092. Parental Mistakes

Parental Mistakes

1Sa_4:18 : ’93He fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died; for he was an old man, and heavy.’94

This is the end of a long story of parental neglect. Judge Eli was a good man, but he let his two boys, Hophni and Phinehas, do as they pleased; and, through over-indulgence, they went to ruin. The blind old judge, ninety-eight years of age, is seated at the gate waiting for the news of an important battle in which his two sons were at the front. An express is coming, with tidings from the battle. This blind nonagenarian puts his hand behind his ear, and listens, and cries: ’93What meaneth the noise of this tumult?’94 An excited messenger, all out of breath with the speed, said to him: ’93Our army is defeated; the sacred chest, called the ark, is captured; and your sons are dead on the field!’94 No wonder the father fainted and expired. The domestic tragedy, in which these two sons were the tragedians, had finished its fifth and last act. ’93He fell from off the seat backward, by the side of the gate, and his neck brake, and he died; for he was an old man, and heavy.’94 Eli had made an awful mistake in regard to his children. The Bible distinctly says: ’93His sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.’94 Oh, the ten thousand mistakes in rearing children’97mistakes of parents, mistakes of teachers in day school and Sabbath classes, mistakes which we all make. Will it not be useful to consider them?

This country is going to be conquered by a great army, compared with which that of Baldwin the First and Xerxes and Alexander and Grant and Lee, all put together, were in numbers insignificant. They will capture all our pulpits, storehouses, factories and halls of legislation; all our shipping, all our wealth and all our honors. They will take possession of all authority, from the United States Presidency down to the humblest constabulary’97of everything between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They are on the march now, and they halt neither day nor night. They will soon be here, and all the present active population of this country must surrender and give way. I refer to the great army of children. Whether they shall take possession of everything for good or for bad depends upon the style of preparation through which they pass on their way from cradle to throne.

Cicero acknowledges that he kept in his desk a collection of prefaces for books, which prefaces he could at any time attach to anything he wanted to publish for himself or others; and all parents and teachers have all prepared the preface of every young life under their charge, and not only the preface, but the appendix, whether the volume be a poem or a farce. Families and schools and legislatures are in our day busily engaged in discussing what is the best mode of educating children. Before this question almost every other dwindles into insignificance, while dependent upon the proper solution is the welfare of governments and ages eternal. Carlyle tells of the war which Frederick the Second made against Queen Maria Theresa. One day she appeared before the august Diet, wearing mourning for her father, and held up in her arms before them her child, the Archduke. This so wrought upon the officers and deputies of the people that, with half-drawn swords, they broke forth in the war-cry: ’93Let us die for our Queen, Maria Theresa!’94 So, realizing that the boy of today is to be the ruler of the future, the popular sovereign, I hold him before the American people to arouse their enthusiasm in his behalf, and to evoke their oath for his defense, his education and his destiny.

If a parent, you will remember when you were aroused to these great responsibilities, and when you found that you had not done all required, after you had admired the tiny hands and the glossy hair and the bright eyes that lay in the cradle, you suddenly remembered that that hand would yet be raised to bless the world with its benediction or to smite it with a curse. In Ariosto’92s great poem there is a character called Ruggiero, who has a shield of insufferable splendor, but it is kept veiled, save on certain occasions; and when uncovered, it startled and overwhelmed its beholder, who before had no suspicion of its brightness. My hope today is to uncover the destiny of your child or student, about which you may have no especial appreciation, and flash upon you the splendors of its immortal nature. Behold the shield and the sword of the coming conflict! I propose in this discourse to set forth what I consider to be some of the errors prevalent in the training of children.

