during the first century of the Christian era. Those triumphs should inspire us to greater endeavor and more intense devotion.

If, then, the young people are to recognize their high calling in Christ Jesus, and are to take their part in the great world movement of which Christ is leader, they must be brought into vital contact with the lives and work of the Judsons and Careys and Moffats of modern missions, till each one shall joyfully cry out with Paul, the first foreign missionary since Calvary," Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death; for me to live is Christ and to die is gain "!

XII. THE HOME

THE PART OF THE HOME IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

PROFESSOR CHARLES R. HENDERSON, PH. D., D.D.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

This general subject has already been ably discussed in certain aspects before this Association. The present contribution will come from a different field of study.

I. Historical. The domestic group, or "matrimonial institution," has assumed many forms during the rise and development of civil zation, and humanity has tried all possible kinds of experiments in order to come to the conclusion to make monogamy, with all it implies, the law of social order; and the impulses of the race tend to become innate and the customs traditional, which require this form to be perpetual.

In all stages, from the earliest mother-group to the modern family, the domestic community has always been the primary association of human beings, the undifferentiated stock out of which all the specialized agencies and institutions of society have grown. It would be incredible to think that all this long, racial experience has left no trace in our physical nature, our deep instincts, our traditional conceptions, our social organization, our methods of regulating conduct.

While there has been no one universal order of specialization, there has been, in general, an advance from the condition in which the domestic group, or the closely knit blood-kin, did almost everything for itself without exchange of goods and services, to the present situation, in which the bread-winner of a family buys all he needs for his own by the exchange of one form of service for all that the world has to offer.

Even now, and in the complicated life of a city, the family is an important industrial organization, cares for the health of its members, is alert to protect them from danger, governs them by a domestic code, judges their causes, disciplines them for faults, instructs them in arts and science, trains them in morality, and furnishes them a sanctuary for worship. Only gradually, with reluctance and pain, do the parents transfer their offspring to the larger life of the world and surrender their leadership in culture and control.

There is no one 66 underlying idea" in the family which will account for it. The family grows naturally out of all the elementary desires of our human nature, physical, æsthetic, ethical, and spiritual. To say

with one very interesting writer that obedience is the " underlying idea," is to make us satisfied with a partial and superficial explanation. The family is a complete community of material and mental goods, and attempted simplification of interpretation is distortion and mutilation. All later and larger forms of association merely enlarge and specialize the activities of the domestic group. It is precisely this fact which gives to the family its unique place and importance in relation to education and social progress. Religion, morality, culture, noble politics — all interests suffer if domestic conduct is defective or immoral.

II. The educational function of the family is permanent. There is a quite general belief in some quarters that the educational work of the family is about to be surrendered to special social agencies of education, to the school. Some influential writers, generally of the socialistic tendency, have drawn up an argument for holding this belief. Their chief reason is that ordinary parents are incapable of instructing and training children and youth; that only the state can furnish nurses and teachers who have the scientific and professional equipment for the worthy task of preparing youth for citizenship.

There is a plausible cover for this view, just enough neglected truth in it to delude the unwary and to awaken the prudent. Much of the current discussion among church leaders overlooks the body of facts which socialist agitators have in mind, and which are manifest in the crowded habitations of our huge cities. There it is unquestionably true that very many girls marry too young, without necessary physical maturity and without preparation for motherhood, and with only such education as they can acquire in a primary school and years of specialized labor in a department store or in a factory. It would be well for our country and for the cause of religion if those who write about moral and spiritual education would take adequate pains to bring these deplorable conditions within their mental horizon. We have able and convincing essays on home religion, which are quite suitable for people who have homes; but the average flat-building, occupied by low-paid, unskilled laborers with irregular employment, presents radically different problems, and the conditions call for different methods. Persons long resident in social settlements, and patient missionaries among immigrants, reveal another region, which the ordinary pastor or Sunday school teacher, psychologist, and seminary professor, living in snug comfort, must regard as alien to all he knows. It is this alien world which the socialist has chiefly in his memory when he claims that parents cannot be trusted to educate the children of the land, and that expert nurses and teachers ought to be employed. The socialist also thinks,

and sometimes speaks very bitterly, of those luxurious homes of people who in the whirl of business and social frivolities accept the burdens of parenthood with regret and pass on the tasks of education of their offspring to incompetent hirelings as quickly as possible. Thus at both extremes of society the argument for abandoning the educational function of the family may seem plausible on superficial examination.

