Works of Ellen Wood, page 1307
How can your son, whether as child, or youth, or man, learn the way to Heaven unless he be taught? If he is not shown in childhood that it is a desirable place, he may never acquire any anxious wish to go thither, may never of himself discover the road to it. Cultivation is necessary in all things. Look at the watchful care, late and early, bestowed by a gardener on some flower that his skill has made rare. It might have been, untended, a very common-place flower; a hedge blossom growing by the road side; but the constant, untiring culture has made it beautiful. Compare the little insignificant strawberry, trailing in woods, with the magnificent specimens sold at half-a-guinea a plate. In what lies the difference? — in care, in training, in cultivation. And ought the soul of a child to be the one only thing in this world that is not cultivated — watchfully, anxiously, untiringly? Oh, my friends, what shall it profit him if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?
Pause, and reflect a little. All our energies are directed to fit the child for this world, that he may hold a fair place in it. A short world. At the best, but threescore years and ten. As a grain of sand to the sea-shore, a drop of water to the wide ocean, a moment to the ages past, is man’s duration here compared with eternity. It is this truth that should arouse you. Eternity! we cannot realise it; the mind loses itself in the attempt. In happiness or in misery for ever, and for ever, and for ever! And such happiness! such misery! Of neither the one nor the other can we form any adequate idea here. If the life hereafter were but to endure the length of this life, why then the solemn considerations attaching to it, though all too vast, would not be what they are; but it is, you know, to be never-ending. Oh, reader, dear reader, do not let this little appeal fall on you in vain!
As soon as your child can comprehend, begin. Have a place apart. A little quiet room that, maybe, is not used for much else: failing such a room, use your own chamber. At the same hour, as nearly as can be, take the child daily; say, after breakfast in the morning; and (as often as you can) after tea at night. Put him upon your knee; and in a low, loving, gentle voice, tell him of God, of his Saviour, of heavenly things. Show him, in simple language adapted to him, what he must do to please God, to gain Heaven. Impress upon him, I say, the great facts that God is ever near him, watching him; that Jesus waits to welcome him; that angels are about his path and about his bed, shielding him from harm. Show him that this world is not our home, but only one in which we are placed, as in a state of probation, to fit us for the real home to come. Teach him not to fear death, only to try and be ever ready for it. Practically inculcate on him his duties to his fellow-creatures that elbow him in the world: kindness, forbearance, gentleness, love, preferring their convenience to his own; humanity to dumb things; fearless truth, honour, uprightness; patience, unselfishness. Read to him pretty Bible stories; let them pave the way for the Bible itself, and for other books telling of God.
The sitting need not be long — ten minutes, or so — but let it be persevered in from day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year. You can have no idea how intensely the teachable and impressionable little child will learn to love these short moments and to look for them; you can have still less idea of the blessing they may prove to him in his future life, the safeguard they may be. As your other children come on, take them also to join him: their eager faces, upturned to yours, will form a picture as they sit around your knee. There is no other teaching can supplant this: you may read the Bible amidst your household, you may hold family prayer; but that cannot make up for the neglect of this. This is what will lay the good foundation for the time to come.
It will be some trouble to you, costing a little time and a good deal of patient perseverance; but you will be working on for a rich reward. Watch the children when they are with you at other times: subject them to discipline; stop the quarrelsome word, the rising temper, but always stop it gently, and reason with the child for a minute, showing him how wrong and foolish it is. A child’s temper may be brought under discipline as well as its mind. Never let them hear a truly unkind word from you, or tones raised in passion. Let the nurse have the trouble of the children; not you: the washing and dressing, the romping, the noise, the tiresome little fractiousness. The best of children will be naughty, and their noise grates on the nerves, inducing irritability and temper in ourselves; but let the noise and the romping and the naughtiness take place in the nursery away from you. Direct yourself principally to their training; the training I am trying to tell you of.
When a child is born to those of rank, how proud does the mother feel in anticipation if he be destined (in all human expectation) to fill some high and mighty place in the land; say, a post about the court or person of his sovereign! How much rather should she wish it to be about Him who is King of kings and Lord of lords! But this wish, I fear, is hardly ever glanced at: and yet that child in his eternal life, if he be to enter upon it, must occupy some post greater or lesser around the heavenly Throne.
Pray do not mistake me. Do not fancy I would wish a child to be brought up to be a hermit or a monk, or a strait-laced man. The children may be reared as other children are: to dance, and dress, and hold their little social meetings, and read their fairy tales, and altogether be made fit for any position or rank they may have to fill. I am not suggesting to you to keep your children from the world; only to endeavour to arm them so that they may not entirely succumb to its evils. Into the world they must go, and enter on its multifarious occupations, and you must do your best to fit them for their business in it. The more comprehensively a child is educated, the better will he be enabled to fulfil these obligations. But, in addition to that education for the world, there must be something else educated — the soul. There is no way of effecting this, that I know of, save by the mother’s earnest, constant teaching. Once make this good impression on a child in his earliest years, when the spirit is in its freshest dawn, and the virgin soil of the mind is free for what may be planted therein, and it will never be effaced, never lost.