First, I remark that many err in too great severity or too great laxity of family government. Between parental tyranny and ruinous looseness of discipline there is a medium. Sometimes the father errs on the one side and the mother on the other side. Good family government is all-important. Anarchy and misrule in the domestic circle are forerunners of anarchy and misrule in the State. In the attempt to avoid all this, and bring the children under proper laws and regulations, parents have sometimes ruled with great rigor. John Howard, who was merciful to the prisons and lazarettos, was merciless in the treatment of his children. John Milton knew everything but how to train his family. Severe and unreasonable was he in his carriage toward them. He made them read to him in four or five languages, but would not allow them to learn any of them; for, he said, that one tongue was enough for a woman. Their reading was mechanical drudgery, when, if they had understood the languages they read, the employment of reading might have been a luxury. No wonder his children despised him, and stealthily sold his books and hoped for his death. In all ages there is need of a society for the prevention of cruelty to children. When Barbara was put to death by her father because she had countermanded his order, and had three windows put into a room instead of two, this cruel parent was a type of many who have acted the Nero and the Robespierre in the home circle. The heart sickens at what you sometimes see, even in families that pretend to be Christian’97perpetual scolding and hair-pulling and ear-boxing and thumping and stamping and faultfinding and teasing, until the children are vexed beyond bounds and growl in the sleeve and pout and rebel, and vow within themselves that in after days they will retaliate. That child’92s nature is too delicate to be worked upon by sledge-hammer and gouge and pile-driver. Such fierce lashing, instead of breaking the high mettle to bit and trace, will make it dash off the more uncontrollable. Many seem to think that children are flax’97not fit for use till they have been hetcheled and swingled. Some one talking to a child said: ’93I wonder what makes that tree out there so crooked.’94 The child replied: ’93I suppose it was trod on while it was young.’94 In some families all the discipline is concentrated upon one child’92s head. If anything is done wrong, the supposition is that George did it. He broke the latch. He left open the gate. He hacked the bannisters. He whittled sticks on the carpets. And George shall be the scapegoat for all misunderstandings and suspicions. In many a household there is such an one singled out for suspicion and castigation. All the sweet flowers of his soul blasted under this perpetual northeast storm, he curses the day in which he was born.

A mother was passing along the street one day, and came up to her little child, who did not see her approach, and her child was saying to her playmate: ’93You good-for-nothing little scamp, you come right into the house this minute or I will beat you till the skin comes off.’94 The mother broke in, saying: ’93Why, Lizzie, I am surprised to hear you talk like that to any one!’94 ’93Oh,’94 said the child, ’93I was only playing, and he is my little boy, and I am scolding him, as you did me this morning.’94 Children are apt to be echoes of their parents. Safer in a Bethlehem manger among cattle and camels with gentle Mary to watch the little innocent than the most extravagant nursery over which God’92s star of peace never stood.

Yet we may rush to the other extreme and rule children by too great leniency. The surgeon is not unkind because notwithstanding the resistance of his patient he goes straight on with firm hand and unfaltering heart to take off the gangrene. Nor is the parent less affectionate and faithful because, notwithstanding all violent remonstrances on the part of the child, he with the firmest discipline advances to the cutting off of its evil inclinations. The Bible says: ’93Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.’94 Childish rage unchecked will, after a while, become a hurricane. Childish petulance will grow up into misanthropy. Childish rebellion will develop into the lawlessness of riot and sedition. If you would ruin the child, dance to his every caprice and stuff him with confectionery. Before you are aware of it that boy of six years will go down the street, a cigar in his mouth and ready on any corner with his comrades to compare pugilistic attainments. The parent who allows the child to grow up without ever having learned the great duty of obedience and submission has prepared a cup of burning gall for his own lips and appalling destruction for his descendant. Remember Eli and his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas.

A second error prevalent in the training of children is a laying out of a theory and following it without adapting it to varieties of disposition. In every family you will find striking differences of temperament. This child is too timid and that too bold and this too miserly and that too wasteful; this too inactive and that too boisterous. Now, the farmer who should plant corn and wheat and turnips in just the same way, then put them through one hopper and grind them in the same mill, would not be so much of a fool as the parents who should attempt to discipline and educate all their children in the same manner. It needs a skilful hand to adjust these checks and balances. The rigidity of government which is necessary to hold in this impetuous nature would utterly crush that flexible disposition, while the gentle reproof that would suffice for the latter, would, when used on the former, be like attempting to hold a champing Bucephalus with reins of gossamer. God gives us in the disposition of each child a hint as to how we ought to train him, and, as God in the mental structure of our children indicates what mode of training is the best, he also indicates in the disposition their future occupation. Do not write down that child as dull, because it may not now be as brilliant as your other children or as those of your neighbor. Some of the mightiest men and women of the centuries had a stupid childhood. Thomas Aquinas was called at school ’93the dumb ox,’94 but afterward demonstrated his sanctified genius and was called ’93the angel of the schools’94 and ’93the eagle of Brittany.’94 Kindness and patience with a child will conquer almost anything, and they are virtues so Christlike that they are inspiring to look at. John Wesley’92s kiss of a child on the pulpit stairs turned Matthias Joyce from a profligate into an evangel.