But many of us think that the better way would be to correct defects; that those who are able to educate their young children should be constrained by public opinion and law to do so; that the ignorant and untrained should be encouraged and helped to perform their social task; and that nurture is as truly a social function of the family as propagation.

There is an educational function for the family which cannot be transferred to the public school, the kindergarten, or the church school. Much of the early and most important factors of education are inseparably connected with that care of the infant body which only mothers can give. The more formal, systematic, and specialized instruction, of communication of knowledge, belongs to the school; but instruction is only one element in the process of forming the character. The foundations are laid before the child can safely be sent away from the parents, and the co-operation of parental influence is necessary in every succeeding stage of development up to maturity. Just what this peculiar and essential contribution of the family is deserves profound study. We can bring out the essential aspects by briefly considering (1) the aim of education and (2) the particular contribution of the domestic life to spiritual nurture.

III. The aim of religious and moral education is just the goal and purpose of life, the crown of all culture. Jesus' saying is none too often quoted: "I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." This aim is not to be attained in fragments and sections of unrelated acts. The entire body, mind, and spirit is to be sanctified. Isolation of interests is impossible.

There are three aspects of this aim of education, and they must be seen stereoscopically, on all sides at once, as if character had three dimensions; and these aspects are, (1) personality, (2) devotion to our kind, and (3) consecration to God. Each involves the other.

We speak of the perfection of personality as our aim; but we do not mean a fixed limit, a fine quality of dwarfed proportions, and therefore our sage Emerson preferred the word " greatness" as the ideal of personal culture. Personality is not the equivalent of egotism. The person must be a "socius," a companion, a member of the race, of kin

to his kind, a neighbor to all. For selfishness is the essence of sin, and it cuts off all roots which might nourish the soul, and leaves it to wither. Personality is still incomplete in the human community, and demands converse with God. This divine and heavenly summit reached, the Mont Blanc of the range of spiritual mountain heights, all lower ranges of being and interests are seen radiant with the shining of God. "Virtue is the gift of God."

IV. The family offers an indispensable contribution to the elementary spiritual nurture, to right life.

1. Deeper and earlier than clear, rational reasoning, there are experiences which well up from the soul of the infant in response to the stimuli of parental touch and care. Has ever any one described the very fountain and origin of religious consciousness better than the good, gentle, prophetic, awkward Pestalozzi?

"The best way for a child to learn to fear God is to see and hear a real Christian. . . The home is the true basis of the education of humanity. It is the home that gives the best moral training, whether for private or public life. . . . Once again I look into my own heart for an answer to my question, and ask myself, How does the idea of God take root in my soul? Whence comes it that I believe in God, that I abandon myself to Him, and feel happy when I love Him and trust Him, thank Him, and obey Him?

"Then I soon see that the sentiments of love, trust, gratitude, and obedience must first exist in my heart before I can feel them for God. I must love men, trust them, thank them and obey them, before I can rise to loving, thanking, trusting, and obeying God. For he who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love his Father in heaven whom he hath not seen?' I next ask myself, How is it that I come to love men, to trust them, to thank them and obey them? How do these sentiments take root in my heart? And I find that it is principally through the relations which exist between a mother and her infant child.

"The mother must care for her child, feed it, protect it, amuse it. She cannot do otherwise; her strongest instincts impel her to this course. And so she provides for its needs, and in every possible way makes up for its powerlessness. Thus the child is cared for and made happy, and the first seed of love is sown within him."

Then he describes with some details the rise of trust, gratitude, and obedience, the feeling and the ideas which correspond to them, and all in response to the stimulus which arises in the relation of child to mother. "These elements are also the elements of religious development, and it