.35.
+
+     E.C. Wilm, _Culture of Religion_, chaps. i, ii. Pilgrim Press,
+     $0.75.
+
+     C.W. Rischell, _The Child as God's Child_. Methodist Book Concern,
+     $0.75.
+
+     E.E. Read Mumford, _The Dawn of Character_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.20. See especially chap. xii on "The Dawn of Religion."
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. How would you define education?
+
+     2. What is the difference between education and religious
+     education?
+
+     3. What makes the home especially effective in education?
+
+     4. Is it true that it is possible to discover the laws of growth
+     and so determine the development of character?
+
+     5. Recall any very early manifestations of religious character in
+     small children. What would you regard as the best kind of
+     manifestation?
+
+     6. What is the essential principle of the right life? How may we
+     develop this in childhood?
+
+     7. What are the things which most of all impress children?
+
+     8. Would you think it wise to bring a child under the influence of
+     a religious revival?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE CHILD'S RELIGIOUS IDEAS
+
+
+How shall I begin to talk with my child about religion? Even the most
+religious parents feel hesitancy here. It may not be at all due to the
+unfamiliarity of the subject, though that is often the case; hesitation
+is due principally to a conscious artificiality in the action. It seems
+unnatural to say, "My child, I want to talk with you about your
+religious life." And so it is. There is something wrong when that
+appears to be the only way. That situation indicates a lack of freedom
+of thought and intercourse with the child and a lack of naturalness in
+religion.
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFICULTY
+
+The instinct is correct that tells us that we should be trespassing on a
+child's rights, or breaking down his proper reticence, in abruptly and
+formally questioning him about his religious life. The reserve of
+children in this matter must be respected. The inner life of aspiration,
+of conscious relationship to the divine, is too sacred for display, even
+to those who are near to us. He violates the child's reverence who tears
+away his reticence. Even though the child may not consciously object,
+the process leads him toward the irreverent, facile self-exposure of
+the soul that characterizes some prayer meetings. But we may, also, as
+easily err in the other direction and, by failing to invite the
+confidences of our children, lead them to suppose we have no interest in
+their higher life.
+
+
+Sec. 2. CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS
+
+First, we must be content to wait for the child to open his heart. We
+must not force the door. But we can invite him to open, and the one form
+of invitation that scarcely ever fails is for you to give him your
+confidence. Talk honestly, simply to him of the aspects of your
+religious life that he can understand. If he knows that you confide in
+him, he will confide in you. Here beware of sentimentality. Religion to
+the child will find expression in everyday experiences. Your philosophy
+of religion he cannot comprehend, and with your mature emotions he has
+no point of contact. Perhaps the best method of approach is to relate
+your memories of those experiences which you _now see_ to have had
+religious significance to you. At the time they may have had no such
+special meaning. You did not then analyze them. Your child will not and
+must not analyze them, either; he must simply feel them.
+
+Secondly, rid your mind of the "times and seasons" notion. There is no
+more reason why you should talk religion on Sunday than on Monday,
+unless the day's interests have quickened the child's questioning. There
+can be no set period; no times when you say, "This is the forty-five
+minutes of spiritual instruction and conversation." The time available
+may be very short, only a sentence may be possible, or it may be
+lengthened; everything will depend on the interest. It must be natural,
+a real part of the everyday thought and talk, lifted by its character
+and subject to its own level. Its value depends on its natural reality.
+
+
+Sec. 3. RELIGIOUS REALITY
+
+Thirdly, avoid the mistake of confounding conversation on "religion"
+with religious conversation, of thinking that the desired end has been
+attained when you have discussed the terminology of theology. To
+illustrate, in the family one hardly ever hears the word hygiene, but
+well-trained children learn much about the care of their bodies in
+health, and the family economy is directed consciously to that end. A
+good, nourishing meal always contributes more to health than many
+lectures on dietetics. Yet back, hidden away in the manager's mind, is
+the science of dietetics. So is it with quickening the child's power and
+thought in the spiritual life. We must avoid the abstract, the
+intellectually analytical. Religion should present itself concretely,
+practically, and as an atmosphere and ideal in the family. We parents
+must not look for theological interest in the child. A Timothy Dwight at
+ten or twelve, though once found in Sunday-school library books, is a
+monstrosity. The child's aspiration, his religious devotion, his love
+for God will find expression in almost every other way before it will be
+formulated into questions of a serious theological character. Nor ought
+we to force upon him the phrases of religion to which we are accustomed.
+He will live in another day and must speak its tongue. His faith must
+find itself in consciousness and then be permitted to clothe itself in
+appropriate garments of words. Those garments must be woven out of the
+realities of actual experiences in the child's life. We cannot prepare
+or make them for him. The expression of religion will be consonant with
+the stage of development. If his faith is to be real he must never be
+allowed or tempted to imagine that if only he can use the words, the
+verbal symbol, he has the fact, the life-experience. Try then to use
+words which are simple and meaningful to him and be content to wait for
+life to lead him to formulate vital verbal forms for himself.
+
+
+Sec. 4. PATIENCE AND COMMON-SENSE
+
+Fourthly, we must have faith in God's laws of growth. If we be but
+faithful, furnishing the soil, the seed, the nurture, we must wait for
+the increase. Many factors which we cannot control will determine
+whether it shall be early or late and what form it shall take. We must
+wait. It is high folly that pulls up the sprouting grain to see whether
+it is growing properly.
+
+Fifthly, manifestations of the religious life will vary in children and
+in families. The commonest error is to expect some one popular form
+alone, to imagine that all children must pass through some standardized
+experiences. Mrs. Brown's Willy may rise in prayer meeting. Do not be
+downhearted. Willy is only doing that which he has seen his parents do,
+and, usually, only because they do it. Your boy, or girl, is seeking
+health of life, of thought, of action; is growing in character. Let them
+grow, help them to grow. You know they love you even when they say
+little about it; you do not expect them to climb to the housetop and
+declare their affection. A flower does not sing about the sun, it grows
+toward it. That is the test of the child's religion: Is he growing
+Godward in life, action, character?
+
+
+Sec. 5. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD
+
+Sixthly, deal most carefully with the child's consciousness of God. The
+truth is that the child in the average home has a consciousness of God.
+It grows out of formal references in social rites and customs, informal
+allusions in conversation, and direct statements and instruction. But
+frequently the resultant mental picture is a misleading one, sometimes
+even vicious in its moral effect. Where superstitious servants take more
+interest in the child's religious ideas than do his parents, we have the
+child whose life is darkened by the fear of an omnipotent ogre.
+Nursemaids will slothfully scare small children into silence by threats
+of the awful presence of a bogey god. The life of the spirit cannot be
+trusted to the hireling. Parents must be sure of the character as well
+as the superficial competency of those who come closest to childhood. A
+child's ideas are formed before he goes to school. The family cannot
+delegate the formation of dominant ideas to persons trained only for
+nursery tasks.
+
+But frequently the mother is a misleading teacher. To her the child goes
+with all the big questions outside the immediate world of things. Is she
+prepared to answer the questions? Few dilemmas of our life today are
+more pathetic than this: the mother has outgrown the theology of her
+childhood; she remembers keenly the suffering and superstition, the
+struggle that followed the darkened pictures she received as a little
+one, but she has nothing better to offer the child. No one has taught
+her how to put the later, more spiritual concepts into language for the
+child of our day. Weakly she falls back on the forms of words she once
+abhorred.
+
+There are certainly two approaches of reality for the child-mind to the
+idea of God. Two immediate experiences are rich in meaning; they are the
+life of the family and the wonder of the everyday world, the life and
+variety of nature and human activities. The first is a very simple and
+rich approach. By every possible means help children in the family to
+think of God as the great and good Father of us all. Do this in the
+phrasing of prayers and graces, in the answers to their questions, in
+the casual word. Why should we assume that the Fatherhood of God is for
+the adult alone? And why should it be that this rich concept dawns on us
+like a new day of freedom in truth in later years instead of becoming
+ours in childhood and so determining the habit and attitude of our
+lives? The finest, the ideal person is, to the child, the father. God in
+terms of fatherhood is the sum and source of all that is ideal in
+personality.
+
+The child's keen interest in the world of nature is our opportunity to
+lead him to love the gracious source of all beauty and goodness. How
+keen is the child's enjoyment of the beauty of the world! Can we forever
+fix the general concept of all this beauty as the thought of God in the
+words of flower and leaf, mountain and stream? And might we not also
+connect the idea of God with the affairs of daily life? That depends on
+the parent's attitude of mind; if we think of the universal life that is
+behind all battles and business and affairs, there will be a difference
+in our answers to the thousand curious inquiries that rise in the
+child's mind.
+
+Nor must we leave the child to think of God as a separate, far-off
+person, on a throne somewhere in the skies. The child is finding his way
+into a universe. The God who is a minute fraction of that universe makes
+possible the religion that is no more than a negligible fraction of
+life. The child asks concerning clouds, the sea, the trees, the birds,
+and all the world about him; he tends to interpret it causally and
+ideally. Childhood affords the great opportunity for giving the color,
+the beauty and glory, the life of the divine to all this universe, to
+instil the feeling that God is everywhere, in all and through all, and
+that in him we live and move and have our being. The child's joy in this
+world can thus be given a religious meaning. He sings
+
+    My God, I thank thee thou hast made
+    This earth so bright....,
+
+and so beauty and joy become part of his religion. His faith becomes a
+gladsome thing; he knows that the trees of the forest clap their hands,
+the mountains and the hills sing, and the morning stars chant together
+in the gladness of the divine life.
+
+Such a view of the world comes not by prearranged and indoor interviews.
+One must walk out into the good outdoor world for the opportunity and
+the inspiration. The garden plot, the park, and, best of all, the open
+fields and woods speak to a child and furnish us an open book from which
+we may teach him to read. Recalling religious impressions, the writer
+would testify to feeling nothing deeper, as a result of church
+attendance in childhood, than the shapes of seats and the colors of
+walls; but there remain deep impressions of wonder, beauty, and the
+meaning of God from Sunday mornings spent with his father under the
+great beeches in Epping Forest, listening to the reading and singing of
+the old hymns, or joining in conversation on the woods and the flowers,
+and even on the legends of Robin Hood in the forest.
+
+
+Sec. 6. THE EVERYDAY OPPORTUNITIES
+
+Seventhly, natural conversation affords the best opportunity for direct
+instruction. A child is a peripatetic interrogation. His questions cover
+the universe; there are no doors which you desire to see opened that he
+will not approach at some time. There is great advantage when the
+religious question rises normally; when the child begins it and when the
+interest continues with the same naturalness as in conversation on any
+other subject. Then questions usually take one of three forms: mere
+childish, curious questions, questions on conduct, and questions on
+religion in its organized form.
+
+The child's curiosity is the basis of even those questions which have
+usually been credited to preternatural piety. The tiny youngster who
+asks strange questions about God asks equally startling ones about
+fairies or about his grandmother. But his questions give us the chance
+to direct him to right thoughts of God. Here we need to be sure of our
+own thoughts and to keep in mind our principal purpose, to quicken in
+this child loyalty to the highest and best. He must be shown a God whom
+he can love and, at the same time, one who will call for his growing
+loyalty, his courage, and devotion. Everything for the child's future
+depends on the pictures he now forms. We all carry to a large degree our
+childhood's view of God.
+
+Some of the child's questions probe deep; how shall we answer them? When
+you know the truth tell him the truth, being sure that it is told in
+language that really conveys truth to his mind. The danger is that
+parents will attempt to tell more than they know, to answer questions
+that cannot be answered, or that they will, in sloth or cowardice or
+ignorance, tell children untrue things. If a child asks, "Did God make
+the world?" the answer that will be true to the child may be a simple
+affirmative. If the child asks or his query implies, "Did God make the
+leaves, or the birds, with his fingers?" we had better take time to
+show the difference between man's making of things and the working of
+the divine energy through all the process of the development of the
+world. When the child asks, "Mother, if God made all things, why did he
+make the devil?" it would surely be wise and opportune to correct the
+child's mental picture of a personal anti-God and to take from him his
+bogey of a "devil." But the question of the relation of God to the
+existence of evil would remain, and the best a parent could do would be
+to illustrate the necessities of freedom of choice and will in life by
+similar freedom in the family.
+
+It must be remembered that children's curious questions are only their
+attempt to discover their world, that they have no peculiar religious
+significance, but that they afford the parent a vital opportunity for
+direct religious instruction. These questions must be treated seriously;
+something is missing in parental consciousness when the child's
+questions furnish only material for jesting relation to the family
+friends.
+
+
+Sec. 7. MORAL TEACHING
+
+_Questions on conduct_: Scores of times in the day the children come in
+from play or from school and tell of what has happened. Their more or
+less breathless recitals very often include vigorous accounts of
+"cheating," "naughtiness," unfair play, unkind words, discourtesies,
+all dependent as to their character on the age of the children and all
+opening doors for free conversation on duties and conduct. Here lies one
+of the large opportunities for moral instruction. There is no need to
+attempt to make formal occasions for this; so long as children play and
+live with others they are under the experience of learning the art of
+living with one another; this is the simple essence of morality. The
+parent's answers to their questions on conduct, the comments on their
+criticisms, and the conversation that may easily be directed on these
+subjects count tremendously with the child in establishing his ideals
+and modes of conduct. Returning to his play, there is no mightier
+authority he can quote than to say, "My mother says--," or "My father
+says--."
+
+Let no one say that instruction in moral living is not religious, for
+there can be no adequate guidance in morals without religion, nor can
+the religious quality of the life find expression adequately except
+through conduct in social living. Children need more than the rules for
+living; they must feel motives and see ideals. They do not live by rules
+any more than we do. Besides the rule that is known there must be a
+reason for following it and a strong desire to do so. All ethical
+teaching needs this imperative and motivation of religion, the
+quickening of loyalty to high ideals, the doing of the right for
+reasons of love as well as of duty and profit.
+
+The father's opportunity comes especially with the boys. They are sure
+to bring to him their ethical questions on games and sport; he knows
+more about boys' fights and struggles than does the mother. When the
+boys begin to discuss their games the father cannot afford to lack
+interest. Trivial as the question may seem to be, it is the most
+important one of the day to the boy and, for the interests of his
+character, it may be the most important for many a day to the father. If
+he answers with sympathy and interest this question on a "foul ball" or
+on marbles or peg-tops, he has opened a door that will always stay open
+so long as he approaches it with sincerity; if he slights it, if he is
+too busy with those lesser things that seem great to him, he has closed
+a door into the boy's life; it may never be opened again. Children learn
+life through the life they are now living. Real preparation for the
+world of business and larger responsibilities comes by the child's
+experiences of his present world of play and schooling and family
+living. To help him to live this present life aright is the best
+training that can be given for the right living of all life.
+
+_Questions on organized religion_: As children grow up, the church comes
+into their range of interests. Just as they often make the day school
+focal for conversation, as they recount their day's work there, so they
+retain impressions of the church school, of the services of the church,
+and will always ask many questions about this institution and its
+observances. Here is the opportunity, in free conversation, to tell the
+child the meaning of the church, the significance of membership therein,
+and to lead him to conscious relationship to the society of the
+followers of Jesus. (See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church.")
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Alice E. Fitts, "Consciousness of God in Children," _The Aims of
+     Religious Education_, pp. 330-38. Religious Education Association,
+     $1.00.
+
+     W.G. Koons, _Child's Religious Life_, sec. II. Eaton & Mains,
+     $1.00.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, chap. vi. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     George Hodges, _The Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. i-vi.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Child and His Religion_, chap. ii. The
+     University of Chicago Press, $0.75.
+
+     Edward Lyttleton, _The Corner-Stone of Education_, chap. viii.
+     Putnam, $1.50.
+
+     T. Stephens (ed.), _The Child and Religion_. Putnam, $1.50.
+
+     C.W. Richell, _The Child as God's Child_. Eaton & Mains, $0.75.
+
+     W.G. Koons, _The Child's Religious Nature_. Eaton & Mains, $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special difficulties which you feel about
+     introducing the topic of religion to children? Describe any methods
+     or modes of approach which have seemed successful?
+
+     2. Would you regard it as a fault if a child seems unwilling to
+     talk about religion? What do you think "religion" means to the
+     child-mind?
+
+     3. In what ways do children's aptitudes differ and what factors
+     probably determine the difference? What was your own childish
+     conception of God? Did you love God or fear him? Why?
+
+     4. Is it ever right to teach the child those conceptions which we
+     have outgrown? What about Santa Claus and fairies? How can you use
+     childish figures of speech as an avenue to more exact truth?
+
+     5. Does the child learn more through ears or eyes? Through which
+     agency do we seek to convey religious ideas?
+
+     6. Is it possible to make the child see the intimate relation
+     between conduct and religion? How would you do this?
+
+     7. Give some of the characteristics of a religious child of seven
+     years, of ten.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+DIRECTED ACTIVITY
+
+
+Probably all parents find themselves at some time thinking that the
+real, fundamental problem of training their children lies in dealing
+with their superabundant energy. "He is such an active child!" mothers
+complain. Were he otherwise a physician might properly be consulted. But
+the child's activity does seriously interfere with parental peace. It
+takes us all a long time to learn that we are not, after all, in our
+homes in order to enjoy peaceful rest, but in order to train children
+into fulness of life. That does not mean that the home should be without
+quiet and rest, but that we must not hope to repress the energy of
+childhood. One might as well hope to plug up a spring in the hillside.
+Our work is to direct that activity into glad, useful service.
+
+
+Sec. 1. VALUE OF ACTIVITY
+
+The things we do not only indicate character, they determine it. Our
+thoughts have value and power as they get into action. To bend our
+energies toward an ideal is to make it more real, to make it a part of
+ourselves. Children learn by doing--learn not only that which they are
+doing but life itself.
+
+It may be doubted whether a child ever grew who did not plead to have a
+share in the work he saw going on about him. That desire to help is part
+of that fundamental virtue of loyalty of which we have spoken above; it
+is his desire to be true to the tendency of the home, to give himself to
+the realization of its purposes. Of course he does not think this out at
+all. But this desire on the part of the child to have a hand in the
+day's work is the parent's fine opportunity for a most valuable and
+influential form of character direction.
+
+One of the tests of a worthy character is whether the life is
+contributory or parasitic, whether one carries his load, does his work,
+makes his contribution, or simply waits on the world for what he can
+get. A religious interpretation of and attitude toward life is
+essentially that of self-giving in service. "My Father worketh hitherto
+and I work." "I must be about my Father's business." How noticeable is
+the child's interest in the vivid word-picture of One who "went about
+doing good"!
+
+
+Sec. 2. THE BLESSING OF LABOR
+
+The home is the first place for life's habituation to service. The child
+is greatly to be pitied who has no duties, no share in the work. Where
+the hands are unsoiled the heart is the easier sullied. It is the height
+of mistaken kindness, one of the common errors of an unthinking,
+superficial affection, to protect our children from work. This is a
+world of the moral order and of the glory of work.
+
+When the child is very small it must learn this by having committed to
+it very simple duties. As soon as it is able to handle things it may
+learn to do that which is most helpful with those things, to care for
+its toys, to put them away neatly. A child can learn while very young to
+take care of its spoon, of certain clothes, of chair, and pencil and
+paper. True, it is much easier to "pick up" after the child; but to do
+so is to yield to our own sloth. The more tedious way is the one we must
+follow if we would train the child.
+
+Besides the care of his possessions the child will gladly take a share
+in the general work of the home. Let some daily duty be assigned to each
+one; such simple responsibilities as picking up all papers and magazines
+and seeing that they are properly stacked or disposed of may be given to
+one; another may sweep the stairs every day with a whisk broom (in one
+instance a boy of eight did this daily); another may be "librarian,"
+caring for all books; each one, after eight years of age, should make
+her own bed; each one should be entirely responsible for his own table
+in his room. Many homes permit of many other "chores," such as keeping
+up the supply of small kindling, caring for a pet or even a larger
+animal, keeping a little personal garden or vegetable plot. Under those
+normal conditions of living, which some day we may reach, where each
+family, or all families, have trees and flowers and ample space, the
+opportunities are increased for joyous child activities which
+consciously contribute to social well-being as a whole.
+
+
+Sec. 3. RELIGION IN ACTION
+
+Perhaps some will say, this is not religious education, it is everyday
+training. Yes, it is "everyday training," but it is the training of a
+religious person with the religious purpose of habituating the child to
+give his life in service to his world. That is precisely what we
+need--_religion in everyday action_. The atmosphere and habitual
+attitude and conversation of the family must be depended on to give a
+really religious meaning to these everyday acts, to make them as
+religious as going to church, perhaps more so, and so to make them a
+training for the life that is religious, not in word only, but in deed
+and in truth.
+
+Whatever we may say to children on the subject of religion, whether
+directly or in teaching by indirection through songs and worship, must
+pass over somehow into action in order to have meaning and reality. It
+must be realized in order to be real. The difficulty that appears is
+that of connecting the daily act with its spiritual significance. Yet
+that is not as difficult as it seems. If the act has religious
+significance to us, if we form the habit of really worshiping God with
+our work, seeking in it to do his will, the child will know it. We
+cannot keep that hidden. The spiritual life will never be more real to
+the child than it is to us, and no amount of moralizing or
+spiritualizing about our acts or his will give them religious
+significance.
+
+At least one person will testify that, after being brought up in a
+really religious home, the most strikingly religious memory of that home
+is an occasion when he delightedly carried a tray of food to a sick
+neighbor. It was doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing
+the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the
+life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are
+acts repeated until they pass from the volitional to the involuntary.
+The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the
+willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it
+becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the
+flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a
+share in all our ministries.[12]
+
+The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in
+forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social
+activities for students to carry out.[13] The parents ought to know what
+is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to
+co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of
+service suggested for the children, these activities lose all
+perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a
+normal part of life.
+
+Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we
+were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we
+were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a
+sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our
+thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for,
+and that joy will be their strength.
+
+
+Sec. 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE
+
+The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own
+activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may
+acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the
+chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life.
+Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or ride in private
+cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted
+life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have
+without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy
+remain the passive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he
+is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert
+him from the pauper habit.
+
+The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of
+passive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to
+shield them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The
+religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the
+days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and
+finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men.
+Vain is all family worship, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless
+we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the
+imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in
+heart. The family may make this the normal way to live.
+
+If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of
+the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see
+itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and
+helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people
+the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight in
+self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in
+relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial,
+and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a
+child is to see that the home which constitutes his personal atmosphere
+is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.
+
+The whole attitude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of
+the family. The greedy family makes the grafting citizen. The grasping
+home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace. Greater than
+the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the
+ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizenship
+in your home. No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beatitudes or
+week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of
+envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home.
+Home action and attitude count for more than all besides.
+
+It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power
+of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective
+method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole
+social duty unselfishly.
+
+
+Sec. 5. FAMILY TRAINING FOR SOCIAL LIVING
+
+The supreme test of the religious life here is ability to live among men
+as brothers and to cause the conditions of the divine family to be
+realized on earth. If we can realize that the purpose of Jesus was to
+bring men into the family of God, that the aim of all religious endeavor
+is the family character in men and women and the conditions of that
+family in all society, we must surely appreciate the possibility of the
+human family as a training school for this larger family of humanity.
+
+The infant approaches social living by the pathway of the society of the
+family. We all go out into life through widening circles, first the
+mother's arms, then the family, the neighborhood, the city, the state,
+the nation, the world-life. Each circle prepares for the next. The
+family is the child's social order; its life is his training for the
+larger life of nation and human brotherhood.
+
+Just how men and women will live in society is determined principally by
+the bent of their characters in the social order of the family. Their
+attitude to the world follows the attitude of the family, especially of
+the parents. They interpret the larger world by the lesser. The home is
+the great school of citizenship and social living.
+
+All the moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the
+purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its
+cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and
+motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the
+coming generation to live in a religious society, in one which will
+steadily move toward the divine ideal of perfect family relations
+through brotherhood and fatherhood. Its business is not to get children
+ready for heaven, but to train them to make all life heavenly. Its aim
+is not alone children who will not tear down the parents' reputation,
+but men and women who will build up the actual worth and beauty of all
+lives.
+
+The realization, in the family, of the purpose of training youth to
+social living and service in the religious spirit depends on two things:
+a spirit and passion in the family for social justice and order, and the
+direction of the activities of the family toward training in social
+usefulness.
+
+Only the social spirit can give birth to the social spirit. True lovers
+of men, who set the values of life and of the spirit first, who give
+their lives that all men may have freedom and means to find more
+abundant life, come out of the families where the passion of human love
+burns high. The selfish family, self-centered, caring not at all in any
+deep sense for the well-being of others, existing to extract the juice
+of life and let who will be nourished on the rind, becomes effective to
+make the social highwayman, the oppressor. From such a family comes he
+who breaks laws for his pocketbook and impedes the enactment of laws
+lest human rights should prevent his acquisition of wealth; he who
+hates his brother man--unless that brother has more than he has; the foe
+of the kingdom of goodness and peace and brotherhood.
+
+And goodness is as contagious as badness. Children catch the spirit of
+social love and idealism in the family. Where men and women are deeply
+concerned with all that makes the world better for lives, better for
+babies and mothers, for workers, and, above all, for the values of the
+spirit gained through leisure, opportunities, and higher incentives;
+where the family is more concerned with folks than with furniture; where
+habitually it thinks of people as Jesus did, as the objects most of all
+worth seeking, worth investing in, there children receive direction,
+habituation, and motivation for the life of religion, the life that
+binds them in glad love to the service of their fellows, and makes them
+think of all their life as the one great chance to serve, to make a
+better world, and to bring God's great family closer together here.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, pp. 142-50. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+     W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_, pp. 85-102. Pilgrim Press,
+     $1.00.
+
+     G. Johnson, _Education by Plays and Games_, Part I. Ginn & Co.,
+     $0.90.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     E.D. Angell, _Play_. Little, Brown & Co., $1.50.
+
+     Fisher, Gulick, _et al._, "Ethical Significance of Play,"
+     _Materials for Religious Education_, pp. 197-215. Religious
+     Education Association, $0.50.
+
+     Publications of the Play Ground Association.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     PLAY
+
+     Forbush, _Manual of Play_. Jacobs, $1.00.
+
+     A. Newton, _Graded Games_. Barnes, $1.25.
+
+     Von Palm, _Rainy Day Pastimes_. Dana Estes, $1.00.
+
+     Johnson, _When Mother Lets Us Help_. Moffat, Yard & Co., $0.75.
+
+     WORK
+
+     Canfield, _What Shall We Do Now?_ Stokes, $1.50.
+
+     Beard, _Jack of All Trades_. Scribner, $2.00.
+
+     Beard, _Things Worth Doing_. Scribner, $2.00.
+
+     Bailey, _Garden Making_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     Bailey (ed.), _Something to Do_ (magazine). School Arts Publishing
+     Co.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Is the quiet child an ideal child? How far should we go in
+     restraining activity?
+
+     2. The relative advantages of work and leisure for children. What
+     of the value of chores to you; did you do them? Describe any forms
+     of children's service in the home which have come under your
+     observation.
+
+     3. What forms of community service can be done by children and by
+     young people?
+
+     4. Recall any lessons learned by activity in your early home life.
+
+     5. Give in their order, according to your judgment, the potencies
+     for religious character in the home.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[12] A short list of books on child activity in the home is appended at
+the end of this chapter; a fairly complete list, long enough for any
+family, will be found on p. 117 of _The Church School_, by W.S. Athearn.
+
+[13] See W.N. Hutchins, _Graded Social Service for the Sunday School_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE HOME AS A SCHOOL[14]
+
+
+The home is so mighty as a school because, requiring little time for
+formal instruction, it enlists its scholars so largely in informal
+activities. It trains for life by living; it trains as an institution,
+by a group of activities, a series of duties, a set of habits. If the
+home is to prepare for social living it will be most of all and best of
+all by its organization and conduct as a social institution.
+
+
+Sec. 1. AN IDEAL COMMUNITY
+
+For the purposes of society homes must be social-training centers; they
+must be conducted as communities if their members are to be fitted for
+communal living. No boy is likely to be ready for the responsibilities
+of free citizenship who has spent his years in a home under an absolute
+monarchy; or, as is today perhaps more frequently the case, in a
+condition of unmitigated anarchy. A free society cannot consist of units
+not free. The problems of parental discipline arise and appear as
+persistently irritating and perplexing stumbling-blocks in many a home
+simply because that home is organized altogether out of harmony and
+relation with the normal life in which it is set. Society environing the
+home gives its members the habits of twentieth-century autonomy,
+individual initiative and responsibility, together with collective
+living and working, while the home often seeks to perpetuate
+thirteenth-century absolutism, serfdom, and subjection. In social living
+outside the home we learn to do the will of all; in the home we attempt
+to compel children to do the will of one.
+
+
+Sec. 2. COMMUNITY INTERESTS
+
+The home organized as a social community will give to every member,
+according to his ability, a share in its guidance and will expect from
+every member the free contribution of his powers. Its rules will be made
+by the will of all, and its affairs governed, not by an executive board
+composed of the parents, but by the free participation and choice of
+all. The young will learn to choose by choosing; will learn both how to
+rule and to be ruled by a share in ruling.
+
+To be explicit, suppose a piece of furniture is desired for the home.
+Two plans at least are possible: first, the "head of the home" may go
+forth and purchase it without consulting anyone, or after advising with
+the other "head"; or, second, before a purchase is made, the wisdom of
+such an addition to the furniture may be suggested in the open council
+of the whole family and the purchase discussed and determined by all.
+Such councils, usually coming at or after the principal meal, freely
+participated in by all, give even to the youngest a sense of the cost of
+a home, of the care that goes into it, with, what is more important, a
+sense of a share in these cares and costs; they cultivate habits of
+prudence, of consideration of a matter, of steady judgments, of
+deference to the wishes and wisdom of others. Of still greater
+importance is another practical issue of such a plan--that every member
+of the household has a new sense of proprietorship with deepened
+responsibility. Instead of thinking of any household possession as
+father's or mother's, or even mine, it becomes _ours_. The parents no
+longer need to say, "Children, do not mar the furniture; it costs money
+to replace it." The children know that already, and they have the same
+pride in the home possessions and the same desire to preserve them as
+they have in that which is peculiarly their own. A habit of mind results
+from such a course so that, by thinking in terms of common possession of
+the best things of life, there is cultivated that respect for the rights
+of others which is simply right social thinking.
+
+The same plan could be pursued in relation to almost every interest of
+the family--as the planning of the annual vacation and outing, the
+holidays, picnics, and birthday celebrations, the church and religious
+exercises. Above all, in the last mentioned, this social spirit may be
+cultivated. The father may cease to be the "high priest" for his family
+and become a worshiper along with the other members. The effect will be
+that his children are more likely to stay as worshipers with him than if
+they gazed on him as on some lonely elevation, unrelated to them in his
+religious exercises. The reading, the song, the prayers, the comment and
+discussion, the story-telling, and all that may make up the regular
+specific religious activities of the family should be such that all may
+have a share in them. Nothing could be finer, diviner, and bring larger
+helpfulness for social living than the attempt of the least little
+lisping child to throw herself into the unified family act of prayer, as
+when one little tot, unable to say the Lord's Prayer, united in worship
+at the time of that act by saying, as reverently as possible, "One, two,
+three, four, five," etc., up to ten. The ability to count was her latest
+accomplishment; counting to ten was bringing the very best thing she
+then had and, in the act of family worship, offering her part to the
+Most High. A fine sense of worship and a desire to be one with the
+others in this united, communal service prompted the participation.