The third error prevalent in the training of children is the one-sided development of either the physical, intellectual or moral nature at the expense of the others. Those, for instance, greatly mistake who, while they are faithful in the intellectual and moral culture of children, forget the physical. The bright eyes half quenched by night study, the cramped chest that comes from too much bending over school desks, the weak side resulting from sedentariness of habit, pale cheeks and the gaunt bodies of multitudes of children attest that physical development does not always go along with intellectual and moral. How do you suppose all those treasures of knowledge the child gets will look in shattered casket? And how much will you give for the wealthiest cargo when it is put into a leaky ship? From this infinite blunder of parents how many have come out in life with a genius that could have piled Ossa upon Pelion and mounted upon them to scale the heavens, but have laid down panting with physical exhaustion before a mole-hill. They who might have thrilled senates and marshaled armies and startled the world with the shock of their scientific batteries, have passed their lives in picking up prescriptions for indigestion. They owned all the thunderbolts of Jupiter, but could not get out of their rocking-chair to use them. George Washington in early life was a poor speller, and used to spell hat h-a-double-t and a ream of paper he spelled ’93rheam,’94 but he knew enough to spell out the independence of this country from foreign oppression. The knowledge of the schools is important, but there are other things quite as important.

Just as great is the wrong done when the mind is cultivated and the heart neglected. The youth of this day are seldom denied any scholarly attainments. Our schools and seminaries are ever growing in efficiency, and the students are conducted through all the realms of philosophy and art and language and mathematics. The most hereditary obtuseness gives way before the onslaught of adroit instructors. But there is a development of infinite importance which mathematics and the dead languages cannot affect. The more mental power, the more capacity for evil, unless coupled with religious restraint. Whether knowledge is a mighty good or an unmitigated evil depends entirely upon which course it takes. The river rolling on between round banks makes all the valley laugh with golden wheat and rank grass, and catching hold the wheel of mill and factory, whirls it with great industries. But, breaking away from restraints and dashing over banks in red wrath, it washes away harvests from their moorings and makes the valleys shrink with the catastrophe. Fire in the furnace heats the house or drives the steamer; but, uncontrolled, warehouses go down in awful crash before it, and in a few hours half a city will lie in black ruin, walls and towers and churches and monuments. You must accompany the education of the intellect with the education of the heart, or you are rousing up within your child an energy which will be blasting and terrific. Better a wicked dunce than a wicked philosopher.

The fourth error often committed in the training of children is the suppression of childish sportfulness. Parents, having for a good many years been jostled about in the rough world, often lose their vivacity, and are astonished to see their children act with so little thought of the earnest world all about them. That is a cruel parent who quenches any of the light in a child’92s soul. Instead of arresting his sportfulness, go forth and help him trundle the hoop and fly the kite and build the snow castle. Those shoulders are too little to carry a burden; that brow is too young to be wrinkled; those feet are too sprightly to go along at a funeral pace. God bless their young hearts! Now is the time for them to be sportful.

The fifth error in the training of childhood is the postponement of its moral culture until too late. Multitudes of children, because of their precocity, have been urged into depths of study where they ought not to go, and their intellects have been overburdened and overstrained and battered to pieces against Latin grammars and algebras, and coming forth into practical life they will hardly rise to mediocrity, and there is now a stuffing and cramming system of education in the schools of our country that is deathful to the teachers who have to enforce it, and destructive to the children who must submit to the process. You find children at nine and ten years of age with school lessons appropriate only for children of fifteen. If children are kept in school and studying from nine to three o’92clock, no home study, except music, ought to be required of them. Six hours of study is enough for any child. The rest of the day ought to be devoted to recreation and pure fun. But you cannot begin too early the moral culture of a child or on too complete a scale. You can look back upon your own life and remember what mighty impressions were made upon you at five or six years of age. That child does not sit so silent during your conversation to be uninfluenced by it. You say he does not understand. Although much of the phraseology is beyond his grasp, he is gathering up from your talk influences which will affect his immortal destiny. From the question he asks you long afterward, you find he understood all about what you were saying. The song with which you sing the child to sleep will echo through all its life, and ring back from the very arches of heaven. I think that often the first seven years of a child’92s life decide whether it shall be irascible, waspish, rude, false, hypocritical, or gentle, truthful, frank, obedient, honest and Christian. The present generations of men will pass off very much as they are now. Although the Gospel is offered them, the general rule is that drunkards die drunkards, thieves die thieves, libertines die libertines. Therefore to the youth we turn. Before they sow wild oats get them to sow wheat and barley. You fill the bushel measure with good corn, and there will be no room for husks.

