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Fundamentals of Christian Education
some innocent pleasure, for lack of time and thought, while their busy
fingers and weary eyes were diligently engaged on some useless piece
of adorning, something which could only serve to encourage vanity and
extravagance in the children. “As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined.”
As the children approach manhood and womanhood, these lessons
bear fruit in pride and moral worthlessness. The parents deplore the
children’s faults, but are blind to the fact that they are but reaping the
crop from seed of their own planting.
Christian parents, take up your life burden, and think candidly of
the sacred obligations that rest upon you. Make the word of God your
standard, instead of following the fashions and customs of the world,
the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. The future happiness of your
families and the welfare of society depend largely upon the physical
and moral education which your children receive in the first years
of their life. If their tastes and habits are as simple in all things as
they should be, if the dress is tidy, without extra adornment, mothers
will find time to make their children happy, and teach them loving
obedience.
Do not send your little ones away to school too early. The mother
should be careful how she trusts the molding of the infant mind to other
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hands. Parents ought to be the best teachers of their children until they
have reached eight or ten years of age. Their schoolroom should be the
open air, amid the flowers and birds, and their textbook the treasure of
nature. As fast as their minds can comprehend it, the parents should
open before them God’s great book of nature. These lessons, given
amid such surroundings, will not soon be forgotten. Great pains should
be taken to prepare the soil of the heart for the Sower to scatter the
good seed. If half the time and labor that is now worse than wasted in
following the fashions of the world, were devoted to the cultivation of
the minds of the children, to the formation of correct habits, a marked
change would be apparent in families.
Not long since I heard a mother say that she liked to see a house
fitly constructed, that defects in the arrangement and mismatched
woodwork in the finishing annoyed her. I do not condemn nice taste
in this respect, but as I listened to her, I regretted that this nicety could
not have been brought into her methods of managing her children.
These were buildings for whose framing she was responsible; yet their
rough, uncourteous ways, their passionate, selfish natures, and uncon-