+
+
+Sec. 3. COMMUNITY SERVICE
+
+Community service may be cultivated in the home. Here is the ideal
+social community, where there are neither parasites nor paupers, where
+all give of their best for the best of all. No one doubts that the baby
+gives its full share of happiness and cheer, and the aged their offering
+of consolation and experience; but the difficulty is supposed to be with
+the lad and the girl who would rather play than work. Usually this is
+because the habits of co-operation in the life of this community have
+been too long neglected. The small boy or girl had no share in its work.
+Parents are too busy to think through the matter of finding suitable
+duties for all. It is so much easier to do things one's self, even
+though the child misses the benefits of participation. More frequently
+the blame lies in the fact that parents desire to shield children from
+labor. Some would have them grow up without knowing what they count as
+the degradation of toil. But a boy who knows nothing of the "chores" has
+missed half the joys of boyhood, and has a terribly hard lesson ahead of
+him when he goes out to relate himself to life. No matter what one's
+station may be, there is a part to be played, and one's piece of work to
+be done. The greatest unkindness we can do our children is to train them
+to lives that do not play their part. The home is our chance to train a
+man to harmonious usefulness in his world. Not only should the family
+train to social co-operation and service, but it should train to
+efficiency therein. Do not let your child's duties become a farce; let
+them exact as much of him as the world will exact also; that is,
+efficiency, accuracy, thoroughness, and fidelity.
+
+
+Sec. 4. A SCHOOL OF SOCIAL MINISTRY
+
+The family trains lives for social ministry. The unsocial lives come out
+of unsocial homes. The home that exists for itself alone trains lives
+that exist only for themselves; these are the homes that throw the sand
+of selfishness into the wheels of society; they ultimately effect social
+suicide through selfishness. The attitude and atmosphere of the home are
+of first importance here. As we think, so will our children act. If the
+home is to us a place without responsibilities for the neighborhood,
+without duties to neighbors, without social roots, then it is a school
+for industrial, commercial, and social greed and warfare. As we think in
+our hearts and talk at our table, so are we educating those who sit
+thereat.
+
+If we would have our homes really efficient and worthy agencies for
+education in social living, the first thing to do is to seek the social
+atmosphere, to cultivate all those influences which young lives
+unconsciously absorb. We all know that character comes through
+environment in large measure, and that the mental and spiritual
+environment is by far the most potent. Here is something that affects us
+more than the finest or poorest furniture and that gives the real zest
+and flavor to any meal. The choice of our own reading enters here, not
+only the matter of reading in sociology, but of all reading, as to
+whether it blinds with class prejudices, intensifies caste feeling, or
+atrophies social sympathy by pandering to selfishness and sensuousness.
+The control of our own feelings and judgment enters here. Do we
+sedulously cultivate charity for others? Do we stifle impatience,
+bitterness, class feeling? Do we guide the conversation of visitors and
+the family group so that antisocial passions are subdued and a spirit of
+brotherly love and compassion for all is cultivated? Here men and women
+have opportunity to give evidence of a change of heart; here they need
+that awakening to social consciousness which is a new birth, a
+regeneration into the life of the Son of Man who came to give his life.
+
+By its active ministry the family is training for social living. When a
+child carries a bowl of soup to some sick or needy one, he learns a
+lesson never to be forgotten. The memories of hours of planning and
+preparation for some neighborly service--the making of bread, the
+packing of a box, the preserves for the sick--shine out like sunshine
+spots along childhood's ways; they direct manhood's steps.
+
+We are gradually learning that social duties are not learned save
+through social deeds; that even the most carefully prepared and
+perfectly pedagogical systems of instruction fail, standing alone. The
+college student uses the laboratory method in his sociology--though we
+know that sociology may be as far from social living as the poles are
+apart. The Social Service Association of the Young Men's Christian
+Association has given up attempts to teach social duty in favor of the
+plan of undertaking specific pieces of social activity. The home must
+adopt the laboratory method. The important thing is, not what the father
+or mother may systematically teach about the social duties of the
+children, but what kinds of service, of ministry and normal activity
+they may lead the children to; that is, in what ways they may all
+together discharge their functions in society.
+
+
+Sec. 5. FAMILIES AS COMMUNITY FACTORS
+
+Each family must clearly see its normal relations to its community, to
+the social whole; first, as an association of social beings having
+social duties, obligations, and privileges; then, to see that the
+ordering of the daily life is the largest single factor in determining
+the value of the family to the development of the community, fitting
+harmoniously into the larger community, and rendering its share of
+service.
+
+The disorderly home spreads its immoral contagion beyond its walls, out
+into the front yard, out and up and down the street, and all through the
+village and city. The City Beautiful cannot come until we have the Home
+Beautiful. Training each one to play his part in keeping the house in
+order, picking up and setting in place his own tools and playthings,
+preventing and removing litter, scraps, and elements of disorder and
+discomfort, acquiring habits of neatness based on social motives--these
+things make more for the city of beauty and health than all our lectures
+on clean cities.
+
+No family lives to itself. Young people need to see clearly how their
+homes and their habits in the home impinge on other homes and lives.
+This is impressed upon us in an accentuated and acute degree in city
+living. One can hardly imagine a finer discipline of grace than
+apartment living, though one may well question whether it is not morally
+and hygienically flying in the face of the natural order. We may not
+have for a long time municipal ordinances forbidding boiled dinners,
+limburger, and phonographs in city apartments; but if, unfortunately, we
+are compelled to live in these modern abominations, we ought to
+cultivate a conscience that will not inflict our idiosyncrasies, either
+in culinary aromas or in musical taste, on our neighbors. But there are
+matters greater than these by which the home trains for social
+thoughtfulness. No man has a right to grow weeds at home, because the
+seeds never stay there. A howling dog, a disease-breeding sty, a
+fly-harboring stable, must be viewed, not from the point of the family's
+convenience, but from that of others' welfare.
+
+
+Sec. 6. TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP
+
+The family has a duty to train children for Christian citizenship. No
+other institution can take its place even here. Courses of lectures in
+churches and settlements effect excellent results, and the study of
+civics from the moral and ideal viewpoint should be encouraged in the
+schools; but the home is the place where, after all, citizens are
+trained and the value or menace of their citizenship determined. If we
+stop long enough to get a clear understanding of what we mean by
+citizenship this will be the more evident.
+
+Citizenship is the condition of full communal, social living in a
+democracy. It is not a special department or activity of a man's life
+which he exercises once in a while, as at the primary or at the polls or
+through the political campaign; it is a permanent condition, the
+condition of his social living in a democracy. It seems to be worth
+while to think of this enough to be quite sure of it, for we have
+thought too long of citizenship as a special aspect of one's life or as
+an occasional duty; we have called for good citizenship at times of
+election and have been content with dormant citizenship at other times;
+we have said that one was exercising his citizenship when he voted, and
+have forgotten that he was exercising it or abusing or neglecting it as
+he walked the streets, talked with his neighbors, or in any way lived
+the life that has relations to other lives.
+
+Matters of citizenship are simply matters of social living, as social
+living expresses itself through what we call government; that is,
+through communal, civic, national administration and regulation.
+Citizenship is social control in action, not through political activity
+alone, but through all that concerns civic and communal life. In view of
+this it may be worth while to look a little more closely into the
+relations of family life to this matter of the determination of the
+character of our citizenship.
+
+The family is an agency for religious training in citizenship. The
+family is the first, smallest, and still the most common and potent
+social group. It is the community in which we nearly all learn communal
+living. At first it is a child's world, then comes his city, and then
+his nation, but ere long again the family is his own kingdom. Its
+ideals, constantly interpreted in action, determine our ideals. Where
+the father is greedy, self-centered, regarding the home as solely for
+his convenience as his private boarding-house, where he is a despotic
+boss, why should not the son at least tolerate bossism in his city if he
+does not himself pattern after his father on a wider scale and regard
+the city or the state as his private boarding-house and the treasury as
+his private manger? Where the mother is a petty parasite, what wonder
+the children regard with indifference, if not even with admiration, the
+whole system of civic and social barnacles, leeches, and other
+parasites?
+
+The very organization of the home must prepare for civic duty by laying
+upon all appropriate duties and activities. It ought to be an ideal type
+of community. But that can never be until we take the training of
+parents seriously in hand; until we cease to delegate the pedagogy of
+courtship, marriage, and home-founding to the comic supplements of the
+Sunday papers and to the joke columns. Parents must themselves be
+trained for the business of the organization of homes as educational
+agencies.
+
+The life and work of the home ought to train religiously for
+citizenship, by causing each to bear his due share of the burdens of
+all. Where the child has been forced to do the indolent parent's share,
+to support the slothful father, he can only look forward to the time
+when he will be free to support only himself, and have no other than
+purely egoistic obligations; this is an utterly immoral conception, and
+one squarely opposed to good citizenship. Where the boy or the girl has
+been trained to regard all toil as dishonorable, where each has been
+taught scrupulously to avoid every burden, they come into social living
+with habits set against bearing their share and toward making others
+carry them. The indolent parent makes the tax-dodging citizen, as the
+indulgent parent often makes the place-hunting citizen who becomes a tax
+on the public.
+
+The ideals of the family determine the needs of citizens. Its
+conversation, its reading, its customs, set the standard of social
+needs. Where the father laughs at the smartness of the artful dodge in
+politics, where the mother sighs after the tinsel and toys that she
+knows others have bought with corrupt cash, where the conversation at
+the meal-table steadily, though often unconsciously, lifts up and lauds
+those who are out after the "real thing," the eager ears about that
+board drink it in and childish hearts resolve what they will do when
+they have a chance. Where no voice speaks for high things, where no tide
+of indignation against wrong sweeps into language, where the children
+never feel that the parents have great moral convictions--where no
+vision is, the people perish.
+
+Yet to realize this civic responsibility of the home would be, in the
+greater number of instances, to remedy it. In those other instances
+where there are no civic ideals, where the domestic conscience is dead,
+there rests upon the state, upon society, for its own sake, the
+responsibility to train those children so that, at any rate, they will
+not perpetuate homes of this type. We may do very much by the
+stimulation and direction of parents. Men need but to be reminded of
+their duty to make it a part of their business to train their children
+in social duty.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Taylor, _Religion in Social Action_, chaps. vii, viii. Dodd, Mead &
+     Co., $1.25.
+
+     E.J. Ward, _The Social Center_, chap. v. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Lofthouse, _Ethics in the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the special social importance of the family?
+
+     2. How do children acquire their social ideals from the home?
+
+     3. What are the advantages which the home has as a school?
+
+     4. How do homes train for the responsibilities of citizenship?
+
+     5. Can you describe any plans of community councils in the home?
+
+     6. How would you promote community service in the family?
+
+     7. What are the dangers of unsocial and selfish lives growing in
+     the home?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[14] This chapter is, with the publisher's kind permission, taken, with
+sundry minor changes, from the author's pamphlet, _The Home as a School
+for Social Living_, published by the American Baptist Publication
+Society in the "Social Service Series."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE CHILD'S IDEAL LIFE
+
+
+The modern child is likely to miss one of the great character enrichings
+which his parents had, in that he is in danger of growing up entirely
+ignorant of the poetic setting of religious thought in historic and
+dignified hymns. The great hymns have done more for religious thought
+and character than all the sermons that have ever been preached. Even in
+the adult of the purely intellectual cast the hymn, aided by rhythm,
+music, repetition, and emotion, is likely to become a more permanent
+part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of
+ideas. How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more
+than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a
+world of imagery!
+
+
+Sec. 1. SONG AND STORY
+
+Very early life's ideals are presented in poetic form; plays,
+school-life, love of country, friendships, all take or are given metric
+expression. So, for children, hymns have a perfectly natural place. The
+child sings as he plays, sings as he works, sings in school, and, as
+long as life and memory hold, these words of song will be his
+possession; in declining years, when eyes are failing and other
+interests may wane, fragments of childhood's songs and youth's poems
+will sing themselves over in his memory; while in the years between how
+often will some stanza or line spring into the focus of thought just at
+the moment when it can give brave and helpful direction!
+
+Those years of facile memorization should be like the ant's summer, a
+period of steady storing in mind of the world's treasures of thought. No
+man ever had too many good and beautiful thoughts in his memory. Few
+have failed to recall with gratitude some apparently long-forgotten word
+of cheer, light, and inspiration stored in childhood. The special virtue
+of the hymn, among all poetic forms of great thoughts, is that memory is
+strengthened by the music and the thought further idealized by it, while
+frequent repetition fixes it the more firmly and repetition in
+congregational song adds the high value of emotional association.
+
+But what kinds of memory treasures are being given to the modern child
+in the realm of religion? In by far the greater number of instances in
+the United States neither church nor Sunday school nor home brings to
+him any knowledge of the great hymns of religion.[15] In the churches
+that use these hymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday
+services; he is in the children's service or the school, while in the
+majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has
+substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified
+hymns. Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance,
+cavort, or drone through the frivolities of "popular" gospel songs is
+only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to
+divorce worship and thought, to make worship a matter of purely
+superficial emotions, and to form the habit of expressing religion, the
+highest experience of life, in language, often irreverent and almost
+always trivial, slangy, or ridiculous. It is an insult to the
+intelligence of children to ask them to sing
+
+    We're pilgrims o'er the sands of time,
+      We have not long to stay,
+    The lifeboat soon is coming,
+      To carry the pilgrims away.
+
+It is the duty of parents to know what their children are learning in
+the Sunday school. Not only are they often missing the opportunity to
+lay up the treasure of elevating, inspiring thoughts; they are acquiring
+crude, mistaken, misleading theological concepts in the hideous,
+revolting figures of "evangelistic songs"; they are storing their minds
+with atrocities in English and in figures of speech; they are acquiring
+the habits of sentimentality in religion and inhibiting the finer,
+higher feelings. They are blunting their higher feelings by repeating
+incongruous and nauseating figures of being "washed in blood," or they
+are carelessly singing sentiments they do not understand.
+
+What can the family do about this? It ought to assert its rights in the
+church. It ought to protest and rebel against the debauching of mind and
+the degrading of religion (all for the sake of selling trashy books at
+$25 per hundred). A parent would do better to keep his child from church
+and Sunday school than to permit his mind to be filled with the
+sanguinary pictures of God, the mediaeval theology of the modern
+songbook, and its offenses against truth in thought and form. But the
+family can work positively and more effectively by providing good hymns
+for children in the home.
+
+
+Sec. 2. TRAINING IN SONG
+
+Almost without exception all children will sing if encouraged early in
+life. In the family group one has only to start a familiar song and soon
+all will be singing. It is just as natural to sing "Abide with Me" when
+the family sits together in the evening as it is to start "My Alabama
+Choo-choo." Children like the swing of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" just
+as much as in the northern states they like "Marching through Georgia."
+If they do not know the hymns the home is the best of all places in
+which to learn them.
+
+A large section of real family life is missing in families that do not
+sing together. A home without song lacks one of the strongest bonds of
+family unity, and the after-years will be deprived of a memory dear
+indeed to many others. Days often come when the wheels of family life
+seem to develop friction, when little rifts seem to throw the members
+far apart, but the evening song brings them together. The unity of
+action, of feeling, the development of emotions above the day's
+irritation and strife, all help to new joys in family living.
+
+We may well think of the fine songs and the great hymns together. There
+is no fixed wall between "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," and "The Son
+of God Goes Forth," nor between "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Jerusalem
+the Golden." The modern home has the musical instruments to lead in
+song--though they are not always essential--and lacks only the planning
+and forethought to develop the joys of song. It must provide the thought
+that applies the simpler forms of musical expression to the sweetening
+and enriching of life.
+
+Let no one say, "My family is not musical." That simply means that your
+family does not take time for music and song. Build on the training in
+patriotic and folk-songs given in the schools; sing these same songs
+over in the home and then associate with the best of them the best of
+the hymns. Cultivate the habit of binding the whole realm of feeling in
+music together, the hymns and the songs, to make religion mean beauty
+and devotion and to make the finer sentiments of life truly religious.
+
+This costs time and thought. Someone must plan that the books of songs
+and hymns are provided, that the opportunity is given, and that wise,
+unobtrusive leadership is there. Have ready several copies of the book
+containing the best hymns. Think out your plan of procedure in advance,
+selecting the songs, or at least the first one. Then at the right time
+simply begin to play that song and you will scarcely need to invite the
+children to sing with you.
+
+Should anyone doubt whether children will enjoy singing good hymns, he
+may purchase a few records for the phonograph, for example, "O Come All
+Ye Faithful," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," "O Zion Haste," "Holy,
+Holy, Holy," "Abide with Me." These will suit those of from ten upward;
+younger children will enjoy "Can a Little Child Like Me," "Brightly
+Gleams Our Banner," "Jesus Loves Me." "I Think When I Read That Sweet
+Story," and "For the Beauty of the Earth," though they will join gladly
+in the other hymns. Or, instead of using the phonograph, sit down
+quietly at the piano and play these hymns, with just enough emphasis for
+the children to catch the rhythm, and they will soon be standing at the
+piano singing with you.[16]
+
+
+Sec. 3. PLAY ACTIVITY
+
+The child is a playing animal. Play is not an invention of the devil,
+designed to plague parents and to lead children to waste their time. It
+is nature's best method of education, for when a child plays he is
+simply reaching forward in his activities to the realization of his
+ideals. Play is idealized experiences. There is always a significance of
+wider and maturer experience in children's play. Therefore the family
+must find space and time and adaptation of organization to the child's
+need of spontaneous, free activity in play.
+
+The special religious value of play lies in the fact that the child in
+his games is experimenting with life, learning its lessons; especially
+is he learning the art of living with other lives. It is our religious
+duty to see to it that our children become used to living in society by
+playing in social groups. Scarcely anyone is more to be pitied than the
+lonely child standing in the corner of the playground, able only to
+watch the games, because parental prohibition has already made him a
+solitary and unsocial creature.
+
+The educational potencies of play are so great that we dare not leave
+its activities to chance. Parents must study the power of play, its
+psychological and educational values, in order to direct its activity to
+the highest good.
+
+The adequate care of a child's play-life will involve, in addition to
+the trained intelligence of the parents, provision for space in the
+house and also outdoors, willingness to subordinate our peace and our
+pleasure to the child's play at times, a reasonable though not
+necessarily expensive provision of play materials, attention to the
+character of the plays and playmates. The home will not lose its harmony
+and beauty if it is filled with playing children. Its function has to do
+with their development rather than with the preservation of chairs.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.F. Cope, _Hymns You Ought to Know_, Introduction. Revell, $1.50.
+
+     W.F. Pratt, _Musical Ministries_. Revell, $1.00.
+
+     H.W. Hulbert, _The Church and Her Children_, chap. x. Revell,
+     $1.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     For a list of great hymns see _Hymns You Ought to Know_, edited by
+     Henry F. Cope, and mentioned above. It contains one hundred
+     standard hymns with a brief account of each hymn and of each
+     author.
+
+     E.D. Eaton, "Hymns for Youth," _Religious Education_, December,
+     1912, VII, 509.
+
+     See report of the Commission on Worship in the Sunday School, in
+     _Religious Education_, October, 1914.
+
+     Read especially the chapter on this subject in H.H. Hartshorne,
+     _Worship in the Sunday School_. Columbia University, $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What special advantages do songs and hymns have in their
+     pedagogical power?
+
+     2. What hymns do you remember from childhood? In what way are these
+     hymns valuable to you?
+
+     3. What changes would you like to see in the hymns the children
+     learn today?
+
+     4. What difficulties do you find in training children to sing in
+     the home?
+
+     5. Is it worth while to teach children to play? What games have
+     special educational value? What games have religious significance
+     or value? Give reasons for your opinions.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[15] One of the best collections of suitable religious songs is _Worship
+and Song_. Pilgrim Press, $0.40.
+
+[16] An excellent plan is worked out in _The Children's Hour of Story
+and Song_ by Moffat and Hidden, Unitarian Sunday School Society, in
+which children's stories are given and following them suitable songs and
+hymns with the music for each.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+STORIES AND READING
+
+
+If we would teach religion to our children we must adopt the method of
+Jesus; that of telling stories. The story has the advantage, first, of
+its natural interest, and, then, of the indirect manner of its
+presentation of the truth, together with the fact that that truth is
+embodied in a statement of life and experience. Besides, story-telling
+to any person of active interests is one of the easiest and most
+stimulating methods of teaching.
+
+
+Sec. 1. STORY-TELLING
+
+So much has already been written on the art of telling stories that only
+a few suggestions are needed here. First, understand why you tell the
+story. Normally a double motive enters in, namely, the conveyance of
+truth in life, at the same time affording real pleasure to the
+listeners. Either motive alone will be inadequate. You cannot convey the
+truth without the desire to give pleasure; you cannot make the pleasure
+worth while without the truth. But this is the place to insist that the
+truth which you desire to convey must find its way to the conviction of
+the child through the story and not through any moral or preface or
+particular statement which you may make. The moral or lesson must be
+clear to you but carefully held in reserve to direct the matter and
+manner of the story.
+
+Secondly, be prepared to pay the price of this most effective method of
+instruction. It will cost the reservation of a certain amount of time
+both for acquiring the story and for relating it. It will require
+careful thought and planning, especially to be sure that the story is
+told in sympathy with the child's world. People who are too busy to tell
+their children stories are, perhaps fortunately, coming to realize that
+they are too busy to have children. If it looks like a waste of time to
+turn off the lights and sit by the firelight for from twenty to thirty
+minutes, we shall need to revise our estimates of the value of
+child-character. Nor must we shrink from the investment of time in
+preparation for the narration of the story; if it is worth telling, it
+is worth telling well.
+
+Thirdly, keep a record of sources of stories. This may be preserved in a
+notebook. One parent used a card-index for this purpose. There are a few
+books published containing good collections.[17] You will find most
+valuable your own little book in which you have noted down the fugitive
+stories and short selections which are to be found in general
+literature.[18]
+
+Fourthly, do not tell a story so as to close the child's interest in the
+narrative. Stories ought to lead to inquiry and further reading in the
+book or other source from which they have been drawn; indeed,
+story-telling is one excellent method of quickening an interest in
+reading.
+
+Fifthly, allow the children to retell the stories to one another. Often
+the whole family will be entertained and helped by the explanation which
+a small child will give of the story he has learned by hearing it
+repeated a few times from his mother's lips.
+
+Sixthly, telling Bible stories to children in the quiet hour is the best
+of all methods to stimulate their interest in the Bible itself. It is
+much better to tell the story in your own language than to read it
+either in the Bible or in a paraphrase. For one reason, you will never
+tell it twice the same way, and children will watch with interest
+changes in the narration. As soon as they can read, secure some of the
+simple Bible narratives and put these in their hands.[19]
+
+
+Sec. 2. BOOKS AND READING
+
+A home without books is like a house with only one window; it can look
+out in only one direction, in that of the present. It knows only a
+limited world; its children have a short measure of the joy of life,
+they can know here only those whom they see today, their friends must be
+few, their world narrow and confined.
+
+If the books are not in your home the children will find them elsewhere.
+Unless the school kills the taste for reading, as it sometimes does, the
+young folks will open ways somehow into the ideal realm of books. As
+they grow up, the book takes the place of the story. The printed page is
+the child's key to all routes of travel, routes that lead to other times
+and lands, routes that lead to other people and into their hearts and
+minds. The child sees conduct and feels it as it is in action in lives
+before him, but he begins to discriminate and to analyze it only through
+reading; souls are revealed where the purpose of the writer is that the
+reader may see the springs of action in the character portrayed.
+Fiction, biography, travel, and adventure soon pass from the merely
+exterior happenings to the discovery of meanings in character.
+
+
+Sec. 3. DANGERS OF READING
+
+Since the book needs only one for its enjoyment, while the story
+requires two, there is less control over reading. There is only one way
+to be sure that children are not devouring vicious books and that is to
+make sure that they have an ample supply of healthful, helpful ones.
+This is especially necessary in a day that caters to sloth in reading.
+The tendency is for reading to take the facile decline from book to
+cheap magazine, from magazine to newspaper, and from the newspaper to
+skimming the headlines and the "funnies." The cheaper papers appeal to
+the lowest intelligence and strike at the line of least moral and mental
+resistance. Reading enriches the life but little and may impoverish it
+greatly unless there is developed the habit of drawing on the world's
+great treasures of thought and feeling. Open windows in your children's
+souls by giving them books; keep them open by encouraging the reading
+habit. Great souls wait for them, willing to converse and become their
+friends and teachers if they will but take down these books from the
+shelves and open them with an eager mind.
+
+
+Sec. 4. DEVELOPING GOOD TASTE
+
+_What can be done to quicken a love of good reading in children?_
+Recognize that not all children develop this appetite at the same age,
+that girls read more than boys, that boys usually have a period of
+decline in reading interest from seventeen to twenty-one or even later.
+But everything really depends on whether we ourselves love good books
+and keep them on hand. One of the life-centers of a family should be the
+bookshelf, while the picture of the evening lamp and the reading group
+will constitute one of its best memories. Where books are at hand and
+where they are used daily, the children need little urging to read. Now
+this does not mean that yards of choice editions make a book-loving
+family. There is a difference between bindings and books. It means books
+known and loved, familiar friends for daily converse, books on handy
+shelves and fit to be used as common food.
+
+_Do you know what your children read?_ Do you watch as carefully the
+food of mind and spirit as you do that of the body? Do you show an
+interest in the books they plan to draw from the public library? Can you
+guide them intelligently when they ask for suggestions of interesting
+books? Do you know the healthful, suitable ones?
+
+
+Sec. 5. PROMOTION OF THE READING INTEREST
+
+The Sunday school might aid greatly in promoting the habit of selecting
+and reading good books. Children often come home from day school
+clamoring for some book which the teacher has recommended as interesting
+and valuable. The Sunday-school teacher's recommendation would also
+carry weight. In every church, whether there exists a Sunday-school
+library or not, there ought to be a library or book committee which
+would watch for the right reading for the different grades and would
+cause the titles of good books to be placed on a bulletin board.
+Further, such a committee might very well place a copy of the book
+selected in the teacher's hand in order that the teacher might call the
+attention of the class directly to it. Of course the range of selection
+should be as wide as the world of books and should include fiction,
+romance, song, and story.[20] Parents could do the same sort of thing.
+Why not talk up the best books we remember? As to those old-time books,
+we need to realize that tastes change. Perhaps they owed much of their
+interest to their vivid descriptions of contemporary life. Therefore we
+must commend the new books, those that belong to the children's own
+days, too. This can be done, provided we really know the books, not by
+saying, "We should like you to read _Sandford and Merton_," but rather,
+"There is a capital story in _Captains Courageous_; have any of you read
+it?" Leave the matter there, or, at most, go only far enough to
+stimulate interest.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_, chaps. i-v. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.50.
+
+     Forbush, _The Coming Generation_, chap. viii. Appleton, $1.50
+
+     Winchester, "Good and Bad Books in the Home," in _The Bible in
+     Practical Life_, p. 38. Religious Education Association, $2.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_. Sturgis & Walton,
+     $1.25.
+
+     H.W. Mabie, _Books and Culture_. Dodd, Mead & Co., $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     ON STORY-TELLING
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_. Eaton & Mains, $0.50.
+
+     Wyche, _Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them_. Newson & Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     L.S. Houghton, _Telling Bible Stories_. Scribner, $1.25.
+
+     Bryant, _How to Tell Stories for Children_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     E.M. and G.E. Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_.
+     Sturgis & Walton, $1.25.
+
+     DIRECTING CHILDREN'S READING IN THE HOME
+
+     Macy, _A Children's Guide to Reading_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.25.
+
+     Field, _Finger Posts to Children's Reading_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     Arnold, _A Mother's List of Books for Children_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     For a short practical list see the different lists classified under
+     Sunday-School Departments in W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_,
+     particularly pp. 54, 83, 118, 169. Pilgrim Press, $1.00.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Do you remember any stories which especially impressed you as a
+     child? What were their qualities? What were the qualities of their
+     narration?
+
+     2. What are your difficulties in story-telling to children?
+
+     3. Is the habit of reading books passing among children? If so,
+     what are the reasons?
+
+     4. What responsibility has the public library toward the child's
+     selection of books? toward promoting book reading?
+
+     5. How many families co-operate with the library?
+
+     6. How might the church co-operate?
+
+     7. Does the reading of newspapers by children affect their general
+     habits of reading? In what ways?
+
+     8. What personal difference is there, if any, between the effect of
+     a borrowed book and of one the child owns?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[17] Laura E. Cragin, _Kindergarten Bible Stories_. Fifty-six of the Old
+Testament stories. There is also a companion volume of New Testament
+stories.
+
+James Baldwin, _Old Stories of the East_. Fresh and interesting versions
+of the familiar Old Testament stories.
+
+Kate Douglas Wiggin, _The Story Hour_. Good stories and a suggestive
+introduction on story-telling.
+
+_Half a Hundred Stories for the Little People_, by various authors.
+
+[18] _A List of Good Stories to Tell to Children under Twelve Years of
+Age_, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, $0.05. There are references to
+books in which the stories may be found, including 25 Bible stories, 16
+fables, 14 myths, 14 Christmas stories, 7 Thanksgiving stories, etc.
+
+[19] Such as O'Shea, _Old World Wonder Stories_; George Hodges, _The
+Garden of Eden_; Cragin, _Old Testament Stories_; Mary Stewart, _Tell Me
+a True Story_.
+
+[20] The H.W. Wilson Co., White Plains, New York, publishes a list of
+_Children's Books for Sunday-School Libraries_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE USE OF THE BIBLE IN THE HOME
+
+
+If we keep clearly in mind the aim of religious education in the family
+as that of the development of the lives of religious persons, the place
+and value of the Bible will be evident. It will be used as a means of
+developing and directing lives. This will be quite different from a
+perfunctory use because our fathers used it or a use under the
+compulsion of the fear lest some strange evil should befall us, some
+visitation of an offended deity.
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE CHILD'S NEED
+
+Children need the Bible as a part of their social heritage. Just as they
+get a larger life, inspired and stimulated by the realization of their
+connection with the past of their family and their country, so the Bible
+brings them into connection with the religious history of the race.
+General history brings heroic forefathers into the stream of
+consciousness; we feel the push of their lives. So the Bible reveals the
+stream farther back and makes us part of the process of life in unity
+with great characters and great movements.
+
+The child has a right to the Bible as his literary heritage. Here in the
+Bible is the precipitation of the ideals of a people unique in the
+place which religion held in their lives. Here is a literature which is
+the source of much of the best in the language and reading of the
+child's life. Its phrases are beautiful and convenient embodiments of
+religious ideals; they will have a steadily developing richness of
+meaning as life opens out to the child.[21]
+
+
+Sec. 2. DIFFICULTIES
+
+The difficulties in the way of the use of the Bible in the home are: the
+crowded programs, or a lack of time due to the absence of any program
+for the days; a feeling of unnaturalness in the special reading of this
+book; the decay of the custom of reading aloud; parental ignorance of
+the Bible and especially of its beauties for the young; and the
+excessive amount of task-reading frequently required by the schools. The
+Sunday school also sometimes offends in this respect by overemphasis on
+academic tasks for home work.