Glorious Alfred Cookman was converted at ten years of age. At Carlisle, Pennsylvania, during the progress of a religious meeting in the Methodist Church, while many were kneeling at the foot of the altar, this boy knelt in a corner of the church all by himself, and said: ’93Precious Saviour, thou art saving others; oh, wilt thou not save me?’94 A Presbyterian elder knelt beside him and led him into the light. Enthroned Alfred Cookman! Tell me from the skies, were you converted too early? But I cannot hear his answer. It is overpowered by the hosannas of the thousands who were brought to God through his ministry. Isaac Watts, the great Christian poet, was converted at nine years of age. Robert Hall, the great Baptist evangelist, was converted at twelve years of age. Jonathan Edwards, the greatest of American logicians, was converted at seven years of age.

Oh for one generation of holy men and women! Shall it be the next? Fathers and mothers, you, under God, are to decide whether from your families shall go forth cowards, inebriates, counterfeiters, blasphemers, and whether there shall be those bearing your image and carrying your name festering in the low haunts of vice, and floundering in dissipation, and making the midnight of their lives horrid with a long howl of ruin, or whether from your family altars shall come the Christians, the reformers, the teachers, the ministers of Christ, the comforters of the troubled, the healers of the sick, the enacters of good laws, the founders of charitable institutions, and a great many who shall in the humbler spheres of toil and usefulness serve God and the best interests of the human race. You cannot as parents shirk the responsibility; God has charged you with a mission, and all the thrones of heaven are waiting to see whether you will do your duty. We must not forget that it is not so much what we teach our children, as what we are in their presence. We wish them to be better than we are, but the probability is that they will only be reproductions of ourselves.

German literature has much to say of the ’93Spectre of the Brocken.’94 Among those mountains travelers, in certain conditions of the atmosphere, see themselves copied on a gigantic scale in the clouds. At first the travelers do not realize that it is themselves on a larger scale. When they lift a hand or move the head, this monster spectre does the same, and with such enlargement of proportions that the scene is most exciting, and thousands have gone to that place just to behold the spectre of the Brocken. The probability is that some of our faults which we consider small and insignificant, if we do not put an end to them, will be copied on a large scale in the lives of our children, and perhaps dilated and exaggerated into spectral proportions. You need not go as far off as the Brocken to see that process.

The first thing in importance in the education of our children is to make ourselves, by the grace of God, fit examples for them to copy. From your side, that son or daughter, bone of your bone, heart of your heart, the father’92s brow his brow, the mother’92s eye his eye, shall go forth to an eternal destiny. What will be your joy if at last you hear their feet in the same golden highway and hear their voices in the same rapturous song, illustrations, while the eternal ages last, of what a faithful parent could, under God, accomplish. I was reading of a dying mother who had all her children about her, and took each one of them by the hand, and asked them to meet her in heaven, and with tears and sobs such as only those know who have stood by the deathbed of a good old mother, they all promised. But there was a young man of nineteen, who had been very wild and reckless, and hard and proud, and when she took his hand she said: ’93Now, my boy, I want you to promise me before I die that you will become a Christian and meet me in heaven.’94 The young man made no answer, for there was so much for him to give up if he made and kept such a promise. But the aged mother persisted in saying: ’93You won’92t deny me that before I go, will you? This parting must not be forever. Tell me now you will serve God, and meet me in the land where there is no parting.’94 Quaking with emotion he stood, making up his mind and halting and hesitating, but at last his stubbornness yielded and he threw his arms around his mother’92s neck, and said: ’93Yes, mother; I will, I will.’94 And as he finished the last word of his promise her spirit ascended. I thank God, the young man kept his promise. Yes; he kept it. May God give all mothers and fathers the gladness of their children’92s salvation.

For all who are trying to do their duty as parents, I quote the tremendous passage: ’93Train up a child in the way in which he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.’94 If through good discipline and prayer and godly example you are acting upon that child, you have the right to expect him to grow up virtuous. And how many tears of joy you will shed when you see your child honorable and just and truthful and Christian and successful’97a holy man amid a world of dishonesty, a godly woman in a world of frivolous pretension. When you come to die they will gather to bless your last hours. They will push back the white locks on your cold forehead, and say: ’93What a good father he always was to me!’94 They will fold your hands peacefully, and say: ’93Dear mother! She is gone. Her troubles are all over. Does she not look beautiful?’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage