Volume I, Number 3

EXCERPT FROM "THE DUTIES OF PARENTS" By J.C. Ryle

Train with this thought continually before your eyes -- that the soul of your child is the first thing to be considered.

Precious, no doubt, are these little ones in your eyes; but if you love them, think often of their souls. No interest should weigh with you so much as their eternal interests. No part of them should be so dear to you as that part which will never die. The world, with all its glory, shall pass away; the hills shall melt; the heavens shall be wrapped together as a scroll; the sun shall cease to shine. But the spirit which dwells in those little creatures, whom you love so well, shall outlive them all, and whether in happiness or misery (to speak as a man) will depend on you.

This is the thought that should be uppermost on your mind in all you do for your children. In every step you take about them, in every plan, and scheme, and arrangement that concerns them, do not leave out that mighty question, "How will this affect their souls?"

Soul love is the soul of all love. To pet and pamper and indulge your child, as if this world was all he had to look to, and this life the only season for happiness -- to do this is not true love, but cruelty. It is treating him like some beast of the earth, which has but one world to look to, and nothing after death. It is hiding from him that grand truth, which he ought to be made to learn from his very infancy, -- that the chief end of his life is the salvation of his soul. A true Christian must be no slave to fashion, if he would train his child for heaven. He must not be content to do things merely because they are the custom of the world; to teach them and instruct them in certain ways, merely because it is usual; to allow them to read books of a questionable sort, merely because everybody else reads them; to let them form habits of a doubtful tendency, merely because they are the habits of the day. He must not be ashamed to hear his training called singular and strange. What if it is? The time is short, -- the fashion of this world passeth away. He that has trained his children for heaven, rather than for earth, -- for God, rather than for man, -- he is the parent that will be called wise at last.

Train them to a habit of obedience

This is an object which it is worth any labor to attain. No habit, I suspect, has such an influence over your lives as this. Parents, determine to make your children obey you, though it may cost you much trouble, and cost them many tears. Let there be no questioning, and reasoning, and disputing, and delaying, and answering again. When you give them a command, let them see plainly that you will have it done.

Obedience is the only reality. It is faith visible, faith acting, and faith incarnate. It is the test of real discipleship among the Lord's people. "Ye are My friends if ye do whatsoever I command you" (John 15:14). It ought to be the mark of well-trained children, that they do whatsoever their parents command them. Where, indeed, is the honor which the fifth commandment enjoins, if fathers and mothers are not obeyed cheerfully, willingly, and at once?

Early obedience has all Scripture on its side. It is in Abraham's praise, not merely he will train his family, but "he will command his children, and his household after him" (Gen. 18:19). It is said of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, that when "He was young He was subject to Mary and Joseph" (Luke 2:51). Observe how implicitly Joseph obeyed the order of his father Jacob (Gen. 37:13). See how Isaiah speaks of it as an evil thing, when "the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient" (Isa. 3:5). Mark how the Apostle Paul names disobedience to parents as one of the bad signs of the latter days (2 Tim. 3:2). Mark how he singles out this grace of requiring obedience as one that should adorn a Christian minister: "a bishop must be one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity." And again, "Let the deacons rule well their own children and their own houses well" (1 Tim. 3:4, 12). And again, an elder must be one "having faithful children, children not accused of riot, or unruly" (Titus 1:6).

Parents, do you wish to see your children happy? Take care, then, that you train them to obey when they are spoken to, -- to do as they are bid. Believe me, we are not made for entire independence, -- we are not fit for it. Even Christ's freeman have a yoke to wear, -- they "serve the Lord Christ" (Col. 3:24). Children cannot learn too soon that this is a world in which we are not all intended to rule, and that we are never in our right place until we know how to obey our betters. Teach them to obey while young, or else they will be fretting against God all their lives long, and wear themselves out with the vain idea of being independent of His control.

Reader, this hint is only too much needed. You will see many in this day who allow their children to choose and think for themselves long before they are able, and even make excuses for their disobedience, as if it were a thing not to be blamed. To my eyes, a parent always yielding, and a child always having its own way, are a most painful sight; -- painful, because I see God's appointed order of things inverted and turned upside down; -- painful, because I feel sure the consequence to that child's character in the end will be self-will, pride, and self-conceit. You must not wonder that men refuse to obey their Father which is in heaven, if you allow them, when children, to disobey their father who is upon earth. Parents, if you love your children, let obedience be a motto and a watchword continually before their eyes.

Train them remembering continually the influence of your own example.

Instruction, and advice, and commands will profit little, unless they are backed up by the pattern of your own life. Your children will never believe you are in earnest, and really wish them to obey you, so long as your actions contradict your counsel. Archbisop Tilloston made a remark when he said, "To give children good instruction, and a bad example, is but coming to them with the head to show them the way to heaven, while we take them by the hand and lead them in the way of hell."

We little know the force and power of example. No one of us can live to himself in this world; we are always influencing those around us, in one way or another, either for good or for evil, either for God or for sin. They see our ways, they mark our conduct, they observe our behavior, and what they see us practice, that they may fairly suppose we think right. And never, I believe, does example tell so powerfully as it does in the case of parents and children.

Fathers and mothers, do not forget that children learn more by the eye than they do by the ear. No school will make much deep marks on character as home. The best schoolmasters will not imprint on their minds as much as they will pick up at your fireside. Imitation is a far stronger principle with children than memory. What they see has a much stronger effect on their minds than what they are told.

Take care, then, what you do before a child. It is a true proverb, "Who sins before a child, sins double." Strive rather to be a living epistle of Christ, such as your families can read, and that plainly too. Be an example of reverence for the Word of God, reverence for the Lord's day. Be an example in words, in temper, in diligence, in temperance, in faith, in charity, in kindness, in humility. Think not your children will practice what they do not see you do. You are their model picture, and they will copy what you are. Your reasoning and your lecturing, your wise commands and your good advice; all this they may not understand, but they can understand your life.

Children are very quick observers; very quick in seeing through some kinds of hypocrisy, very quick in finding out what you really think and feel, very quick in adopting all your ways and opinions. You will often find as the father is, so is the son.

Remember the word that the conqueror Caesar always used to his soldiers in a battle. He did not say "Go forward," but "Come." So it must be with you in training your children. They will seldom learn habits which they see you despise, or walk in paths in which you do not walk yourself. He that preaches to his children what he does not practice, is working a work that never goes forward. It is like the fabled web of Penelope of old, who wove all day, and unwove all night. Even so, the parent who tries to train without setting a good example is building with one hand, and pulling down with the other.

EXCERPT FROM "PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES" By Robert Lewis Dabney

The religious importance of parental obligation may be inferred from many scriptural truths; and, among others, from the place it occupies at the end of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new. Historians tell us that from the prophesying of Malachi to the Christian era was an interval of more than four hundred years. During all these ages the heavens were silent, and the church received oracle neither by "Urim and Thummim," nor by prophetic voice. Malachi, in his last chapter, prepares the people for this long silence of revelation by two words, of which one is a promise, and the other a precept. The command is (4:4) to walk by the law of Moses, God's servant, and to keep the statutes and judgments given, through him, for all Israel. The promise (4:5) is, that in due time the Messiah's forerunner, coming in the spirit and power of Elijah, shall usher in the solemn, yet glorious day of Christ, by his preparatory ministry. This was to be, therefore, the next prophet whom the church was entitled to expect. But his work was to be prominently a revival of parental fidelity and domestic piety. "He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." (4:6)

This revival of domestic piety and parental fidelity to the souls of children, Malachi declares, is necessary to prevent the coming of the Divine Messiah from being a woe, instead of a blessing, to men. This reform alone prevents his coming to "smite the land with a curse, instead of crowning it with mercies; because the wickedness, which would otherwise prevail among men, would outrage the holiness, instead of attracting the compassion, of the incarnate God. According to the angel, the same reform is the appointed means to "make ready a people prepared for the Lord." God's way of promoting revival, then, is not to increase the activity of any public and outward means only, but "to turn the hearts of the parents to the children."