+
+
+Sec. 3. METHODS
+
+First, let parents use the Bible themselves. Use the books as you wish
+children to use them. This will be the longest step you can take toward
+the solution of the problem.
+
+Secondly, use the Bible naturally. When children have an aversion to the
+Bible it is due usually to two causes: the peculiar place and use of
+the book which makes it a thing apart from life, and often an object of
+dread; and the practice of using it as a task-book, to be opened only in
+order to prepare Sunday-school lessons. Just as it takes years to
+overcome the aversion set up against English literature by its
+analytical study in the schools, so that the child becomes a man before
+he voluntarily reads Dickens, Thackeray, the poets, and essayists, in
+the same manner we have succeeded in making the Bible undesirable to
+youth. If you read passages aloud, use the tone of voice which would be
+appropriate if this was a new book not bound in leather. Read it for
+pleasure as one would read a literary masterpiece--not because opinion
+might frown on you if you had not read the classic. Does someone object
+that that would be to degrade the Bible to the level of secular
+writings? You cannot degrade a literature; it makes its own level and
+our labels do not affect it. Certain it is that a pious tone of voice
+will not protect the Bible from the secular level. But to use it
+unnaturally will degrade it in the opinion of those who hear us.
+
+Thirdly, make its use a pleasure. All children enjoy story-telling and
+listening to reading. Many parents practice the children's hour, some
+period in the day when they will, alone with the children, read and talk
+with them. Let the Bible story be the reward of a good day, something
+promised as an incentive to good behavior. Children delight, not alone
+in the story itself, but in rhythmic passages, in the poetic flights of
+Isaiah and the beautiful imagery of the Psalms. To them it is natural
+and pleasant to think of the hills that skipped and the stars that sang
+and the trees that gave forth praise. They know the song of nature and
+are happy to find it put into words.
+
+Fourthly, use the Bible as a book of life. How many times a day do
+questions of conduct arise in the family! How often do children ask what
+is right, and freely discuss the question! Here is a book rich in
+precept and example on at least many of the questions. There are
+pictures of actual lives meeting real temptations; there are the
+epigrammatic precepts of Proverbs and of the teachings of Jesus. Call
+attention to them, not as settling the question out of hand, but as
+testimony to the point. Accustom children to getting the light of the
+Bible on their lives, remembering that this book is a light and not a
+fence nor a code of laws.
+
+Fifthly, use the Bible in worship. This does not conflict with the plea
+for its use naturally, for worship should be as natural as any of the
+social pleasures of the family. Here select those passages for reading
+which count most for the spirit of worship. It is a good plan to read a
+short passage, suitable for memorizing, so frequently that children
+learn it and are able to repeat it in concert. Be sure that all the
+passages read or recited are short. It will often be wise to preface the
+reading with a brief account of its original circumstances, so that all
+may hear the words as the actual utterances of a real man living in real
+life.
+
+Sixthly, provide material which helps to make the Bible interesting, and
+which helps children to see its pictures through the eyes of geography
+and history.[22]
+
+Seventhly, make the use of the Bible possible at all times for all. See
+that as soon as the child can read he has his own Bible, that it is in
+large, readable type, as much like any other book as possible. It is no
+evidence of grace to ruin the eyes over diamond-text Bibles. If
+possible, also provide separate books of the Bible, in modern literary
+form and some in the idiom of our day.[23]
+
+
+Sec. 4. DOUBTFUL METHODS
+
+It is doubtful whether good comes from the use of the Bible as a
+riddle-book, nor do the "Bible games" tend to develop a natural
+appreciation of the book. There is no new light but rather a confusing
+shadow thrown on the character of Joseph by the foolish conundrum
+concerning Pharaoh making a ruler out of him. Sending a child to the
+Bible to discover the shortest verse, the longest, the middle one, etc.,
+trains him to regard it as an odd kind of book, to think of it as a
+dictionary, and to use it less.
+
+We assume too readily that a knowledge of the separate details of
+biblical information, such as the date of the Flood, the age of
+Methuselah, the names of the twelve tribes, the twelve apostles, the
+books of the two Testaments, is the desired end. But one might know all
+these things and many more and be not one whit the better. For the child
+surely the desirable end is that he may feel deeply the attractiveness
+of the character of Joseph or of Jesus, may say within himself, "What a
+fine man; I want to be like him." Be sure the persons are real, that you
+see them living their lives in their times, just as you live your life
+now.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     T.G. Soares, "Making the Bible Real to Boys," in _Boy Training_,
+     pp. 117-40. Association Press, $0.75.
+
+     W.T. Lhamon, "Bible in the Home," _Religious Education_, December,
+     1912, p. 486.
+
+     G. Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. x. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     _The Bible in Practical Life._ Religious Education Association.
+     Numerous references to the use of the Bible in the home in this
+     volume.
+
+     Patterson Dubois, _The Natural Way_, sec. iv. Revell, $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     "Passages of Bible for Memorization," _Religious Education_,
+     August, 1906.
+
+     Louise S. Houghton, _Telling Bible Stories_. Scribner, $1.25.
+
+     Johnson, _The Narrative Bible_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.50.
+
+     Hall and Wood, _The Bible Story_, 5 vols. King, $2.00 by
+     subscription.
+
+     Courtney, _The Literary Man's Bible_. Crowell, $1.25.
+
+     The above are but a few of the many collections of biblical
+     material.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the conditions which seem to make the reading of the
+     Bible different from other reading? Is there a sense of unreality
+     about it as a book? What are the causes?
+
+     2. Try the experiment of reading the story of Joseph at one
+     sitting. Try to retell this to children.
+
+     3. What biblical material stands out in your memory of childhood?
+     In what degree is this due to the art of the story-teller or the
+     reader? to the character of the material?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[21] See M.J.C. Foster, _The Mother the Child's First Bible Teacher_.
+
+[22] Mackie, _Bible Manners and Customs_.
+
+Chamberlin, _Introduction to the Bible for Teachers of Children_.
+
+Worcester, _On Holy Ground_, 2 vols.
+
+[23] For example, Moulton, _Modern Reader's Bible_. The new Jewish
+renderings of Old Testament books are good, especially the Psalms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+FAMILY WORSHIP
+
+
+Family worship has declined until, at least in the United States, the
+percentage of families practicing daily worship in the home is so small
+as to be negligible. If this meant that a general institution of
+religion had passed out of existence the fact would be highly
+significant. But it is well to remember that family worship has never
+been a general institution. We have generalized the picture of the
+"Cotter's Saturday Night" so eloquently drawn by Burns; it has been
+applied to every night and to every fireside. Daily family worship was
+observed in practically all the Puritan homes of New England; but there
+is no evidence for it as a uniform custom, either in other parts of this
+country or in other parts of the world, save perhaps in sections of
+Scotland. True, there were many families which observed the custom; but
+there were also many families of church members and doubtless of truly
+religious people in which family worship as a regular institution was
+unknown. This has been especially true in the type of family life which
+has developed under modern social conditions. Further, even so simple an
+exercise as grace at meals has not always been a general custom.
+
+
+Sec. 1. PAST CUSTOMS
+
+But the fact today is that family worship is so rare as to be counted
+phenomenal wherever found. The instances, though not general, were
+common a generation ago. Many are living to whom family worship afforded
+the largest part of their conscious and formal religious education.
+Following the morning meal, or, occasionally, the evening meal, the
+family waited while the father, or the mother in his absence, read a
+portion of the Scriptures and offered prayer. In other families the act
+of worship would be the closing one of the day, perhaps participated in
+by the older members only, the younger children having repeated their
+prayers at bedside on retiring. A thousand happy and sacred associations
+gather about the memories of these occasions: the sense of reverence,
+the feeling that the home was a sacred place, the impression of noble
+words and elevating thoughts, the reflex influence of the prayer that
+committed all to the keeping and guidance of God.[24]
+
+
+Sec. 2. WHY FAMILY WORSHIP?
+
+Parents need to see the values in family worship. We have been insisting
+on the primary importance of the religious interpretation of the family
+as an institution, on the power of the religious motive, and the
+atmosphere of religion. But wherever there is a truly religious motive
+and a permanent religious atmosphere these will find definite expression
+in acts easily recognized as religious. Love is the motive and
+atmosphere of the true home, but love blossoms into words and bears
+fruit in a thousand deeds. The life of love dies without reality in act.
+Ideals are precipitated in expressive acts. So is it with religion in
+the home; it must not only be real in its sincerity, it must be
+realized, must pass over into conduct and action, as suggested above in
+chaps. vii and viii. And it must do this in ways so sharply defined and
+readily recognized as to leave no doubt as to their meaning. True, all
+acts may be religious and thus full of worship--this is most important
+of all--but worship expressly unites all such acts in a spirit of
+loyalty and aspiration.
+
+Worship is a necessity for the sake of the ideal unity of the family
+life. Just as the individual must not only feel the religious emotion
+but must also do the thing called for, so must this united personality
+of the family give expression to its faith and aspiration, its motives
+and emotions, in such a manner that, acting as a social unit, all can
+together put the inner life into the outer form. The social value of
+family worship is the strongest reason for its maintenance. It is the
+united act of the family group, the one in which group consciousness is
+expressly directed to the highest possible aims. Every period of worship
+brings the family into unity at an ideal level.
+
+The expression of religion in definite forms is necessary for children,
+too, as furnishing a means by which they can manifest their feeling of
+the higher meaning of family life. The reality of that feeling is
+stimulated in the daily, common life of the right family; the hour of
+worship is one out of many definite forms of its concrete expression. It
+is the form which gathers up the totality of feeling and aspiration into
+an act of worship and praise toward God, the Father of all families. It
+is evident there cannot be true worship in the family that is
+irreligious in its essential qualities, in its character, in its ideals
+and atmosphere.
+
+
+Sec. 3. ADVANTAGES
+
+The period of worship is a necessity in interpreting to all the spirit
+and meaning of a religious family. It objectifies the inner life. It
+makes definite, tangible, and easily remembered the general impressions
+of religion. It precipitates the atmosphere of religion into
+definiteness. In the chemical laboratory of a university there is
+usually a decided atmosphere of chemistry, but no one expects to become
+a chemical engineer by absorbing that atmosphere, nor even to attain a
+simple working knowledge by merely general impressions. Definiteness
+aids in gathering up our knowledge, our impressions.
+
+The reading of the Bible in the home will give, when the passages are
+wisely chosen, forms of language into which the often chaotic but
+nevertheless valuable and potential emotions of youth fall as into a
+beautiful mold; they become remembered forms of beauty thereafter.
+
+Family worship furnishes opportunity for direct religious instruction.
+When the home life has its regular institution, as regular as meals and
+play, the formality, the apparent abnormality of conversation about
+religion, is absent. Children expect and look forward to the period when
+the family will lay other things aside to think on the eternal values.
+Their questions in the breathing-space that always ought to follow
+worship become perfectly natural and sincere.
+
+Family worship lifts the whole level of family life. Ideally conceived,
+it simply means the family unity consciously coming into its highest
+place. Children may not understand all the reading nor enter into the
+motives for all parts of the petition, but they do feel that this moment
+is the one in which the family enters a holy place. They feel that God
+is real and that their family life is a part of his whole care and of
+his life. One short period of natural reverence sends light and calm
+all through the day. Where the home is the place where true prayer is
+offered, the family is the group which meets in an act of worship; here
+and into this group there cannot easily enter strife, bickerings, or
+baseness. One short period, five minutes or even less, of quietness, of
+united turning toward the eternal, gives tone to the day and finer
+atmosphere to the home.
+
+What our community life might be like without the churches, faulty or
+incompetent as we may know some of them to be, what that life would lose
+and miss without them is precisely, and perhaps in larger degree, what
+the family life misses without its own institution of regular devotion
+and worship.
+
+
+Sec. 4. THE DIFFICULTIES
+
+We can always afford to do that which is most worth while doing; our
+essential difficulty is to shake off the delusion of the lesser values,
+the lower prizes, to realize that, of all the good of life, the
+characters of our children, the gain we can all make in the eternal
+values of the spirit, in love and joy and truth and goodness, is the
+gain most worth while. We tend to set the making of a living before the
+making of lives. We need to see the development of the powers of
+personality, the riches of character, as the ultimate, dominant purpose
+of all being. Once grasp that, and hold to it, and we shall not allow
+lesser considerations, such as the pressure of business, the desire for
+gain, for ease, for pleasure, for social life, to come before this first
+and highest good; we shall make time for definite conscious religion in
+the life of the family.[25]
+
+
+Sec. 5. TYPES OF WORSHIP
+
+There are three simple forms which worship takes in the family: first,
+grace offered at the meals; secondly, the prayers of children on
+retiring and, occasionally, on rising; thirdly, the daily gathering of
+the family for an act of the spirit. The statement of the three forms
+reads so as to give them a formal character, but the most important
+point to remember is that wherever they are true acts of worship they
+are formal only in that they occur at definite, determined times and
+places. The acts have no merit in themselves. Merely to institute their
+observance will not secure religious feeling and life in the home. These
+three observances have arisen because at these times there is the best
+and most natural opportunity for the expression of aspiration, desire,
+and feeling.
+
+
+Sec. 6. METHODS OF FAMILY WORSHIP
+
+1. _Grace at meals._--Shall we say grace at meals? To assent because it
+is the custom, or because it was so done in our childhood's home, may
+make an irreligious mockery of the act. Perhaps, too, there are some who
+even hesitate to omit the grace from an unspoken fear that the food
+might harm them without it. All have heard grace so muttered, or
+hurriedly and carelessly spoken, void of all feeling and thought, that
+the act was almost unconscious, a species of "vain repetition."
+
+There are two outstanding aspects of the asking of a blessing--the
+desire to express gratitude for the common benefits of life, and the
+expression of a wish, with the recognition of its realization, that at
+each meal the family group might include the Unseen Guest, the Infinite
+Spirit of God. That wish lifts the meal above the dull level of
+satisfying appetites. Just as, in good society, we seek to make the meal
+much more than an eating of food, "a feast of reason and a flow of
+soul," so does this act make each meal a social occasion lifted toward
+the spiritual. The one thought at the beginning, the thought of the
+reality of the presence of God, and of the nearness of the divine to us
+in our daily pleasures, gives a new level to all our thinking.
+
+How shall we say grace, or "ask a blessing"? First, with simplicity and
+sincerity. Avoid long, elaborate, ornate phrases. It is better to err
+in rhetoric than in feeling and reality. The sonorous grace may soon
+become stilted and offensive. It is better to say in your own words just
+what you mean, for that will help all, even to the youngest, to mean
+what they say with you.
+
+Vary the form of petition. Sometimes let it be the silent grace of the
+Quakers; sometimes children will enjoy singing one of the old four-line
+stanzas, as
+
+    Be present at our table, Lord,
+    Be here and everywhere adored;
+    These mercies bless and grant that we
+    May feast in Paradise with thee.
+
+One might use the first three of the following lines for breakfast and
+the last three at another meal:
+
+    For the new morning with its light,
+    For rest and shelter of the night,
+      We thank the heavenly Father.
+
+    For rest and food, for love and friends,
+    For everything his goodness sends,
+      We thank the heavenly Father.[26]
+
+or
+
+    When early in the morning the birds lift up their songs,
+    We bring our praise to Jesus to whom all praise belongs.
+
+One especially needs to guard against the purely dietetic grace, the one
+that only asks that the deity will aid digestion, as that form so often
+heard, "Bless these mercies to our use."[27]
+
+Should we say grace on all occasions of meals? What shall we do at the
+social dinner in the home? The answer depends on the purpose of the
+grace. Is it not that in our own group we may have the consciousness of
+the presence of God? When the meal is that of our own group with a
+friend or two, we bring the friends into the group and the act of family
+worship is maintained. Usually this is the case. So it will be when the
+group is entirely at one in this desire: the asking of grace will be
+perfectly natural. But when the group is a large one, when the sense of
+family unity is lost, or when the observance would seem unnatural, it is
+better to omit it. Grace in large gatherings often seems an uncovering
+of the sacred aspects of the home life.
+
+2. _Bedtime prayers._--What of children's bedtime prayers? Many can
+remember them. To many the most natural, helpful time for formal periods
+of prayer is in the quiet of the bedroom just before retiring. But there
+is a grave danger in establishing a regular custom of bedside prayers
+for children, a danger manifest in the very form of certain of these
+prayers, as
+
+    Now I lay me down to sleep,
+    I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
+
+It is as though the child were saying, "The day is ended during which I
+have been able to take care of myself, the hours of helpless sleep
+begin, and I ask God to take care of me through the terrors of the
+night." For some children, at least, the night has been made terrible by
+that thought; they have been led to feel that the day was safe and
+beautiful, but that the night was so dangerous and fearful that only the
+great God could keep them through it, and it was an open question
+whether their prayer for that keeping would be heard.
+
+One must avoid also the notion that such prayers are part of a price
+paid, a system of daily taxation in return for which heaven furnishes us
+police protection.
+
+The best plan seems to be to encourage children to pray, to establish in
+them the habit of closing the day with quiet, grateful thoughts, to
+watch especially that the prayers learned in early life do not distort
+the child's thoughts of God, and to make the evening prayer an
+opportunity for the child to express his desires to God his Father and
+Friend. Having done this, as the children grow up it is best to leave
+them free to pray when and where they will. One may properly encourage
+the evening, private prayer; but the child ought to have the feeling
+that it is not obligatory, that it must grow out of his desire to talk
+with God, and, above all, that it has no special connection with the
+hour and act of retiring for sleep but rather, so far as time is
+concerned, with the closing of the day. Mothers must see far beyond the
+charm of the picture formed by the little white-robed figure at her
+knee. There is no hour so rich in possibilities for this growing life.
+It is one of the great opportunities to guide its consciousness of
+God.[28]
+
+3. _General family prayers._--It is true that, in many homes, under
+modern conditions of business, it is almost impossible for the family to
+be united at the hour when worship used to be customary, following
+breakfast. However, that is not the only hour available. In many
+respects it is a poor one for the purpose of social worship; it lacks
+the sense of leisure. But there are few families where the members do
+not all gather for the evening meal. It is not difficult to plan at its
+close for ten minutes in which all shall remain. Without leaving the
+table it is possible to spend a short time in united, social worship.
+Or, by establishing the custom and steadily following it, it is possible
+to leave the table and in less than ten minutes find ample time for
+worship in another room.
+
+Really everything depends at first on how much we desire to have family
+worship, whether we see its beauty and value in the knitting of home
+ties, in the elevation of the family spirit, and in the quickening of
+the religious ideas. We find time to eat simply because we must; when
+the necessity of the spirit is upon us we shall find time also to
+worship and to pray.
+
+Next to the will to make time comes the question of method. First,
+determine to be simple, natural, and informal. A stilted exercise soon
+becomes a burden and a source of pain to all. In whatever you do, seek
+to make it possible for all to have a share by seeing that every thought
+is expressed within the intelligence of even the younger members, that
+is, of those who desire to have a share. This does not mean descending
+to "baby-talk." Just read the Twenty-third Psalm; that is not baby talk,
+but a child of seven can understand what is meant up to the measure of
+his experience; the language is essentially simple though the ideas are
+sublime.
+
+Secondly, insure brevity. For that part of worship in which all are
+expected regularly to unite, ten minutes should be ample. Some excellent
+programs will not take more than half this time. Family worship is not a
+diminutive facsimile of church worship. Doubtless the experiment has
+failed in many families because the father has attempted to preach to a
+congregation which could not escape. Keep in mind the thought that this
+is to be a high moment in each day in which every member will have an
+equal share.
+
+Thirdly, plan for the largest possible amount of common participation.
+This is to be the expression of the unity of the family life. Children
+enjoy doing things co-operatively and in concert.
+
+Fourthly, treat the occasion naturally in relation to other affairs.
+Proceed to the worship without formal notice, without change of voice,
+and without apology to visitors. Take this for granted. At the close
+move on into other duties without the sense of coming back into the
+world. You have not been out of it; you have only recognized the eternal
+life and love everywhere in it.
+
+4. _Suggestions of plans._--There are given below seven outlines of
+plans of worship. They are plans which have been in use and have been
+tried for years. Their only merit is simplicity and practicability; but
+they are at least worthy of trial. There is no special significance in
+the arrangement of the days and this may be changed in any way
+desirable. Further, all plans should be elastic; there will come special
+days, such as festivals and birthdays, when the program should be
+varied. For example, on a birthday the child whose anniversary then
+occurs should have the privilege of making the choice of recitation or
+reading or of determining the order of all the parts of this brief
+period of worship.
+
+
+     MONDAY
+
+     1. A short psalm repeated in concert.
+
+     2. A brief, informal petition by father or mother.
+
+     3. The Lord's Prayer, in which all join.
+
+     Before attempting even this simple plan, prepare for it by first
+     selecting several suitable psalms. The following should be
+     included: the 1st, 19th, 23d, 24th, 100th, 117th, 121st, and a part
+     of the 103d. You would do well to memorize one of these yourself,
+     so as to be able to lead without reading from the book. Next, think
+     over with some care the things for which you may pray, the
+     aspirations which your children can share with you. Few things are
+     more difficult than this, so to pray that all can make the prayer
+     their own. Let it also be a prayer of love and joy, not a craven
+     begging off from punishments, nor a cowardly plea for protection
+     and provision. We can pray over all these things with gratitude and
+     with confidence toward the God of love. Do not try to preach in
+     your prayers. Many prayers have been ruined by preaching, just as
+     some preaching has been spoiled by praying to the people. Usually
+     four or five sentences will do for the one day. Better a single
+     thought simply expressed than the most brilliant attempt to inform
+     the Almighty on all the events of the world that day.
+
+     A prayer in which all can join is always desirable. The Lord's
+     Prayer never wearies us nor grows old. Children enter into it with
+     some new meaning every day; it covers all our great, common, daily
+     needs.
+
+
+     TUESDAY
+
+     1. A few favorite memory verses repeated by all (from either the
+     Bible or other literature).
+
+     2. Read a very brief passage from the Bible.
+
+     3. Prayer, ending with the Lord's Prayer.
+
+     Many excellent selections will be found in Dr. Dole's book
+     mentioned at the end of this chapter. Encourage children, however,
+     to make their selections from the poems and passages they already
+     know.
+
+     The passage of the Bible selected to be read should be one which
+     first of all incites to worship, and should be chosen for its
+     inspiration and literary beauty. A few lines from the great
+     chapters of Isaiah (e.g., chaps. 35 and 55), from the Psalms (e.g.,
+     Pss. 61, 65, 145), from the Sermon on the Mount, from 1 Cor., chap.
+     13, from the parables of Jesus, will be suitable.
+
+     The closing prayer may be extemporaneous or may be read from one of
+     the books of prayers. Many of the prayers in the Episcopal Prayer
+     Book are especially beautiful and quite suitable. Of course in
+     families of the Episcopal church the collect for the day would be
+     the right prayer to use. It is sometimes necessary to use prayers
+     prepared beforehand; some persons never acquire the ability to pray
+     aloud, even in their own families. But halting sentences that are
+     your own, that your children recognize as yours, may mean more to
+     them than the finest flowing phrases from a book. Use the prayers
+     from the book, not as a substitute, but as an addition.
+
+
+     WEDNESDAY
+
+     1. A good poem from general literature.
+
+     2. Prayer.
+
+     There are so many good collections of the great and inspiring poems
+     that one hesitates to recommend any collection. Remember that a
+     poem may be religious and imbued with the spirit of worship,
+     helpful to the purpose of this occasion, even though it contains no
+     allusions to Scripture and makes no direct references to religious
+     belief. "A House by the Side of the Road"[29] is thoroughly human,
+     popular, and could not even be accused of being a classic; but it
+     has a helpful motive and is likely to lead the will toward the life
+     of service and brotherhood. Some would prefer to read a part of one
+     of the great hymns.
+
+
+     THURSDAY
+
+     1. A brief reading or recitation from the New Testament.
+
+     2. A few moments' conversation on the reading.
+
+     3. A very brief prayer followed by a song.
+
+     The only apparent difficulty here is in starting the conversation.
+     Do not ask formal questions; rather put them something like this:
+     "I wonder whether people would do just the same on our street
+     today." Make the conversation as general as possible; do not
+     slight, nor scoff at, the contribution of even the least in the
+     group.
+
+
+     FRIDAY
+
+     1. A few verses in concert.
+
+     2. Read a parable or very brief narrative.
+
+     3. The Lord's Prayer.
+
+     The reading had better be from one of the paraphrases if it is a
+     narrative from the Old Testament.[30] Even in reading the New
+     Testament one can at times use with advantage the
+     _Twentieth-Century Bible_ or the _Modern Reader's Bible_.
+
+
+     SATURDAY
+
+     1. A period of song.
+
+     2. Closing prayer, with the Lord's Prayer.
+
+     Perhaps only one song can be sung. It need not be a hymn; that
+     should depend on the choice of the children. Help them to put
+     together all the good songs, including the hymns, in one category
+     in their minds.
+
+
+     SUNDAY
+
+     1. Ask: "What has been the best we have read or repeated in our
+     worship this week?"
+
+     2. Ask: "What shall we learn for memory repetition this week, what
+     psalm or other passage for our concerted worship?"
+
+     3. Read the psalm selected.
+
+     4. Closing prayer.
+
+     5. Period of song, lasting as long as desired.
+
+     This exercise evidently permits of extension in time and should be
+     arranged in accordance with the program for the day.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     George Hodges, _The Training of Children in Religion_, chaps. viii,
+     ix. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     _The Improvement of Religious Education_, pp. 108 to 123. Religious
+     Education Association, $0.50.
+
+     Mrs. B.S. Winchester, "Methods and Materials Available," _Religious
+     Education_, October, 1911. $0.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Koons, _The Child's Religious Life_. Eaton & Mains, $1.00.
+
+     Hartshorne, _Worship in the Sunday School_. Columbia University,
+     $1.25.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     A.R. Wells, _Grace before Meat_. U.S.C.E., $0.25.
+
+     C.F. Dole, _Choice Verses_. Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts.
+     Privately printed.
+
+     F.A. Hinckley (ed.), _Readings for Sunday School and Home_.
+     American Unitarian Association, $0.35.
+
+     J. Martin, _Prayers for Little Men and Women_. Harper, $1.25.
+
+     S. Hart (ed.), _Short Daily Prayers for Families_. Longmans, $0.60.
+
+     G.A. Miller, _Some Out-Door Prayers_. Crowell, $0.35.
+
+     Oxenden, _Family Prayers_. Longmans, $1.50.
+
+     George Skene, _Morning Prayers for Home Worship_. Methodist Book
+     Concern, $1.50.
+
+     W.E. Barton, _Four Weeks of Family Prayer_. Puritan Press, Oak
+     Park, Ill.
+
+     Abbott, _Family Prayers_. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.50.
+
+     _Prayers for Parents and Children._ Young Churchman Co., Milwaukee,
+     Wisconsin, $0.15.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the causes for the decay of the custom of family
+     worship?
+
+     2. What influences us most: public opinion, popular custom,
+     economic pressure?
+
+     3. How have the changes affected the religious influence of the
+     home?
+
+     4. What features of the older customs are most worth preserving?
+
+     5. Recall any of childhood's prayers which you remember. How many
+     maintain the custom of bedtime prayers in mature life?
+
+     6. What should be the central motive of "grace" at meals?
+
+     7. Would there be advantage in occasionally omitting the "grace"?
+
+     8. Give reasons for and against "grace."
+
+     9. Criticize the proposed plan of evening family prayers.
+
+     10. Describe any plans which have been tried.
+
+     11. Why is it desirable to maintain family worship?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[24] For a study of children's worship see H.H. Hartshorne, _Worship in
+the Sunday School_; "Report of Commission on Graded Worship," _Religious
+Education_, October, 1914.
+
+[25] "Parents who give up such a practice as family prayers mainly
+because they know of many other people who have done the same are
+just as much the slaves of public opinion and ignorant cant as the
+narrowest Lowlander who forbids his children secular history on
+Sunday."--Lyttleton, _Corner-Stone of Education_, pp. 207-8.
+
+[26] Quoted by W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_.
+
+[27] A number of good poems are given in A.R. Wells, _Grace before
+Meat_.
+
+[28] W.B. Forbush gives a number of poetic forms of prayer for children
+in _The Religious Nurture of a Little Child_, pp. 12, 13.
+
+[29] By Samuel Walter Foss.
+
+[30] One handy form is _The Heart of the Bible_, prepared by E.A.
+Broadus; another, _The Children's Bible_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+SUNDAY IN THE HOME
+
+
+Almost every family finds Sunday a problem. Other days are well occupied
+with full programs; this one has a program for only part of its time.
+Other days are rich with the liberty of happy action, but this one is
+frequently marked by inaction, repression, and limitations. As soon as
+the evanescent pleasure of Sunday clothes has passed, for those for whom
+it existed at all, the children settle down to endure the day.
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE MEANING OF THE DAY
+
+Fathers and mothers who vent a sigh of relief when Sunday is over must
+marvel at the strains of "O day of joy and gladness." Yet this day
+defeats its purpose when it is of any other character. We have no right
+to rob it of its joy and its healing balm. On the day made for man,
+sacred to his highest good, whatever hinders the real happiness of the
+child ought to be set aside.
+
+Instead of accepting traditions regarding the method of observing the
+Sunday, would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, For what use of
+the day can we properly be held responsible? Here are so many--fifty-two
+a year--days of special opportunity. To us who complain that business
+interferes with the personal education of our children through the week,
+what ought this day to mean? To us who lament the little time we can
+spend with our families, what ought this day to mean? And what ought we
+to try to make it mean to children?
+
+We call this God's day; what must some children think of a God who robs
+his day of all pleasure? If this is the kind of day he makes, then how
+unattractive would be his years and eternity! It is the day when we have
+our best opportunity to show them what God is like, to interpret his
+world and his works in terms of beauty, kindness, riches of thought, and
+love.
+
+It ought to be the day reserved for the best in life, for the treasures
+of affection, for the uses of the spirit. Whatever is done this day must
+come to this test, Is this a ministry to the life of goodness, truth,
+and loving service? Does this enrich lives? In other words, we may put
+the broad educational test to the day and its program and determine all
+by ministry to growing lives.
+
+
+Sec. 2. CONSERVING THE VALUES
+
+The family faces the problem of the opposition between the rights of man
+on this day and the greed of commerce, the fight between a day of rest
+and a day of work. Man's right to rest is assured, legally, but
+commerce in the name of amusement and in the guise of petty and
+unnecessary trading constantly maintains its fight to invade the day of
+rest, to turn it from ministry to man as a person to the dull level of
+the week of ministry to things. The home has much at stake in this
+struggle. It needs one day free from the life that tears its members
+apart, free from the toil that engrosses thought, free for its members
+to live together as spiritual beings.
+
+In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to
+the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use
+of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious
+opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life. It is
+devoted to personality, to man's rights as a religious being.
+
+Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one
+another, shall look into faces of friends and companions! And this
+opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an
+act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one
+family. That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our
+Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that
+makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's
+service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the
+church family. If we think of the day as affording us the pleasure of
+social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning
+will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. Of
+course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and
+school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.[31]
+
+Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all
+the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the
+presence of one another which is the essential life of the family. It
+has always been a good custom for friends to visit on this day, for
+families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather
+again for a few hours. It is the day when we have time to discover how
+much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when,
+looking into the eyes of those we love, we see "the light that never was
+on sea or land," the ultimate good!
+
+The hours of being together are the hours of real education. Children
+cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives
+need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for
+real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere
+with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church.
+
+
+Sec. 3. THE PROBLEM OF PLAY
+
+What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday? Is there
+any other kind of child? They all want to. It is as natural for a child
+to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary. A child is a
+growing person learning life by play. Because play seems trivial to us
+we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day
+devoted to the higher life. In some families play is forbidden because
+children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate
+piety and pleasure.
+
+Shall we then throw down all barriers and make this day the same as all
+others? No, rather make the day different by throwing down barriers that
+stand on other days. Let this be the day when the barriers between
+father and sons, parents and children, are let down and all can enter
+into the joy of living.
+
+Play is to a child the idealization of life's experiences and the
+realization of its ideals. That is why he plays at school, idealizing
+the everyday life; that is why he plays at housekeeping, at being in
+church, at being a railway engineer, even a highwayman or an outlaw. The
+traditional games are the game of life itself in terms of childhood.
+Play as idealized experience and realized ideals is to the child what
+the church, worship, and the reading of fiction and essays are to the
+adult. Play is the child's method of reaching forward into life's
+meaning. Some games as old as history carry a weight of human tradition
+and experience as rich for a child as the adult obtains from historical
+review and from association with the past. There is a sense in which the
+child playing these games opens the Bible of the race.[32]
+
+We cannot make children over into our pattern; we have to learn from
+them. Indeed, we come to life through their ways. We must become as
+little children. Before we settle the question of play on Sunday we do
+well to be sure that we know what play means to children, that we really
+grasp something of its educational value and its religious potency. Then
+we can proceed to a family policy in Sunday play.
+
+
+Sec. 4. A POLICY ON PLAY
+
+_Keep the day as one of family unity._ Help the child to think of it as
+a day protected for the sake of family togetherness. You can play that
+for this day the ideal is already realized of a family life
+uninterrupted by the demands of labor and business.
+
+_Maintain the unity by doing the ideal things together._ Go to the place
+of worship together, provided it is the place where the child can find
+expression for spiritual ideals. If the Sunday school does not really
+lift the child-life and really teach the child, if it is not honest with
+him and makes no suitable provision for his developing nature, he will
+be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at
+home. That means the application of parents to this hour.[33] It
+banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing
+pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud
+of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at
+times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the better type of
+Sunday school is more and more to be found; children are more and more
+receiving a ministry actually determined by their needs. So far as the
+church service is concerned the ideal situation is found when a parallel
+service is provided for children, based on their needs and capacities.
+As to attendance, under other circumstances, in the family pew, that
+depends on whether the child is gaining an aversion to the church by the
+torture and tedium often involved. Without doubt many adults acquired
+the settled habit of sleeping in church because that was the only
+possible relief in childhood.[34]
+
+_Maintain the family unity by stepping into the child's ideal life.
+Expect activity and use it._ Why should we assume that because the adult
+finds a Sunday nap enjoyable the child will be blessed by enforced
+silence? I would rather see a father playing catch with his boys on
+Sunday than see the boys cowed into silence while he slept a Sabbath
+sleep. Children will play. Their play is innocent; more, it may be
+helpful and educative; we can insure these values in it by our
+participation. That is the parent's opportunity for a closer sympathy
+with his children. Playing together is the closest living, thinking, and
+feeling together. Where games are shared, confidences, secrets, and
+aspirations are shared, too. Besides, the participation of the adult may
+tend to tone up the game and to moderate boisterousness.
+
+_Seek the beautiful._ Speaking as one who has been under both the
+puritanical regulation and the so-called "continental" freedom of Sunday
+observance, nothing seems much more beautiful than the sight of an
+entire family playing at home, in the park, or off in the woods or the
+fields of the country. Life is strengthened, ideals are lifted, family
+ties knit closer, gratitude is quickened, and courage stimulated by play
+of this kind.
+
+
+Sec. 5. POINTS OF DIFFERENCE
+
+But because it is evidently most important that this day should be
+different from other days, it is well to mark that difference in our
+plays and pleasures and to follow some simple principles for Sunday
+play.
+
+First, make it the day of the _best_ plays. The participation of parents
+will tend to have this effect. Sometimes some forms of play may be
+reserved for this day.
+
+Secondly, our play should never interfere with the rights of those who
+desire to be quiet or to observe the day in ways differing from ours. We
+must respect the rights of all.
+
+Thirdly, our play must not cause additional or unnecessary labor.
+
+Fourthly, our play must not interfere with the pleasures of others. For
+instance, in the city children who can use the public tennis courts
+every day should keep off them on Sunday in order to give opportunity to
+those who can use them only on that day.
+
+Having said so much on play on Sundays, we must not leave the impression
+that play is the principal thing. It would be the principal thing for
+children compelled to work or confined in crowded tenements on all other
+days. This is a day of rest. Play should not be carried beyond the rest
+and refreshment stage.
+
+Nor must we assume that a recognition of play involves neglect of
+worship and instruction. Both should be cherished among the delights of
+the day. Every attempt to make the day a happy one, by normal play,
+associates the emphasis on worship with increased happiness in the
+child's mind.
+
+
+Sec. 6. THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON PROBLEM
+
+"What shall we do?" the children ask restlessly on Sunday afternoons,
+and it is by no means a strange question. All the week they have their
+school work, on Saturdays their play. No wonder Sunday afternoon seems
+dull. Yet if we older ones use it aright this is our opportunity to give
+them the best time of all the week. We can make this part of the day
+really a holiday if we just take time to plan it right. There is
+something wrong in the home in which the child, as he grows up, does not
+look forward happily to his Sunday afternoons.
+
+Sunday afternoon should be a family festival time. Keep it sacred to the
+family. Business and social life claim us all the week, and the church
+claims its share of this day; but these afternoon hours we can, if we
+will, reserve for our own home life, for the closer drawing together of
+children and parents. To hold this time sacred for the children and
+their interests will help to solve "the Sunday afternoon problem."
+
+1. _The child's question, "What shall I do next?"_--Children are
+dynamic, perpetually active. They grow in the direction toward which
+their activities are turned. Repression is impossible. We must either
+find the best things for them to do, or let them chance on things good
+or bad. The following outline for Sunday afternoon is given in the hope
+that it may help to answer the "what next."
+
+
+     1. Begin to make _The Family Book_.
+
+     2. Give "festival name" to the day, and take an excursion in honor
+     of the one for whom the day is named.
+
+     3. Organize an exploring party to discover peoples and scenes of
+     long, long ago.
+
+     4. Get acquainted with some beautiful home thoughts.
+
+     5. Enjoy an evening hour of song and praise.
+
+
+2. _"The Family Book."_--To start _The Family Book_, mother or father
+raises the question at dinner: "What was the best Sunday of all last
+year, and why was it the best?" Everyone, from the oldest down to the
+least, should have a chance to tell. The statements of the older ones
+will encourage the younger.
+
+That question will start another: What is the very best thing we can
+remember about the year past? Let everyone take a pencil and paper and
+in just ten minutes decide on and write down the one thing best worth
+remembering. Perhaps the baby cannot write yet, but he or she will want
+paper and pencil, too. Now, instead of making our answers known to one
+another, we fold the papers and keep them till the evening meal. We will
+open them then and talk it all over. Afterward we are going to copy the
+answers into a new book we are going to make.
+
+This new book is to be called _The Family Book_, and we expect to put
+into it all the pleasant things we wish to record about our home and
+family. Any blank book with ruled lines will do. Some time today we will
+elect a keeper of the book, and before we go to bed we will see the
+first entry in that book under the title, "Happy Memories of 1915." That
+will make a good beginning for _The Family Book_. Next Sunday we will
+discuss and set down in the book the happy memories of the intervening
+week.
+
+3. _The festival name._--Now, we have been sitting, talking, and writing
+as long as the children will care to be still. Suppose we all go
+outdoors together, every one of us. What if the weather is bad? It is
+seldom truly bad, and there is so much real happiness in going out in
+all weathers together.
+
+But where shall we go? There is no fun in walking simply for exercise or
+health. Well, says father, we can decide where to go by naming the day.
+How? We will find the most interesting birthday or anniversary that
+falls today or during the next week. If one of the family has a birthday
+then, that one shall choose our walk for us. If not, then when we have
+chosen the national hero or heroine whose birthday falls near this time,
+or the event the anniversary of which comes nearest, we will go, if
+possible, where something will remind us of that person or event.
+
+So we fall to discussing the possibilities. We search through almanacs
+until we find the anniversary that suits us all. Perhaps one of the
+parents has anticipated all this by looking up the matter, and has a
+good name to suggest. Or the older ones may consult a dictionary of
+dates. It may turn out to be the birthday of a national hero. In the
+city he may have a statue; in the country may be found the kinds of
+woods, flowers, or animals he loved.
+
+4. _The exploring party._--But even after the walk it will not be long
+before the little ones are asking, "What can we do next?" So we organize
+the exploring party. Our object is to discover the countries, scenes,
+strange peoples, and most interesting persons we have heard of in the
+Bible. We are to find them in the advertising sections of old magazines.
+Let each one take a magazine and go through it, looking for oriental
+scenes, for pictures of incidents and of men and women that will remind
+him of Bible scenes and characters. These are to be cut out, explained,
+and arranged in the order of time, as they happened, every member of the
+family helping. The same plan may be applied to scenes of missionary
+work, using blank books for stories of heroism which children will
+illustrate with the magazine pictures.
+
+5. _Home thoughts._--"Home, sweet home," is just a corner of the
+afternoon saved for the discovery and reading of selections that are
+worth keeping in our memories and are also likely to help us hold our
+homes in some measure of the love and reverence they deserve. There are
+songs of home that ought never to be forgotten.
+
+6. _Religious reading and songs close the day happily._--Children love
+religious reading and songs, provided they are offered for their worth
+and not as an exercise, or to be learned as an empty duty. Take down
+your Bible and read Psalm 100, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all
+ye lands"; see whether they do not all enjoy the music and majesty of
+those lines. You will not find it difficult to secure their co-operation
+in learning that by heart.
+
+Then close the day with an hour of song. The children will remember
+songs learned thus all their lives; therefore those worth remembering
+should be chosen. For one, there is that dear old song many of us
+learned at mother's knee, "Jesus loves me, this I know." That and others
+that are appropriate can be found in almost every hymnbook. Many books
+of school songs also have a few hymns and Sunday songs that children
+like.
+
+Parents are puzzled, perhaps most of all, to choose appropriate stories
+to read to the children on Sunday. Youngsters prefer, of course, the
+told story to the read one, but if you wish to read you will make no
+mistake in selecting _Christie's Old Organ_; _Aunt Abbey's Neighbors_,
+by Annie T. Slosson; _The Book of Golden Deeds_, by Charlotte M. Yonge;
+and _Telling Bible Stories_, by Louise S. Houghton. _Some Great Stories
+and How to Tell Them_, by Richard Wyche, and _Story Telling_, by Edna
+Lyman, will serve as good guides to what to tell, and how to tell it.
+
+7. _Naming the day._--From week to week variety should enter into the
+Sunday program. On the Sunday following the one described above we can
+begin at the dinner table the happy task of "naming the day." We can
+decide whether it shall be called after one of our own number, whose
+birthday falls near this date, or after one of the anniversaries of the
+week following.
+
+Perhaps someone suggests calling it after the feast day of the church
+year observed by certain churches. That should lead to discussion and
+investigation of the meaning of the day.
+
+When all are agreed on a name, write it under its date on your wall
+calendar. It will be a convenient suggestion for next year, unless the
+decision is for a different name when the day again comes round. It will
+also call to mind some of the interesting discussions which it aroused.
+
+After this we might call for _The Family Book_, which now contains, you
+will recall, the family's decision as to the best Sunday and the
+happiest occurrences of the year before. The keeper, appointed last
+week, must bring it out. We can read what we wrote a week ago and decide
+on the things worth entering this week. Records of birthdays, special
+happenings to each of the family, the bright sayings of little ones, and
+the visits of friends and relatives all should go in.
+
+8. _"I remember" stories._--While _The Family Book_ is open is the
+psychological moment for father and mother to tell stories of their
+childhood. Every child likes to hear the story that begins, "I
+remember," and feels a thrill of pride in belonging to something that
+goes back and has a history. The old family album is a never-failing
+source of delight, not so much because of the pictures as because of
+what they suggest of family traditions.
+
+Now is a good time to select some certain thing which shall be used only
+on this day, such as a festival lamp or candlestick, some festival
+plates or dishes--just one thing or set of things toward the use of
+which we can look forward during the week. This helps to make Sunday
+what we used to call "a treat."
+
+9. _Golden deeds._--Last week we started _The Family Book_ in which to
+keep a record of all the happy experiences that belong to our family.
+This week we begin another book. In it we expect to place every week
+just one splendid story, the account of a golden deed, some piece of
+everyday kindness or heroism of which we have read or heard or which we
+have witnessed. Everyone is to have a chance to contribute to this book,
+all the family deciding by vote each week as to which story should be
+placed on its pages.
+
+Did you read in the paper this week of some brave or kindly deed done by
+a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? Did you see someone do an act of
+kindness? Cut out the account or write out the story and have it ready
+for your own _Golden Deed Book_. Everyone must watch all the week for
+the right kind of stories. It is wonderful how much good you will find
+in the world when you are looking for it.
+
+Sunday afternoons all the family can hear each story and talk over its
+fine points of virtue and goodness. Thus may be developed an
+appreciation of the human qualities that are really admirable. We can
+discuss also the probability of certain of the stories and the
+righteousness of the deeds.
+
+Any blank book will do, or even a composition book. It will help to keep
+hands happily occupied if you make your own covers and cut out gilt
+letters for the title. Often you can find pictures to illustrate the
+stories chosen; sometimes you may prefer to draw the illustrations. Keep
+_The Golden Deed Book_ in a safe and convenient place, because there
+ought to be something to go into it every week. For instance, did you
+read the other day of the young man who jumped in front of a train to
+save a young girl? He lost his life, but he saved hers. Can you find
+that story and put it in the book? Perhaps you have found one that seems
+even more fitting.
+
+10. _Various plans._--Giving happiness creates it. Plan something every
+Sunday for the happiness of others. Occasionally go in a body to call on
+someone who will be made happy by the visit.
+
+If you walk in the park or elsewhere, see how many things you can
+discover that you have read about in the Bible or know to be mentioned
+there.
+
+Try the game of "guessing hymns." While someone plays the familiar
+tunes, each takes a turn at identifying them and the hymns to which they
+belong.
+
+Set aside twenty minutes for each one to write a letter to send to the
+brother or sister, relative or friend, at a distance. Even the baby can
+scratch something which he thinks is a "real enough" letter in penciled
+scribbles.
+
+Close the day with quiet reading and song, or with the memory exercise
+in which all endeavor to repeat some simple psalm or a few verses, like
+the Beatitudes. All children like to repeat the Lord's Prayer in family
+concert.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Emilie Poulsson, _Love and Law in Child Training_, chaps. i-iv.
+     Milton Bradley, $1.00.
+
+     _Happy Sundays for Children_ and _Sunday in the Home_. Pamphlets.
+     American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     _Sunday Play._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life,
+     Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. xiii. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Methods and Materials
+
+     _A Year of Good Sundays._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
+     Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     IV. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What is the real problem of Sunday in the family? Is it that of
+     securing quiet or of wisely directing the action of the young?
+
+     2. Recall your childhood's Sundays. Were they for good or ill?
+
+     3. What are the arguments against children playing on Sunday? Is
+     there any essential relation between the play of children and the
+     wide-open Sunday of commercialized amusements?
+
+     4. Can you describe forms of play in which practically all the
+     family might unite?
+
+     5. What characteristics should distinguish play on Sundays from
+     other days? Is it wise to attempt thus to distinguish this day?
+
+     6. Criticize the suggestions on occupations for Sunday afternoons.
+
+     7. Recall any especially helpful forms of the use of this day in
+     your childhood, or coming under your observation.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[31] See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church."
+
+[32] See chap. vii on "Directed Activity," and the references for study
+at its end.
+
+[33] Much may be learned by a study of Primary plans in a modern Sunday
+school. See Athearn, _The Church School_, chap. vi.
+
+[34] Since we are dealing here especially with religious education in
+the family, the author refers to his more extended treatment of the
+question of children in church services in _Efficiency in the Sunday
+School_, chap. xv.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE MINISTRY OF THE TABLE
+
+
+Shall the periods for meals be for the body only or shall we see in them
+happy occasions for the enriching of the higher life? Upon the answer
+depends whether the table shall be little more than a feeding-trough or
+the scene of constant mental and character development. In some memories
+the meals stand out only in terms of food, while pictures of dishes and
+fragments of food fill the mind; in others there are borne through all
+life pictures of happy faces and thoughts of cheer, of knowledge gained
+and ideals created in the glow of conversation.
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE OPPORTUNITY
+
+The family is together as a united group at the table more than anywhere
+besides. Table-talk, by its informality and by the aid of the pleasures
+of social eating, is one of the most influential means of education.
+Depend upon it, children are more impressed by table-talk than by
+teacher-talk or by pulpit-talk. They expect moralizing on the other
+occasions, but here the moral lessons throw out no warning; they meet no
+opposition; they are--or ought to be, if they would be effective--a
+natural part of ordinary conversation and, by being part and parcel of
+everyday affairs, they become normally related to life. The table is the
+best opportunity for informal, indirect teaching, and this is for
+children the natural and only really effective form of moral
+instruction.
+
+The child comes to these social occasions with a hungry mind as well as
+with an empty stomach. His mind is always receptive--even more so than
+his stomach; at the table he is absorbing that which will stay with him
+much longer than his food. Even if we were thinking of his food alone,
+we should still do well to see that the table is graced by happy and
+helpful conversation; nothing will aid digestion more than good cheer of
+the spirit; it stimulates the organs and, by diverting attention from
+the mere mechanics of eating, it tends to that most desirable end, a
+leisurely consumption of food.
+
+The general conversation of the family group has more to do with
+character development in children than we are likely to realize, and the
+table is peculiarly the opportunity for general conversation. Here, most
+of all, we need to watch its character and consider its teaching
+effects. Where father scolds or mother complains the children grow
+fretful and quarrelsome. Where father spends the time in reciting the
+sharp dealing of the market or the political ring, where mother
+delights in dilating on the tinsel splendors of her social rivalries,
+they teach the children that life's object is either gain at any cost or
+social glory. But it is just as easy to do precisely the opposite, to
+speak of the pleasures found in simpler ways, to glory in goodness and
+kindness, and to teach, by relating the worthy things of the day, the
+worth of love and truth and high ideals. The news of the day may be
+discussed so as to make this world a game of grab, inviting youth to
+cast conscience and honor to the winds and to plunge into the greedy
+struggle, or so as to make each day a book of beautiful pictures of
+life's best pleasures and enduring prizes.
+
+
+Sec. 2. DIRECTING TABLE-TALK
+
+But table-talk, helpful, cheerful, and educative, does not occur by
+accident. It comes, first, from our own constant and habitual thought of
+the meals in social and spiritual, as well as in physical, terms. And it
+reaches its possibilities as we endeavor to create and direct the kind
+of conversation that is desired. "Let all your speech be seasoned with
+salt," wrote the apostle, and we might add, let your salt be seasoned
+with good speech. That is the quality we must seek, the seasoning of
+healthful, saving, and not insipid, speech.
+
+One of the great advantages of "grace before meat" lies in this: it
+gives a tone to the occasion. Its chief meaning is surely that we
+remind ourselves of the ever-present guest who is also the giver of all
+good. Where the grace is not a perfunctory act, but rather the welcoming
+of such a guest, the meal has started on a high level. We cannot do
+better than so to act and speak as those who take the divine presence
+for granted. We need not preach about it; we need only to assume it and
+move on the level of that friendship. Children will feel it; they will
+seek to answer to it, and will find pleasure in the very thought which
+they have perhaps never expressed in words.
+
+The central idea of the grace suggests another means of helpful
+influences at the table, by bringing into our homes, for the meals, the
+friends whose lives will lift these younger ones. It is worth everything
+to live even for an hour with good and broadening lives. There are
+obligations to our guests to be considered, and their wishes should be
+consulted, but one always feels that children are being cheated when
+they are sent to eat at another table and deprived of the peculiar
+intimate touch with lives that bring the benefits of travel and
+experience. Ask your own memory what some persons who ate at the table
+with you in childhood meant to you.
+
+The wise hostess knows that even when she brings together the group of
+mature folks, and even when they are wise and witty, she must be
+prepared adroitly to inspire the conversation or it may flag at times.
+How much more does the conversation need direction where we have the
+same group every day composed largely of immature persons! When you have
+thought of all the portions and all the plates, have you thought of the
+food for the spirit?
+
+Before suggesting methods of selection and direction, let a word of
+explanation be said: food for the spirit is not confined to theology, to
+hymns and the Bible; it is whatever will help us to feel and think of
+life as an affair of the spirit. And this must come in very simple
+terms, by the elementary steps, for young folks. It will be whatever
+will in any way help us to live more kindly, more cheerfully, more as
+though this really were God's world and all folks his family. Whatever
+does this is truly religious.
+
+
+Sec. 3. METHODS
+
+Plan for the food of the spirit as seriously at least as for the food of
+the body. Learn to recognize poisons and also indigestibles. The first
+are subjects of scandal, bitterness of spirit, malice, impatience,
+tale-bearing, unkindly criticism, and discontent. The second are
+subjects too heavy for children: your formal theology would be one of
+them, your judgments on some intricate subjects may be among them. It is
+seldom wise to announce negative injunctions, but we can make up our
+own minds to avoid the conversational poisons and, when they appear, it
+is always easy to push them out. Even when the unpleasant subject is so
+common to all and has been so impressive in the day's experience that it
+threatens to become the sole, absorbing topic, we can say, "We won't
+talk of it at table! Let's find something better." But we must then have
+ready the something better; that will be possible only by forethought.
+
+First, save up during the day, or between the meals, the best thoughts,
+the cheering, kind, ideal, and amusing incidents. Cultivate the habit of
+saying to yourself, "This is something for us all to enjoy tonight at
+the table."
+
+Secondly, expect the other members to bring their best. Ask for "the
+best news of the day" from one and another. Encourage them to tell of
+good things seen and done and of pleasant and ideal things heard and
+spoken.
+
+Thirdly, use the incidents as the basis of discussion. Let children tell
+what they think of moral situations. Often they will quote the opinions
+of teachers and others. Always you will secure under these circumstances
+the unreserved expression of what they actually think. A free, informal
+conversation of this sort where opinions are kindly examined and
+compared is the finest kind of teaching.
+
+Fourthly, do not forget the grace of humor. To see the odd, whimsical,
+startling side of the incident or experience trains one to see the
+interplay of life, to catch a ray of light from all things, and to
+moderate our tendency to permit our tragedies to pull the heavens down.
+
+Fifthly, use this period to strengthen the consciousness of family unity
+by recounting past happy experiences and discussing plans of family
+life. In one family there are few meals from October to Christmas that
+do not include reminiscences of the summer in the woods and by the
+water, or from Christmas to June without plans for the next summer in
+the same place. Then, too, if you are contemplating something new, a
+piano, a chair, an automobile, talk it all over here. Let each one have
+his share in the planning. The effect is most important for character;
+the children acquire the sense of a share in the family community life.
+They get their first lessons in citizenship in this group, and they thus
+learn social living. Then when the chair, or what not, is bought, it is
+not alone the parents' possession; it belongs to all and all treat it as
+the property of all.
+
+Sixthly, introduce great guests who cannot come in person. It is fine
+fun to say, "We have with us tonight a man who loved bees and wrote
+books." Let them guess who it was; help, if necessary, by an allusion
+to _The Life of the Bee_ and _The Blue Bird_. They will want to know
+more about Maeterlinck and they will joyously imagine what they would
+say to him and how he would answer, what he would eat and how he would
+behave. In this way we may enjoy knowing better Lincoln, Whittier,
+Florence Nightingale, and an innumerable company.
+
+Seventhly, this is the place to remind ourselves that table-manners are
+no small part of the moral life. By the habituation of custom we can
+establish lives in attitudes of everyday thoughtfulness for others, in
+the underlying consideration of others which is the basis of all
+courtesy. Children's questions on table-etiquette must be met, not only
+by the formal rules, but also by their explanation in the intent of
+every gentle life to give pleasure and not pain to others, so to live in
+all things as to find helpful harmony with other lives and to help them
+to find and be the best. It is not only impolite to grab and guzzle, it
+is unsocial and so unmoral, because it is both a bad example and a
+distressing sight to others. It is irreligious, because whatever tends
+to make this life less beautiful must be offensive to the God who made
+all things good.
+
+If we ourselves seek to maintain beauty, order, and kindliness in the
+conduct of the table, our children acquire a love of all that makes for
+beauty and order and kindliness, for righteousness in the little things
+of life. A clean tablecloth may be a means of grace. You have to try to
+live up to it. Order and quietness in eating are not separable from the
+rest of the life. To lift up life at any point is to raise the whole
+level. To let it down at any point is to let all down. But to lift up
+the level of conversation at the table is to raise the level of the
+entire occasion and to make it more than a period of eating, to convert
+it into a festival, a joyous occasion of the spirit. The meal should be
+in all things worthy of the unseen guest.
+
+How near we all come together at the table! In its freedom how clearly
+are we seen by our children! Here they know us for what we are and so
+learn to interpret life.
+
+
+     I. Reference for Study
+
+     _Table Talk._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life,
+     Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+
+     II. Topics Tor Discussion
+
+     1. The relation of mental conditions to digestion.
+
+     2. The relation of table-etiquette to life-habits.
+
+     3. The table as an opportunity for the grace of courtesy, and the
+     relation of this grace to Christian character.
+
+     4. Training children in listening as well as in talking at table.
+
+     5. Do you regard table-talk and table-manners as having any
+     directly religious values? Why?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE BOY AND GIRL IN THE FAMILY
+
+
+Much that has been said so far has had in mind only the problems of
+dealing with younger children in the life of the home. Indeed, almost
+all literature on education in the family is devoted to the years prior
+to adolescence. But older boys and girls need the family and the family
+needs them. Many of the more serious problems of youth with which
+society is attempting to deal are due to the fact that from the age of
+thirteen on boys have no home life and girls, especially in the cities,
+are deprived of the home influences.
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE GROWING BOY
+
+The life of the family must have a place for the growing boy. It must
+make provision for his physical needs; these are food, activity, rest,
+and shelter. Youth is a period of physical crisis. Health is the basis
+of a sound moral life. Many of the lad's apparently strange propensities
+are due to the physical changes taking place in his body and, often, to
+the fact that it is assumed that his rugged frame needs no care or
+attention.[35]
+
+It will take more than tearful pleading to hold him to his home; he can
+be held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most
+attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering
+boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded
+quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makeshift bed, and
+the general home organization which long ago assumed that a boy could be
+left out of the reckoning.
+
+The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to
+that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree
+that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him
+about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a
+chance to do part of the work, not only its "chores," but also its forms
+of service. But even a boy's attitude to the "chores" will depend on
+whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of
+unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be
+responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does
+regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services
+which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his
+training for the larger citizenship and society of service.[36]
+
+The boy is a playing animal. Not all homes can be fully equipped with
+play apparatus. But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as
+though children needed nothing but meals and beds. The shame of the
+modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for passive
+adults. To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human
+creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are
+shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to
+force him out to the life of the streets. The thoughtless
+self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical
+effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.[37]
+
+But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the grass and
+among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation. For
+the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary,
+and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or
+pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off
+the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof. If
+possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his
+friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of
+home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.[38]
+
+A workbench in the attic or basement has saved many a boy from the
+street. Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a
+home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but
+families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the
+home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the
+purpose of a salon.[39]
+
+
+Sec. 2. RELIGIOUS SERVICE
+
+In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to
+one form of participation in the religious life. Whatever the family
+gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the
+support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of
+one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending
+itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world. The
+form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family
+conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the
+means of determining his share in such extension. The child's gifts to
+the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the
+threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own
+account--partly his own direct earnings--appropriated for this or for
+other purposes by himself and with the advice of his parents. Family
+councils on forms of participation in ideal activities, by gifts and by
+service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the
+child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.[40]
+
+The boy needs friendship. Not all his needs can be met by the schoolboys
+whom he may bring into his room, nor can they all be met by his mother's
+affection. He needs a father. The most serious obstacle to the religious
+education of boys is that most of them are half-orphans; intellectually
+and spiritually they have no fathers. The American ideal seems to be
+that the man shall be the money-maker, the woman the social organizer,
+and the children shall be committed to hired shepherds or left to shift
+for themselves.
+
+
+Sec. 3. THE FATHER AND THE BOY
+
+No one else can be quite the teacher for the boy that his father ought
+to be. No man can ever commit to another, still less to some tract or
+book, the duty of guiding his boy to sanity and consecration in the
+matter of the sex problems.
+
+The first word that needs to be said on this subject is that such
+problems receive safe and sufficient guidance only in the atmosphere of
+affection and reverence. Do not attempt to teach this boy of yours as
+though you were dealing with a class in physiology. The largest thing
+you can do for him is to quicken a reverence for the body and for the
+functions of life. By your own attitude, by your own expressions and
+opinions, lead him to a hatred and abhorrence of the base, filthy, and
+bestial, to a healthy fear and detestation of all that despoils and
+degrades manhood, and to a reverence for purity, beauty, and life.[41]
+
+Be prepared to give him, on the basis of reverence, the clean, clear
+facts. Be sure you have the facts. Do not think he is ignorant; he is in
+a world seething with conversation, stories, pictures, and experiences
+of evil. The trouble is that his facts are partial, distorted, and
+unbalanced by positive errors; his knowledge is gained from the street
+and the school-yard. Only a personal teacher can help him unravel the
+good from the bad, the true from the false. Do not trust to your own
+general knowledge; take time to read one of the simple and sane books on
+this subject.[42] Be ready to lead him aright. Remember this subject has
+provoked a large number of books, many of which are foolish and others
+unwholesome. Do not try to deputize your duty to some doubtful book.
+
+
+Sec. 4. FATHERING THE BOY
+
+But the boy needs more than instruction on a special subject; he needs
+personality, he needs the time and thought of, and _personal contact_
+with, his father. Men who do not live with boys never know what they
+lose. And alas, see what the boy misses! He has been his mother's boy up
+to school age when school takes him and gives him a woman's guidance,
+while the Sunday school is likely to keep him--for a while only--under
+the eye of some dear sister who "just loves boys." The system is a
+vicious one. The lad needs developed masculinity. If he gets it neither
+in school nor in the home he will find it on the street corner, through
+the vicious boy-leader of the degrading poolroom or the alleys.
