Pro Rege

John L. Girardeau

Family Religion (Sermon)

Let us, first, contemplate the family as an Institute of Instruction.

It is not necessary to spend time in discussing the question of the natural obligation resting upon parents to teach their children. Whether they do or do not address themselves formally and methodically to the discharge of this parental function they are, from the nature of the case, teachers, and teachers exerting a prodigious influence upon their children. The school is one of nature’s construction, and not a product of conventional arrangement. The pupils are born into it, have no vacations, and never leave it until they arrive at an age when they are prepared to become teachers in a similar school with similar students. The near and tender relations involved, the almost god-like authority of the parent, the assimilating disposition of the child causing it with sponge-like facility to absorb the influence of the daily words, and acts and life of the father and mother, —all these considerations show that the family is necessarily a potent institute of instruction. This is obvious. But the duty resting upon the parent in a stricter and more formal sense to teach his children will also be generally conceded. As, however, in consequence of our weakness and imperfection we are liable to the neglect of even admitted duties, let us look at some of the reasons which bind us to the conscientious performance of this obligation.

The Scriptures are not silent in regard to this primal duty of religion. There can be no doubt that the first family which existed on earth was a school of religious indoctrination. The narrative in Genesis confirms the antecedent probabilities in the case. The pious Abel conformed his practice to the evangelical instructions of his parents when he offered in his worship an animal as significant of his faith in the Lamb of God, who should, in accordance with the purpose of redemption, render himself a propitiatory sacrifice for sin; and his wicked brother sinned against the gospel delivered to him by the same instructions, when he furnished the first and leading instance of will-worship in his infidel presentation of a bloodless offering. Through the Patriarchal dispensation believing parents handed down to their children, generation by generation, the first glorious promise of redemption; and even when the professed people of God had lapsed into an almost universal apostasy from the truth, there remained one family in which the torch was still kept burning that was kindled at the altar of Adam and Eve. The same sacred light shed its rays in the ark when shut in by God’s hand, and when borne upward by the swelling waters of a mighty deluge, with the corpses of a drowned world floating around it and heaved up against its sides. That family school, thus miraculously preserved, became the distributing centre of gospel truth to a new world, alas, so soon by the force of corruption to repeat the crime of its predecessor, and in the face of its doom to plunge into an idolatrous apostasy from God ! Yet here and there in that desert of defection the truth of the gospel maintained its supremacy in some family seminary. The venerable patriarch of Uz taught his children the scheme of salvation in which all his personal hopes were grounded. Abraham, when called of God to be the founder of the church under new sanctions, became an exemplar of fidelity in the duty of parental instruction. By express and solemn statute, the Mosaic code constituted every family in Israel a school of religious training. “Only take heed to thyself and keep thy soul diligently lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them, thy sons and thy sons’ sons.” “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” The illustrious captain who led the host of Israel across Jordan into the promised land, said in his last, affecting address to his countrymen : “Choose you this day whom we will serve. . . As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

The royal Psalmist declared that he would “walk within his house with a perfect heart,” implying that he would in his family both inculcate by precept and exemplify in his conduct the principles of the religion he professed. His son, the wisest of men, who well knew, from his own experience, the benefits of family tuition and the disastrous effects of its neglect, furnishes the salutary admonition : “Train up a child in the way he should go,” and appends the promise that “when he is old he will not depart from it;” intimating that the habits engendered in the young by faithful parental instruction may ordinarily be expected to bear corresponding fruits in maturer life. The same great man, speaking by the Holy Ghost, also charmingly counsels the young: “My son, keep thy father’s commandment, and forsake not the law of thy mother: bind them continually upon thine heart, and tie them about thy neck. When thou goest it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest it shall keep thee; and when thou awakest it shall talk with thee. For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life.” The evangelic prophet records “the writing of Hezekiah, king of Judah, when he had been sick, and was recovered of his sickness,” in which the restored monarch says: “The living, the living, he shall praise thee, as I do this day; the father to the children shall make known thy truth,” as though he esteemed it one of the chief offices for which his life was prolonged to impress upon his children the ways of the Lord. It is worthy of notice that the last of the prophets, in the very closing words of the Old Testament Scriptures emphasizes the discharge or neglect of parental and filial obligations and the consent or disagreement of parents and children in supporting the true religion, as conditioning God’s blessing or His curse: “Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: and 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.” The practice of the pious in training their children in the knowledge of the Scriptures, after the Old Testament canon was completed, is evinced by the case of Timothy, to whom Paul says : “And that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus;” and he had previously intimated who Timothy’s instructors were when he alluded to the unfeigned faith which dwelt in his grandmother Lois, and his mother Eunice. The Spirit of New Testament teachings on this subject is expressed in Paul’s exhortation to parents to “bring up” their children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord”; that is, to give them a Christian education —to train them in the school and for the service of Christ, their Savior and Lord.

