Religious Education in the Family Part 4

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 inst.i.tution?

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 inst.i.tution for the protection, nurture, development, and training of young lives, and, secondly, that it is a religious inst.i.tution, the most influential and important of all religious inst.i.tutions, 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution as necessarily a place where pupils sit at desks and teachers preside over cla.s.ses, 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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sages and of the different catechisms once const.i.tuted 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, G.o.d-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 G.o.d and to childhood will mean more than pet.i.tions 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, inst.i.tutions, and concepts which are to him ideal. He does not a.n.a.lyze, 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 cla.s.s, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 a.n.a.lyze 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded 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?