+
+The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the
+merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as
+simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious
+questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with
+the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering
+your young men if you lost your boys.[43]
+
+
+Sec. 5. THE GROWING GIRL
+
+Almost all that has been said about the boy applies to the girl of the
+same years. Let _a special plea_ be entered here against the notion that
+girls are favored when sheltered from a share in the activities of the
+home. They desire to express their ideals as much as do boys. Much of
+the so-called craze for amusements is due to the fact that the family is
+so organized that there is no vent to the ideals there, no chance to
+have a share in the business of life. Young folks with the sense that
+"this is our home," not "our parents', but _ours_" bend their energies
+to its adorning, and find in it the chance to realize some of their
+passion for beauty and for service.[44]
+
+Mothers usually do better than do fathers in the matter of sex
+instruction. Yet they usually begin too late, long after the little girl
+has acquired much misleading information in the school. Here, too, the
+first aim must be to quicken reverence for life, to set up the
+conception of the beauty and dignity of sex functions before the baser
+mind of the street has had an opportunity to interpret them in terms of
+the dirt.[45]
+
+Above all, with boys and girls, the whole subject, including marriage
+and the founding of a family, must ever be treated with dignity and
+reverence. Foolish parents jest with their girls about their beaux and
+boast that their little ones are playing at courtship. If they could
+realize the wonder awakened, followed by pain and then by hardened
+sensibilities and coarsened ideals, they would sacrifice their jests for
+the sake of the child's soul. We wonder that youth treats lightly the
+matter of social purity when we have treated the sacred relations of
+life as a jest. If this family in which they now live is to be a place
+of sacred associations, of real religious life, the whole matter of
+marriage and the family must be treated with reverence. Their practice
+will not rise above our everyday ideals as expressed in casual
+conversation and in our own practice.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     THE BOY
+
+     W.A. McKeever, _Training the Boy_, Part III. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     _Boy Training_, Part IV. A Symposium. Associated Press.
+
+     Johnson, _The Problems of Boyhood_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     THE GIRL
+
+     Margaret Slattery, _The Girl in Her Teens_, chaps. iv, vii. Sunday
+     School Times Co., $0.50.
+
+     Wayne, _Building Your Girl_. McClurg, $0.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation_. Appleton, $1.50.
+
+     Puffer, _The Boy and His Gang_. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.
+
+     Irving King, _The High School Age_. Bobbs-Merrill, $1.00.
+
+     _Building Childhood_, A Symposium. Sunday School Times Co., $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special needs of the growing boy?
+
+     2. What are the things that a boy enjoys in his home?
+
+     3. In what way does city life interfere with the natural
+     development of the child?
+
+     4. What are some of the natural expressions of religion for a boy?
+
+     5. How early should the sex instruction begin?
+
+     6. What does a father owe to the boy, and what are the best methods
+     of meeting the duty?
+
+     7. What are the normal activities for girls in the home?
+
+     8. What are their especial needs?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[35] A good brief book on the problem of the adolescent is E.T. Swift,
+_Youth and the Race_; another, from the school point of view, is Irving
+King, _The High-School Age_, which has much material of great value to
+parents.
+
+[36] On the various activities of boys see W.A. McKeever, _Training the
+Boy_.
+
+[37] See the notable report by Breckinridge and Abbott, _The Delinquent
+Child and the Home_.
+
+[38] On the gregarious instincts see J.A. Puffer, _The Boy and His
+Gang_.
+
+[39] See the books on manual work given in chap. vii, "Directed
+Activity."
+
+[40] On the religious life of the boy in relation to society and the
+church see Allan Hoben, _The Minister and the Boy_, and the author's
+treatment of boys and the Sunday school in _Efficiency in the Sunday
+School_, chap. xiv; also J. Alexander _et al._, _Training the Boy_, a
+symposium.
+
+[41] On the attitude of reverence in this question read Dr. Cabot's fine
+essay, _The Christian Approach to Social Morality_.
+
+[42] The works of Dr. W.S. Hall, _From Boyhood to Manhood_, for parents'
+guidance with boys of thirteen to eighteen; E. Lyttleton, _Training of
+the Young in Laws of Sex_, is excellent for fathers; _Reproduction and
+Sexual Hygiene_ is a text for older youth to be recommended; also, for
+reading, N.E. Richardson, _Sex Culture Talks_, D.S. Jordan, _The
+Strength of Being Clean_.
+
+[43] For further studies of the problem of the boy parents would do well
+to read: _Building Boyhood_, a symposium; W.A. McKeever, _Training the
+Boy;_ W.B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation;_ W.D. Hyde, _The Quest of
+the Best_.
+
+[44] On activities see W.A. McKeever, _Training the Girl_.
+
+[45] On the problem with young children see M. Morley, _The Renewal of
+Life_; in connection with older girls see K.H. Wayne, _Building Your
+Girl_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE NEEDS OF YOUTH
+
+
+Families are for the spiritual development of youth as well as of
+childhood. The home is for the young people as well as for the younger
+ones. But the very period when they slip from church school is also the
+period when they are often lost to the real life of the family. In some
+measure this is due to the natural development of the social life. The
+youths go out to work, move forward into enlarging social groups which
+demand more of their free time. They are learning the life of the larger
+world of which they are now a part.
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE SCHOOL OF YOUTH
+
+But the family is still the home of these young people; normally it is
+still the most vital educational influence for them. Yet there is no
+problem more baffling than that of family ministry for, and leadership
+of, the higher life of youth.
+
+It is a short-measure interpretation of the home which thinks of it as
+only for young children and old folks. The young men and women from
+sixteen to twenty and over still need training and direction; they need
+close touch with other lives in affection and in an ideal atmosphere. In
+a few years they, too, will be home-makers, and here in the home they
+are very directly learning the art of family life.
+
+For youth there are few effective schools, outside the home, other than
+the streets and the places of commercialized amusement. Even where the
+other agencies of training are used, such as college, classes, and
+associations (such as the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A.), life, at that
+period, needs the restraints on selfishness that come from family life,
+the refining and socializing power of the family group.
+
+
+Sec. 2. SPECIAL NEEDS OF YOUTH
+
+What are the special needs of youth upon which the family may base a
+reasonable program for their higher needs?
+
+First, the need of sound physical health. This is a period of physical
+adjustment. Rapid bodily growth is nearly or quite at an end; new
+functions are asserting themselves. The new demands for directed
+activity may, under the ambitious impulses of youth, make undue drafts
+on the energies. The apparent moodiness that at times characterizes this
+period may be due to poor health. The moral strain of the period will
+need sound muscles and good health. Parents who would sit up all
+night--perhaps involuntarily--when the baby has the colic treat with
+indifference sickness in youth and too readily assume that the young
+man or the young woman will outgrow these physical ills. But bodily
+maladjustment or incapacity has most serious character effects. To live
+the right life and render high service one needs to be a whole person,
+with opportunity to give undivided attention and undiminished powers to
+the struggle of life.
+
+Secondly, this is peculiarly the period of the joy of friendships. The
+social nature must have its food. This young man has discovered that the
+world consists of something besides things; it is full of people. He is
+just learning that they are all persons like himself. He enters the era
+of conscious personal relationships. He would explore the realm of
+personality. He touches great heights of happiness as other lives are
+opened to him. It is all new and wonderful, this realm of personality,
+with its aspects of feeling, thinking, willing, and longing.
+
+
+Sec. 3. MAINTAINING FRIENDSHIP WITH YOUTH
+
+Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their
+friendship? They will never tell us, for this world is too new and
+strange for facile description; they are always bashful about their
+hunger for persons until they find the same hunger and joy in us. We
+imagine that they are indifferent to us; the trouble is we are hidden
+from them. We seldom give them a chance to talk as friend to friend,
+not about trifling things, but about life itself and what it means.
+Perhaps at no point do parents exhibit less ability for sympathetic
+reconstruction and interpretation of their own lives than here. They
+recall the pleasures of childhood and provide those pleasures for the
+children. Why not recall the hunger of eighteen years of age and give
+these youths the very bread of our own inner selves? Or do we, when they
+ask this bread, give them the stone of mere provision for their physical
+needs or the scorpion of careless indulgence in things that debase the
+tastes?
+
+One perplexing phenomenon must not be overlooked: it will often happen
+that young people pass through a period of what appears to be parental
+aversion. There will sometimes seem to be suspicion, violent opposition,
+and even hatred of parents. This is no occasion for despair. It is a
+stage of development. It is due to the attempt of a will now realizing
+its freedom under social conditions to adapt itself to the will that has
+hitherto directed it. To some degree the sex consciousness, which leads
+to viewing the parents in a new light, may enter in. It may be easily
+made permanent, however, if parents do not do two things: first, adjust
+themselves and their methods to the new social freedom of the youth,
+and, secondly, fling open the doors into their true selves now fully
+understandable by these men and women.
+
+But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of
+youth. Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will
+feed. Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere. If
+they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere. You can
+scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they
+are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when
+home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth. If you
+are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but
+you will lose a life or lives. Here is the opportunity of the home to
+enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many
+lives.
+
+
+Sec. 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD
+
+As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful
+realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than
+others. Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel
+him to make a selection. The same law is operative with the young woman.
+Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities;
+it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther. But father
+and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as
+they see their children taking their first evident steps toward
+home-making. What an opportunity is theirs!
+
+Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just
+where some of the most serious mistakes are made. This is no time for
+teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule. If you treat this
+essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young
+people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke. The home is
+the place where the home is treated most irreverently. Of course one
+must not take too seriously those "calf" courtships, prematurely
+fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school
+tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here
+jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what
+would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or
+kindly, simple advice will help most of all.
+
+To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when
+they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth's
+idealism, make high vows and stand on high places. Give them at least
+the opportunity to enter your inmost self, to find there all the light
+you can give them and all the memory of your own joys and hopes. Make
+them feel, though you need not say it, that they are at the threshold of
+a temple. If to you this is an affair of the spirit it will be a matter
+of religion to them.
+
+Approached in such a temper, many of the practical problems of courtship
+settle themselves. Take the case of the young man at home. If he knows
+that you think with him of the high meaning of this experience he will
+not hesitate to bring the young woman to the home. She will feel your
+attitude. Upon this level questions of times and seasons, hours in the
+parlor, and all the matters of their relations will settle themselves.
+If you treat courtship as a matter of the spirit he will do just what he
+most of all wants to do, treat this woman who is to be his mate as a
+person, a spirit, with reverence and love that lifts itself above lust.
+This is the only ground upon which you can appeal to either in matters
+of conduct at this time. The conventions of society they will despise;
+but the inner law speaks to them when the outer letter has no meaning.
+
+
+Sec. 5. THE SOCIAL LIFE
+
+We must expect our children to go out into their larger world. The
+beginning of adolescence is the normal time of their social awakening,
+their conversion from a nature that turns in upon itself to one that
+moves out into a world of persons. For them, now, the home group ought
+to be seen as a society as well as a family, as the social group
+gathering about a definite ideal and mission into which they should
+delight to project themselves. The appeal of religion is peculiarly
+vivid just now, for it involves a recognition of one's self as a person
+with the power of personal choices and with the opportunity to find
+association with other persons. The family must aid its young people to
+see the opportunity which the church offers for ideal social
+relationships which direct themselves to high and attractive service.
+
+
+Sec. 6. AMUSEMENTS
+
+What should the family do about the question of the amusements of young
+people?
+
+Healthy young persons must have recreation. They will seek it on its
+highest level first and find their way down the facile descent of
+commercialized amusements only as the higher opportunities are denied
+them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would
+rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than
+sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the
+idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this
+need the home must minister by the provision of space, time,
+opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth,
+selfishness, preoccupation, or a mistaken idea of an empty innocence of
+life you make recreation and social intercourse impossible in the
+family, the young people will find it on the street or in the crowd. In
+the family that plans for recreation and provides facilities and time
+for young people to play the problem is a minor one.
+
+But young people will naturally desire to project themselves into the
+social amusements of the larger groups. Then we ought to know what those
+amusements are; we must be able to advise, from actual knowledge, not
+from hearsay or prejudice, as to the healthful and worth while. The home
+must insist on the provision in the community for the safe socialization
+of amusements. The thousands of young girls in the cities, who tramp the
+pavements down to dance halls, primarily are only seeking the
+satisfaction of a normal craving; and they, on their way to the dance
+halls, pass the splendid plants of the schools and the churches,
+standing dark and idle. Families must develop a public opinion that will
+demand, for the sake of their young people, a provision for amusement
+and recreation that, instead of poisoning the life, shall strengthen,
+dignify, and elevate it. If the demand for clean drinking-water is a
+proper one, is the demand for healthful food for the life of ideals less
+so?
+
+There can be no doubt of the attitude of any home with the least
+conscience for character toward all forms of public amusements in which
+young people are herded promiscuously for the mere purpose of killing
+time in trivialities. The "white cities" with their glittering lights
+and baubles are often moral plague colonies. The amusements debase the
+intellect, blunt the moral sensibilities, and appeal to the baser
+passions. They are the low-water mark, we may hope, of commercialized
+amusement. But they remind us that young people demand company and
+change from the monotony of the day's toil. They ask us as to the
+provision we are making for young people and challenge us to use their
+inclinations for good.
+
+But besides these "shows" there are many dignified forms of social
+recreation. Good music is to be heard and good plays are to be seen.
+
+The theater, whether of the regular drama or of the motion-picture type,
+offers a perplexing problem, principally because, in the first place,
+American people have been too busy conquering a new soil and making a
+living to give careful thought to the social side of aesthetics and
+recreation, and, secondly, because the ministry of social recreation has
+fallen almost entirely under the dominance of the same trend; it has
+been thoroughly commercialized. We cannot cut the puzzling knot by
+simply prohibiting all forms of public theatrical entertainment. For one
+reason, these forms shade off imperceptibly from the church service to
+the extremes of the vaudeville. But the simple fact is that we no longer
+indiscriminately class all theaters as baneful and immoral; we are
+coming to see their potentialities for good. If the young will go, as
+they will--and ought--to the theater, and if the theater can lift their
+ideals, parents would do well to guide their children in this matter and
+to enlist the aid of the theater.
+
+It is worth while to come to a sympathetic understanding of the place of
+the drama and the opera, to see what they have meant in the education of
+the race and what is the significance, to us, of the fact of the strong
+dramatic instinct in childhood. Naturally the subject can only be
+mentioned here and the suggestion be offered that parents take time to
+cultivate an appreciation of good orchestral and concert music and of
+the drama.
+
+The social life will find outlet in other directions. Young people need
+our aid to find social groups which will inspire and develop them,
+especially groups that are serviceful.
+
+
+Sec. 7. THE CALL TO SERVICE
+
+This is the period when ideals begin to give direction to the hitherto
+undirected activity of childhood and youth. Young people are idealists.
+They see no height too giddy, no task too hard, no dream too roseate,
+and no hope unattainable. If the times are out of joint they believe
+they were "born to set them right." Whatever is wrong or imperfect they
+would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we
+are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so
+the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth.
+Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blase view of the
+world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead
+of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those
+ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the
+songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your
+Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's passion and let it
+breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and
+conversation the life of ideals.
+
+Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is
+surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the
+period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in
+the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do
+something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We
+know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of
+others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and
+active minds--not with sleepy fatalism--believe in their boys, have boys
+who believe in them.
+
+They wait for leadership. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of
+indifference to social reform and other types of ideal service, get
+back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.
+
+They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their
+service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.
+
+They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It
+will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be
+merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life
+in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of
+the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange
+from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else
+goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to
+today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to
+give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to
+make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious
+person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find
+the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God's world.
+The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are
+interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his
+high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to
+you--as you have been doing all along--by your daily attitude; you will
+have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly
+discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the
+life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to
+realize the God-vision of the world.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.C. King, _Personal and Ideal Elements in Education_, pp. 105-27.
+     Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     E.D. Starbuck, _The Psychology of Religion_, chaps., xvi-xxi.
+     Scribner, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     1. ON YOUTH
+
+     C.R. Brown, _The Young Man's Affairs_. Crowell, $1.00.
+
+     Wayne, _Building the Young Man_. McClurg, $0.50.
+
+     Swift, _Youth and the Race_. Scribner, $1.50.
+
+     Wilson, _Making the Most of Ourselves_. McClurg, $1.00.
+
+     2. ON RECREATIONS
+
+     L.C. Lillie, _The Story of Music and the Musicians_. Harper, $0.60.
+
+     Gustav Kobbe, _How to Appreciate Music_. Moffat, $1.50.
+
+     P. Chubb, _Festivals and Plays_. Harper, $2.00.
+
+     _Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of
+     Dramatic Plays_, monographs published by the American Institute of
+     Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     L.H. Gulick, _Popular Recreation and Public Morality_. American
+     Unitarian Association. Free.
+
+     M. Fowler, _Morality of Social Pleasures_. Longmans, $1.00.
+
+     Addams, _The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets_. Macmillan,
+     $1.25.
+
+     The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see
+     Herbert A. Jump, _The Religious Possibilities of the Motion
+     Picture_ (a pamphlet) and _Vaudeville and Moving Pictures_, a
+     report of an investigation in Portland, Ore. _Reed College Record,
+     No. 16._
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?
+
+     2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their
+     evenings? Why is this the case?
+
+     3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.
+
+     4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friendship of our
+     young people?
+
+     5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion
+     to parents?
+
+     6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of
+     courtship?
+
+     7. What are the special social needs of young people?
+
+     8. What is the religious significance of the period of social
+     awakening?
+
+     9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amusements?
+
+     10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?
+
+     11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?
+
+     12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE FAMILY AND THE CHURCH
+
+
+If the family is engaged in the development of religious character
+through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close
+relations with the other great social institution engaged in precisely
+the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of
+religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and
+the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained,
+these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.
+
+As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should
+be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home constitutes the
+first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives
+prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of
+social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives
+together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of
+life.
+
+
+Sec. 1. RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME
+
+Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an
+institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the
+developing relations of children to the church, would be largely solved
+if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these
+two institutions. The institutional difficulties occur because these
+relations appear to be competitive. Here is the family with its
+interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on
+the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time,
+interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture
+unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that
+money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it
+to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from
+the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of
+the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.
+
+But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The
+home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems
+of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the
+opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions. We carelessly
+think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be
+persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests
+of which are in a different sphere. We think of the church as an
+independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or
+shortcomings and to criticize it if it fails to meet our standards,
+just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to
+our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the
+homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.
+
+This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence
+independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and
+makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the
+church and the children. If the church is a thing apart we can analyze
+its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw
+recruits. It marches by while we stand on the curb. But here, surely, is
+one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms: the church is no
+more than our own selves associated for certain purposes. If the church
+fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we
+would a bridge that failed to carry a reasonable load? We do but condemn
+ourselves. If my church is not fit to send my children to, then I must
+help to make it fit. Before falling back on the lazy man's salve of
+caustic ridicule, before taking the seat of the scornful, before setting
+in the child's mind an aversion to this institution, based on my
+opinion, let me be sure I have done all that lies in my power to better
+it. True, I am only one; but surely, where so many family tables are
+each Sunday devoted to finding fault with the church and its services,
+I can find many others who will aid in at least stimulating a sense of
+personal responsibility for any incompleteness in the church.
+
+The family cannot afford to take the attitude of hostile criticism, for
+it is thus fighting its first and most natural ally, the one other
+institution engaged in its own special work. If the forces for spiritual
+character be divided, how easily do the opposing forces enter in and
+occupy! The family needs the support of the wider public opinion of the
+church, insisting on the supremacy of righteousness. The family needs
+the co-operation of the church in its task of developing religious
+lives. The family needs the power of this larger social body controlling
+social conditions and making them contributory to character purposes.
+The family needs the stimulus which a larger group can give to children
+and young people.
+
+This does not mean that we must never criticize the church. It is not
+set off in a niche protected from the acid of secular tongues and minds.
+Ministers of the gospel are unduly resentful of criticism, perhaps
+because, after they leave the seminary, no one has a fair opportunity to
+controvert their publicly stated opinions. But the church needs the
+cleansing powers of kindly, wise, creative criticism. Anyone can find
+fault, but he is wise who can show us a better way. This church is the
+family's ally; it is our business to aid her to greater effectiveness.
+The new church for our own day awaits the services of the men of today.
+
+The purpose of the family is the basis of alliance with the church. As
+in every other relation and purpose of the home, so here: the dominant
+factor is the conscious function of the home and family. If the home is
+really a religious institution it will seek natural alliance with all
+other truly religious institutions. Ideally, what is a church but a
+group of families associated for religious purposes? Is not the church
+simply a number of families co-operating in the ideal purposes of each
+family, the development of the lives of religious persons and the
+control of social conditions for the sake of that purpose? Without
+entering into disputation as to the relationship of little children to
+the church, is there not just this relation to the human society called
+the church, that it is a grouping of families for the purpose of the
+divine family?
+
+
+Sec. 2. THE FAMILY IDEAL IN THE CHURCH
+
+Would there be any question as to the naturalness of the relation of our
+children to the church if the family ideal so controlled our thinking as
+to saturate theirs? Is not this the present need, that both family and
+church shall conceive the latter in family terms? By this is meant, not
+simply that we shall think of what is called "a family church," a church
+into which we succeed in projecting our families in a fair degree of
+integrity, but that we shall think of the organization and mission of
+the church in terms of family life and of the ideal of the divine
+family. Keeping in mind the general definition already given of a family
+as persons associated for the development of spiritual persons, let us
+hold the church to that same ideal; the lives of persons associated in
+the broadest fellowship that includes both God and man for the purposes
+of spiritual personality. The church then should be the expression of
+that family of which Jesus often spoke, the family that calls God Father
+and man brother.
+
+Closer and more helpful relations between family and church follow where
+the principles of the family prevail in the latter. The family is an
+ideal democracy because it exists primarily for persons. It places the
+value of persons first of all. So with the true church; it will exist to
+grow lives to spiritual fulness, and to this end all buildings,
+adornments, exercises, teachings, and organizations will be but as
+tools, as means serving that purpose. As the family sees its house,
+table, and activities designed to personal ends, so will the church. In
+an institution existing to grow lives, the great principle of democracy
+and of the family will prevail, viz., that to the least we owe the most.
+Just as the home gives its best to the little child, so will the church
+place the child in the midst. Just as the home exists for the child and
+thus holds to itself all other lives, so will the church some day exist
+for the little ones and so hold and use all other lives.
+
+The prime difficulty of relating the children in our families to the
+average church lies in the fact that they are children, while the church
+is an adult institution. Its buildings are designed for adults--save in
+rare and happy exceptions;[46] its services are designed for adults; it
+has a more or less extraneous institution called a school for the
+children. The church spends its money for adults; it compasses sea and
+land to make one proselyte and coerce him back in old age, and allows
+the many that already as children are its own to drift away. It often
+fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the
+growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted
+from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving
+service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the
+development of such lives through childhood and youth. They must hear
+again the Master's voice regarding "these little ones," regarding the
+significance of the child. And all must be loyal to his picture of his
+Kingdom as a family and must, therefore, do what all true families do,
+become child-centric. A church in which children occupy the same place
+that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a
+place for the children. It will be a natural and unnoticed transition
+from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.
+
+
+Sec. 3. A PLACE FOR ALL IN THE CHURCH
+
+The family may help directly toward the realization of this ideal by an
+insistence on the family conception and the family program in the
+church. Bring the children with you to the church and seek to find there
+a place for each as natural as the place he occupies in the home. If the
+church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the
+name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let
+the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and
+specially designed worship for child-life--suitable forms of service and
+activity. Let the thought that goes to furnish these in the home be
+carried over to provide them in the church.
+
+Parents may help their children to find right relations with the church
+by their attitude toward it as the larger family group. To think and act
+toward this institution as our home, the wider home of the families, is
+to establish similar habits of thought in children. Such a concept is
+not always easy to maintain; the church includes many of different
+habits of thought from ourselves, divergent tastes and habits of general
+life. Here one must exercise the family principle of responsibility
+toward the weaker and immature. This family, the church, just like our
+own family, exists, not to minister to our tastes, but that we may all
+minister to others.
+
+The principal service which the family may render to the church is,
+then, to foster an interpretation and view of the latter which will
+relate it more closely to the home and will make it evidently natural
+for child-life to move out into this wider social organization for
+religious culture and service. Surely this should be the attitude toward
+membership in the church, whether that membership begins theoretically
+in infancy or in maturer years; the child is trained to see the church
+as his normal society, the group into which he naturally moves and in
+which he finds his opportunity for fellowship and service. The family
+may well hold that relationship steadily before its members. In
+childhood the child is in the church in the fellowship of those who
+learn. The Sunday school is the spiritual family in groups discovering
+the way of the religious life and the art of its service. The fellowship
+grows closer and the sense of unity deepens as the child's relationship
+passes over from the passive to the active, from the involuntary to the
+voluntary--just as it does in the home--and develops, as the child comes
+into social consciousness, into a recognition of himself as belonging to
+a social organization for specific purposes.
+
+
+Sec. 4. CHILD UNITY WITH THE CHURCH
+
+At some time every child of church-attending parents will want to know
+whether he "belongs to the church." One must be very careful here,
+regardless of the ecclesiastical practice, to show the child that he is
+essentially one with this body, this religious family. He may be too
+young to subscribe his name to its roll, but he belongs at least to the
+full measure of unity appreciable by his mind. He must not be permitted
+to think of himself as an outsider. Indeed, no matter what our theology
+may hold, every religious parent believes that his children belong to
+God. Do they not also belong to the church in at least the sense that
+the church is responsible for their spiritual welfare?
+
+The sense of unity must be developed. Writing the child's name on the
+"Cradle Roll" of the church school may help. Assuming, as he develops,
+that he is a part of this spiritual family, naturally expecting that he
+will have an increasing share in its life, will help more. Parents who
+dedicate their children to God pass on to them the stimulus of that
+dedication. A church service of dedication is likely to impress them
+with a feeling of unity with the church; seeing other children so
+dedicated they know that a similar occasion occurred in their own early
+lives.
+
+The forms of relationship must develop with the nature of the child. The
+church needs not only a graded curriculum of instruction but a graded
+series of relationships by which children, step by step, come into
+closer conscious social unity, each step determined by their developing
+needs and capacities.
+
+It is easy to say that the responsibility lies with the church to
+provide these methods of attachment. But the church we have been
+sketching is a congeries of families, after all, and it will do just
+what these families, particularly the parents in them, stimulate it to
+do.
+
+
+Sec. 5. INCIDENTAL DIFFICULTIES
+
+But what of those instances in which parents are convinced that the
+church does not furnish a normal and healthy atmosphere for the child's
+spiritual life? There are churches where the Sunday school is simply a
+training school in insubordination, confusion, and irreverence, or where
+religion is so taught as to cultivate superstition and to lead
+eventually either to a painful intellectual reconstruction or to a
+barren denial of all faith. There are churches of one type so devoted
+to the entertainment of adults, to the ministry to the pride of the
+flesh and the lust of things, that a child is likely to be trained to
+pious pride and greed, or of another type, in which religion is a matter
+of verbiage, tradition, and unethical subterfuge.
+
+Parents must be true to their responsibilities. The family is the
+child's first religious institution. Fathers and mothers are not only
+the first and most potent quickeners and guides in the religious life,
+but they are primarily responsible for the selection of all other
+stimuli to that life. Under the drag of our own indifference we must not
+withhold from the child the good he would get even from the church we do
+not particularly enjoy; neither dare we, for fear of criticism or
+ostracism, force the child under influences which, in the name of
+religion, would chill and prevent his spiritual development, would
+twist, dwarf, or distort it. Responsibility to the spiritual purpose of
+the family is far higher than any responsibility to a church. The
+churches are ordered for the souls of men.
+
+What shall we do in the family when the sermon is always tediously dull?
+Don't try to force children to go to sleep in church; they will never
+get over the habit. Insist that there shall be a service suitable for
+them parallel to the adult service of worship.[47] Next, try to
+overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church
+is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many
+criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher
+by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If
+that is essentially your attitude, you cannot complain if your children
+are dissatisfied unless they too are entertained according to their
+childish appetites. When the sermon is poor, put it where it belongs
+proportionately and enlarge on the many good features of church
+fellowship and service.
+
+In a word, let the church be to the family that larger home where
+families live together their life of fellowship and service in the
+spirit and purpose of religion and where there is a natural place for
+everyone.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     H.W. Hulbert, _The Church and Her Children_, chaps. i-v. Revell,
+     $1.00.
+
+     H.F. Cope, _Efficiency in the Sunday School_, chaps. xiv-xvi.
+     Doran, $1.00.
+
+     George Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. xiv.
+     Appleton, $1.50.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     A. Hoben, _The Minister and the Boy_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     E.C. Foster, _The Boy and the Church_. Sunday School Times Co.,
+     $0.75.
+
+     G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, Part II. Revell,
+     $1.35.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What are the special common interests of church and family?
+
+     2. What are the fundamental relationships of the two?
+
+     3. What conception of the church ought to be fostered in the
+     children's minds?
+
+     4. When is criticism of the church unwise?
+
+     5. What changes might be made in church life for the sake of the
+     children?
+
+     6. What changes would bring the church and the home closer
+     together?
+
+     7. What should be the children's conception of unity with the
+     church?
+
+     8. Should children attend, in family groups, the church service of
+     worship?
+
+     9. Does the plan of a short service for children meet the need?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[46] See a pamphlet on _Church School Buildings_ (free) published by the
+Religious Education Association; also H.F. Evans, _The Sunday-School
+Building and Its Equipment_.
+
+[47] See the author's suggestion for the Sunday school in _Efficiency in
+the Sunday School_, chap. xv.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+CHILDREN AND THE SCHOOL
+
+
+Wise parents will know the character of the influences affecting their
+children at all times. At no time can their responsibility be delegated
+to others. There is a tendency to think that when children go to school
+the family has a release from responsibility. But the school is simply
+the community--the group of families--syndicating its efforts for the
+formal training of the young. Every family ought to know what the
+community is doing with its children. The school belongs to all; it is
+not the property of a board, nor a private machine belonging to the
+teaching force; it belongs to us and we owe a social duty as well as a
+family obligation to understand its work and its influence on the
+children.
+
+Parents ought to visit the school. Wise principals and teachers will
+welcome them, setting times when visits can best be made. The visitors
+come, not as critics, but as citizens and parents. The principal
+benefits will be an acquaintance with the teachers of our children and a
+better understanding of the conditions under which the children work for
+the greater part of the day. By far the larger number of teachers most
+earnestly desire character results from their work. It will help them
+to know that we are interested in what they are doing.
+
+
+Sec. 1. HOME AND SCHOOL CO-OPERATION
+
+Parents and teachers, both desiring spiritual results, can find means of
+co-operation. Parent-teacher clubs and associations have done much to
+bring the home and the school together. Meeting regularly in the
+evening, so that fathers, too, can attend, gives opportunity to work out
+a common understanding to raise the spiritual aims of the school, and to
+discover means by which the families may aid in securing better
+conditions for school work.
+
+One of the most important considerations relates to the moral effect of
+the school life and environment. We are committed in this country to the
+principle that the public school cannot teach religion, but this by no
+means relieves it of responsibility for moral character. The family
+needs this ally. Children expect instruction in the school and they feel
+keenly the power of its ideals and the standards established by its
+methods and requirements. The family and the school greatly need to
+co-ordinate their efforts here to the end that there may be under way in
+both an orderly program for the moral training of children.
+
+
+Sec. 2. THE SCHOOL TEACHING PARENTS
+
+The school may help the home if arrangements are made for parents to
+meet regularly and receive instruction in those forms of moral training
+which can best be given at home. This is one method of solving the vexed
+question of sex instruction. Many hesitate as to the wisdom of such
+instruction in schools; but no one doubts that it ought to be and could
+be given in families but for the fact that parents are both ignorant of
+what to tell and indifferent to the matter. It may be that some day the
+state will not only say that the child must go to school, but also that
+every parent intrusted with children must either prove ability to train
+and instruct in these and other matters or go to school to obtain the
+necessary training. The state would not go beyond its province if it
+required ignorant parents--and that means most of us in matters of moral
+training--to go to school and learn our business. And without waiting
+for such compulsion the school may now offer opportunity for all parents
+to obtain the desired information. Teachers are especially trained to an
+understanding of child-nature and to methods of pedagogy; they are
+prepared to teach many things we ought to know; why should not the
+family obtain the advantage of such expert knowledge?
+
+The school would also be within its province if it undertook to
+stimulate the indifferent parents, both rich and poor, to an
+appreciation of the educational task and opportunity of the home. Each
+institution greatly needs the other. The school reaches all the children
+of all the people; might it not be made a larger means of helping all
+the parents of all the children to quickened moral responsibility and to
+greater educational efficiency?
+
+
+Sec. 3. CONTROLLING SCHOOL CONDITIONS
+
+The family ought to know the conditions at the school outside the
+recitation or working hours. Few parents have any conception of the
+power of the playground over moral character. Perhaps a smaller number
+realize how dangerous are some of the elements at work there. Play of
+itself is immensely valuable, but play means playfellows, and some of
+these are simply purveyors of indecency and moral contagion in
+conversation and act. We are required to send our children to school; we
+have a right to demand freedom from moral contagion. Do you know what
+goes on in secret places on the grounds? Do you know that the vilest
+ideas and phrases are current in pictures, cards, on scraps of paper,
+and in handwriting on walls, not only in the high schools, but often
+among children of from six to twelve years of age? This is too large a
+subject to be developed properly here. It is one familiar to all
+wide-awake school men and women and ought to be equally so to the
+parents of children. Where the school combats this evil the home should
+intelligently aid; where the school is indifferent the family dare not
+rest until either the indifference is quite dispelled or the indifferent
+dismissed.
+
+Do not expect to get the facts concerning these suggested conditions by
+inquiry among your children. They are reticent, naturally, on such
+matters when talking with adults; besides, the sense of school honor
+holds them to silence. If they tell you voluntarily, you are happy in
+their free confidence. Do not betray it; simply let it lead you to make
+further inquiry at the school from the authorities and stimulate you to
+insist that, for the sake of the spiritual good of the young, the school
+must furnish conditions of moral health.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Ella Lyman Cabot, _Voluntary Help to the Schools_, chaps. vii,
+     viii. Houghton Mifflin Co., $0.60.
+
+     W.A. Baldwin, "The Home and the Public Schools," _Religious
+     Education_, February, 1912. $0.65.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     M. Sadler, _Moral Instruction and Training in Schools_. 2 vols.
+     Longmans.
+
+     John Dewey, _The School and Society_. The University of Chicago
+     Press, $1.00.
+
+     Smith, _All the Children of All the People_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     G.A. Coe, "Virtue and the Virtues," _Religious Education_,
+     February, 1912.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What ought parents to know about public-school life?
+
+     2. In visiting a school what may the parent do to acquire
+     information in the proper way?
+
+     3. How may the home co-operate with the school?
+
+     4. What degree of instruction in morals ought the school to give?
+
+     5. In what way does the school best help in moral training?
+
+     6. What do you know about the conditions on the playgrounds of your
+     own school?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES
+
+
+Moral crises arise in every family. Deeply as we may desire to maintain
+an even tenor of character-development, in harmony and quietness,
+occasions will bring either our own imperfections or those of our
+children--or of our neighbors' children--to a focus and throw them in
+high relief on the screen. Progress comes not alone in perpetual
+placidity. When temper slips from control, when angry passions rule,
+when the spirit under discipline rebels, when a course of petty
+wrongdoing comes to a head, when secret sins are discovered, and when we
+suddenly find ourselves confronted with a tragic problem in the higher
+life, it is still important to remember that the crisis is just as truly
+a part of the educational process as is the orderly, gradual method of
+development.
+
+A moral crisis is an experience in which our acts are such, or have such
+results, that they are thrown out in a white light that reveals their
+inner meaning, so that they are sharply discerned for their spiritual
+and character values. Then in that light courses of conduct have to be
+valued anew, reconsidered, and determined.
+
+Two courses are open in times of moral crisis in the family. One is to
+bend our efforts to settle the situation, to proceed on the policy of
+getting through with the crisis as quickly as possible, to seek to
+remove the pain rather than to cure the ill. The other is to regard the
+crisis as a revealer of truth, to use it as a valuable opportunity, one
+in which moral qualities of acts are so easily evident, so keenly felt,
+as to make it a time of spiritual quickening, a chance for the best sort
+of training.
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE PROMISE OF IMPERFECTION
+
+The perfect child is the one unborn; shortly after his birth he begins
+to take after his father. The perfect character does not exist in a
+child. It is as unreasonable to expect it as it would be to look for the
+perfect tree in the sapling. _Character comes by development_; it is not
+born full-blown. Childhood implies promise, development. Therefore
+parents must not be surprised at evidences that their children are
+pretty much like their neighbors' children. Outside of the old-time
+Sunday-school-library book the child who never lied, lost his temper,
+sulked, or made a disturbance never existed and never will, except in a
+psychopathic ward in some hospital. Could anything be sadder than the
+picture of the anemic, pulseless automaton who is always "good"?
+
+When parents speak of the "natural depravity" of their children, they
+are commonly using terms they do not understand. What they mean is the
+natural immaturity of their children, a condition of imperfection in
+which they may rejoice, as it shows the possibility of development. The
+child is in the world to grow to the fulness of all his powers. The
+powers of the higher life are to develop as truly as those which we call
+physical and mental. The family is the great human culture-bed for the
+development of those powers, their training-field and school.
+
+Does someone say, concerning a little child, "But we thought he had the
+grace of God in his heart, that he had been born again and would no more
+do wrong"? True, he may be born again, but there is a world of
+difference between being born and being grown up. From one to the other,
+in the realm of character, is a long and tedious process, with many a
+stumble, many a fall, many a hard knock, and many a lesson to be
+learned. Every moral crisis is part of the struggle, the experience and
+training that may make toward the matured life. You have no more right
+to expect your child to be a mature Christian than you had to expect him
+to be born six feet tall.
+
+A moral crisis is a lesson. The important consideration for the parent,
+then, is to see the wrongdoing of the child as an experience in his
+moral upward climb; not as a fall alone, but as part of the acquisition
+of the art of standing upright and walking forward. Dealing with such an
+occasion one may well say to himself or herself, "This is my chance to
+guide, to make this experience a light that shines forward on the way
+for the child's weak feet and to strengthen him to walk in it." For is
+it not true with us that practically all we really know has come by the
+organizing of our different experiences? Think whether it is so or not.
+And is it not to be the same with the child?
+
+We can study here only a few typical moral crises, perhaps those that
+give greatest perplexity to parents. They cannot be successfully met as
+isolated instances, but must be seen as a part of the whole educational
+process. Those to whom the development of character is a reality will
+watch tendencies and train them before they focalize in crises.
+
+
+Sec. 2. THE COLLISION OF WILLS
+
+Parenthood presents tremendous moral strains; it is rife with
+temptations. It offers a little world for autocracy to vaunt itself. The
+martinets command, often totally blind to the changing nature of the
+subjects as they pass from the submissive to the rebellious. One day the
+parents wake up to realize that they are not the only ones possessed of
+will.
+
+When to your Yes the child says No, while you may not applaud, you ought
+to rejoice; you have discovered a will, you have found developing in
+your child the central and essential quality of character. Forgiveness
+will be hard to find and recovery still more difficult if you make the
+mistake of attempting to crush that will. The child needs it and you
+will need its co-operation. The power to see the possibility of choice
+of action, to know one's self as a choosing, willing entity, able to
+elect and follow one among many courses of action, is a distinctive,
+Godlike quality. The opposition of wills is like the birth of a new
+personality, a new force thrown out into the world to meet and struggle
+and adjust itself with all other persons.
+
+When the collision comes, take a few long breaths before you move; take
+time to think what it means. _Keep your temper._ Do not break before the
+other will by an exhibition of chagrin that your authority is defied.
+From now on the basis of any real authority is being transformed from
+force and tradition to a moral plane.
+
+Therefore, first, be sure you are right in your direction or request.
+You cannot afford to make the child think that authority is more
+important than justice, that might makes right in the social order of
+the home. If you do he will accept the lesson and practice it all his
+life.
+
+Remember the right has many elements. There is the child's side to
+consider. As soon as he can decide on courses of action his ideas of
+justice are developing. To do him an injustice is to help make him an
+unjust man.
+
+Secondly, help him to see the right. This will involve sympathetic
+explanations of your reasons which you may have to give in the form of
+simple arguments or of a story, perhaps from your own experience, or by
+an appeal or reference to the wider knowledge of the older children. It
+may be necessary to let him learn in the effective school of experience.
+Other means failing, allow him to discover the pain and folly of his own
+way when it is wrong. Of course this does not apply if he is minded, for
+instance, to imbibe carbolic acid. But even in such circumstances it
+would be better to prove his unwisdom by demonstration--as a drop of
+acid on a finger tip--than to let the issue rest on blind authority. One
+such demonstration gives a new, intelligible basis to your authority in
+other cases.
+
+Thirdly, help him to will the right. Help him to feel that he must
+choose for himself, to recognize the power of the will and the grave
+responsibilities of its use. He is entering the realm of the freedom of
+the will. Every act of deliberate choice, with your aid, in a sense of
+the seriousness of choice, goes to establish the character that does not
+drift, is not dragged, and will not go save with its whole selfhood of
+feeling, knowing, choosing, and willing.
+
+
+Sec. 3. ANGER
+
+An angry child is a child in rebellion. Rebellion is sometimes
+justifiable. Anger may be a virtue. You would not take this force out of
+your child any more than you would take the temper out of a knife or a
+spring. Anger manifested vocally or muscularly is the child's form of
+protest. But, established as a habit of the life, it is altogether
+unlovely. Who does not know grown-up people who seem to be inflexibly
+angry; either they are in perpetual eruption or the fires smoulder so
+near the surface that a pin-prick sets them loose. Usually a study of
+their cases will show either that the attitude of angry opposition to
+everything in life has been established and fostered from infancy or
+that it was acquired in the adolescent period.
+
+The angry, antisocial person is most emphatically an irreligious person;
+there can be no love of his brother man where that spirit is. The home
+is the place where this ill can best be met and cured, for it deals most
+directly with the infant, and for the adolescent it is the best school
+of normal social living.
+
+Let no one think the angry demonstrations of little children are
+negligible or that they have nothing to do with the religious character
+of the child or the adult. They are important for at least two reasons,
+first, as furnishing the angry one opportunity to acquire self-control,
+to master his own spirit, and, secondly, because they disturb the peace
+and interfere with the well-being of others.
+
+It is possible to set up habits of anger in the cradle. In the first
+instance the infant encountered opposition in the cradle and proceeded
+to conquer it by yelling, and so, day after day, he found anger the only
+route to the satisfaction of his desires. He grew to take all life in
+terms of a bitter struggle and every person became his natural enemy.
+
+In the case of the adolescent it sometimes happens that a boy or a girl
+will make a very tardy passage through the normal experience of social
+aversion, the time when they seem to suspect all other people, to flee
+from social intercourse and to sulk, to want to be off in a corner
+alone. This is a normal phase of adolescent adjustment, coming at
+thirteen or fourteen, but it ought to pass quickly. A few allow this
+period to become lengthened; they fail to regain social pleasure and
+soon drift into habits of social enmity. This may be due to scolding at
+this period, or to a lack of healthful friendships.
+
+
+Sec. 4. METHODS OF DEALING WITH ANGER
+
+It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant
+will not help the case. He may feel the emotion of your anger but
+misses any shreds of your logic. Parents ought first to ask, Why is an
+infant angry? With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or
+affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion. The baby
+yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither
+possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural
+depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant
+fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department
+of the interior. Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to
+the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and
+you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you
+yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its
+reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with
+anger. That is one of life's early lessons; it is one of the first
+exercises in training character.
+
+_Consider the future._ Each family is a social unit, a little world.
+Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and
+experiences of the larger world of later life. It is a world which
+prepares children for living by actually living. The qualities that are
+needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here. When
+young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality,
+under similar circumstances, serve in the business of mature life?
+Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character.
+Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin. Anger is the emotional
+effect of extreme discontent and opposition. For the stern fight against
+evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement. But it must be
+purified, it must be controlled. Like the dynamic of steam, it must be
+confined and guided. Love must free it from hatred; self-control must
+guide it.
+
+When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the
+feeling. Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the
+situation for yourself. It may be that they are entirely justified, that
+not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of
+conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life's stimuli. Always
+help the child to see why he is angry. Perhaps the situation is one he
+may remedy himself. Is he angry because the top-string is tangled? Stay
+with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own
+temper.
+
+Step by step, dealing with each excitement of anger, _train him in
+self-control_. Self-mastery is a matter of learning to direct and apply
+our own powers at will. It is developed by habitual practice. It is the
+largest general element in character. The temper that smashes a toy is
+the temper that kills a human being when it opposes our will, but it is
+the same temper that, being controlled, patiently sets the great ills of
+society right, fights and works to remove gigantic wrongs and to build a
+better social order. That patience which is self-control saves the
+immensely valuable dynamic of the emotions and harnesses them to Godlike
+service. And that patience is not learned at a single lesson, not
+acquired in a miraculous moment; it is learned in one little lesson
+after another, in every act and all the daily discipline of home and
+school and street.
+
+Children must learn to qualify and govern temper by love in order to
+save it from hatred. When the irritating object is a personal one the
+rights, the well-being, of that one must gain some consideration. There
+will be but little feeling of altruism in children under thirteen; we
+must not expect it; but egoism is one way to an understanding of the
+rights, the feelings, and needs of others. The child can put himself in
+the other's place. He is capable of affection; he loves and is willing
+to sacrifice for those he loves, and when he is angry with them, or with
+strangers, he must be helped to think of them as persons, as those he
+loves or may love. He also can be aided to see the pain of hatred, the
+misery of the life without friends, the joy of friendships.
+
+Anger against persons is the opportunity for learning the joy of
+forgiveness and, if the occasion warrants, the dignity and courage of
+the apology. The self-control, consideration, and social adjustment
+involved must be learned early in life. It is part of that great lesson
+of the fine art of living with others. Little children must be
+habituated to acknowledging errors and acts of rudeness or temper with
+suitable forms of apology. Above all, they must, by habit, learn how
+great is the victory of forgiveness.[48]
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     _The Problem of Temper._ Pamphlet. American Institute of Child
+     Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_, chap. v. Pilgrim
+     Press, $0.50.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, chap. x. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Patterson Du Bois, _The Culture of Justice_, chaps. i-v. Dodd, Mead
+     & Co., $0.75.
+
+     E.H. Abbott, _The Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     M. Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg,
+     $1.00 each.
+
+     H.Y. Campbell, _Practical Motherhood_. Longmans, $2.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. What special opportunities are offered in the rise of moral
+     crises?
+
+     2. Do we tend to expect too high a development of character in
+     children?
+
+     3. How early in life do we have manifestations of a conscious will?
+
+     4. What constitutes the importance of early crises of the will?
+
+     5. What are probably the causes when children habitually defy
+     authority?
+
+     6. Is anger always a purely mental condition?
+
+     7. What importance have the angry demonstrations of infants?
+
+     8. What is the relation of the control of temper to the rightly
+     developed life?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[48] See Gow, _Good Morals and Gentle Manners_, chap. viii.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Continued_)
+
+
+Sec. 1. QUARRELS
+
+A child who never quarrels probably needs to be examined by a physician;
+a child who is always quarreling equally needs the physician. In the
+first there is a lack of sufficient energy so to move as to meet and
+realize some of life's oppositions; in the other there is probably some
+underlying cause for nervous irritability.
+
+It is perfectly natural for healthy people to differ; in childhood's
+realm, where the values and proportions of life are not clearly seen,
+where social adjustments have not been acquired, the differences in
+opinions, as in possessions, lead to the expression of feeling in sharp
+and emphatic terms. Rivalry and conflict are natural to the young
+animal. Children do not wilfully enter into conflicts any more than
+adults; they are only less diplomatic in their language, more direct,
+and more likely to follow the word with attempts at force.
+
+In few things do parents need more patience than in dealing with
+children's quarrels. First, seek to determine quietly the merits of the
+cause; but do not attempt to pronounce a verdict. It is seldom wise to
+act as judge unless you allow the children to act as a jury. But
+ascertain whether the quarrel is an expression somewhere of anger
+against injustice, wrong, or evil in some form. Sometimes their quarrels
+have as much virtue as our crusades. It is a sad mistake to quench the
+feeling of indignation against wrong or of hatred against evil. A boy
+will need that emotional backing in his fights against the base and the
+foes of his kind. While rejoicing in his feeling, show him how to direct
+it, train him to discriminate between hatred of wrong and bitterness
+toward the wrongdoer. Help him to see the good that comes from loving
+people, no matter what they do.
+
+Our methods of dealing with a quarrel will do more to develop their
+sense of justice than all our decisions can. Be sure to get each one to
+state all the facts; insist on some measure of calmness in the recital.
+Keep on sifting down the facts until by their own statements the quarrel
+is seen stripped of passion and standing clear in its own light. Usually
+that course, when kindly pursued and followed with sympathy for the
+group, with a saving sense of humor, will result in the voluntary
+acknowledgment of wrong. The boys--or girls--have for the first time
+seen their acts, their words, their course, in a light without
+prejudice. They are more ready to confess to being mistaken than are we
+when convinced against our wishes.
+
+When no acknowledgment of wrong is proffered voluntarily, we must still
+not offer a verdict. Put the case to the contestants and let them settle
+it. Listen, as a bystander, coming in only when absolutely necessary to
+insist on exact statements of fact. That course should be excellent
+training in clear thinking, in the duty of seeing the other man's side,
+in the deliberation that saves from unwise accusations and the serious
+quarrels of later life. Teach children to think through their
+differences.
+
+The perpetually petulant child, bickering with all others, should be
+taken to a physician. Get him right nervously, physically, first. He is
+out of harmony with himself and so cannot find harmony with others. When
+the condition of habitual bickering seems to afflict all the children in
+the family, it cannot be settled by attributing it to a mysterious
+dispensation of natural depravity. The probability is that the home life
+is without harmony and full of discord, that the parents are themselves
+petulant and more anxious to assert their separate opinions than to find
+unity of action. Nothing is more effective to teach children peaceful
+living than to see it constantly before them in their parents. A
+harmonious home seldom has quarrelsome children. Such harmony is a
+matter of organization and management of affairs as much as of our own
+attitude.
+
+Some children are educated to a life of quarrels by being trained in the
+family that spoils them. The single child is at a great disadvantage; he
+occupies the throne alone. His home life becomes a mere series of spokes
+radiating from himself. When he finds the world ordered otherwise, he
+quarrels with it and tries to rearrange the spokes into a new,
+self-centric social order. Whatever the number of children may be, each
+one must learn to live with other lives, to adjust himself to them.
+Neighboring social play and activities are the chance for this. Do not
+try to keep Algernon in a glass case; he needs the world in which he
+will have to live some day.
+
+
+Sec. 2. FIGHTING
+
+The best of men are likely to have a secret satisfaction in their boys'
+fights, and the bravest of mothers will deplore them. The fathers know
+how hard are the knocks that life is going to give; the mothers hope
+that the boys can be saved from blows. A man's life is often pretty much
+of a fight, every day struggling in competition and rivalry; we have not
+yet learned the lesson of co-operation, and we still tend to think of
+business as a battlefield. Something in us calls for fighting; we have
+to use the utmost strength at our command to fight the evil tendencies
+of our own hearts; often we rejoice in life as a conflict. It feels good
+to find causes worth fighting for. If all this is true of the man, it
+is not strange that the small boy, scarce more than a young savage, will
+find opportunities for conflict. He is more dependent on the weapons of
+force than is his father. He cannot cast out the enemy with a ballot,
+nor with a sneer or biting sarcasm, nor by some device or strategy of
+business or affairs. He can only hit back. Taken altogether, boys settle
+their differences as honestly at least as do men.
+
+Moreover, children's fights are not as cruel as they seem to be; even
+the bloodshed means little either of pain or of injury. A boy may be
+badly banged up today and in full trim tomorrow; it is quite different
+with the wounds bloodlessly inflicted by men in their conflicts.
+
+Does all this mean that boys should be encouraged to fight? No; but it
+does mean that when Billy comes home with one eye apparently retired
+from business, we must not scold him as though he were the first
+wanderer from Eden. That fight may have been precisely the same thing as
+a croquet game to his sister, or any test of skill to his big brother,
+or a business transaction to his father; it was a mere contest of two
+healthy bodies at a time when the body was the outstanding fact of life.
+The fight may give us our chance, however, to aid him to a sense of the
+greatness of life's conflict, to a sense of the qualities that make the
+true fighter. It may leave him open to the appeal of true heroism. We
+must make light of the victory of brute strength, just as we may make
+light of his wounds and scars, and glorify the victory of the mind and
+will.
+
+The boy who fights because he lacks control of temper needs careful
+training. He gets a good deal of discipline on the playground and
+street, but it is not always effective; the beatings may only further
+undermine control. But the lack of self-control will manifest itself in
+many ways and must be remedied at all points. The discipline of daily
+living in the family must come into play here.
+
+
+Sec. 3. SELF-CONTROL
+
+The matter of self-control is not separable into special features; one
+cannot learn control under one set of moral circumstances without
+learning it for all. The boy who strikes without thinking is simply one
+who acts without thinking. He tends to throw away the brakes of the
+will. The regain of control comes only through training at every point
+in deliberation of action.
+
+Probably there is no other point at which children so frequently and
+readily learn control as in the matter of speech. The family where all
+speak at once, where a babel of sounds leads to a rivalry of vocal
+organs, is not only a nuisance to the neighbors, it is a school of
+uncontrolled action to the children. Just to learn to wait, even after
+the thought is formed into words, until it shall be my turn or my
+opportunity to speak is a fine discipline of control. To do that every
+day, year after year, tends to break up the hair-trigger process of
+action.
+
+Control is gained also by the acquisition of the habit of thought
+regarding general courses of action. We can hardly expect meditation on
+the part of little children. But those who are older, those entering
+their teens, may and should be able to think things out, to plan out the
+day's actions, to determine their own ways of conduct. Children who have
+the custom of quiet, private prayer often develop ability to see their
+conduct in the calm of those moments. They get a mental elevation over
+the day and its deeds.
+
+
+Sec. 4. GOOD FIGHTS
+
+The evident danger of undue deliberation of action must be met by
+another cure of the personal-conflict spirit; that is, the substitution
+of games of rivalry and skill for the unorganized rivalry and "game" of
+fighting. The transition from the bloody arena to the excitement of a
+game is very easy and natural. But the game is the boy's great chance to
+learn life as a game to be played according to the rules. All that the
+fight calls for--courage, endurance, skill, quickness of action, and
+grim persistence--comes out in a good game. Here is a suitable youthful
+realization of the fight that is worth waging. Our participation in the
+youths' games, our appreciation of their points, our joy in honestly won
+success, is the best possible way to lead up to their taking life in
+terms of a good fight, a grand game, a real chance to call out the
+heroic qualities. Turn every fighting instinct into the good fight that
+will clarify and elevate them all.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     W.L. Sheldon, _Ethics in the Home_, chaps. xi, xii, xiii. Welch &
+     Co., $1.25.
+
+     E.A. Abbott, _Training of Parents_, chap. v. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Ella Lyman Cabot, _Every Day Ethics_. Holt, $1.25.
+
+     M. Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg,
+     $1.00 each.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Do all children quarrel? Should one punish for small quarrels?
+
+     2. What are the facts which ought to be ascertained regarding any
+     quarrel?
+
+     3. What special opportunities do children's differences offer?
+
+     4. What are the causes of habitual petulance? What are the dangers
+     of this habit of mind?
+
+     5. Is fighting necessarily wrong? What part does it play in the
+     lives of men?
+
+     6. What are the dangerous elements in boys' fights?
+
+     7. What special quality of character needs development in this
+     connection?
+
+     8. What are the valuable possibilities in the fighting tendency?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Continued_)
+
+
+Sec. 1. LYING
+
+Parents are likely to be wilfully blind to the faults of their children.
+But some faults cannot be ignored; they must surely quicken the most
+indifferent parent to thought. We suffer a shock when our own child
+appears as a wilful liar.
+
+"What shall I do when I catch the child in an outright lie? Surely he
+knows that is wrong and that he is wilfully doing the wrong!"
+
+First, be sure whether he is "lying." Lying means a purposeful intent to
+deceive by word of mouth or written word. When Charles Dickens wrote
+_Oliver Twist_ he described a burglary that never happened, so far as he
+knew. He intended the reader to feel that it was true. Was he lying? No;
+because he simply used his imagination to paint a scene which was part
+of a great lesson he desired to teach the English public. Even had he
+had no great moral purpose, it would still not have been a lie, just as
+we do not accuse the writer of even the most frivolous novel of lying.
+He is simply creating, or imitating, in the field of imagination.
+
+Imagination is the child's native world. When the little girl says, "My
+dolly is sick," she is saying that which is not so, but instead of
+reproving her for lying, you prepare an imaginary pill for the doll.
+Many children's lies are simply elaborations of their doll- and
+plaything-imaginings. When my little daughter told me, and insisted upon
+it, that she had seen seven bears, of varied colors, on the avenue,
+should I have reproved her for lying? Was it not better to humor her
+fancy, to draw it out, to give it free play, being careful gradually to
+let her know that I knew it was fancy? I entered into the game with her
+and enjoyed it so long as we all understood it was only fancy. It is a
+crime to crush a child's power of creating a world by imagination, a
+fair world, set in the midst of this world where things are imperfect,
+jarring, and disappointing, a world in which everything is always "just
+so."
+
+But one must also carefully aid the child in distinguishing between the
+world of fancy and the world of fact. This takes time and patience. We
+must not rob the life of fancy nor must we allow the habits of freedom
+with ideas to pass over into habits of carelessly handling realities.
+Along with the development of fancy we must train the powers of exact
+observation and statement of facts. The child who saw seven bears, red,
+green, yellow, etc., must go to see real bears and must tell me exactly
+their colors and forms. Daily training in exactitude of statements of
+real facts is the best antidote for a fancy that has run out of its
+bounds. It establishes a habit of precision in thinking which is the
+essence of truth-telling.
+
+
+Sec. 2. PROTECTIVE LYING
+
+But there is another form of lying which is frequently met in some form.
+It may be called protective lying. Ask the little fellow with the
+jam-smeared face, "Have you been in the pantry?" and he is likely to do
+the same thing that nature does for the birds when she gives them a coat
+that makes it easier to hide from their enemies. He valiantly answers
+"No, Mother." He would protect himself from your reproof. There has been
+awakened before this the desire to seem good in your eyes and he desires
+your approbation most of all. The moral struggle with him is very brief;
+he does not yet distinguish between being good and seeming good; if his
+negative answer will help him to seem good he will give it.
+
+What shall we do? First, stop long enough to remember that appetites for
+jam speak louder than your verbal prohibitions. The jam was there and
+you were not. It can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a
+wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things
+deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether
+your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and
+sufficient to establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask
+these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It
+would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too
+much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable
+idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with
+them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to
+establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow
+with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the
+acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others,
+and against his own good.
+
+Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the
+temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child
+that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there
+watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought
+of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of
+irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a
+reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel
+in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy
+feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his
+well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper,
+and confidant. I like better the God to whom a little fellow in Montana
+prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy
+Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help
+him to do and know the right.
+
+
+Sec. 3. OLDER CHILDREN
+
+But protective lying presents a more serious problem with older
+children. The school-teacher and parent meet it, just as the judge and
+the employer meet it in adults. The cure lies early in life.
+Truth-telling is as much a habit as lying is. Perhaps it is more easily
+practiced; its drafts are on the powers of observation and memory rather
+than on those of imagination. Along with the child's imaginative powers
+there must be developed the powers of exact observation and description.
+Exact observation and description or relation are but parts of the
+larger general virtue of precision. Help children at every turn of life
+to be right--right in doing things, right in thinking, in saying, and in
+execution. Precision at any point in life helps lift the life's whole
+level. Truth-telling is not a separable virtue. You cannot make a boy
+truthful in word if you let him lie in deed. You cannot expect he will
+speak the truth if you do not train him to do the truth, in his play, in
+ordering his room, in thinking through his school problems, and in
+thinking through his religious difficulties. Truth-telling is the verbal
+reaction of the life which habitually holds that nothing is right until
+it is just right.
+
+Two things would, ordinarily, make sure of a truthful statement, instead
+of a protective lie, in answer to your question: first, that the young
+person has been trained to the habit of seeing and stating things as
+they are--and that you really give him a chance so to state them, and,
+secondly, that to some degree there has been developed a recognition of
+considerations or values that are higher than either escape from
+punishment or the winning of your approbation. He will choose the course
+that offers what seems to him to be the greater good; he will choose
+between punishment, with rectitude, a good conscience, a sense of unity
+with the higher good, of peace with God his friend, a greater
+approximation to your ideal, on the one side, and, on the other, escape
+from punishment.
+
+Everything in that crisis will depend on how real you have made the good
+to be, how much the sense of the reality of God and his companionship
+has brought of joy and friendship, and how high are his values of the
+actual, the real, the true.
+
+
+Sec. 4. AT THE CRISIS
+
+But what shall we do as we meet the lie on the lips of the child? First,
+as already suggested, do not wait until you meet it. Train the child to
+the truthful life. Second, be sure you do not make too heavy moral
+demands. Remember the instinct to protect himself from immediate
+punishment or disapprobation is stronger than any other just then. Do
+not ask him to do what the law says the prisoner may not do, incriminate
+himself. We have no right to put on our children tests harder than they
+can bear. Often we put those which are harder than we could face. What
+you will do just then depends on what you have been doing for the
+training of the child or youth. Do not expect him to solve problems in
+moral geometry if you have neglected simple addition in that realm.
+
+Punishment by the blow or the immediate sentence will be futile. The
+offender must know he has trespassed in a realm beyond your
+administration and rule; he has done more than commit an offense against
+you. Whatever consequences follow--such as your hesitation to accept his
+word--must evidently be a part of the operation of the entire moral law.
+Help him to see that lying strikes at the root of all social relations
+and would make all happy and prosperous living, all friendship, and all
+business impossible by destroying social confidence.
+
+Facing the crisis, do not demand more than your training gives you a
+right to expect. Often, instead of the direct categorical question as to
+guilt, we must gradually draw out a narrative of the events in question;
+we must patiently help the child to state the facts and to see the
+values of exactitudes. Without preaching or posing we must bring the
+events into the light of larger areas of time and circles of life, help
+him to see them related to all his life and to all mankind and to the
+very fringes of existence, to God and the eternal. That cannot be done
+in a moment; it is part of a habit of our own minds or it is not really
+done at all. At the moment we can, however, make the deepest impression
+by insistence on the importance of the actual, the real, the exactly
+true.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     E.L. Cabot, _Every Day Ethics_, chaps. xix, xx. Holt, $1.25.
+
+     W.B. Forbush, _On Truth Telling_. Pamphlet. American Institute of
+     Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.
+
+     J. Sully, _Children's Ways_, pp. 124-33. Appleton, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     G.S. Hall, "A Study of Children's Lies," _Educational Problems_, I,
+     chap. vi. Appleton, $2.50.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _A Genetic Study of Veracity_. Pamphlet.
+
+     J. Sully, _Studies in Childhood_.
+
+     E.H. Griggs, _Moral Education_. Huebsch, $1.60.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Are there degrees of lying?
+
+     2. When is a lie not a lie?
+
+     3. How can we discriminate among the statements of children?
+
+     4. How can we help them to recognize the qualities of truth?
+
+     5. In what ways are parents to blame for forcing children to
+     protective lying?
+
+     6. What of the relation of the thought of God to the demands for
+     truth?
+
+     7. Would you punish a child for lying and, if so, in what way?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+DEALING WITH MORAL CRISES (_Concluded_)
+
+
+Sec. 1. DISHONESTY
+
+Many parents appear to think that the child's concepts of property
+rights and of fair dealing are without importance. Habits of pilfering
+are permitted to develop and success in cheating wins admiration. Low
+standards are accepted and religion is divorced from moral questions.
+The family attitude practically assumes that all persons cheat more or
+less and that it is necessary only to use wisdom to insure freedom from
+conviction.
+
+Responsibility lies at home. We shall never have an honest generation
+until we have honest men and women to breed and train it. It is folly to
+think we can lay on the public schools the burden of the moral education
+of the young. Much is already being attempted there; yet little seems to
+be accomplished because the home, having the child before and after
+school and for a longer period each day, furnishes no adequate basis in
+habits, ideals, and instruction for the moral work of the school. If
+parents assume that one cannot succeed with absolute integrity, that
+dishonesty in some degree is necessary to prosperity, then children will
+learn that lesson despite all that may be said elsewhere. Honest
+children grow where, in answer to the false statement, "You will starve
+if you do business honestly," parents say, "Then we will starve."
+
+But the very home life itself can be a teacher of dishonesty. Is it
+largely a matter of sham and pretense for the sake of social glory? Does
+it prefer a cheap veneer to a slowly acquired genuine article? Is the
+front appearance that of a dandy while the backyard looks like a
+slattern? Is the home striving for more than it deserves? Is it trying
+to get more out of life than it puts in? Evading taxes, avoiding duties,
+a community parasite, does it commend to children the arts of social
+cheating and lying? Such homes teach so loudly that no voice could be
+heard in them.
+
+Given the atmosphere, ideals, and practices of the honest life in the
+home itself, the problems of conduct, in the realm of these rights, are
+more than half solved. Here in the home the real training for the life
+of business takes place. Not for an instant can we afford to lower
+standards here, nor to lose sight of the life-long power of our ideals,
+our habits, and our attitudes on the conduct of the next generation. Do
+parents know that the problems of lying, cheating, quarreling are the
+great, vital questions for their children, much more important than
+industrial or professional success in life; that on these all success is
+predicated? If they do, surely they cannot regard the problems which
+arise as mere incidents; surely they will provide for the culture of the
+moral life as definitely as for the culture of the physical or the
+intellectual!
+
+
+Sec. 2. LESSONS IN HONESTY
+
+But children also acquire habits from their playmates. Whenever the act
+of pilfering appears, the wrong must be made clear. Some sense of
+property rights is necessary; not the right, as some assume, to do what
+you will with a thing because you have it, but the right to enjoy and
+usefully employ it. Help children to see the difference between mine and
+thine. Slovenly moral thinking often comes from too great freedom in
+forgetful borrowing within the family. In this little social group the
+members must first acquire the habits of respect for the rights of
+others. Through toys, tools, and books the lesson may be learned so
+early that it becomes a part of the normal order of things.
+
+Children can learn that the game of life has its rules and that the
+breach of these rules spoils the game and prevents our own happiness.
+They can learn, too, that these are not arbitrary rules; they are like
+the laws of nature; they are the conditions under which alone it is
+possible for people to live together and to make life worth while.
+Gambling is wrong because it is unsocial; it is the attempt to gain
+without an equivalent giving. Cheating is wrong, no matter how many
+practice it, just as surely as cheating is wrong in the game on the
+playground.
+
+Children are really peculiarly sensitive to the social consciousness. In
+school under no circumstances will they do that which the school custom
+forbids or the older boys condemn. In the home, despite contrary
+appearances, the opinion of elders, brothers, sisters, and parents is
+the recognized law. Every small boy wants to be like his big brother.
+Children's conduct may be guided by an understanding of the social will
+outside the school and home. Help them to know that all people
+everywhere in organized society condemn cheating and dishonesty.[49]
+
+Sentiment and emotional feeling must back up all teaching of conduct.
+Your stories and readings should be selected with this in mind. The
+approbation of parents and of the great Father of all enters as an
+effectual motive.
+
+But parents seldom understand these problems; they attempt to deal with
+each one as it arises until they are weary of the seemingly endless
+procession and abandon the task. Their endeavors are based on faint
+memories of such problems in their own youth or on rule-of-thumb
+proverbial philosophy about morals and children. Does not the
+development of moral ability and culture deserve at least as much
+attention as any other phase of the child's life? After all, what do we
+most of all desire for all our children--position, fame, ease? or is it
+not rather simply this, that, no matter what else they do, they may be
+good and useful men and women? Then what are we doing to make them good
+and useful?
+
+A clear view of the need for moral training, a belief that is possible,
+will surely lead to serious attempts to learn the art of moral training.
+In this they need not be without guidance. There is a number of good
+books on character development in the child.[50] The foundation for all
+such training of parents ought to be laid in an understanding of what
+the moral nature is, and then of the laws of its development. Later the
+specific problems may be separately considered.
+
+
+Sec. 3. TEASING AND BULLYING
+
+Teasing is the child's crude method of experimentation in psychological
+reactions; the teaser desires to discover just how the teased will
+respond. It degenerates, by easy steps, into a thoughtless infliction of
+pain in sheer enjoyment of another's misery, and then into brutal
+bullying. When only two children are together mere teasing will not
+last long; either the teaser will tire of his task or his teasing will
+turn to that lowest of all brutalities, delight in inflicting pain on
+weaker ones.
+
+But teasing is a serious problem in many families; the whole group
+sometimes lives in an atmosphere of ridicule, derision, and annoyance.
+Teasing is likely to appear at its worst wherever a group is gathered,
+for the guilty ones are under the stimulus of the praise of others; they
+inflict mental pain for the sake of winning approbation.
+
+Teasing has a pedagogical basis. A certain amount of ridicule acts
+healthfully on most persons. Even children need sometimes to see their
+weaknesses, and especially their faults of temper, in the light of other
+eyes, in the aspect of the ridiculous. But children are seldom to be
+trusted to discipline one another; freedom to do so is likely to develop
+hardness, indifference to the sufferings of others, and arrogance from
+the sense of lordship. The corrective of ridicule is safe only as it is
+a kindly expression of the sense of humor. The ability to see and to
+show just how foolish or funny some situations are will turn many a
+tragedy of childhood into a comedy. Whenever children laugh at the
+distresses or faults of others, help them to laugh at their own.
+Cultivate the habit of seeing the odd, the whimsical, the humorous side
+of things. A sound sense of kindly humor often will save us all from
+unkind teasing.
+
+
+Sec. 4. SOME CURES FOR TEASING
+
+Help the habitual and unkind teaser to see how cowardly the act is, to
+see how it is against the spirit of fair play. Call on him to help the
+weaker one. If he is teasing for some fault of temper or some habit,
+show him the chance that is afforded to do the nobler deed of helping
+another to overcome that fault.
+
+Let the cowardly teaser reap the consequences of his own act; he must
+bear the burden of the critic, the expectation of perfection. Teasing
+him for his own shortcomings will sometimes cure him, but usually he
+loses his temper quickly. Make him feel the injustice of the teaser's
+method. If he is a bully he needs bullying. If ever corporal punishment
+is wise it is in such a case. He who inflicts pain simply because he can
+deserves to endure pain inflicted by someone stronger. But one must be
+careful not to confirm him in the coward's code. The injustice of it he
+must see, see by smarting under it. If ever punishment before others is
+wise it is in this case; for surely he who delights in humiliating
+others must be humiliated. But though justice suggests this course,
+experience shows that it does not always work; the bully only bides his
+time, and, cherishing resentment, he wreaks it on the weaker ones.
+
+The best cure for brutal teasing will take a longer time than is
+involved in a thrashing. Besides, the teaser will get his thrashings
+very soon from other boys. It requires time to change the habits that
+make bullying possible. Try gradually helping him to see the beauty and
+pleasure of helpfulness. Give him a chance to give pleasure instead of
+pain. Help him to taste the joy of praise, the praise that helps more
+than all teasing criticism. Help him to see that it is more truly a mark
+of superiority to help, to cheer, to do good, than to oppress and tease.
+Take time to habituate him in helpfulness.
+
+In dealing with teasing in the family, two other things are worth
+remembering: First, the teased must be taught the protective power of
+indifference. Teasers stop as soon as their barbs fail to wound; the fun
+ends there. Laugh at those who laugh at you, and they will soon cease.
+Secondly, the atmosphere and habit of the family determine the course of
+teasing. Where carping criticism and unkindly ridicule abound, children
+cannot be blamed for like habits. Where the sense of humor lightens
+tense situations, where we sacrifice the pleasure of stinging criticism
+for the sake of encouraging those who most need it, children are quick
+to catch those habits too. The teasing child usually comes out of a
+family of similar habits. On seeing our children engaged in teasing
+others, our first thought ought to be as to the extent to which we may
+have been their example in this respect. Constant watchfulness on our
+part against the temptations to tease will have an effect far more
+potent than all attempts to talk them out of the habit; it will lead
+them out.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     1. HONESTY
+
+     P. Du Bois, _The Culture of Justice_, chaps. iii, x. Dodd, Mead &
+     Co., $0.75.
+
+     E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_, chap. viii.
+     Pilgrim Press, $0.50.
+
+     2. TEASING
+
+     W.L. Sheldon, _A Study of Habits_, chap. xvii. Welch & Co.,
+     Chicago, $1.25.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     ON GENERAL MORAL TRAINING
+
+     Sneath & Hodges, _Moral Training in School and Home_. Macmillan,
+     $0.80.
+
+     E.O. Sisson, _The Essentials of Character_. Macmillan, $1.00.
+
+     H. Thisleton Mark, _The Unfolding of Personality_. The University
+     of Chicago Press, $1.00.
+
+     Paul Carus, _Our Children_. Open Court Publishing Co., $1.00.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Of what importance is the child's sense of possession?
+
+     2. What are the first evidences of a consciousness of property
+     rights?
+
+     3. How do homes train in dishonesty?
+
+     4. What is the relation between cheating and dishonesty?
+
+     5. What is a child seeking to do when he teases another?
+
+     6. What are the unfortunate features of teasing?
+
+     7. What is the relation of teasing to bullying?
+
+     8. What cures would you suggest for either?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[49] Parents will be helped by the practical discussions of cheating,
+cribbing, and other boy problems in Johnson, _Problems of Boyhood_.
+
+[50] See "Book List" in Appendix.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE PERSONAL FACTORS IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
+
+
+Whoever will stop to review his early educational experience will be
+impressed with the instantaneous and vivid manner in which certain
+teachers spring into memory. They are seen as though actually living
+again. We have difficulty in recalling even the subjects they taught,
+while of the particulars of their teaching we have absolutely no
+recollection. But they continue to influence us; they are like so many
+silent forces leading our lives to this day. The teacher is always
+greater than his lesson, and what he is, is greater than what he says.
+The religious education of the young depends more on the gift of
+persons, on contact with lives, than on anything else.
+
+There are instructors and there are teachers; the former impart
+information, the latter convey personality; the former deal with
+subjects, the latter teach people. The greatest factor in education as a
+process of developing persons is the power of stimulating personality.
+The power of the family as an educational agency is in the fact that it
+is an organization of persons for personal purposes. When you take the
+persons away you remove all educational potencies.
+
+The depersonalized home is the modern menace. We have come to think that
+provided you throw furniture and food together in proper proportions you
+can produce a capable life. So we depend on the home as a piece of
+machinery to do its work automatically, forgetting that the working
+activity is not the home but the family, not the furniture but people.
+Life can only come from life, and lives can only come from lives.
+Personality alone can develop personality. By so much as you rob the
+family life of your personal presence, as mother or as father, you take
+away from its reality as a family, from its force as an educational
+agency, from its religious reality.
+
+
+Sec. 1. ORPHANED FAMILIES
+
+All that is said here about fathers might well be applied to mothers,
+save that they are not as flagrant sinners in this respect, and,
+besides, it comes with better grace for a father to speak on the sins of
+fathers.
+
+There are too many fathers who are financial and physiological fathers
+only. A good father easily grows as crooked as a dollar sign when he is
+nurtured only on money. Many, both fathers and mothers, take parenthood
+wholly in physiological terms, imagining--if they think about it at
+all--that they have fully discharged all possible obligations if only
+they know how to bear, feed, and clothe children properly. True, such
+duties are fundamental, but no father can be rightly called "a good
+provider" who provides only _things_ for his family, no matter with what
+generosity he provides these things. Our homes need more of ourselves
+first of all.
+
+He makes a capital error of setting first things in secondary places who
+willingly permits business to interfere with the pleasure of being with
+his children. Our social order fights its own welfare as long as any
+father is chained to the wheels of industry through the hours that
+belong to his home. But there are just as many who are not chained, but
+who enslave themselves to business, and so miss the largest and best
+business in the world, the development of children's characters.
+
+Many a good father goes wrong here. Love and ambition prompt him to
+provide abundantly for his children; he enslaves himself to give them
+those social advantages which he missed in youth.
+
+But it is a short-measure love that gives only gifts and never gives
+itself. The heart hungers, not for what you have in your hand, but for
+what you are. "The gift without the giver is bare." No amount of
+bountiful providing can atone for the loss of the father's personality.
+It is easy for the hands to be so engrossed in providing that the home
+is left headless and soon heartless. If we at all desire the fruits of
+character in the home we must give ourselves personally.
+
+It is not alone the habitue of the saloon or the idler in clubs and
+fraternities who is guilty of stealing from the home its rightful share
+of his presence. He who gives so much of himself to any object as not to
+give the best of himself to his family comes under the apostolic ban of
+being worse than an infidel. _A father belongs to his home more than he
+belongs to his church._ There have been men, though probably their
+number is not legion, who have allowed church duties, meetings, and
+obligations so to absorb their time and energy that they have given only
+a worn-out, burned-out, and useless fragment of themselves to their
+children. Some have found it more attractive to talk of the heavenly
+home in prayer-meeting or to be gracious to the stranger and to win the
+smile of the neighbor at the church than to take up the by-no-means-easy
+task of being godly, sympathetic and cheerful, courteous and kind among
+their children and in their homes. No matter what it may be, church or
+club, politics or reform organization, we are working at the wrong end
+if we are allowing them to take precedence of the home.
+
+
+Sec. 2. THE FATHER'S CHANCE
+
+The father owes it to his family _to give himself at his best_, that is,
+as far as possible, when his vitality is freshest and his powers
+keenest to answer to the young life about him. He owes it to his family
+to conserve for it the time to think of its needs, time to listen to the
+wife's story of its problems, time to sit and sympathize with children,
+time to hear their seemingly idle prattle, time to play with them. Have
+you ever noticed this great difference between the father and the
+mother, that while the latter always has time to bind up cut fingers and
+to hear to its end the story of what the little neighbor, Johnny Smith,
+did and said, somehow father's ear seems deaf to such stories and he is
+often too busy to sympathize? It might work a vast change in some
+families if the "children's hour" had a call to the father as well as to
+the mother. Of course we are crowded with social engagements and life is
+at high pressure under the enticing obligation of uplifting and
+reforming everybody else, yet one hour of every evening held sacred for
+the firelight conversation, one in which the children could really get
+at our hearts, might be worth more to tomorrow than all our public
+propaganda.
+
+Fathers owe their brains as well as their hands to their families.
+Competent and efficient fatherhood does not come by accident. We are
+learning that children cannot be understood merely by loving them, that
+two things must be held in balance: the scientific and the sympathetic
+study of childhood. Is there any good reason why, while so readily
+granting that mothers should belong to mothers' clubs, study child
+psychology, the hygiene of infancy, domestic science, and eugenics, we
+should assume that fathers may safely dispense with all such knowledge?
+There are men who sit up nights studying how to grow the biggest
+radishes in the block, there are men who toil through technical
+handbooks on the game of golf, who would look at you in open-eyed wonder
+if you should suggest the duty of studying their children with equal
+scientific patience. They of course desire to have ideal children but
+they are not willing to learn how to grow them.
+
+
+Sec. 3. FATHERING AS A MAN'S TASK
+
+It takes intelligence and burns up brain power to keep the confidence of
+your boy so that he will freely talk of his own life and needs to you.
+Those much-to-be-desired open doors are kept open, not by accident, nor
+by our sentiments or wishes alone. A boy changes so fast that a man has
+to be alert, thinking and trying to understand and sympathize all the
+time. The boy sees through all sleepy pretenses of understanding. We
+keep the open door of confidence only as by steady endeavor we keep in
+real touch with the boy's world.
+
+Fathers are ignorant of the problems of family training; they oscillate
+between the wishy-washy sentimentality that permits anarchy in the home
+and the harsh, unthinking despotism that breeds hatred and rebellion.
+Fathers criticize the public schools but never take the time to go and
+look inside one. They laugh at women's clubs because they are too lazy
+to make a like investment in the patient study of some of their
+problems. They affect indifference to the parent-teacher clubs while
+remaining ignorant of the significant things they have already
+accomplished for the schools. If we were to make an inventory of what
+the women, the mothers, have accomplished by study, agitation, and
+legislation for social, civic, ethical, and religious betterment, we
+proud lords of creation would, or ought to, hang our heads in shame.
+
+Fatherhood is our chance to become. It is our chance to grow into our
+finest selves. The measure of its gains to us depends upon the measure
+of our gifts to its opportunities and duties. It is our chance to be
+what we should like our children to be, our chance to find ourselves.
+All that it costs, all the self-denial, labor, and often pain it must
+mean, is just the process of developing a fine, rich life. Now, that
+life is just the greatest gift that any man can make to his home and his
+world. We can never give any more than ourselves or any other than
+ourselves, and this pathway of sacrifice, this costly way of
+home-making, is a man's chance to become Godlike. The race has come
+upward in this way. It needs the masculine in its ideal self as well as
+the feminine. There is no race salvation without constant individual
+self-giving. That self-giving must be balanced equally on the part of
+the man and the woman. Fatherhood, like motherhood, is just our chance
+to learn life's best lesson, that there is a certain short path to
+happiness which men have called the way of pain and God calls the way of
+peace.
+
+Motherhood is a sacred portion, but so is fatherhood. Its calls are just
+as high, its service just as holy, its opportunities just as large, its
+meaning just as divine. How worse than empty are all our pratings about
+divine fatherhood if we illustrate its meaning only degradingly or
+misleadingly! And just as the life of the spirit is the gift of that
+divine fatherhood, so for us the gift of our lives, ourselves, is the
+largest and richest contribution we can make to the religious lives of
+our children.
+
+The father as a teacher teaches by what he is. The classes in the home
+have no set lessons, for the text is written in lives and the word is
+spoken and taught in personality. You effect the religious education of
+your children in the degree that you give yourself as a simple religious
+person to them.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Hodges, _Training of Children in Religion_, chap. vii. Appleton,
+     $1.50.
+
+     K.G. Busby, _Home Life in America_, chaps. i, ii. Macmillan,
+     $2.00.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     E.A. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin Co.,
+     $1.00.
+
+     Allen, _Making the Most of Our Children_. 2 vols. McClurg, $1.00
+     each.
+
+     Wilm, _The Culture of Religion_, chap. ii. Pilgrim Press, $0.75
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. Which do you remember best, your teachers or your lessons? Why?
+
+     2. Describe, from your memory, some of the influences of
+     personality?
+
+     3. Are these influences greater or less with parents on children?
+
+     4. What are the causes that separate parents and children?
+
+     5. How shall we define duties to business, to society, and to the
+     family?
+
+     6. Under what circumstances is one justified in refusing time to
+     the church for the sake of the family?
+
+     7. What are the best times and opportunities for the strengthening
+     of the personal bonds between children and parents?
+
+     8. How shall we overcome the apparent difficulty of maintaining the
+     confidence of children?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
+
+
+Whether we can remedy the ills of family living today or not, we can
+determine the character of the family life of the future. The homes of
+tomorrow are being determined today. The children who swing their feet
+in schoolrooms and play in our gardens will control family living very
+soon. We can do little to reconstruct the old order; we can do
+everything to determine the new. When the mountain sides have been made
+bare, forest conservation cannot save the old trees, but it can prepare
+for new growths. Ours is the larger opportunity because we can determine
+the ideals of our children. Today we can determine that they shall not
+suffer from false conceptions, shall not bruise themselves in the blind
+ignorance that compelled us to find our own way. We shall see that,
+first, in the education of our children we can save the homes of
+tomorrow by training the children of today to set first things first. If
+family life has been neglected in America, it has been because we have
+submerged its real values of character and affection in a flood of
+things, of materialism.
+
+
+Sec. 1. A CONSTRUCTIVE POLICY FOR CHARACTER
+
+The future higher efficiency of the family depends on an extension of a
+conscience for character through all our thinking on the family. We are
+really half-ashamed to talk of character. We blush for ideals but we
+have no shame in boasting of commerce and factories; we are ashamed of
+the things of beauty and we love only the useful. So we have become
+ashamed of the ideals of the home. Not only do we passively acquiesce in
+the popular attitude of indifference or derision, but we voice it
+ourselves. We join in the jest at marriage; we joke over marital
+infelicities. We would be ashamed to be caught singing "Home, Sweet
+Home." What is more important, we show that, as a people, we have less
+and less the habit of regarding the home as any other than a commercial
+affair. The tendency is to determine domestic living wholly by economic
+factors. The literature on the "home" is overwhelmingly economic; its
+heart is in the kitchen. High efficiency on the physiological, sanitary,
+culinary, and mechanical sides makes the modern home so convenient that
+you can lie on a folding bed, press a button to light the grate fire,
+turn on the lights, start the toaster, and wake the children. Homes are
+places to hide in at night, to feed the body, arrange the clothes, and
+start out from for real living. They are private hotels.
+
+If we would save the family we must save the child from losing sight of
+the primacy of human values; we must strengthen his natural faith that
+people are worth more than all besides, leading him into the faith that
+moral integrity, truth, honor, righteousness, are the glory of a life.
+More, these young lives must be trained to habitual and efficient
+right-doing. In a word, the conservation of the home is simply a program
+of beginning today ourselves to set first things first, to conserve the
+human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in
+school and church and home count first of all for character. And that
+broader education we ourselves must test first of all by this, whether
+it makes youth competent to live aright, cultivates the love of worthy
+ideals, and makes him willing and able to pay the price of a trained
+life consecrated to the service of his world, to the love of his
+fellows, and to the making of a new world.
+
+We shall need, first, to safeguard the primary motives that enter into
+the founding of families. Those motives begin to develop early. They are
+in the making in childhood. Somehow we must plan the education of youths
+so that they will think of homes and of marriage in new terms. Possibly
+the public school will not only teach the physiology of marriage and the
+bare physical facts of sexual purity, but will teach new ideals of
+family life; it will count it at least as much a duty to cultivate a
+love of home as it is to cultivate a love of country. It can set so
+clearly the final objective of character that even children shall see
+that life has higher ends than money-making and the family greater
+purposes than garish social display.
+
+
+Sec. 2. THE CHURCH AIDING
+
+Certainly the church must seek to quicken and develop new ideals of
+family life; it must bring religion to our hearths and homes; it must
+worry less about a "home over there," and show how truly heavenly homes
+may be made here. It must not only get youth ready to die, it must
+prepare them to live; to live together on religious terms. It will do
+this, not only by general discussions in the pulpit, but by special
+instruction in classes. No church has a clear conscience in regard to
+any young person contemplating the duties of a family whom it has not
+directly instructed in the duties of that life.
+
+It is a strange spectacle, if we would stop long enough to look at it,
+of the church proclaiming a way of life but scarcely ever teaching it.
+In any church there is a large number of young people under instruction;
+what are they learning? Usually a theological interpretation of an
+ancient religious literature. Some still are learning to hate all other
+persons whose religion differs from the brand carried in that
+institution. In a few years these youths will be bearing social burdens,
+facing temptations, taking up duties; does their teaching relate at all
+to these things? No, indeed, that would be "worldly"; it would seem to
+be sacrilegious to teach them how actually to be religious. The business
+of the church school is still largely that of filling minds with
+theological data rather than training young, trainable lives to become
+religious schoolboys, religious voters, religious parents. How many have
+been at all influenced by Sunday-school teaching when they stepped into
+a polling-booth, when they chose a life-mate, when they guided or
+disciplined their children? If religious education does not at all
+influence us in the great events of life, of what value is it to us?
+Must it not be counted a sheer waste of time?
+
+If we would conserve the human values of the family we must train youth
+to a religious interpretation of the home. If we cannot do that in the
+church we might as well confess that the church cannot touch the sources
+of human affairs.
+
+
+Sec. 3. IDEALS AND METHODS
+
+No matter what the breadth of the interests of the public school, youth
+will still need training for family living given under religious
+auspices and with the religious aim. The day school may give courses in
+domestic economy, but family living demands more than ability to sweep a
+room or cook an egg. In fact, no one can be competent to meet its higher
+demands unless at least two things are accomplished, first, that he, or
+she, is led to see the family as essentially a religious, spiritual
+institution because it is an association of persons for the purpose of
+developing other persons to spiritual fulness; secondly, that he, or
+she, is moved to willingness to count the work of the family, its
+purpose and aim, as the highest in life and that for which one is
+willing to pay any price of time, treasure, thought, and endeavor.
+
+This means that the fundamental need is that our young people shall grow
+up with a new vision and a new passion for the home and family. That
+passion is needed to give value to any training in the economics or
+mechanics of the home; and that training is precisely the contribution
+which the church should make to all departments of life today. It is the
+prophet, the interpreter, revealing the spiritual meanings of all daily
+affairs and quickening us to right feeling, to highly directed passion
+for worthy ideals.
+
+From the general teaching, the high message of the church, directed to
+this special problem, there must be formed in the mind of the coming
+generation a new picture of the family, a new ethics of its life, a new
+evaluation of its worth. That can come in part by the prophetic message
+from the pulpit, but it will come more naturally and readily by regular
+teaching directed to the actual experiences and the coming needs of the
+young people who are to be home-makers. The soaring ideals pass over
+their heads, but when you teach the practice, the details of the life of
+the family in the spirit of these ideals, as interpreted and determined
+by the higher conception, then they catch the vision through the
+details.
+
+We need two types of classes in church schools in relation to the life
+of the family: First, classes for young people in which their social
+duties as religious persons are carefully taught and discussed. Perhaps
+such courses should not be specifically on "The Family," but this
+institution ought, in the course, to occupy a place proportionate to
+that which belongs to it in life. The instruction should be specific and
+detailed, not simply a series of homilies on "The Christian Family,"
+"Love of Home," etc., but taking up the great problems of the economic
+place of the family today, its spiritual function, questions of choice
+of life-partners, types of dwelling, finances and money relations in the
+family, children and their training, and the actual duties and problems
+which arise in family living.
+
+All topics should be treated from the dominant viewpoint of the family
+as a religious institution for the development of the lives of
+religious persons. The courses should be so arranged as to be given to
+young people of about twenty years of age, or of twenty to twenty-five.
+They should be among the electives offered in the church school.
+
+The second type of class would be for those who are already parents and
+who desire help on their special problems. Many schools now conduct such
+classes, meeting either on Sunday or during the week.[51] Work on
+"Parents' Problems," "Family Religious Education," and similar topics is
+also being given in the city institutes for religious workers. No church
+can be satisfied with its service to the community unless it provides
+opportunity for parents to study their work of character development
+through the family and to secure greater efficiency therein. Such
+classes need only three conditions: a clear understanding of the purpose
+of meeting the actual problems of religious training in the family, a
+leader or instructor who is really qualified to lead and to instruct in
+this subject, and an invitation to parents to avail themselves of this
+opportunity.
+
+The value of such a class would be greatly enhanced if it should be held
+in close co-ordination with similar classes or clubs conducted by the
+public schools.[52] Here all the parents of the community meet in the
+school building, not to discuss how the teachers may satisfy parental
+criticism, but to learn what the school has to teach on modern
+educational methods applied to the life of the child, especially in the
+family, and mutually to find ways of co-operation between the home and
+the school for the betterment of the child.
+
+
+     I. References for Study
+
+     Articles in _Religious Education_, April, 1911, VI, 1-77.
+
+     Helen C. Putnam in _Religious Education_, June, 1911, VI, 159-66.
+
+     George W. Dawson in _Religious Education_, June, 1911, VI, 167-74.
+
+     Cabot, _Volunteer Help in the Schools_, chap. vii. Houghton Mifflin
+     Co., $0.60.
+
+
+     II. Further Reading
+
+     Forsyth, _Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion_. Hodder & Stoughton,
+     $1.25.
+
+     Lovejoy, _Self-Training for Motherhood_. American Unitarian
+     Association, $1.00.
+
+     Pomeroy, _Ethics of Marriage_. Funk & Wagnalls, $1.50.
+
+
+     III. Topics for Discussion
+
+     1. In how far are home problems due to the ignorance of parents?
+
+     2. What do you regard as the essentials in the training of parents?
+
+     3. Where can the necessary subjects best be taught?
+
+     4. What are the difficulties in the way of teaching these subjects
+     to young people?
+
+     5. In how far can we direct the reading of young people toward sane
+     and helpful knowledge of family life and duties?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[51] Pamphlets on plans for parents' classes: _The Home and the Sunday
+School_, Pilgrim Press; _Plans for Mothers' and Parents' Meetings_,
+Sunday School Times Co.; _How to Start a Mothers' Department_, David C.
+Cook Co.; _The Parents' Department of the Sunday School_, Connecticut
+Sunday School Association, Hartford, Conn.
+
+[52] See pamphlet published by the National Congress of Mothers: _How to
+Organize Parents' Associations and Mothers' Circles in Public Schools_.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIXES
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+SUGGESTIONS FOR CLASS WORK
+
+
+This book is designed for individual reading or for use in classes. It
+is not a textbook of the same character as a textbook in mathematics or
+history, but the material is arranged so as to be both easily readable
+and of ready analysis for classes. There are two methods of following
+the course: one by work conducted under a regular teacher in a class,
+and the other by private or correspondence study.
+
+
+Sec. 1. THE CLASS
+
+The class should be composed of parents and other adults, inasmuch as
+the work is designed for them. It may be a class in connection with the
+Sunday school in a church, a class conducted by a mothers' club or
+congress or by a parent-teacher association, or it may be organized
+under other auspices. Or it might be organized by a group of parents in
+any community. The class need not consist of either fathers or mothers
+alone, as the work is planned for both. In any case the work of teaching
+will be facilitated if, in addition to the customary officers of the
+class, the teacher will appoint a librarian, whose duties would be to
+ascertain for the members of the class where the books for study and
+for reference may be obtained, that is, whether they are in the public
+library, church library, or in private collections, and also, whenever
+it is desired to purchase books, where they may best be secured.