Having taken this hasty survey of Scripture teachings on this subject, let us also look at some of the considerations which exhibit the inexpressible importance of the family as a school, and the gigantic responsibilities of parents as its divinely appointed preceptors.

The most superficial attention to the matter must impress upon us the fact that the family school exerts an incalculable influence, because it is the very first in which human beings are trained for time and eternity. From the nature of the case, it takes chronological precedence of all others, secular or ecclesiastical. It is one into which the pupils enter at birth. Their first sense-perceptions are connected with the faces and the voices of their mothers and their fathers. From them they acquire, by absorption, their vernacular tongue With all the ideas which it symbolizes. Their first type of thinking is assimilated involuntarily from that of their parents. They know them before they know God, and derive their first knowledge of God Himself from them. They are in a school in which their teachers are their parents. Their parents are to them the first interpreters alike of nature and the Bible. The conditions of instruction are the most favorable that can be conceived. On the one hand, there is the forming and impressible state of childhood, its boundless credulity as yet unchecked by the experience of untruth and deception, its readiness to accept the testimony of all with whom it comes in contact ; and on the other, the undisputed authority and influence of its parental instructors, founded in admittedly superior will and wielded in tenderness and love. No wonder it has passed into a proverb, that our earliest impressions are the strongest. Like the bottom inscriptions upon some old parchments, however overlaid and crossed, they remain clear when the later are obscured, or abide when they are obliterated. As the experienced Christian turns in the mysterious process of death to the happy time when first he knew the Lord, so it is an affecting natural fact that on the dying bed men reproduce, in imagination, the scenes of early life. Even the abandoned profligate who has gone through gulfs of impurity, and whose mind and conscience are defiled, reverts at last to the sweet associations of his boyhood’s home, and “babbles o’ green fields” over which he once roamed an uncontaminated child. Who can measure the influence of that first school in which we receive our earliest and profoundest impressions? A fragment of Scripture, a bit of a hymn, a scrap of a prayer, taught by a mother’s lips to the child lying in her lap or bowing at her knee, sometimes comes up to the consciousness of the despairing sinner in life’s last struggles, and leads to the clutch of faith upon the promise of salvation through the merits of Christ. And, on the contrary, the remembrance of wicked words and infidel expressions which fell from a parent’s lips upon the ready ear of the child, may arise into the latest consciousness of life to deepen unbelief and thicken the gloom of death.

This leads to the further remark, that the school of childhood is not only a source of enduring impressions, but a nursery of fundamental and regulative ideas. Is not this abundantly attested by facts? The child is almost sure, unless through the operation of some exceptional and revolutionary force, to adopt and maintain the doctrines, views and opinions of its parents. They are absorbed without difficulty and, almost as a matter of course, are incorporated into his intellectual being, and stamp the complexion of his future thinking. The child of the Pagan naturally becomes a Pagan; the child of a Mohammedan, a believer in the Koran. He who is so unfortunate as to be born of an Atheist naturally acts upon the testimony of his earthly father that he has no heavenly. John Stuart Mill, having been bred in a family school in which Atheism was taught, naturally became an Atheist. One who is taught by nominally Christian parents absorbs, in accordance with the same law, nominally Christian views; and it is a matter of the commonest observation that the sects and denominations into which nominal Christianity is divided, in the main perpetuate their existence by virtue of birth and education, rather than by the examination of evidence and judgment rendered upon it. It is true —and God be praised that it is ! —that the almighty grace of the ever-blessed Spirit is not tied to the laws of a merely natural development, but sovereignly operates not only to the reversal of false regulative ideas and views which are derived from education, but to the destruction of the fundamental principle of inherent sin itself, from which all religious errors and all actual transgressions of the divine law proceed. It is left on record for our instruction that Saul, the persecuting inquisitor, was thus miraculously converted; and without this doctrine delivered to us clearly in God’s word, the whole cause of foreign missions would be a wild vagary. But while this is true, and must be insisted on, it must also be admitted that ordinarily the operations of God’s saving grace are concurrent with the line of family descent and family culture. The promise of salvation by Jesus Christ is indeed unto all that are afar off, even to as many as the Lord our God shall call, but it is chiefly and emphatically to those who profess the true religion and to their children.