A perfect faith, too deeply seated ever to be shaken; a profound feeling of religion in the soul; a sense of his own individual responsibility as to whether he shall choose the good or the ill; a lively sense of the life that is awaiting him after this life, and that he must, if he is to attain to its perfect bliss, work on for — all this will be possessed by a young man if he have been brought up in the right way. As the charge runs in the Book of Deuteronomy, so will the early charge he has been imbued with be to him:— “See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.”
It is the best, the only safeguard a young man can start with in life, and will bring him scatheless through many a temptation. “God sees me; my mother taught me and prays for me; for very shame, in very gratitude, I cannot do this.” And so, the armour will keep him safe. I do not say that all will be so kept. Nay, a very many will fall into snares in spite of it; for the world teems with fascinations, with engrossing pursuits, good and evil, and youth is hot and heedless. But, rely upon it, though that early teaching may lie dormant, it is not eradicated: from the depths of his memory will arise, ever and anon, the stings of conscience to prick him in the midst of his sin, warning him to return to the better path, and perhaps in time prevailing. And so, though he may wander astray for a time, never fear but he will come back again and carry his sins and his repentance on High, and be received into the Redeemer’s fold. When the prodigal son grew sick of his riotous living in a foreign country, and would fain return to his father with tears and remorse, that father had compassion on him, and ran to meet him when he was yet a great way off, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and called to his servants to bring forth the best robe to put upon him, and a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet, and to kill the fatted calf that they might eat and be merry: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.”
Unhappy instances may occur where this early training and teaching avails not, where even during its process the child throws it off again, and repays you with hardness and incipient scorn: his nature is so evil and vicious that no good seems to be able to penetrate it. Happily these cases are extremely rare; but a unit in the many. Should such a one be found in your home, bringing you no return for your perseverance and prayer, you will at least have the consolation of knowing that your conscience is free — that not on you will lie the blame should the child’s soul be lost — that you have done your duty by him, and are guiltless of his blood in the sight of God. And you cannot imagine, unless you experience it, the peace that this knowledge would give you.
Sometimes, the bitter trouble arising from an ill-doing child comes home to us during our lifetime. Two instances of this, chancing in nearly the opposite ends of society, have recently occurred. Lady R. had a son whom she idolised — a fine young fellow in the pride and flower of his early manhood, but graceless. While plunged up to the ears in a vortex of folly and sin, he met with a sudden death. His mother’s anguish is heartrending; her despair pitiable. “Oh! where is he now?” she cries, wringing her hands in her bitter self-reproach. “Lost! Lost! It is my fault, Lord! Let the sin lie upon me. I might have trained him better, and I did not.”
Going past a street corner the other day, I missed the apple-woman from it. Another sat in her place. “Where is she?” I asked. “Oh, ma’am, she’s dead!”
“Dead! What from?”
“A sort o’ bronchitis.”
“But she could not have been ill long?”— “No time at all, ma’am, so to say. But she has lately had a deal of in’ard trouble: her daughter went wrong, and was lost.”
Is it too much to assume that this poor woman’s “inward trouble” consisted largely of self-reproach? — that she blamed herself for not having tried to give her daughter that armour which would have kept her from the snares of the world, and that the remorse told upon and helped to kill her? These two incidents are not fables invented for the sake of illustration; they have just taken place.
Oh, mothers! Ladies of high degree, women of humble station, for your own peace’ sake, train your child! There must arise an hour when the recollection of this most vital duty will come home to you, bringing to your heart comfort or despair, according to the manner in which you shall have sought to fulfil it. “A child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame,” says that great and wise king to whom God gave more than earthly wisdom. Look out into the world; mark and note, and you will see that it is only too true. Your untrained, untaught son — trained, that is, only for himself and the world, not for God — may not bring you to outward shame in the sight of men, but he will bring you to shame and remorse of heart.
Say not to yourself (as it may be that some of you, my readers, will say), “Surely the necessity for this arduous and continuous training cannot lie on me! my children have good parts — they are sensible, moral, thoughtful, tractable; not likely to go astray when they shall come to years of discretion.” Believe me, there is at least as much necessity to train a good child as a bad one. The child of good parts may turn out to be a good man; moral, intellectual, upright; and yet, with all that, he may not live for God, The great sinner, who has crimson sins to repent of, may find Him first. For, when he awakens to his state and sees himself as he is, he can only fall at Heaven’s feet in shame, and gasp out his despairing cry for mercy. But the man who has been good all his life, as we count goodness, may not see his need of the same mercy until it is too late, or on the verge of being too late. He has been moral and immaculate, he has; has never found out that all men, including himself, are sinners, and so has not been brought to seek the only one means of salvation — his Redeemer. When the portals of the grave are opening for him, then he probably does see it, sees his need and his error, and his nakedness, and wakes up to an extremity of despair that the other knows not of. “Lord, I have lived without Thee, I have sinned in the midst of light; I have neglected my Saviour: can it be that Thou wilt receive me at this the closing hour?” And he wishes — oh, with what bitter yearning! — just as that other one wishes, that he could live his life over again, so that he might serve God as well as man.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Nothing can be fraught with more earnest truth than the promise contained in this injunction. You may deem that I repeat it too frequently. I do not think so.