+
+
+Sec. 2. THE TEACHER
+
+The primary requisite for the teacher will be an eagerness to learn, a
+sufficiently deep interest in the subject to lead to thorough study. No
+one can teach this class who already knows all about the subject. A
+spirit sympathetic with the child and the life of the family and a mind
+willing to study the subject will accomplish much more than facile
+rhetorical familiarity with it. The best teacher will not often be "an
+easy talker" on the family; class time is too precious to be occupied
+with a lecture. While, naturally, one who is a parent will speak with
+greater experience than another, the ability to teach this subject
+cannot be limited to fathers and mothers; physiological parenthood is
+less important than spiritual parenthood. The teacher must have, then,
+willingness to study the subject, ability to teach as contrasted with
+mere talking, sympathy with parenthood, and a passion for the religious
+personal values in life.
+
+
+Sec. 3. GENERAL METHOD
+
+The teacher's aim will be to make this course definitely practical. The
+book is not concerned so much with theories of the family as with the
+present problems of the family, and especially with those that relate to
+moral and religious education. There must be a sense of definite
+problems to be concretely treated in all lessons. The teacher will
+therefore encourage discussion, but will also avoid the tendency to
+drift into desultory conversation. Direct the discussion to avoid
+tedious detours on side issues. Direct the discussion to avoid the
+tendency to treat superficially all the subject at one session. It will
+be necessary frequently to insist that attention be focused upon the
+immediate problems suggested by the lesson for the day, and to ask the
+class to wait until the subjects which they in their eagerness suggest
+shall come in their due order.
+
+Encourage personal experiences as sidelights and criticisms on the text,
+but remember that no single experience is conclusive. Beware of the
+over-elaboration and detailed narration of experiences.
+
+_Insist on a thorough study of the text._ Students should be so prepared
+as to make a lecture superfluous and to allow discussion to take the
+place of review and explanation. The greatest danger in parents' classes
+is that the members do not study; class work becomes indefinite and soon
+loses value. Again, the members of the class often are unwilling to be
+governed by the schedule of lessons, and the class drifts into aimless
+conversation. Adult students especially need to be turned from the
+tendency to regard educational experience as having come to an end with
+their school days. The members of this class will need encouragement;
+they must be stimulated patiently until they have re-formed some habits
+of study and rediscovered the pleasures of systematic thinking. The best
+stimulus will be a teacher so convinced of the supreme importance of the
+subject to be studied as to lead the members to recognize its importance
+and the insignificance of any price they may pay for efficient spiritual
+parenthood.
+
+
+Sec. 4. CLASS WORK
+
+At the first session teach chap. i, which is introductory. Draw out
+discussion on the points suggested therein, and assign this chapter and
+the one following for the next session. The first lesson will give the
+teacher opportunity to explain and illustrate the method of study,
+presentation, and discussion.
+
+Assign the work carefully each week, calling especial attention to the
+"References for Study." Secure promises from as many as possible to read
+at least one of these references and to prepare a written report, on one
+sheet of paper, for presentation at the next session. Ask others to look
+into the special points which will be found in the references given
+under the heading "Further Reading."
+
+In beginning a lesson it will be wise to call to mind first the
+principle running through the book, that the great work of the family is
+the development of religious persons in the home; then call to mind the
+application of this principle in the last lesson. Make your review very
+brief.
+
+Next, bring out the leading topic of the lesson for the day. This should
+be done so as to present a vital issue and a live topic to the class.
+Very often the best way of doing this is to state a concrete case
+involving the issue discussed. The presentation of a definite set of
+circumstances or a fairly complete experience involving the fundamental
+principles under discussion is an instance of teaching by the "case
+method." If the teacher will consider how the law student is trained by
+the study of _particular cases_, the advantage of the method will be
+clear. Be sure that the "case" selected will include the principles to
+be taught. Prepare the statement of the case beforehand. This should be
+done in a very brief narrative, so giving the instance as to enable the
+class to see the reality of the question. Be sure that your instance is
+itself vital and probable. A class of adults will especially need such
+points of vital contact. By announcing the topic in advance the teacher
+will often be able to obtain definite cases in point from the members.
+
+With the case thus presented take the points in the text and apply them,
+first to the special case alone, but with the purpose of developing the
+principles involved in that and similar cases. Beware of the special
+danger of the case method, namely, that the class may discuss the
+specific instances rather than the principles.
+
+_Teaching is more than telling_; it is stimulating other minds to see
+and comprehend and state for themselves. Therefore the teacher must
+first comprehend and be able to state for himself. Avoid repeating the
+phrases of the text. Get them over into your own language and see that
+the class does the same. Do not fail to call for the brief reports on
+reading, and to make them a real part of the subject of discussion.
+
+_Questioning_ is the natural method of stimulating minds. Use the
+question method, but do not confine yourself to "What does the author
+say on this?" Direct your questions to the points stated and the issues
+raised so as to compel students to think on the topics and so as to draw
+out the results of their thinking. Form your own judgments and help the
+class to form theirs too. Remember that the purpose of the class is to
+get people thinking on the great subjects discussed. The text is not
+written in order that groups of students may learn the author's
+statements, but that they may be led to think seriously on all these
+matters and stimulated to do something about them.
+
+Use the "discussion topics" given at the end of each lesson. They are
+not designed to furnish a syllabus of the lesson, but to suggest
+important questions for discussion, some of which may barely be
+mentioned in the text. They may be used in assigning the advance work,
+giving topics to different students, and they may be used in your review
+of the previous lesson.
+
+A syllabus of each lesson will be helpful, provided it be prepared by
+the students themselves. Encourage the careful reading of the lesson by
+every member of the class, letting the syllabus grow out of this.
+
+Notebooks will have their largest value if used at home for two
+purposes: first, to set down the student's analysis of the book as he
+reads, secondly, to record the student's observations on definite
+problems and on practice in the home. Note-taking in the class will have
+very little value unless it is backed up by study at home.
+
+_Generalization._ Have clearly in your own mind a definite concept of
+the general principle underlying each section. Read through each section
+until you can state the principle for yourself. Bring your teaching into
+a focus at the point of that principle before the lesson ends. Try to
+get the members of the class to state the principle in their own words.
+
+_In action:_ The principles will have little value unless translated
+into practical methods; direct your teaching to their actual use in
+families. Your generalization is for guidance into application. Urge
+that the plans described be actually tried. Expect this and call for
+reports on plans tested in the daily experience of families. If a number
+of students would try, for example, the plan of worship suggested for
+two or three weeks and report their experiences in writing, together
+with the accounts of any other plans tried, a valuable budget of helpful
+knowledge could thus be gathered.[53]
+
+_Conference plan:_ Some classes will be able to meet twice a week,
+taking the lesson at one session and at another spending the time in
+conference. At the conference period the program might provide for (1)
+brief papers by members of the class on topics personally assigned, (2)
+abstracts or summaries of assigned readings, (3) discussion on the
+particular points raised in the papers, and (4) conference on unsettled
+questions from the lesson for the class period preceding.
+
+_Club work:_ A parents' club might be organized, either in a church or
+in connection with a school, which would use this textbook, follow the
+study work with conferences, and would secure for its own use a library
+of the books listed after each chapter. Such a club would be able to put
+into practice some of the plans advocated and could encourage their
+application in groups of families.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[53] The teachers are especially invited to secure records of actual
+experiments of this character. Accounts of tried methods of family
+worship, especially those with new features, which should be given in
+some detail as to the exact plan, the circumstances, the material used,
+and the results, should be sent to the author in care of the publishers.
+Perhaps in this way material which may be valuable to large numbers may
+be gathered.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+A BOOK LIST
+
+
+The following books would be found useful for the working library of a
+class or club following the study of this text or for a section of the
+church library on the home and family. The books marked with an asterisk
+are the ones which may be regarded as of first practical value to
+parents and others studying the development of character in the life of
+the family.
+
+In addition to the titles mentioned below, the the references at the end
+of each chapter in this book will furnish a list of other sources of
+valuable material.
+
+
+     I. the Institution of the Family
+
+     C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.
+     A historical survey of the family with a special study of its
+     modern dangers and needs.
+
+     P.T. Forsyth, _Marriage, Its Ethics and Religion_. Hodder &
+     Stoughton, $1.25. An important, popular statement of the ethics of
+     marriage as the foundation of family life.
+
+     *W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50
+     net. The most important recent book on the family; traces its
+     historical development, the ethical ideals involved in the
+     institution, and discusses its present problems and perplexities.
+
+     Katherine G. Busby, _Home Life in America_. Macmillan, $2.00 net. A
+     popular statement of the outstanding characteristics of life in
+     American homes; entertaining and informing.
+
+     *Clyde W. Votaw, _Progress of Moral and Religious Education in the
+     American Home_. Religious Education Association, $0.25. A careful
+     and comprehensive survey, of great value.
+
+     Charles A.L. Reed, _Marriage and Genetics_. Galton Press,
+     Cincinnati, Ohio, $1.00. A surgeon's message on eugenics,
+     especially on the aspects indicated in the title. A study of the
+     laws of human breeding.
+
+
+     II. Child Nature
+
+     *E.P. St. John, _Child Nature and Child Nurture_. Pilgrim Press,
+     $0.50. A textbook dealing with the nature of the child and with
+     problems of his training in the home.
+
+     *Irving King, _The High School Age_. Bobbs-Merrill & Co., $1.00
+     net. A study of the nature and needs of boys and girls in the first
+     period of adolescence. Written for all who are alive to the
+     problems of this period as well as for school people; gives
+     constructive suggestions for educational problems.
+
+     Elizabeth Harrison, _A Study of the Child Nature_. Chicago
+     Kindergarten College, $1.00. Long recognized as a standard for
+     parents in the study of the development and functions of the
+     child-life.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Right of the Child to Be Well Born_. Funk &
+     Wagnalls, $0.75. A plain study of eugenics, non-technical and
+     helpful; includes a chapter on eugenics and religion. To be
+     commended to parents.
+
+     George E. Dawson, _The Child and His Religion_. The University of
+     Chicago Press, $0.75. The religious nature and needs of the child
+     with some suggestions as to method.
+
+     *W. Arter Wright, _The Moral Conditions and Development of the
+     Child_. Jennings & Graham, $0.75. An important and valuable book on
+     the newer views of the religious development of the child-life.
+
+     Frederick Tracy and J. Stempfl, _The Psychology of Childhood_. D.C.
+     Heath & Co., $1.20. Gathers up the general results in the field of
+     child psychology.
+
+     *W.G. Koons, _The Child's Religious Life_. Jennings & Graham,
+     $1.00. From the modern point of view, dealing with some of the
+     interesting problems of the relation of the child to religious life
+     and the development of his religious ideas.
+
+     Thomas Stephens, _The Child and Religion_. Putnam, $1.50. A series
+     of short papers by English writers, particularly on the question of
+     child conversion.
+
+     George A. Hubbell, _Up through Childhood_. Putnam, $1.25. A good
+     general review with special reference to religious problems and
+     religious institutions.
+
+     Edith E.R. Mumford, _The Dawn of Character_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.20. A very important book, dealing especially with the moral
+     development of young children.
+
+
+     III. Training in the Home
+
+     William B. Forbush (ed.), _Guide Book to Childhood_. American
+     Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa. Very valuable as a guide
+     to reading on the many problems of child-training.
+
+     LeGrand Kerr, _The Care and Training of the Child_. Funk &
+     Wagnalls, $0.75. A good, general, brief study of the nature of the
+     child and the method of education.
+
+     William J. Shearer, _The Management and Training of the Child_.
+     Richardson, Smith & Co. A popular and practical statement of many
+     problems and their treatment in the home and school.
+
+     John Wirt Dinsmore, _The Training of Children_. American Book Co.
+     While written for school-teachers, this is one of the best studies
+     which parents could possibly read.
+
+     A.A. Berle, _The School in the Home_. Moffat, Yard & Co., $1.00.
+     Contains much valuable suggestion to parents who really desire to
+     take advantage of the educational opportunities of the home.
+
+     John Locke, _How to Train Up Your Children_. Sampson, Low, Marston
+     & Co., London. Written over two hundred years ago, and yet of very
+     great value in many parts to day.
+
+     *William B. Forbush, _The Coming Generation_. D. Appleton & Co.,
+     $1.50. Discusses the various aspects of child-training in the light
+     of the social consciousness of today. Many of the public agencies
+     for child betterment are carefully discussed.
+
+     *William A. McKeever, _Training the Girl_. Macmillan, $1.50.
+
+     *----, _Training the Boy_. Macmillan, $1.50. These two books
+     constitute one of the best collections of material, most practical
+     and helpful. They view girls and boys as active factors and all the
+     phases of home and community life are studied with reference to
+     their needs.
+
+
+     IV. Special Religious Training in the Home
+
+     *George Hodges, _The Training of the Child in Religion_. D.
+     Appleton & Co., $1.50. One of the few books dealing in any modern
+     manner with the special problems of the religious life of the
+     family.
+
+     Rev. William Becker, _Christian Education or The Duties of
+     Parents_. B. Herder, St. Louis, $1.00. Recent and interesting
+     sermons on the duties of parents in the religious education of the
+     Catholic child; a striking example of messages that ought to be
+     heard from every pulpit.
+
+     John T. Faris, _Pleasant Sunday Afternoons for the Children_.
+     Sunday School Times Co., $0.50. A number of practical plans are
+     suggested.
+
+     *George A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_. Fleming H.
+     Revell Co., $1.35. A book which all parents ought to read for its
+     valuable guidance on the general principles of religious education.
+
+     Elizabeth Grinnell, _How John and I Brought Up the Children_.
+     American Sunday School Union, $0.70. A popular statement in a
+     simple form of methods of dealing with many of the problems of
+     religious training.
+
+
+     V. Moral Training
+
+     Edward H. Griggs, _Moral Education_. B.W. Huebsch, $1.60. One of
+     the best-known books on this question, readable and helpful at many
+     points.
+
+     Ennis Richmond, _The Mind of the Child_. Longmans, Green & Co.,
+     $1.00. One of the most helpful books because of its new and
+     refreshing point of view.
+
+     *Edward O. Sisson, _The Essentials of Character_. Macmillan, $1.00.
+     A book on the broad principles and ideals; one dealing with the
+     outstanding elements of character.
+
+     Ernest H. Abbott, _On the Training of Parents_. Houghton Mifflin
+     Co., $1.00. A bright statement of some of the most perplexing
+     problems of family life.
+
+     *Mary Wood-Allen, _Making the Best of Our Children_. First and
+     Second Series. A.C. McClurg & Co., $1.00 each. Takes one after
+     another of the different situations in child-training.
+
+     *Patterson DuBois, _The Culture of Justice_. Dodd, Mead & Co.,
+     $0.75. An important contribution, as it calls attention to some
+     frequently neglected aspects of moral training especially
+     applicable to the home.
+
+     Walter L. Sheldon, _Duties in the Home_. W.M. Welch & Co. A
+     textbook, the thirty sections of which would furnish an excellent
+     basis for parents' discussions of home discipline.
+
+
+     VI. General Reading in the Home
+
+     John Macy, _Child's Guide to Reading_. Baker & Taylor Co., $1.25. A
+     discussion of reading and the education of children thereby, with
+     suggestions and criticisms of suitable books in different
+     departments of reading.
+
+     W.T. Taylor, _Finger Posts to Children's Reading_. A.C. McClurg &
+     Co., $1.00. A practical discussion of suitable reading for
+     children, with a list of books.
+
+     *G.W. Arnold, _A Mothers' List of Books for Children_. A.C. McClurg
+     & Co., $1.00. The books are arranged by ages and topics, making
+     this one of the most useful collections available.
+
+     Edward P. St. John, _Stories and Story Telling_. Eaton & Mains,
+     $0.35. A textbook, for parents' classes. It contains much valuable
+     material.
+
+     E.M. Partridge, _Story Telling in School and Home_. Sturgis &
+     Walton, $1.35. One of the best discussions of the principles and
+     methods of story-telling, with a number of good stories.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Activity in relation to character, 75
+
+Amusement of young people, 190
+
+Anger, Dealing with, 224
+
+
+Bible, Methods of using the, 121
+
+Bible, The, in the home, 119
+
+Blessing at table, 133
+
+Book list on the family, 290
+
+Books and reading, 113
+
+Boy, The, in the family, 173
+
+Boys' play, 175
+
+Bullying, 253
+
+
+Character, A constructive policy for, 269
+
+Child nature, Books on, 291
+
+Child unity with the church, 207
+
+Child welfare, Religious meanings of, 3
+
+Childhood characteristics, 53
+
+Christian family, The, as a type, 41
+
+Church, The, and the children, 204
+
+Church, The, and the family, 198
+
+Church, The, and the program of the home, 271
+
+Citizenship, Training for, 96
+
+Class work, Plans of, 281
+
+Community, The, in relation to the home, 88
+
+Community service, 91
+
+Conversation, Religious, 62
+
+Courtship, 188
+
+
+Dishonesty, 249
+
+
+Economic development of the home, 13
+
+Educational function, The, of the family, 46
+
+Educational process, The, 49
+
+
+Factory system, The, and the home, 14
+
+Family as an institution, Books on the, 290
+
+"Family Book," 155
+
+Family defined, 5
+
+Family ideal in the church, 202
+
+Family life, Dominating motive of, 27
+
+Family worship, 126
+
+Family worship, Methods of, 133
+
+Father, The, and the boy, 177
+
+Father, The, and the family, 263
+
+Fighting among children, 234
+
+Function of the family, 46
+
+Future of the family, 268
+
+
+Girl, The, in the family, 180
+
+God, The consciousness of, 64
+
+Grace at table, 133
+
+
+Hebrew family life, 39
+
+Home and school co-operation, 213
+
+Home, is it passing? 10
+
+Home, Religious interpretation of, 1
+
+Home versus family, 18, 22
+
+Honesty, Training in, 249
+
+Hymns for children, 102
+
+
+Jesus' teaching on the family, 42
+
+
+Loyalty as the basic principle, 31, 54
+
+Loyalty, The organization of, 57
+
+Lying and the moral problem, 240
+
+
+Meals, Conversation at, 165
+
+Moral crises, Dealing with, 218
+
+Moral life, religious roots in the family, 31
+
+Moral teaching, 70
+
+Moral training, Books on, 294
+
+Motive, Religious, in the family, 2
+
+Music in the family, 105
+
+
+Organization of home, Purpose of, 19
+
+
+Parental aversion, 186
+
+Parenthood and religious training, 260
+
+Parents' classes, 274
+
+Parents trained in schools, 214
+
+Petulancy in children, 233
+
+Play activity, 107
+
+Play, A policy of, 150
+
+Play on Sunday, 149
+
+Prayers, Children's, 135
+
+Prayers, Family, 137
+
+
+Quarrels of children, 231
+
+Questions, Children's, 69
+
+
+Reading, Developing taste for, 115
+
+Religious character of the family, 46
+
+Religious development of the child, 52
+
+Religious education in the family, Books on, 293
+
+Religious education, Meaning of, 47
+
+Religious growth of the child, 55
+
+Religious history of the family, 37
+
+Religious ideas of children, 60
+
+Religious service, 78, 80
+
+
+School, The home as a, 87
+
+Schools, Public, and the home, 212
+
+Self-control, Developing, 227, 236
+
+Social life of youth, 189
+
+Social qualities to be developed, 28
+
+Social training, 29, 82, 92
+
+Socialization of the home, 16
+
+Song and story, 101
+
+Spiritual values, Place of, 30
+
+Stories and reading, 110
+
+Story-telling, 110
+
+Sunday afternoon problem, 154
+
+Sunday in the home, 145
+
+Sunday play, 149
+
+
+Table, Ministry of the, 164
+
+Table-talk, 169
+
+Teasing and bullying, 253
+
+
+Will, Training the, 221
+
+Work and character, 76
+
+Worship in the family, 126
+
+Worship, Outlines of, 139
+
+
+Youth in the home, 183
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONSTRUCTIVE STUDIES
+
+
+The Constructive Studies comprise volumes suitable for all grades, from
+kindergarten to adult years, in schools or churches. In the production
+of these studies the editors and authors have sought to embody not only
+their own ideals but the best product of the thought of all who are
+contributing to the theory and practice of modern religious education.
+They have had due regard for fundamental principles of pedagogical
+method, for the results of the best modern biblical scholarship, and for
+those contributions to religious education which may be made by the use
+of a religious interpretation of all life-processes, whether in the
+field of science, literature, or social phenomena.
+
+Their task is not regarded as complete because of having produced one or
+more books suitable for each grade. There will be a constant process of
+renewal and change, and the possible setting aside of books which,
+because of changing conditions in the religious world or further advance
+in the science of religious education, no longer perform their function,
+and the continual enrichment of the series by new volumes so that it may
+always be adapted to those who are taking initial steps in modern
+religious education, as well as to those who have accepted and are ready
+to put into practice the most recent theories.
+
+As teachers profoundly interested in the problems of religious
+education, the editors have invited to co-operate with them authors
+chosen from a wide territory and in several instances already well known
+through practical experiments in the field in which they are asked to
+write.
+
+The editors are well aware that those who are most deeply interested in
+religious education hold that churches and schools should be accorded
+perfect independence in their choice of literature regardless of
+publishing-house interests and they heartily sympathize with this
+standard. They realize that many schools will select from the
+Constructive Studies such volumes as they prefer, but at the same time
+they hope that the Constructive Studies will be most widely serviceable
+as a series. The following analysis of the series will help the reader
+to get the point of view of the editors and authors.
+
+
+KINDERGARTEN, 4-6 YEARS
+
+The kindergarten child needs most of all to gain those simple ideals of
+life which will keep him in harmony with his surroundings in the home,
+at play, and in the out-of-doors. He is most susceptible to a religious
+interpretation of all these, which can best be fostered through a
+program of story, play, handwork, and other activities as outlined in
+
+     _The Sunday Kindergarten_ (Ferris). A teachers' manual giving
+     directions for the use of a one- or two-hour period with story,
+     song, play, and handwork. Permanent and temporary material for the
+     children's table work, and story leaflets to be taken home.
+
+
+PRIMARY, 6-8 YEARS, GRADES I-III
+
+At the age of six years when children enter upon a new era because of
+their recognition by the first grade in the public schools the
+opportunity for the cultivation of right social reactions is
+considerably increased. Their world still, however, comprises chiefly
+the home, the school, the playground, and the phenomena of nature. A
+normal religion at this time is one which will enable the child to
+develop the best sort of life in all these relationships, which now
+present more complicated moral problems than in the earlier stage.
+Religious impressions may be made through interpretations of nature,
+stories of life, song, prayer, simple scripture texts, and handwork. All
+of these are embodied in
+
+     _Child Religion in Song and Story_ (Chamberlin and Kern). Three
+     interchangeable volumes; only one of which is used at one time in
+     all three grades. Each lesson presents a complete service, song,
+     prayers, responses, texts, story, and handwork. Constructive and
+     beautiful handwork books are provided for the pupil.
+
+
+JUNIOR, 9 YEARS, GRADE IV
+
+When the children have reached the fourth grade they are able to read
+comfortably and have developed an interest in books, having a "reading
+book" in school and an accumulating group of story-books at home. One
+book in the household is as yet a mystery, the Bible, of which the
+parents speak reverently as God's Book. It contains many interesting
+stories and presents inspiring characters which are, however, buried in
+the midst of much that would not interest the children. To help them to
+find these stories and to show them the living men who are their heroes
+or who were the writers of the stories, the poems, or the letters, makes
+the Bible to them a living book which they will enjoy more and more as
+the years pass. This service is performed by
+
+     _An Introduction to the Bible for Teachers of Children_
+     (Chamberlin). Story-reading from the Bible for the school and home,
+     designed to utilize the growing interest in books and reading found
+     in children of this age, in cultivating an attitude of intelligent
+     interest in the Bible and enjoyment of suitable portions of it.
+     Full instructions with regard to picturesque, historical, and
+     social introductions are given the teacher. A pupil's homework
+     book, designed to help him to think of the story as a whole and to
+     express his thinking, is provided for the pupil.
+
+
+JUNIOR, 10-12 YEARS, GRADES V-VII
+
+Children in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades are hero-worshipers. In
+the preceding grade they have had a brief introduction to the life of
+Jesus through their childish explorations of the gospels. His character
+has impressed them already as heroic and they are eager to know more
+about him, therefore the year is spent in the study of
+
+     _The Life of Jesus_ (Gates). The story of Jesus graphically
+     presented from the standpoint of a hero. A teacher's manual
+     contains full instructions for preparation of material and
+     presentation to the class. A partially completed story of Jesus
+     prepared for the introduction of illustrations, maps, and original
+     work, together with all materials required, is provided for the
+     pupil.
+
+In the sixth grade a new point of approach to some of the heroes with
+whom the children are already slightly acquainted seems desirable. The
+Old Testament furnishes examples of men who were brave warriors,
+magnanimous citizens, loyal patriots, great statesmen, and champions of
+democratic justice. To make the discovery of these traits in ancient
+characters and to interpret them in the terms of modern boyhood and
+girlhood is the task of two volumes in the list. The choice between them
+will be made on the basis of preference for handwork or textbook work
+for the children.
+
+     _Heroes of Israel_ (Soares). Stories selected from the Old
+     Testament which are calculated to inspire the imagination of boys
+     and girls of the early adolescent period. The most complete
+     instructions for preparation and presentation of the lesson are
+     given the teacher in his manual. The pupil's book provides the full
+     text of each story and many questions which will lead to the
+     consideration of problems arising in the life of boys and girls of
+     this age.
+
+     _Old Testament Stories_ (Corbett). Also a series of stories
+     selected from the Old Testament. Complete instructions for vivid
+     presentation are given the teacher in his manual. The pupil's
+     material consists of a notebook containing a great variety of
+     opportunities for constructive handwork.
+
+Paul was a great hero. Most people know him only as a theologian. His
+life presents miracles of courage, struggle, loyalty, and
+self-abnegation. The next book in the series is intended to help the
+pupil to see such a man. The student is assisted by a wealth of local
+color.
+
+     _Paul of Tarsus_ (Atkinson). The story of Paul which is partially
+     presented to the pupil and partially the result of his own
+     exploration in the Bible and in the library. Much attention is
+     given to story of Paul's boyhood and his adventurous travels,
+     inspiring courage and loyalty to a cause. The pupil's notebook is
+     similar in form to the one used in the study of Gates's "Life of
+     Jesus," but more advanced in thought.
+
+
+HIGH SCHOOL, 13-17 YEARS
+
+In the secular school the work of the eighth grade is tending toward
+elimination. It is, therefore, considered here as one of the high-school
+grades. In the high-school years new needs arise. There is necessary a
+group of books which will dignify the study of the Bible and give it as
+history and literature a place in education, at least equivalent to that
+of other histories and literatures which have contributed to the
+progress of the world. This series is rich in biblical studies which
+will enable young people to gain a historical appreciation of the
+religion which they profess. Such books are
+
+     _The Gospel According to Mark_ (Burton). A study of the life of
+     Jesus from this gospel. The full text is printed in the book, which
+     is provided with a good dictionary and many interesting notes and
+     questions of very great value to both teacher and pupil.
+
+     _The First Book of Samuel_ (Willett). Textbook for teacher and
+     pupil in which the fascinating stories of Samuel, Saul, and David
+     are graphically presented. The complete text of the first book of
+     Samuel is given, many interesting explanatory notes, and questions
+     which will stir the interest of the pupil, not only in the present
+     volume but in the future study of the Old Testament.
+
+     _The Life of Christ_ (Burgess). A careful historical study of the
+     life of Christ from the four gospels. A manual for teacher and
+     pupil presents a somewhat exhaustive treatment, but full
+     instructions for the selection of material for classes in which but
+     one recitation a week occurs are given the teacher in a separate
+     outline.
+
+     _The Hebrew Prophets_ (Chamberlin). An inspiring presentation of
+     the lives of some of the greatest of the prophets from the point of
+     view of their work as citizens and patriots. In the manual for
+     teachers and pupils the biblical text in a good modern translation
+     is included.
+
+     _Christianity in the Apostolic Age_ (Gilbert). A story of early
+     Christianity chronologically presented, full of interest in the
+     hands of a teacher who enjoys the historical point of view.
+
+In the high-school years also young people find it necessary to face the
+problem of living the Christian life in a modern world, both as a
+personal experience and as a basis on which to build an ideal society.
+To meet this need a number of books intended to inspire boys and girls
+to look forward to taking their places as home-builders and responsible
+citizens of a great Christian democracy and to intelligently choose
+their task in it are prepared or in preparation. The following are now
+ready:
+
+     _Problems of Boyhood_ (Johnson). A series of chapters discussing
+     matters of supreme interest to boys and girls, but presented from
+     the point of view of the boy. A splendid preparation for efficiency
+     in all life's relationships.
+
+     _Lives Worth Living_ (Peabody). A series of studies of important
+     women, biblical and modern, representing different phases of life
+     and introducing the opportunity to discuss the possibilities of
+     effective womanhood in the modern world.
+
+     _The Third and Fourth Generation_ (Downing). A series of studies in
+     heredity based upon studies of phenomena in the natural world and
+     leading up to important historical facts and inferences in the
+     human world.
+
+
+ADULT GROUP
+
+The Biblical studies assigned to the high-school period are in most
+cases adaptable to adult class work. There are other volumes, however,
+intended only for the adult group, which also includes the young people
+beyond the high-school age. They are as follows:
+
+     _The Life of Christ_ (Burton and Mathews). A careful historical
+     study of the life of Christ from the four gospels, with copious
+     notes, reading references, maps, etc.
+
+     _What Jesus Taught_ (Slaten). This book develops an unusual but
+     stimulating method of teaching groups of students in colleges,
+     Christian associations, and churches. After a swift survey of the
+     material and spiritual environment of Jesus this book suggests
+     outlines for _discussions_ of his teaching on such topics as
+     civilization, hate, war and non-resistance, democracy, religion,
+     and similar topics. Can be effectively used by laymen as well as
+     professional leaders.
+
+     _Great Men of the Christian Church_ (Walker). A series of
+     delightful biographies of men who have been influential in great
+     crises in the history of the church.
+
+     _Christian Faith for Men of Today_ (Cook). A re-interpretation of
+     old doctrines in the light of modern attitudes.
+
+     _Social Duties from the Christian Point of View_ (Henderson).
+     Practical studies in the fundamental social relationships which
+     make up life in the family, the city, and the state.
+
+     _Religious Education in the Family_ (Cope). An illuminating study
+     of the possibilities of a normal religious development in the
+     family life. Invaluable to parents.
+
+     _Christianity and Its Bible_ (Waring). A remarkably comprehensive
+     sketch of the Old and the New Testament religion, the Christian
+     church, and the present status of Christianity.
+
+It is needless to say that the Constructive Studies present no sectarian
+dogmas and are used by churches and schools of all denominational
+affiliations. In the grammar-and high-school years more books are
+provided than there are years in which to study them, each book
+representing a school year's work. Local conditions, and the preference
+of the Director of Education or the teacher of the class will be the
+guide in choosing the courses desired, remembering that in the preceding
+list the approximate place given to the book is the one which the
+editors and authors consider most appropriate.
+
+For prices consult the latest price list. Address
+
+The University of Chicago Press
+Chicago    Illinois
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN THE FAMILY***
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