These considerations prepare us to expect that the parent's influence will be more effectual for good and evil than any or all others that surround the young soul. Hence is drawn another argument for the parent's awful responsibility. Pastoral experience teaches us that, as parents perform or neglect their duties, the children usually end in grace or impiety. The impressions for good or evil made in the families of Christian countries are usually found too deep to be effectually changed after adult years are reached. The parent has the first and all-important opportunity. Those who come after him--the teacher, the pastor--have but the remnant. The forming hand of the parent is armed with a venerable authority, all others with but a small portion of the delegated power. His words and example are weighted by filial love. He has perpetual familiarity and opportunity; his children are with him at his board; they sleep in their little couch at his feet; they follow him as he comes in and as he goes out. Even when his lips are silent, his example speaks perpetually to them.

Here is the parent's responsibility, and here also is the encouragement. Our God is a faithful and a righteous God. He has not laid this heavy and fearful burden upon our shoulders without the promised help to bear it. His covenant still stands, to be a God to his people and their seed. Faithful effort and holy example shall be rewarded; and that word of Holy Writ will ever be found as much a divine promise as it is a deduction of experience, that, if we "train up our children in the way they should go, when they are old they shall not depart from it." By the very reason which makes parental neglect so blighting to the souls of children, parental teaching will prove an efficient help; and that God who, in paradise, pronounced paternity a blessing, before Satan the murderer had infused the curse of original sin into the stream of humanity, has promised through Christ, the woman's seed, still to use this holy relation for its primeval end of raising up sons unto glory.

Seeing the parental relation is what the Scripture describes it, and seeing Satan has perverted it since the fall for the diffusion and multiplication of depravity and eternal death, the education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God--this is his task on earth. On the right training of the generation now arising, turns not only the individual salvation of each member in it, not only the religious hope of the age which is approaching, but the fate of all future generations in a large degree. Train up him who is now a boy for Christ, and you not only sanctify that soul, but you set on foot the best earthly agencies to redeem the whole broadening stream of human beings who shall proceed from him, down to the time when men cease to marry and give in marriage. Until then, the work of education is never ending.

The generation which is trained for heaven is the one that dies; the one that is born into its place is born in enmity and under the curse. Thus the task of training is ever renewed, until the final consummation shall make the race equal to the angels.

In the last place: We observe some sincere Christians, whose minds are so swayed by the assertion that personal faith must be the invariable pre-requisite to baptism and admission to the church, that they seem incapable of ever entertaining the thought that the church membership of the children of believers may be reasonable and scriptural. The doctrine seems to them so great an anomaly that they cannot look dispassionately at the evidence for it. But to one who has weighed the truths set forth above, the absence of that doctrine from God's dispensations would seem the strange anomaly. To him who has appreciated the parental relation as God represents it, the failure to include it within the circuit of the visible church, to sanctify its obligations and to seal its hopes with the sacramental badge, would appear the unaccountable thing.

We have seen that the promise of a multiplying offspring was the blessing of paradise; that paternity was the splendid expedient of our Maker for multiplying the human subjects of his blessings and instruments of his glory, and of making holiness and bliss the sure, hereditary possession of the increasing multitudes of men, through the probation and adoption of their first father. We have seen how, when Satan had essayed, with a stupendous, yet impotent malice, to pervert the invention of God to the propagation of sin and death, our merciful father rendered his victory void through the woman's seed, thus causing redemption in the second Adam to spring again out of the family tie. We hear him declare in Malachi 2:15, long after the fall, that his object in the founding the family, in the form of monogamy, was "to seek a godly seed." Thus the supreme end of the family institution is as distinctly religious and spiritual as that of the church itself.

Civic legislators speak of the well-ordered family as the integer of which the prosperous commonwealth is formed, but God assigns the family a far higher and holier aim. The Christian family is the constituent integer of the church--the kingdom of redemption.

The instrumentalities of the family are chosen and ordained of God as the most efficient of all means of grace--more truly and efficaciously means of saving grace than all the other ordinances of the church. To family piety are given the best promises of the gospel, under the new, as well as under the old dispensation. How, then, should a wise God do otherwise than consecrate the Christian family, and ordain that the believing parents shall sanctify the children? Hence, the very foundation of all parental fidelity to children's souls is to be laid in the conscientious, solemn, and hearty adoption of the very duties and promises which God seals in the covenant of infant baptism. It is pleasing to think that many Christians who refuse the sacrament do, with a happy inconsistency, embrace the duties and seek the blessing. But God gives all his people the truths and promises, along with the edifying seal. Let us hold fast to both.