46
Fundamentals of Christian Education
a life of wretchedness, perhaps of sin, because of the ignorance or
neglect of parents and teachers.
Many a mother spends hours and even days in needless work
merely for display, and yet has no time to obtain the information
necessary that she may preserve the health of her children. She trusts
their bodies to the doctor, and their souls to the minister, that she may
go on undisturbed in her worship of fashion. To become acquainted
with the wonderful mechanism of the human frame, to understand the
dependence of one organ upon another, for the healthful action of all,
is a work in which she has no interest. Of the mutual influence of mind
and body, she knows little. The mind itself, that wonderful endowment
which allies the finite with the infinite, she does not understand.
For generations, the system of popular education, for children es-
pecially, has been destructive to health, and even to life itself. Five and
even six hours a day young children have passed in schoolrooms not
properly ventilated nor sufficiently large for the healthful accommoda-
tion of the scholars. The air of such rooms soon becomes poisonous
to the lungs that inhale it. And here the little ones, with their active,
restless bodies, and no less active and restless minds, have been kept
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unoccupied during the long summer days, when the fair world without
called them to gather health and happiness with the birds and flowers.
Many children have at best but a slight hold on life. Confinement
in school makes them nervous and diseased. Their bodies become
dwarfed from want of exercise and the exhausted condition of the
nervous system. If the lamp of life goes out, parents and teachers are
far from suspecting that they themselves had aught to do with quench-
ing the vital spark. The sad bereavement is looked upon as a special
dispensation of Providence, when the truth is, inexcusable ignorance
and neglect of nature’s laws had destroyed the life of these children.
God designed them to live in the enjoyment of health and vigor, to
develop pure, noble, and lovely characters, to glorify Him in this life
and to praise Him forever in the future life.
Who can estimate the lives that have been wrecked by cultivating
the intellectual to the neglect of the physical powers? The course of
injudicious parents and teachers in stimulating the young mind by
flattery or fear, has proved fatal to many a promising pupil. Instead of
urging them on with every possible incentive, a judicious instructor