2. Bedtime prayers.—What of children's bedtime prayers? Many can remember them. To many the most natural, helpful time for formal periods of prayer is in the quiet of the bedroom just before retiring. But there is a grave danger in establishing a regular custom of bedside prayers for children, a danger manifest in the very form of certain of these prayers, as

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

It is as though the child were saying, "The day is ended during which I have been able to take care of myself, the hours of helpless sleep begin, and I ask God to take care of me through the terrors of the night." For some children, at least, the night has been made terrible by that thought; they have been led to feel that the day was safe and beautiful, but that the night was so dangerous and fearful that only the great God could keep them through it, and it was an open question whether their prayer for that keeping would be heard.

One must avoid also the notion that such prayers are part of a price paid, a system of daily taxation in return for which heaven furnishes us police protection.

The best plan seems to be to encourage children to pray, to establish in them the habit of closing the day with quiet, grateful thoughts, to watch especially that the prayers learned in early life do not distort the child's thoughts of God, and to make the evening prayer an opportunity for the child to express his desires to God his Father and Friend. Having done this, as the children grow up it is best to leave them free to pray when and where they will. One may properly encourage the evening, private prayer; but the child ought to have the feeling that it is not obligatory, that it must grow out of his desire to talk with God, and, above all, that it has no special connection with the hour and act of retiring for sleep but rather, so far as time is concerned, with the closing of the day. Mothers must see far beyond the charm of the picture formed by the little white-robed figure at her knee. There is no hour so rich in possibilities for this growing life. It is one of the great opportunities to guide its consciousness of God.[28]

3. General family prayers.—It is true that, in many homes, under modern conditions of business, it is almost impossible for the family to be united at the hour when worship used to be customary, following breakfast. However, that is not the only hour available. In many respects it is a poor one for the purpose of social worship; it lacks the sense of leisure. But there are few families where the members do not all gather for the evening meal. It is not difficult to plan at its close for ten minutes in which all shall remain. Without leaving the table it is possible to spend a short time in united, social worship. Or, by establishing the custom and steadily following it, it is possible to leave the table and in less than ten minutes find ample time for worship in another room.

Really everything depends at first on how much we desire to have family worship, whether we see its beauty and value in the knitting of home ties, in the elevation of the family spirit, and in the quickening of the religious ideas. We find time to eat simply because we must; when the necessity of the spirit is upon us we shall find time also to worship and to pray.

Next to the will to make time comes the question of method. First, determine to be simple, natural, and informal. A stilted exercise soon becomes a burden and a source of pain to all. In whatever you do, seek to make it possible for all to have a share by seeing that every thought is expressed within the intelligence of even the younger members, that is, of those who desire to have a share. This does not mean descending to "baby-talk." Just read the Twenty-third Psalm; that is not baby talk, but a child of seven can understand what is meant up to the measure of his experience; the language is essentially simple though the ideas are sublime.

Secondly, insure brevity. For that part of worship in which all are expected regularly to unite, ten minutes should be ample. Some excellent programs will not take more than half this time. Family worship is not a diminutive facsimile of church worship. Doubtless the experiment has failed in many families because the father has attempted to preach to a congregation which could not escape. Keep in mind the thought that this is to be a high moment in each day in which every member will have an equal share.

Thirdly, plan for the largest possible amount of common participation. This is to be the expression of the unity of the family life. Children enjoy doing things co-operatively and in concert.

Fourthly, treat the occasion naturally in relation to other affairs. Proceed to the worship without formal notice, without change of voice, and without apology to visitors. Take this for granted. At the close move on into other duties without the sense of coming back into the world. You have not been out of it; you have only recognized the eternal life and love everywhere in it.

4. Suggestions of plans.—There are given below seven outlines of plans of worship. They are plans which have been in use and have been tried for years. Their only merit is simplicity and practicability; but they are at least worthy of trial. There is no special significance in the arrangement of the days and this may be changed in any way desirable. Further, all plans should be elastic; there will come special days, such as festivals and birthdays, when the program should be varied. For example, on a birthday the child whose anniversary then occurs should have the privilege of making the choice of recitation or reading or of determining the order of all the parts of this brief period of worship.

MONDAY

1. A short psalm repeated in concert.

2. A brief, informal petition by father or mother.

3. The Lord's Prayer, in which all join.

Before attempting even this simple plan, prepare for it by first selecting several suitable psalms. The following should be included: the 1st, 19th, 23d, 24th, 100th, 117th, 121st, and a part of the 103d. You would do well to memorize one of these yourself, so as to be able to lead without reading from the book. Next, think over with some care the things for which you may pray, the aspirations which your children can share with you. Few things are more difficult than this, so to pray that all can make the prayer their own. Let it also be a prayer of love and joy, not a craven begging off from punishments, nor a cowardly plea for protection and provision. We can pray over all these things with gratitude and with confidence toward the God of love. Do not try to preach in your prayers. Many prayers have been ruined by preaching, just as some preaching has been spoiled by praying to the people. Usually four or five sentences will do for the one day. Better a single thought simply expressed than the most brilliant attempt to inform the Almighty on all the events of the world that day.

A prayer in which all can join is always desirable. The Lord's Prayer never wearies us nor grows old. Children enter into it with some new meaning every day; it covers all our great, common, daily needs.

TUESDAY

1. A few favorite memory verses repeated by all (from either the Bible or other literature).

2. Read a very brief passage from the Bible.

3. Prayer, ending with the Lord's Prayer.

Many excellent selections will be found in Dr. Dole's book mentioned at the end of this chapter. Encourage children, however, to make their selections from the poems and passages they already know.

The passage of the Bible selected to be read should be one which first of all incites to worship, and should be chosen for its inspiration and literary beauty. A few lines from the great chapters of Isaiah (e.g., chaps. 35 and 55), from the Psalms (e.g., Pss. 61, 65, 145), from the Sermon on the Mount, from 1 Cor., chap. 13, from the parables of Jesus, will be suitable.

The closing prayer may be extemporaneous or may be read from one of the books of prayers. Many of the prayers in the Episcopal Prayer Book are especially beautiful and quite suitable. Of course in families of the Episcopal church the collect for the day would be the right prayer to use. It is sometimes necessary to use prayers prepared beforehand; some persons never acquire the ability to pray aloud, even in their own families. But halting sentences that are your own, that your children recognize as yours, may mean more to them than the finest flowing phrases from a book. Use the prayers from the book, not as a substitute, but as an addition.

WEDNESDAY

1. A good poem from general literature.

2. Prayer.

There are so many good collections of the great and inspiring poems that one hesitates to recommend any collection. Remember that a poem may be religious and imbued with the spirit of worship, helpful to the purpose of this occasion, even though it contains no allusions to Scripture and makes no direct references to religious belief. "A House by the Side of the Road"[29] is thoroughly human, popular, and could not even be accused of being a classic; but it has a helpful motive and is likely to lead the will toward the life of service and brotherhood. Some would prefer to read a part of one of the great hymns.

THURSDAY

1. A brief reading or recitation from the New Testament.

2. A few moments' conversation on the reading.

3. A very brief prayer followed by a song.

The only apparent difficulty here is in starting the conversation. Do not ask formal questions; rather put them something like this: "I wonder whether people would do just the same on our street today." Make the conversation as general as possible; do not slight, nor scoff at, the contribution of even the least in the group.

FRIDAY

1. A few verses in concert.

2. Read a parable or very brief narrative.

3. The Lord's Prayer.

The reading had better be from one of the paraphrases if it is a narrative from the Old Testament.[30] Even in reading the New Testament one can at times use with advantage the Twentieth-Century Bible or the Modern Reader's Bible.

SATURDAY

1. A period of song.

2. Closing prayer, with the Lord's Prayer.

Perhaps only one song can be sung. It need not be a hymn; that should depend on the choice of the children. Help them to put together all the good songs, including the hymns, in one category in their minds.

SUNDAY

1. Ask: "What has been the best we have read or repeated in our worship this week?"

2. Ask: "What shall we learn for memory repetition this week, what psalm or other passage for our concerted worship?"

3. Read the psalm selected.

4. Closing prayer.

5. Period of song, lasting as long as desired.

This exercise evidently permits of extension in time and should be arranged in accordance with the program for the day.

I. References for Study

George Hodges, The Training of Children in Religion, chaps. viii, ix. Appleton, $1.50.

The Improvement of Religious Education, pp. 108 to 123. Religious Education Association, $0.50.

Mrs. B.S. Winchester, "Methods and Materials Available," Religious Education, October, 1911. $0.50.

II. Further Reading

Koons, The Child's Religious Life. Eaton & Mains, $1.00.

Hartshorne, Worship in the Sunday School. Columbia University, $1.25.

III. Methods and Materials

A.R. Wells, Grace before Meat. U.S.C.E., $0.25.

C.F. Dole, Choice Verses. Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts. Privately printed.

F.A. Hinckley (ed.), Readings for Sunday School and Home. American Unitarian Association, $0.35.

J. Martin, Prayers for Little Men and Women. Harper, $1.25.

S. Hart (ed.), Short Daily Prayers for Families. Longmans, $0.60.

G.A. Miller, Some Out-Door Prayers. Crowell, $0.35.

Oxenden, Family Prayers. Longmans, $1.50.

George Skene, Morning Prayers for Home Worship. Methodist Book Concern, $1.50.

W.E. Barton, Four Weeks of Family Prayer. Puritan Press, Oak Park, Ill.

Abbott, Family Prayers. Dodd, Mead & Co., $0.50.

Prayers for Parents and Children. Young Churchman Co., Milwaukee, Wisconsin, $0.15.

IV. Topics for Discussion

1. What are the causes for the decay of the custom of family worship?

2. What influences us most: public opinion, popular custom, economic pressure?

3. How have the changes affected the religious influence of the home?

4. What features of the older customs are most worth preserving?

5. Recall any of childhood's prayers which you remember. How many maintain the custom of bedtime prayers in mature life?

6. What should be the central motive of "grace" at meals?

7. Would there be advantage in occasionally omitting the "grace"?

8. Give reasons for and against "grace."

9. Criticize the proposed plan of evening family prayers.

10. Describe any plans which have been tried.

11. Why is it desirable to maintain family worship?

FOOTNOTES:

[24] For a study of children's worship see H.H. Hartshorne, Worship in the Sunday School; "Report of Commission on Graded Worship," Religious Education, October, 1914.

[25] "Parents who give up such a practice as family prayers mainly because they know of many other people who have done the same are just as much the slaves of public opinion and ignorant cant as the narrowest Lowlander who forbids his children secular history on Sunday."—Lyttleton, Corner-Stone of Education, pp. 207-8.

[26] Quoted by W.S. Athearn, The Church School.

[27] A number of good poems are given in A.R. Wells, Grace before Meat.

[28] W.B. Forbush gives a number of poetic forms of prayer for children in The Religious Nurture of a Little Child, pp. 12, 13.

[29] By Samuel Walter Foss.

[30] One handy form is The Heart of the Bible, prepared by E.A. Broadus; another, The Children's Bible.



CHAPTER XIII

SUNDAY IN THE HOME

Almost every family finds Sunday a problem. Other days are well occupied with full programs; this one has a program for only part of its time. Other days are rich with the liberty of happy action, but this one is frequently marked by inaction, repression, and limitations. As soon as the evanescent pleasure of Sunday clothes has passed, for those for whom it existed at all, the children settle down to endure the day.

Sec. 1. THE MEANING OF THE DAY

Fathers and mothers who vent a sigh of relief when Sunday is over must marvel at the strains of "O day of joy and gladness." Yet this day defeats its purpose when it is of any other character. We have no right to rob it of its joy and its healing balm. On the day made for man, sacred to his highest good, whatever hinders the real happiness of the child ought to be set aside.

Instead of accepting traditions regarding the method of observing the Sunday, would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, For what use of the day can we properly be held responsible? Here are so many—fifty-two a year—days of special opportunity. To us who complain that business interferes with the personal education of our children through the week, what ought this day to mean? To us who lament the little time we can spend with our families, what ought this day to mean? And what ought we to try to make it mean to children?

We call this God's day; what must some children think of a God who robs his day of all pleasure? If this is the kind of day he makes, then how unattractive would be his years and eternity! It is the day when we have our best opportunity to show them what God is like, to interpret his world and his works in terms of beauty, kindness, riches of thought, and love.

It ought to be the day reserved for the best in life, for the treasures of affection, for the uses of the spirit. Whatever is done this day must come to this test, Is this a ministry to the life of goodness, truth, and loving service? Does this enrich lives? In other words, we may put the broad educational test to the day and its program and determine all by ministry to growing lives.

Sec. 2. CONSERVING THE VALUES

The family faces the problem of the opposition between the rights of man on this day and the greed of commerce, the fight between a day of rest and a day of work. Man's right to rest is assured, legally, but commerce in the name of amusement and in the guise of petty and unnecessary trading constantly maintains its fight to invade the day of rest, to turn it from ministry to man as a person to the dull level of the week of ministry to things. The home has much at stake in this struggle. It needs one day free from the life that tears its members apart, free from the toil that engrosses thought, free for its members to live together as spiritual beings.

In the need for one day, free from the things that hinder and devoted to the life of the spirit, the home finds the guiding principle for the use of the day; all members are to be trained to use it as a glorious opportunity, a welcome period, a day of the best things of life. It is devoted to personality, to man's rights as a religious being.

Surely one of the best things of life will be that we shall meet one another, shall look into faces of friends and companions! And this opportunity of social mingling is lifted to a high level when it is an act of the larger family life, the life that brings God and man into one family. That is what the church meeting and service ought to be: our Father's larger family getting together on the day of the life that makes them one. For the child the church school and the children's service of worship are their immediate points of vital touch with the church family. If we think of the day as affording us the pleasure of social mingling with friends and members of that family, Sunday morning will cease to be a period of unwilling observance of empty duties. Of course that will depend, too, on the measure in which the church and school grasp their opportunity to make this the best of days.[31]

Further, let the home keep this day as the one of personal values all the way through, sacred to that life of love, friendship, and joy in the presence of one another which is the essential life of the family. It has always been a good custom for friends to visit on this day, for families grown up and established around their own hearths to gather again for a few hours. It is the day when we have time to discover how much greater are the riches of friendship than aught besides, when, looking into the eyes of those we love, we see "the light that never was on sea or land," the ultimate good!

The hours of being together are the hours of real education. Children cannot be with good and great people and remain the same. Their lives need other lives. Above all, they need us. This should be the day for real mothering and fathering. Nothing ought to be permitted to interfere with this, neither our social pleasures nor the demands of the church.

Sec. 3. THE PROBLEM OF PLAY

What shall we do with the child who wants to play on Sunday? Is there any other kind of child? They all want to. It is as natural for a child to play as it is for a man to rest; it is as necessary. A child is a growing person learning life by play. Because play seems trivial to us we assume it is so to them; we would banish the trivial from the day devoted to the higher life. In some families play is forbidden because children find pleasure in it, and adults find it impossible to associate piety and pleasure.

Shall we then throw down all barriers and make this day the same as all others? No, rather make the day different by throwing down barriers that stand on other days. Let this be the day when the barriers between father and sons, parents and children, are let down and all can enter into the joy of living.

Play is to a child the idealization of life's experiences and the realization of its ideals. That is why he plays at school, idealizing the everyday life; that is why he plays at housekeeping, at being in church, at being a railway engineer, even a highwayman or an outlaw. The traditional games are the game of life itself in terms of childhood. Play as idealized experience and realized ideals is to the child what the church, worship, and the reading of fiction and essays are to the adult. Play is the child's method of reaching forward into life's meaning. Some games as old as history carry a weight of human tradition and experience as rich for a child as the adult obtains from historical review and from association with the past. There is a sense in which the child playing these games opens the Bible of the race.[32]

We cannot make children over into our pattern; we have to learn from them. Indeed, we come to life through their ways. We must become as little children. Before we settle the question of play on Sunday we do well to be sure that we know what play means to children, that we really grasp something of its educational value and its religious potency. Then we can proceed to a family policy in Sunday play.

Sec. 4. A POLICY ON PLAY

Keep the day as one of family unity. Help the child to think of it as a day protected for the sake of family togetherness. You can play that for this day the ideal is already realized of a family life uninterrupted by the demands of labor and business.

Maintain the unity by doing the ideal things together. Go to the place of worship together, provided it is the place where the child can find expression for spiritual ideals. If the Sunday school does not really lift the child-life and really teach the child, if it is not honest with him and makes no suitable provision for his developing nature, he will be better off in a quiet hour of family conversation and reading at home. That means the application of parents to this hour.[33] It banishes the monstrous Sunday supplement with its hideous, debasing pictures. It substitutes conversation in the whole group, reading aloud of stories and poems, biblical and otherwise, and songs, hymns, or at times the walk in the fields or parks. Fortunately the better type of Sunday school is more and more to be found; children are more and more receiving a ministry actually determined by their needs. So far as the church service is concerned the ideal situation is found when a parallel service is provided for children, based on their needs and capacities. As to attendance, under other circumstances, in the family pew, that depends on whether the child is gaining an aversion to the church by the torture and tedium often involved. Without doubt many adults acquired the settled habit of sleeping in church because that was the only possible relief in childhood.[34]

Maintain the family unity by stepping into the child's ideal life. Expect activity and use it. Why should we assume that because the adult finds a Sunday nap enjoyable the child will be blessed by enforced silence? I would rather see a father playing catch with his boys on Sunday than see the boys cowed into silence while he slept a Sabbath sleep. Children will play. Their play is innocent; more, it may be helpful and educative; we can insure these values in it by our participation. That is the parent's opportunity for a closer sympathy with his children. Playing together is the closest living, thinking, and feeling together. Where games are shared, confidences, secrets, and aspirations are shared, too. Besides, the participation of the adult may tend to tone up the game and to moderate boisterousness.

Seek the beautiful. Speaking as one who has been under both the puritanical regulation and the so-called "continental" freedom of Sunday observance, nothing seems much more beautiful than the sight of an entire family playing at home, in the park, or off in the woods or the fields of the country. Life is strengthened, ideals are lifted, family ties knit closer, gratitude is quickened, and courage stimulated by play of this kind.

Sec. 5. POINTS OF DIFFERENCE

But because it is evidently most important that this day should be different from other days, it is well to mark that difference in our plays and pleasures and to follow some simple principles for Sunday play.

First, make it the day of the best plays. The participation of parents will tend to have this effect. Sometimes some forms of play may be reserved for this day.

Secondly, our play should never interfere with the rights of those who desire to be quiet or to observe the day in ways differing from ours. We must respect the rights of all.

Thirdly, our play must not cause additional or unnecessary labor.

Fourthly, our play must not interfere with the pleasures of others. For instance, in the city children who can use the public tennis courts every day should keep off them on Sunday in order to give opportunity to those who can use them only on that day.

Having said so much on play on Sundays, we must not leave the impression that play is the principal thing. It would be the principal thing for children compelled to work or confined in crowded tenements on all other days. This is a day of rest. Play should not be carried beyond the rest and refreshment stage.

Nor must we assume that a recognition of play involves neglect of worship and instruction. Both should be cherished among the delights of the day. Every attempt to make the day a happy one, by normal play, associates the emphasis on worship with increased happiness in the child's mind.

Sec. 6. THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON PROBLEM

"What shall we do?" the children ask restlessly on Sunday afternoons, and it is by no means a strange question. All the week they have their school work, on Saturdays their play. No wonder Sunday afternoon seems dull. Yet if we older ones use it aright this is our opportunity to give them the best time of all the week. We can make this part of the day really a holiday if we just take time to plan it right. There is something wrong in the home in which the child, as he grows up, does not look forward happily to his Sunday afternoons.

Sunday afternoon should be a family festival time. Keep it sacred to the family. Business and social life claim us all the week, and the church claims its share of this day; but these afternoon hours we can, if we will, reserve for our own home life, for the closer drawing together of children and parents. To hold this time sacred for the children and their interests will help to solve "the Sunday afternoon problem."

1. The child's question, "What shall I do next?"—Children are dynamic, perpetually active. They grow in the direction toward which their activities are turned. Repression is impossible. We must either find the best things for them to do, or let them chance on things good or bad. The following outline for Sunday afternoon is given in the hope that it may help to answer the "what next."

1. Begin to make The Family Book.

2. Give "festival name" to the day, and take an excursion in honor of the one for whom the day is named.

3. Organize an exploring party to discover peoples and scenes of long, long ago.

4. Get acquainted with some beautiful home thoughts.

5. Enjoy an evening hour of song and praise.

2. "The Family Book."—To start The Family Book, mother or father raises the question at dinner: "What was the best Sunday of all last year, and why was it the best?" Everyone, from the oldest down to the least, should have a chance to tell. The statements of the older ones will encourage the younger.

That question will start another: What is the very best thing we can remember about the year past? Let everyone take a pencil and paper and in just ten minutes decide on and write down the one thing best worth remembering. Perhaps the baby cannot write yet, but he or she will want paper and pencil, too. Now, instead of making our answers known to one another, we fold the papers and keep them till the evening meal. We will open them then and talk it all over. Afterward we are going to copy the answers into a new book we are going to make.

This new book is to be called The Family Book, and we expect to put into it all the pleasant things we wish to record about our home and family. Any blank book with ruled lines will do. Some time today we will elect a keeper of the book, and before we go to bed we will see the first entry in that book under the title, "Happy Memories of 1915." That will make a good beginning for The Family Book. Next Sunday we will discuss and set down in the book the happy memories of the intervening week.

3. The festival name.—Now, we have been sitting, talking, and writing as long as the children will care to be still. Suppose we all go outdoors together, every one of us. What if the weather is bad? It is seldom truly bad, and there is so much real happiness in going out in all weathers together.

But where shall we go? There is no fun in walking simply for exercise or health. Well, says father, we can decide where to go by naming the day. How? We will find the most interesting birthday or anniversary that falls today or during the next week. If one of the family has a birthday then, that one shall choose our walk for us. If not, then when we have chosen the national hero or heroine whose birthday falls near this time, or the event the anniversary of which comes nearest, we will go, if possible, where something will remind us of that person or event.

So we fall to discussing the possibilities. We search through almanacs until we find the anniversary that suits us all. Perhaps one of the parents has anticipated all this by looking up the matter, and has a good name to suggest. Or the older ones may consult a dictionary of dates. It may turn out to be the birthday of a national hero. In the city he may have a statue; in the country may be found the kinds of woods, flowers, or animals he loved.

4. The exploring party.—But even after the walk it will not be long before the little ones are asking, "What can we do next?" So we organize the exploring party. Our object is to discover the countries, scenes, strange peoples, and most interesting persons we have heard of in the Bible. We are to find them in the advertising sections of old magazines. Let each one take a magazine and go through it, looking for oriental scenes, for pictures of incidents and of men and women that will remind him of Bible scenes and characters. These are to be cut out, explained, and arranged in the order of time, as they happened, every member of the family helping. The same plan may be applied to scenes of missionary work, using blank books for stories of heroism which children will illustrate with the magazine pictures.

5. Home thoughts.—"Home, sweet home," is just a corner of the afternoon saved for the discovery and reading of selections that are worth keeping in our memories and are also likely to help us hold our homes in some measure of the love and reverence they deserve. There are songs of home that ought never to be forgotten.

6. Religious reading and songs close the day happily.—Children love religious reading and songs, provided they are offered for their worth and not as an exercise, or to be learned as an empty duty. Take down your Bible and read Psalm 100, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands"; see whether they do not all enjoy the music and majesty of those lines. You will not find it difficult to secure their co-operation in learning that by heart.

Then close the day with an hour of song. The children will remember songs learned thus all their lives; therefore those worth remembering should be chosen. For one, there is that dear old song many of us learned at mother's knee, "Jesus loves me, this I know." That and others that are appropriate can be found in almost every hymnbook. Many books of school songs also have a few hymns and Sunday songs that children like.

Parents are puzzled, perhaps most of all, to choose appropriate stories to read to the children on Sunday. Youngsters prefer, of course, the told story to the read one, but if you wish to read you will make no mistake in selecting Christie's Old Organ; Aunt Abbey's Neighbors, by Annie T. Slosson; The Book of Golden Deeds, by Charlotte M. Yonge; and Telling Bible Stories, by Louise S. Houghton. Some Great Stories and How to Tell Them, by Richard Wyche, and Story Telling, by Edna Lyman, will serve as good guides to what to tell, and how to tell it.

7. Naming the day.—From week to week variety should enter into the Sunday program. On the Sunday following the one described above we can begin at the dinner table the happy task of "naming the day." We can decide whether it shall be called after one of our own number, whose birthday falls near this date, or after one of the anniversaries of the week following.

Perhaps someone suggests calling it after the feast day of the church year observed by certain churches. That should lead to discussion and investigation of the meaning of the day.

When all are agreed on a name, write it under its date on your wall calendar. It will be a convenient suggestion for next year, unless the decision is for a different name when the day again comes round. It will also call to mind some of the interesting discussions which it aroused.

After this we might call for The Family Book, which now contains, you will recall, the family's decision as to the best Sunday and the happiest occurrences of the year before. The keeper, appointed last week, must bring it out. We can read what we wrote a week ago and decide on the things worth entering this week. Records of birthdays, special happenings to each of the family, the bright sayings of little ones, and the visits of friends and relatives all should go in.

8. "I remember" stories.—While The Family Book is open is the psychological moment for father and mother to tell stories of their childhood. Every child likes to hear the story that begins, "I remember," and feels a thrill of pride in belonging to something that goes back and has a history. The old family album is a never-failing source of delight, not so much because of the pictures as because of what they suggest of family traditions.

Now is a good time to select some certain thing which shall be used only on this day, such as a festival lamp or candlestick, some festival plates or dishes—just one thing or set of things toward the use of which we can look forward during the week. This helps to make Sunday what we used to call "a treat."

9. Golden deeds.—Last week we started The Family Book in which to keep a record of all the happy experiences that belong to our family. This week we begin another book. In it we expect to place every week just one splendid story, the account of a golden deed, some piece of everyday kindness or heroism of which we have read or heard or which we have witnessed. Everyone is to have a chance to contribute to this book, all the family deciding by vote each week as to which story should be placed on its pages.

Did you read in the paper this week of some brave or kindly deed done by a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? Did you see someone do an act of kindness? Cut out the account or write out the story and have it ready for your own Golden Deed Book. Everyone must watch all the week for the right kind of stories. It is wonderful how much good you will find in the world when you are looking for it.

Sunday afternoons all the family can hear each story and talk over its fine points of virtue and goodness. Thus may be developed an appreciation of the human qualities that are really admirable. We can discuss also the probability of certain of the stories and the righteousness of the deeds.

Any blank book will do, or even a composition book. It will help to keep hands happily occupied if you make your own covers and cut out gilt letters for the title. Often you can find pictures to illustrate the stories chosen; sometimes you may prefer to draw the illustrations. Keep The Golden Deed Book in a safe and convenient place, because there ought to be something to go into it every week. For instance, did you read the other day of the young man who jumped in front of a train to save a young girl? He lost his life, but he saved hers. Can you find that story and put it in the book? Perhaps you have found one that seems even more fitting.

10. Various plans.—Giving happiness creates it. Plan something every Sunday for the happiness of others. Occasionally go in a body to call on someone who will be made happy by the visit.

If you walk in the park or elsewhere, see how many things you can discover that you have read about in the Bible or know to be mentioned there.

Try the game of "guessing hymns." While someone plays the familiar tunes, each takes a turn at identifying them and the hymns to which they belong.

Set aside twenty minutes for each one to write a letter to send to the brother or sister, relative or friend, at a distance. Even the baby can scratch something which he thinks is a "real enough" letter in penciled scribbles.

Close the day with quiet reading and song, or with the memory exercise in which all endeavor to repeat some simple psalm or a few verses, like the Beatitudes. All children like to repeat the Lord's Prayer in family concert.

I. References for Study

Emilie Poulsson, Love and Law in Child Training, chaps. i-iv. Milton Bradley, $1.00.

Happy Sundays for Children and Sunday in the Home. Pamphlets. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.

II. Further Reading

Sunday Play. Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.

Hodges, Training of Children in Religion, chap. xiii. Appleton, $1.50.

III. Methods and Materials

A Year of Good Sundays. Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.

IV. Topics for Discussion

1. What is the real problem of Sunday in the family? Is it that of securing quiet or of wisely directing the action of the young?

2. Recall your childhood's Sundays. Were they for good or ill?

3. What are the arguments against children playing on Sunday? Is there any essential relation between the play of children and the wide-open Sunday of commercialized amusements?

4. Can you describe forms of play in which practically all the family might unite?

5. What characteristics should distinguish play on Sundays from other days? Is it wise to attempt thus to distinguish this day?

6. Criticize the suggestions on occupations for Sunday afternoons.

7. Recall any especially helpful forms of the use of this day in your childhood, or coming under your observation.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] See chap. xvii, "The Family and the Church."

[32] See chap. vii on "Directed Activity," and the references for study at its end.

[33] Much may be learned by a study of Primary plans in a modern Sunday school. See Athearn, The Church School, chap. vi.

[34] Since we are dealing here especially with religious education in the family, the author refers to his more extended treatment of the question of children in church services in Efficiency in the Sunday School, chap. xv.



CHAPTER XIV

THE MINISTRY OF THE TABLE

Shall the periods for meals be for the body only or shall we see in them happy occasions for the enriching of the higher life? Upon the answer depends whether the table shall be little more than a feeding-trough or the scene of constant mental and character development. In some memories the meals stand out only in terms of food, while pictures of dishes and fragments of food fill the mind; in others there are borne through all life pictures of happy faces and thoughts of cheer, of knowledge gained and ideals created in the glow of conversation.

Sec. 1. THE OPPORTUNITY

The family is together as a united group at the table more than anywhere besides. Table-talk, by its informality and by the aid of the pleasures of social eating, is one of the most influential means of education. Depend upon it, children are more impressed by table-talk than by teacher-talk or by pulpit-talk. They expect moralizing on the other occasions, but here the moral lessons throw out no warning; they meet no opposition; they are—or ought to be, if they would be effective—a natural part of ordinary conversation and, by being part and parcel of everyday affairs, they become normally related to life. The table is the best opportunity for informal, indirect teaching, and this is for children the natural and only really effective form of moral instruction.

The child comes to these social occasions with a hungry mind as well as with an empty stomach. His mind is always receptive—even more so than his stomach; at the table he is absorbing that which will stay with him much longer than his food. Even if we were thinking of his food alone, we should still do well to see that the table is graced by happy and helpful conversation; nothing will aid digestion more than good cheer of the spirit; it stimulates the organs and, by diverting attention from the mere mechanics of eating, it tends to that most desirable end, a leisurely consumption of food.

The general conversation of the family group has more to do with character development in children than we are likely to realize, and the table is peculiarly the opportunity for general conversation. Here, most of all, we need to watch its character and consider its teaching effects. Where father scolds or mother complains the children grow fretful and quarrelsome. Where father spends the time in reciting the sharp dealing of the market or the political ring, where mother delights in dilating on the tinsel splendors of her social rivalries, they teach the children that life's object is either gain at any cost or social glory. But it is just as easy to do precisely the opposite, to speak of the pleasures found in simpler ways, to glory in goodness and kindness, and to teach, by relating the worthy things of the day, the worth of love and truth and high ideals. The news of the day may be discussed so as to make this world a game of grab, inviting youth to cast conscience and honor to the winds and to plunge into the greedy struggle, or so as to make each day a book of beautiful pictures of life's best pleasures and enduring prizes.

Sec. 2. DIRECTING TABLE-TALK

But table-talk, helpful, cheerful, and educative, does not occur by accident. It comes, first, from our own constant and habitual thought of the meals in social and spiritual, as well as in physical, terms. And it reaches its possibilities as we endeavor to create and direct the kind of conversation that is desired. "Let all your speech be seasoned with salt," wrote the apostle, and we might add, let your salt be seasoned with good speech. That is the quality we must seek, the seasoning of healthful, saving, and not insipid, speech.

One of the great advantages of "grace before meat" lies in this: it gives a tone to the occasion. Its chief meaning is surely that we remind ourselves of the ever-present guest who is also the giver of all good. Where the grace is not a perfunctory act, but rather the welcoming of such a guest, the meal has started on a high level. We cannot do better than so to act and speak as those who take the divine presence for granted. We need not preach about it; we need only to assume it and move on the level of that friendship. Children will feel it; they will seek to answer to it, and will find pleasure in the very thought which they have perhaps never expressed in words.

The central idea of the grace suggests another means of helpful influences at the table, by bringing into our homes, for the meals, the friends whose lives will lift these younger ones. It is worth everything to live even for an hour with good and broadening lives. There are obligations to our guests to be considered, and their wishes should be consulted, but one always feels that children are being cheated when they are sent to eat at another table and deprived of the peculiar intimate touch with lives that bring the benefits of travel and experience. Ask your own memory what some persons who ate at the table with you in childhood meant to you.

The wise hostess knows that even when she brings together the group of mature folks, and even when they are wise and witty, she must be prepared adroitly to inspire the conversation or it may flag at times. How much more does the conversation need direction where we have the same group every day composed largely of immature persons! When you have thought of all the portions and all the plates, have you thought of the food for the spirit?

Before suggesting methods of selection and direction, let a word of explanation be said: food for the spirit is not confined to theology, to hymns and the Bible; it is whatever will help us to feel and think of life as an affair of the spirit. And this must come in very simple terms, by the elementary steps, for young folks. It will be whatever will in any way help us to live more kindly, more cheerfully, more as though this really were God's world and all folks his family. Whatever does this is truly religious.

Sec. 3. METHODS

Plan for the food of the spirit as seriously at least as for the food of the body. Learn to recognize poisons and also indigestibles. The first are subjects of scandal, bitterness of spirit, malice, impatience, tale-bearing, unkindly criticism, and discontent. The second are subjects too heavy for children: your formal theology would be one of them, your judgments on some intricate subjects may be among them. It is seldom wise to announce negative injunctions, but we can make up our own minds to avoid the conversational poisons and, when they appear, it is always easy to push them out. Even when the unpleasant subject is so common to all and has been so impressive in the day's experience that it threatens to become the sole, absorbing topic, we can say, "We won't talk of it at table! Let's find something better." But we must then have ready the something better; that will be possible only by forethought.

First, save up during the day, or between the meals, the best thoughts, the cheering, kind, ideal, and amusing incidents. Cultivate the habit of saying to yourself, "This is something for us all to enjoy tonight at the table."

Secondly, expect the other members to bring their best. Ask for "the best news of the day" from one and another. Encourage them to tell of good things seen and done and of pleasant and ideal things heard and spoken.

Thirdly, use the incidents as the basis of discussion. Let children tell what they think of moral situations. Often they will quote the opinions of teachers and others. Always you will secure under these circumstances the unreserved expression of what they actually think. A free, informal conversation of this sort where opinions are kindly examined and compared is the finest kind of teaching.

Fourthly, do not forget the grace of humor. To see the odd, whimsical, startling side of the incident or experience trains one to see the interplay of life, to catch a ray of light from all things, and to moderate our tendency to permit our tragedies to pull the heavens down.

Fifthly, use this period to strengthen the consciousness of family unity by recounting past happy experiences and discussing plans of family life. In one family there are few meals from October to Christmas that do not include reminiscences of the summer in the woods and by the water, or from Christmas to June without plans for the next summer in the same place. Then, too, if you are contemplating something new, a piano, a chair, an automobile, talk it all over here. Let each one have his share in the planning. The effect is most important for character; the children acquire the sense of a share in the family community life. They get their first lessons in citizenship in this group, and they thus learn social living. Then when the chair, or what not, is bought, it is not alone the parents' possession; it belongs to all and all treat it as the property of all.

Sixthly, introduce great guests who cannot come in person. It is fine fun to say, "We have with us tonight a man who loved bees and wrote books." Let them guess who it was; help, if necessary, by an allusion to The Life of the Bee and The Blue Bird. They will want to know more about Maeterlinck and they will joyously imagine what they would say to him and how he would answer, what he would eat and how he would behave. In this way we may enjoy knowing better Lincoln, Whittier, Florence Nightingale, and an innumerable company.

Seventhly, this is the place to remind ourselves that table-manners are no small part of the moral life. By the habituation of custom we can establish lives in attitudes of everyday thoughtfulness for others, in the underlying consideration of others which is the basis of all courtesy. Children's questions on table-etiquette must be met, not only by the formal rules, but also by their explanation in the intent of every gentle life to give pleasure and not pain to others, so to live in all things as to find helpful harmony with other lives and to help them to find and be the best. It is not only impolite to grab and guzzle, it is unsocial and so unmoral, because it is both a bad example and a distressing sight to others. It is irreligious, because whatever tends to make this life less beautiful must be offensive to the God who made all things good.

If we ourselves seek to maintain beauty, order, and kindliness in the conduct of the table, our children acquire a love of all that makes for beauty and order and kindliness, for righteousness in the little things of life. A clean tablecloth may be a means of grace. You have to try to live up to it. Order and quietness in eating are not separable from the rest of the life. To lift up life at any point is to raise the whole level. To let it down at any point is to let all down. But to lift up the level of conversation at the table is to raise the level of the entire occasion and to make it more than a period of eating, to convert it into a festival, a joyous occasion of the spirit. The meal should be in all things worthy of the unseen guest.

How near we all come together at the table! In its freedom how clearly are we seen by our children! Here they know us for what we are and so learn to interpret life.

I. Reference for Study

Table Talk. Pamphlet. American Institute of Child Life, Philadelphia, Pa.

II. Topics Tor Discussion

1. The relation of mental conditions to digestion.

2. The relation of table-etiquette to life-habits.

3. The table as an opportunity for the grace of courtesy, and the relation of this grace to Christian character.

4. Training children in listening as well as in talking at table.

5. Do you regard table-talk and table-manners as having any directly religious values? Why?



CHAPTER XV

THE BOY AND GIRL IN THE FAMILY

Much that has been said so far has had in mind only the problems of dealing with younger children in the life of the home. Indeed, almost all literature on education in the family is devoted to the years prior to adolescence. But older boys and girls need the family and the family needs them. Many of the more serious problems of youth with which society is attempting to deal are due to the fact that from the age of thirteen on boys have no home life and girls, especially in the cities, are deprived of the home influences.

Sec. 1. THE GROWING BOY

The life of the family must have a place for the growing boy. It must make provision for his physical needs; these are food, activity, rest, and shelter. Youth is a period of physical crisis. Health is the basis of a sound moral life. Many of the lad's apparently strange propensities are due to the physical changes taking place in his body and, often, to the fact that it is assumed that his rugged frame needs no care or attention.[35]

It will take more than tearful pleading to hold him to his home; he can be held only by its ministry to him; he will be there if it is the most attractive place for him. Some parents who are praying for wandering boys would know why they wandered if they looked calmly at the crowded quarters given to the boy, the comfortless room, the makeshift bed, and the general home organization which long ago assumed that a boy could be left out of the reckoning.

The boy needs a part in the family activities. He can belong only to that to which he can give himself. It will be his home in the degree that he has a share in its business. Begin early to confer with him about your plans; make him feel that he is a partner. See that he has a chance to do part of the work, not only its "chores," but also its forms of service. But even a boy's attitude to the "chores" will depend on whether they are a responsibility with a degree of dignity or a form of unpaid drudgery. His room should be his own room, and he should be responsible for its neatness and its adorning. Services which he does regularly for all should receive regular compensation. In all services which the home renders for others he should have a share; this is his training for the larger citizenship and society of service.[36]

The boy is a playing animal. Not all homes can be fully equipped with play apparatus. But no parents have a right to choose family quarters as though children needed nothing but meals and beds. The shame of the modern apartment building is that its conveniences are all for passive adults. To attempt to train an active, growing, vigorous, playing human creature in one of these immense filing-cases, where all persons are shot up elevators and filed away in pigeonholes called rooms, is to force him out to the life of the streets. The thoughtless self-indulgence of modern parents, seeking only to live without physical effort, is the cause of much juvenile delinquency.[37]

But play for the boy is more than shouting and running in the grass and among trees; he needs books and opportunities for indoor recreation. For the sake of the lad we had better sacrifice the guest-room if necessary, and make way for the punching-bag and the home billiard-table or pool-table; here is a magnet of innocent skilful play to draw him off the street and to bring the boy and his friends under his own roof. If possible his room ought to be the place that is his own, where his friends may come, where he may taste the beginnings of the joys of home-living in receiving them and entertaining them.[38]

A workbench in the attic or basement has saved many a boy from the street. Such apparatus truly interferes with the symmetrical plan of a home that is designed for the entertainment of the neighbors; but families must some time choose between chairs and children, between the home for the purpose of the lives in it and the household for the purpose of a salon.[39]

Sec. 2. RELIGIOUS SERVICE

In the religious family there is valuable opportunity to train youth to one form of participation in the religious life. Whatever the family gives or does for social service, for philanthropic enterprises, for the support of the church or religious work, ought to be, not the gift of one member or of the heads alone, but of the whole family, extending itself in service through the community, the nation, and the world. The form and the amount of the gifts ought to be a matter of family conference and each member ought early to have the opportunity and the means of determining his share in such extension. The child's gifts to the church should not be pennies thrust into his hand as he crosses the threshold of home for the Sunday school, but his own money, from his own account—partly his own direct earnings—appropriated for this or for other purposes by himself and with the advice of his parents. Family councils on forms of participation in ideal activities, by gifts and by service, bind the whole life together and form occasions in which the child is learning life in terms of loving, self-giving service.[40]

The boy needs friendship. Not all his needs can be met by the schoolboys whom he may bring into his room, nor can they all be met by his mother's affection. He needs a father. The most serious obstacle to the religious education of boys is that most of them are half-orphans; intellectually and spiritually they have no fathers. The American ideal seems to be that the man shall be the money-maker, the woman the social organizer, and the children shall be committed to hired shepherds or left to shift for themselves.

Sec. 3. THE FATHER AND THE BOY

No one else can be quite the teacher for the boy that his father ought to be. No man can ever commit to another, still less to some tract or book, the duty of guiding his boy to sanity and consecration in the matter of the sex problems.

The first word that needs to be said on this subject is that such problems receive safe and sufficient guidance only in the atmosphere of affection and reverence. Do not attempt to teach this boy of yours as though you were dealing with a class in physiology. The largest thing you can do for him is to quicken a reverence for the body and for the functions of life. By your own attitude, by your own expressions and opinions, lead him to a hatred and abhorrence of the base, filthy, and bestial, to a healthy fear and detestation of all that despoils and degrades manhood, and to a reverence for purity, beauty, and life.[41]

Be prepared to give him, on the basis of reverence, the clean, clear facts. Be sure you have the facts. Do not think he is ignorant; he is in a world seething with conversation, stories, pictures, and experiences of evil. The trouble is that his facts are partial, distorted, and unbalanced by positive errors; his knowledge is gained from the street and the school-yard. Only a personal teacher can help him unravel the good from the bad, the true from the false. Do not trust to your own general knowledge; take time to read one of the simple and sane books on this subject.[42] Be ready to lead him aright. Remember this subject has provoked a large number of books, many of which are foolish and others unwholesome. Do not try to deputize your duty to some doubtful book.

Sec. 4. FATHERING THE BOY

But the boy needs more than instruction on a special subject; he needs personality, he needs the time and thought of, and personal contact with, his father. Men who do not live with boys never know what they lose. And alas, see what the boy misses! He has been his mother's boy up to school age when school takes him and gives him a woman's guidance, while the Sunday school is likely to keep him—for a while only—under the eye of some dear sister who "just loves boys." The system is a vicious one. The lad needs developed masculinity. If he gets it neither in school nor in the home he will find it on the street corner, through the vicious boy-leader of the degrading poolroom or the alleys.

The boy who finds his father eager to talk over the game, to discuss the merits of peg-tops, to walk, row, play, and work with him, finds it as simple and natural to talk with him over his moral and religious questionings as it is to talk over the daily happenings. To live with the boy is to find the youth with you. But it is hard work discovering your young men if you lost your boys.[43]

Sec. 5. THE GROWING GIRL

Almost all that has been said about the boy applies to the girl of the same years. Let a special plea be entered here against the notion that girls are favored when sheltered from a share in the activities of the home. They desire to express their ideals as much as do boys. Much of the so-called craze for amusements is due to the fact that the family is so organized that there is no vent to the ideals there, no chance to have a share in the business of life. Young folks with the sense that "this is our home," not "our parents', but ours" bend their energies to its adorning, and find in it the chance to realize some of their passion for beauty and for service.[44]

Mothers usually do better than do fathers in the matter of sex instruction. Yet they usually begin too late, long after the little girl has acquired much misleading information in the school. Here, too, the first aim must be to quicken reverence for life, to set up the conception of the beauty and dignity of sex functions before the baser mind of the street has had an opportunity to interpret them in terms of the dirt.[45]

Above all, with boys and girls, the whole subject, including marriage and the founding of a family, must ever be treated with dignity and reverence. Foolish parents jest with their girls about their beaux and boast that their little ones are playing at courtship. If they could realize the wonder awakened, followed by pain and then by hardened sensibilities and coarsened ideals, they would sacrifice their jests for the sake of the child's soul. We wonder that youth treats lightly the matter of social purity when we have treated the sacred relations of life as a jest. If this family in which they now live is to be a place of sacred associations, of real religious life, the whole matter of marriage and the family must be treated with reverence. Their practice will not rise above our everyday ideals as expressed in casual conversation and in our own practice.

I. References for Study

THE BOY

W.A. McKeever, Training the Boy, Part III. Macmillan, $1.50.

Boy Training, Part IV. A Symposium. Associated Press.

Johnson, The Problems of Boyhood. The University of Chicago Press, $1.00.

THE GIRL

Margaret Slattery, The Girl in Her Teens, chaps. iv, vii. Sunday School Times Co., $0.50.

Wayne, Building Your Girl. McClurg, $0.50.

II. Further Reading

W.B. Forbush, The Coming Generation. Appleton, $1.50.

Puffer, The Boy and His Gang. Houghton Mifflin Co., $1.00.

Irving King, The High School Age. Bobbs-Merrill, $1.00.

Building Childhood, A Symposium. Sunday School Times Co., $1.00.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What are the special needs of the growing boy?

2. What are the things that a boy enjoys in his home?

3. In what way does city life interfere with the natural development of the child?

4. What are some of the natural expressions of religion for a boy?

5. How early should the sex instruction begin?

6. What does a father owe to the boy, and what are the best methods of meeting the duty?

7. What are the normal activities for girls in the home?

8. What are their especial needs?

FOOTNOTES:

[35] A good brief book on the problem of the adolescent is E.T. Swift, Youth and the Race; another, from the school point of view, is Irving King, The High-School Age, which has much material of great value to parents.

[36] On the various activities of boys see W.A. McKeever, Training the Boy.

[37] See the notable report by Breckinridge and Abbott, The Delinquent Child and the Home.

[38] On the gregarious instincts see J.A. Puffer, The Boy and His Gang.

[39] See the books on manual work given in chap. vii, "Directed Activity."

[40] On the religious life of the boy in relation to society and the church see Allan Hoben, The Minister and the Boy, and the author's treatment of boys and the Sunday school in Efficiency in the Sunday School, chap. xiv; also J. Alexander et al., Training the Boy, a symposium.

[41] On the attitude of reverence in this question read Dr. Cabot's fine essay, The Christian Approach to Social Morality.

[42] The works of Dr. W.S. Hall, From Boyhood to Manhood, for parents' guidance with boys of thirteen to eighteen; E. Lyttleton, Training of the Young in Laws of Sex, is excellent for fathers; Reproduction and Sexual Hygiene is a text for older youth to be recommended; also, for reading, N.E. Richardson, Sex Culture Talks, D.S. Jordan, The Strength of Being Clean.

[43] For further studies of the problem of the boy parents would do well to read: Building Boyhood, a symposium; W.A. McKeever, Training the Boy; W.B. Forbush, The Coming Generation; W.D. Hyde, The Quest of the Best.

[44] On activities see W.A. McKeever, Training the Girl.

[45] On the problem with young children see M. Morley, The Renewal of Life; in connection with older girls see K.H. Wayne, Building Your Girl.



CHAPTER XVI

THE NEEDS OF YOUTH

Families are for the spiritual development of youth as well as of childhood. The home is for the young people as well as for the younger ones. But the very period when they slip from church school is also the period when they are often lost to the real life of the family. In some measure this is due to the natural development of the social life. The youths go out to work, move forward into enlarging social groups which demand more of their free time. They are learning the life of the larger world of which they are now a part.

Sec. 1. THE SCHOOL OF YOUTH

But the family is still the home of these young people; normally it is still the most vital educational influence for them. Yet there is no problem more baffling than that of family ministry for, and leadership of, the higher life of youth.

It is a short-measure interpretation of the home which thinks of it as only for young children and old folks. The young men and women from sixteen to twenty and over still need training and direction; they need close touch with other lives in affection and in an ideal atmosphere. In a few years they, too, will be home-makers, and here in the home they are very directly learning the art of family life.

For youth there are few effective schools, outside the home, other than the streets and the places of commercialized amusement. Even where the other agencies of training are used, such as college, classes, and associations (such as the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A.), life, at that period, needs the restraints on selfishness that come from family life, the refining and socializing power of the family group.

Sec. 2. SPECIAL NEEDS OF YOUTH

What are the special needs of youth upon which the family may base a reasonable program for their higher needs?

First, the need of sound physical health. This is a period of physical adjustment. Rapid bodily growth is nearly or quite at an end; new functions are asserting themselves. The new demands for directed activity may, under the ambitious impulses of youth, make undue drafts on the energies. The apparent moodiness that at times characterizes this period may be due to poor health. The moral strain of the period will need sound muscles and good health. Parents who would sit up all night—perhaps involuntarily—when the baby has the colic treat with indifference sickness in youth and too readily assume that the young man or the young woman will outgrow these physical ills. But bodily maladjustment or incapacity has most serious character effects. To live the right life and render high service one needs to be a whole person, with opportunity to give undivided attention and undiminished powers to the struggle of life.

Secondly, this is peculiarly the period of the joy of friendships. The social nature must have its food. This young man has discovered that the world consists of something besides things; it is full of people. He is just learning that they are all persons like himself. He enters the era of conscious personal relationships. He would explore the realm of personality. He touches great heights of happiness as other lives are opened to him. It is all new and wonderful, this realm of personality, with its aspects of feeling, thinking, willing, and longing.

Sec. 3. MAINTAINING FRIENDSHIP WITH YOUTH

Do parents know how hungry their older children are for their friendship? They will never tell us, for this world is too new and strange for facile description; they are always bashful about their hunger for persons until they find the same hunger and joy in us. We imagine that they are indifferent to us; the trouble is we are hidden from them. We seldom give them a chance to talk as friend to friend, not about trifling things, but about life itself and what it means. Perhaps at no point do parents exhibit less ability for sympathetic reconstruction and interpretation of their own lives than here. They recall the pleasures of childhood and provide those pleasures for the children. Why not recall the hunger of eighteen years of age and give these youths the very bread of our own inner selves? Or do we, when they ask this bread, give them the stone of mere provision for their physical needs or the scorpion of careless indulgence in things that debase the tastes?

One perplexing phenomenon must not be overlooked: it will often happen that young people pass through a period of what appears to be parental aversion. There will sometimes seem to be suspicion, violent opposition, and even hatred of parents. This is no occasion for despair. It is a stage of development. It is due to the attempt of a will now realizing its freedom under social conditions to adapt itself to the will that has hitherto directed it. To some degree the sex consciousness, which leads to viewing the parents in a new light, may enter in. It may be easily made permanent, however, if parents do not do two things: first, adjust themselves and their methods to the new social freedom of the youth, and, secondly, fling open the doors into their true selves now fully understandable by these men and women.

But the family life must make provision for the wider friendships of youth. Somewhere this insatiable appetite for the reality of lives will feed. Groups of friends your young man and woman will find somewhere. If they cannot bring them into your home they will go elsewhere. You can scarce pay any price too high for the opportunity that comes when they are perfectly free to have their friends with them and with you, when home becomes the natural place of the social meetings of youth. If you are afraid of the wear on the furniture you may keep your furniture, but you will lose a life or lives. Here is the opportunity of the home to enter a wider ministry, to be a place of the joy of friendships to many lives.

Sec. 4. AT THE DOOR OF A NEW WORLD

As through friendships the youth enters and explores this wonderful realm of personality he will find some persons more wonderful than others. Those instincts of which he is largely unconscious will impel him to make a selection. The same law is operative with the young woman. Mating is normally always first on the higher levels of personalities; it first calls itself friendship, nor does it think farther. But father and mother, if they have the least spiritual vision, stand in awe as they see their children taking their first evident steps toward home-making. What an opportunity is theirs!

Yet here, as the home faces its duty toward a family yet to be, is just where some of the most serious mistakes are made. This is no time for teasing and jesting, still less for mocking ridicule. If you treat this essentially sacred step as a joke it will not be strange if the young people follow suit and take marriage as a yet larger joke. The home is the place where the home is treated most irreverently. Of course one must not take too seriously those "calf" courtships, prematurely fostered by boys and girls, under the pressure of the high-school tendency to anticipate all of life's riper experiences. But even here jesting and teasing will only tend to confirm and make permanent what would be but a temporary aberration. In that case either silence or kindly, simple advice will help most of all.

To young people who think at all courtship has its times of vision, when they stand trembling before the unknown future, when they, with youth's idealism, make high vows and stand on high places. Give them at least the opportunity to enter your inmost self, to find there all the light you can give them and all the memory of your own joys and hopes. Make them feel, though you need not say it, that they are at the threshold of a temple. If to you this is an affair of the spirit it will be a matter of religion to them.

Approached in such a temper, many of the practical problems of courtship settle themselves. Take the case of the young man at home. If he knows that you think with him of the high meaning of this experience he will not hesitate to bring the young woman to the home. She will feel your attitude. Upon this level questions of times and seasons, hours in the parlor, and all the matters of their relations will settle themselves. If you treat courtship as a matter of the spirit he will do just what he most of all wants to do, treat this woman who is to be his mate as a person, a spirit, with reverence and love that lifts itself above lust. This is the only ground upon which you can appeal to either in matters of conduct at this time. The conventions of society they will despise; but the inner law speaks to them when the outer letter has no meaning.

Sec. 5. THE SOCIAL LIFE

We must expect our children to go out into their larger world. The beginning of adolescence is the normal time of their social awakening, their conversion from a nature that turns in upon itself to one that moves out into a world of persons. For them, now, the home group ought to be seen as a society as well as a family, as the social group gathering about a definite ideal and mission into which they should delight to project themselves. The appeal of religion is peculiarly vivid just now, for it involves a recognition of one's self as a person with the power of personal choices and with the opportunity to find association with other persons. The family must aid its young people to see the opportunity which the church offers for ideal social relationships which direct themselves to high and attractive service.

Sec. 6. AMUSEMENTS

What should the family do about the question of the amusements of young people?

Healthy young persons must have recreation. They will seek it on its highest level first and find their way down the facile descent of commercialized amusements only as the higher opportunities are denied them. They would always rather play than be played to; they would rather, where early labor has not sapped vitality, play outdoors than sit in a fetid atmosphere watching tawdry spectacles. But play, the idealization of life's experiences, they will find somewhere. To this need the home must minister by the provision of space, time, opportunity, and the means of play. If through either sloth, selfishness, preoccupation, or a mistaken idea of an empty innocence of life you make recreation and social intercourse impossible in the family, the young people will find it on the street or in the crowd. In the family that plans for recreation and provides facilities and time for young people to play the problem is a minor one.

But young people will naturally desire to project themselves into the social amusements of the larger groups. Then we ought to know what those amusements are; we must be able to advise, from actual knowledge, not from hearsay or prejudice, as to the healthful and worth while. The home must insist on the provision in the community for the safe socialization of amusements. The thousands of young girls in the cities, who tramp the pavements down to dance halls, primarily are only seeking the satisfaction of a normal craving; and they, on their way to the dance halls, pass the splendid plants of the schools and the churches, standing dark and idle. Families must develop a public opinion that will demand, for the sake of their young people, a provision for amusement and recreation that, instead of poisoning the life, shall strengthen, dignify, and elevate it. If the demand for clean drinking-water is a proper one, is the demand for healthful food for the life of ideals less so?

There can be no doubt of the attitude of any home with the least conscience for character toward all forms of public amusements in which young people are herded promiscuously for the mere purpose of killing time in trivialities. The "white cities" with their glittering lights and baubles are often moral plague colonies. The amusements debase the intellect, blunt the moral sensibilities, and appeal to the baser passions. They are the low-water mark, we may hope, of commercialized amusement. But they remind us that young people demand company and change from the monotony of the day's toil. They ask us as to the provision we are making for young people and challenge us to use their inclinations for good.

But besides these "shows" there are many dignified forms of social recreation. Good music is to be heard and good plays are to be seen.

The theater, whether of the regular drama or of the motion-picture type, offers a perplexing problem, principally because, in the first place, American people have been too busy conquering a new soil and making a living to give careful thought to the social side of aesthetics and recreation, and, secondly, because the ministry of social recreation has fallen almost entirely under the dominance of the same trend; it has been thoroughly commercialized. We cannot cut the puzzling knot by simply prohibiting all forms of public theatrical entertainment. For one reason, these forms shade off imperceptibly from the church service to the extremes of the vaudeville. But the simple fact is that we no longer indiscriminately class all theaters as baneful and immoral; we are coming to see their potentialities for good. If the young will go, as they will—and ought—to the theater, and if the theater can lift their ideals, parents would do well to guide their children in this matter and to enlist the aid of the theater.

It is worth while to come to a sympathetic understanding of the place of the drama and the opera, to see what they have meant in the education of the race and what is the significance, to us, of the fact of the strong dramatic instinct in childhood. Naturally the subject can only be mentioned here and the suggestion be offered that parents take time to cultivate an appreciation of good orchestral and concert music and of the drama.

The social life will find outlet in other directions. Young people need our aid to find social groups which will inspire and develop them, especially groups that are serviceful.

Sec. 7. THE CALL TO SERVICE

This is the period when ideals begin to give direction to the hitherto undirected activity of childhood and youth. Young people are idealists. They see no height too giddy, no task too hard, no dream too roseate, and no hope unattainable. If the times are out of joint they believe they were "born to set them right." Whatever is wrong or imperfect they would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth. Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blase view of the world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's passion and let it breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and conversation the life of ideals.

Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We know that this was true of us at that time; why should we assume less of others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and active minds—not with sleepy fatalism—believe in their boys, have boys who believe in them.

They wait for leadership. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of indifference to social reform and other types of ideal service, get back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.

They wait for friendship in this matter of their ideals and their service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.

They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to God's world. The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to you—as you have been doing all along—by your daily attitude; you will have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to realize the God-vision of the world.

I. References for Study

H.C. King, Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 105-27. Macmillan, $1.50.

E.D. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, chaps., xvi-xxi. Scribner, $1.50.

II. Further Reading

1. ON YOUTH

C.R. Brown, The Young Man's Affairs. Crowell, $1.00.

Wayne, Building the Young Man. McClurg, $0.50.

Swift, Youth and the Race. Scribner, $1.50.

Wilson, Making the Most of Ourselves. McClurg, $1.00.

2. ON RECREATIONS

L.C. Lillie, The Story of Music and the Musicians. Harper, $0.60.

Gustav Kobbe, How to Appreciate Music. Moffat, $1.50.

P. Chubb, Festivals and Plays. Harper, $2.00.

Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of Dramatic Plays, monographs published by the American Institute of Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.

L.H. Gulick, Popular Recreation and Public Morality. American Unitarian Association. Free.

M. Fowler, Morality of Social Pleasures. Longmans, $1.00.

Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Macmillan, $1.25.

The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see Herbert A. Jump, The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture (a pamphlet) and Vaudeville and Moving Pictures, a report of an investigation in Portland, Ore. Reed College Record, No. 16.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?

2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their evenings? Why is this the case?

3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.

4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friendship of our young people?

5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion to parents?

6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of courtship?

7. What are the special social needs of young people?

8. What is the religious significance of the period of social awakening?

9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amusements?

10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?

11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?

12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?



CHAPTER XVII

THE FAMILY AND THE CHURCH

If the family is engaged in the development of religious character through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close relations with the other great social institution engaged in precisely the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained, these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.

As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home constitutes the first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of life.

Sec. 1. RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME

Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an institution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the developing relations of children to the church, would be largely solved if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these two institutions. The institutional difficulties occur because these relations appear to be competitive. Here is the family with its interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time, interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of the two institutions shall win in the conflict of interests.

But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The home must not by its attitude and conversation assume that the problems of the relationship of children to the church arise largely from the opposite concept, as though these were rival institutions. We carelessly think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be persuaded to give their allegiance to another institution, the interests of which are in a different sphere. We think of the church as an independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or shortcomings and to criticize it if it fails to meet our standards, just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.

This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the church and the children. If the church is a thing apart we can analyze its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw recruits. It marches by while we stand on the curb. But here, surely, is one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms: the church is no more than our own selves associated for certain purposes. If the church fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we would a bridge that failed to carry a reasonable load? We do but condemn ourselves. If my church is not fit to send my children to, then I must help to make it fit. Before falling back on the lazy man's salve of caustic ridicule, before taking the seat of the scornful, before setting in the child's mind an aversion to this institution, based on my opinion, let me be sure I have done all that lies in my power to better it. True, I am only one; but surely, where so many family tables are each Sunday devoted to finding fault with the church and its services, I can find many others who will aid in at least stimulating a sense of personal responsibility for any incompleteness in the church.

The family cannot afford to take the attitude of hostile criticism, for it is thus fighting its first and most natural ally, the one other institution engaged in its own special work. If the forces for spiritual character be divided, how easily do the opposing forces enter in and occupy! The family needs the support of the wider public opinion of the church, insisting on the supremacy of righteousness. The family needs the co-operation of the church in its task of developing religious lives. The family needs the power of this larger social body controlling social conditions and making them contributory to character purposes. The family needs the stimulus which a larger group can give to children and young people.

This does not mean that we must never criticize the church. It is not set off in a niche protected from the acid of secular tongues and minds. Ministers of the gospel are unduly resentful of criticism, perhaps because, after they leave the seminary, no one has a fair opportunity to controvert their publicly stated opinions. But the church needs the cleansing powers of kindly, wise, creative criticism. Anyone can find fault, but he is wise who can show us a better way. This church is the family's ally; it is our business to aid her to greater effectiveness. The new church for our own day awaits the services of the men of today.

The purpose of the family is the basis of alliance with the church. As in every other relation and purpose of the home, so here: the dominant factor is the conscious function of the home and family. If the home is really a religious institution it will seek natural alliance with all other truly religious institutions. Ideally, what is a church but a group of families associated for religious purposes? Is not the church simply a number of families co-operating in the ideal purposes of each family, the development of the lives of religious persons and the control of social conditions for the sake of that purpose? Without entering into disputation as to the relationship of little children to the church, is there not just this relation to the human society called the church, that it is a grouping of families for the purpose of the divine family?

Sec. 2. THE FAMILY IDEAL IN THE CHURCH

Would there be any question as to the naturalness of the relation of our children to the church if the family ideal so controlled our thinking as to saturate theirs? Is not this the present need, that both family and church shall conceive the latter in family terms? By this is meant, not simply that we shall think of what is called "a family church," a church into which we succeed in projecting our families in a fair degree of integrity, but that we shall think of the organization and mission of the church in terms of family life and of the ideal of the divine family. Keeping in mind the general definition already given of a family as persons associated for the development of spiritual persons, let us hold the church to that same ideal; the lives of persons associated in the broadest fellowship that includes both God and man for the purposes of spiritual personality. The church then should be the expression of that family of which Jesus often spoke, the family that calls God Father and man brother.

Closer and more helpful relations between family and church follow where the principles of the family prevail in the latter. The family is an ideal democracy because it exists primarily for persons. It places the value of persons first of all. So with the true church; it will exist to grow lives to spiritual fulness, and to this end all buildings, adornments, exercises, teachings, and organizations will be but as tools, as means serving that purpose. As the family sees its house, table, and activities designed to personal ends, so will the church. In an institution existing to grow lives, the great principle of democracy and of the family will prevail, viz., that to the least we owe the most. Just as the home gives its best to the little child, so will the church place the child in the midst. Just as the home exists for the child and thus holds to itself all other lives, so will the church some day exist for the little ones and so hold and use all other lives.

The prime difficulty of relating the children in our families to the average church lies in the fact that they are children, while the church is an adult institution. Its buildings are designed for adults—save in rare and happy exceptions;[46] its services are designed for adults; it has a more or less extraneous institution called a school for the children. The church spends its money for adults; it compasses sea and land to make one proselyte and coerce him back in old age, and allows the many that already as children are its own to drift away. It often fails to see that if it is to grow lives it must grow them in the growing period. There still remain many churches that must be converted from the selfishness of adult ministry and entertainment to self-giving service for the development of spiritual lives and, especially, for the development of such lives through childhood and youth. They must hear again the Master's voice regarding "these little ones," regarding the significance of the child. And all must be loyal to his picture of his Kingdom as a family and must, therefore, do what all true families do, become child-centric. A church in which children occupy the same place that they hold in an ideal family will have no difficulty in finding a place for the children. It will be a natural and unnoticed transition from the family life in the home to the family life in the church.