When he is old, take you notice. I believe those words are pregnant with a meaning not usually attached to them. The impression gathered from them generally is, that the child so trained will never depart from the right way. This is wrong: at least, it is not borne out usually in life — as a vast experience proves. I read them differently. Although he may wander, or fall astray from it in his midday life, he will not fail to return to it when he is old. To me it seems that this may be the true and wider acceptation.
Precepts imparted in childhood, trained with the child, become part and parcel of his nature. You cannot root them out. They are his for life. They grow with his growth, and strengthen with his strength. Though he may — I here again say it — yield for a while to the sins society recks of, in the hot blood of his spring-time, when life’s morning is fair and young, and evil wears its most specious aspect to delude the inexperienced and unwary, he will come back to the right when he is old. Believe me, for I tell you truth. Take your child’s heart to Heaven in his early years, and to Heaven he will turn in his later ones. Do you think that God will let him be lost? No. He has heard the prayers of that child, and seen that his heart was set aright. He has heard your prayers for him: and, though the snares of the world may have drawn him astray for a time, his Heavenly Father will assuredly bring his heart home again ere the last final scene shall come.
That is a beautiful saying; one I like to believe in; though I do not remember just now who first recorded it — That the child of a praying mother will never be lost. Most of us, I suppose, pray for our children: but the prayers must be of the most solemn, supplicating earnestness, and be persevered in to the end.
Yes. Those early lessons will come back again in the time of need, for they were implanted within him in characters of adamant. What a child learns in infancy he learns for life.
When man is old, and his faculties begin to fail, it is not the present, daily, occurrences he remembers and dwells upon. Perhaps he will hardly recal what has happened the day before. But, question him on the memories of his childhood, and you will find his recollections vivid and bright as ever. They cannot leave him; he holds to them with clinging fondness; believes in them, cherishes them, takes them down with him to the grave. No power in earth — I had almost written, in Heaven — can disenchant us in regard to our childhood’s home. We believe in the grand hills around; in the green green fields; in the wild flowers growing amid the tall grass; in the shrubs and trees; in the old rooms, be they ever so homely. We learnt to love and believe in them with our earliest years, as being the dearest and best objects the world contained, and they became part and parcel of ourselves, not to be effaced in after-life. Dormant they may lie for the most part, but they are there within us. And thus it is with our childhood’s lessons, the precepts we learnt at our mother’s knee. What she impresses upon the teachable young heart, is impressed for ever.
It lies with you, and with you only, to train your child — to train him for good or for ill. Had the young men of the present generation been taught to know God in their early years; had faith, and hope, and trust been then implanted within them; we should hear less of the sin of infidelity that is stalking abroad. In their superciliousness, in what they are pleased to call their advanced knowledge, their positivism, their rationalism — I know not how many other isms, but they all tend to one point, atheism — these young men ridicule the very name of religion. The Bible is questioned, carped at, called a string of fables. Speak to them a word of solemn warning, and they shrug their shoulders in return, uncertain which to despise most, that kindly-meant word, or him who gives it. What will their end be? Do they ever ask themselves what? Will they remember in time that there is a God to judge them — a Redeemer to save them? Or will they go down to the grave as they have lived: selfsufficient; unbelievers?
“In the last day,” says St. Paul, “perilous times shall come. For men shall he lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy: lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.”
Would it not seem, looking around us, that these last day have come? And your child must live in them, and be exposed to all their danger. But, if you encompass him about with his casing of heavenly armour, you need not fear for him.
One word of caution I would give here. It relates to the Bible. Beware how you bring up your child to regard it. Implant within him a holy reverence for it in all respects, imbue him with the most implicit belief in it. Let him see you hold it in reverence, even to your touch, handling it solemnly as something pertaining to God. Let the Bible have a place to itself in your home; put no other books under it, or above it, or close around it; teach the little child to revere even its outward form as a thing that may not be taken up heedlessly and lightly. Impress upon his mind the fact that in its doctrines he will learn the way to Life; see that belief in them shall take such root in his heart as to become entwined with its growing fibres. In short, let his faith in the Bible be such that no adverse dogma shall have power to shake it.
This caution is not unnecessary. For unless our faith in the Bible be a sure faith, strong and firm, and has grown with our growth and strengthened with our strength, so that no assailing enemy can uproot it, I see not how we should escape the taint that is abroad, of which I have just spoken. Even the clergy are not all free from this taint — the taint of infidelity. One of them, a young man, stood up in a pulpit the other day, and told the congregation before him that they need not believe altogether in the Bible and New Testament, for that two books at least, one in each of them, were not inspired. Ah, my friends, let us hope that in their assumption of displayed erudition, in their egregious selfsufficiency, he and such as he little suspect the harm they do, or that one such sermon of doubt as this may destroy a soul.