It must also be remarked, by way of qualification, that the correct views and principles instilled by parental instruction into their children cannot be expected of themselves to preserve them in future life from the addition of erroneous opinions or the formation of evil characters. That result might fairly be looked for if their development were unimpeded by antagonistic forces. But that development is counteracted and hindered by the all-conditioning law of inherent depravity, which can only be overcome by supernatural grace. Still, with all the limitations which justice requires to be imposed upon it, the position in the main is unquestionably true, that the doctrines, ideas and opinions which the parent inserts into the mind of the child are fundamental and regulative in their influence. Beyond doubt, they exercise a powerful influence upon the future career of the child. If right, they act as barriers in the way of the development of wickedness both in speculation and in practice; and they become the moulds to which a true religious system easily adjusts itself, the forms in which a true religious life finds its legitimate expression. If wrong, they fall in with the fatal tendency to sin, and hasten it to its consummation in open heresy or immorality.

This becomes still more evident when we consider the implicit faith of the child in the authority of the parent as a teacher. Not yet arrived at that period of mental growth when he becomes individually responsible for his beliefs and opinions in consequence of his ability to investigate evidence and his obligation to follow it, he looks up to his parent as being to him the vicar and representative of God. He has not the right to question the parent’s authority. To him his father is infallible. There is no appeal possible to any higher human authority, for there is to him no higher human authority. If the father should teach his young child that the Bible does not deliver the doctrine of the deity of Christ, or of an expiatory atonement, or of the supernatural grace of the Holy Spirit, or of the eternal punishment of the wicked, how, in his immature condition, could the child possibly know the incorrectness of these instructions? Would they not be the Bible’s teachings to him? Is not his father the unerring expounder of truth to him? No scholars are so ready to imbibe the views of teachers as are the young members of the family school those of their parents. They listen to them as they would to God.

This implicit faith is moreover enhanced immensely by the love and veneration which the youthful learner cherishes for his parent. And as he grows there naturally springs up a partisan feeling of prodigious power which leads him to maintain and vindicate the ideas and opinions received from so dear and so venerable a source. The tendency, even when started by conviction, to depart from them is held in check by the almost irresistible feeling that injustice would be done to his parents and duty to them would be infringed by a breach with their instructions; a sentiment which is heightened if they be dead, and can no more speak for themselves. Their graves are seals of their instructions, and the monuments above them are protests against their abandonment. He who in mature life embraces truth in opposition to error taught by a parent’s lips, pays as striking a tribute as can well be furnished on earth to the majestic authority of evidence, and the imperious force of conviction. It will readily be conceded by us who profess to be Christians, that our little children are bound by filial dependence and obligation to accept the Bible at our hands, and to receive those interpretations of its meaning which we put upon it. But if we take a broad view of the subject, we must also allow that the general rule holds in regard to the religious instruction of all children by their parents. The child of the Mohammedan, in his tender and unthinking years, is bound to comply with the authority of his father which delivers to him the Koran as his directory of faith and duty. The rule holds in the various special applications of which it is capable. The mere child has no right to affirm independence of his father’s instructions. It may be questioned whether he has the right to adopt opinions from any human quarter which contradict those of his parents. Indeed, from the nature of the case, it is difficult to see how he could. The conditions do not exist for an intelligent comparison of opinions and tenets. He is the helpless receiver of his father’s faith. His religion is determined by the nod of his father’s head. If this be true, it is seen that the responsibility of the parental teacher is nothing less than tremendous. His magisterial authority may, no doubt often does, project his child into a path of development, the logical result of which is hell. Oh, how urgent is the necessity for the parent to settle the views which he impresses upon the plastic mind of his child upon candid and patient examination of the truth, with humble dependence upon God and earnest supplication for His guidance ! He cannot, if wrong, plead the authority of his own parents. That plea will vanish into smoke at the touch of the last fire. The religious beliefs of the adult man are not evolved, like the instincts of animals, by a law of imminent necessity operating along the line of parental propagation. A point is inevitably reached in the progress of every human individual when his own personal responsibility emerges for the kind of religion which he adopts.

But, when that point has been reached, the question presses, What value ought to be attached to the religious ideas which have been derived from parental instruction? I venture to answer that they ought not to be held as settled and ultimate conclusions in accordance with which one’s personal faith and practice must be determined. Nor, on the other hand, ought they to be treated as possessed of no value. They are venerable presumptions which must, on solid grounds of evidence, be rebutted before they can be legitimately discarded. They are tentative, working hypotheses which are to be tested by comparison with facts, and sustained or rejected in view of the whole evidence which is accessible to the inquirer after truth. The mind ought to hold the position of neutrality, of indifference —not to the truth, for that, as the very end of the inquiry, is of supreme consequence —but of indifference as to what shall prove to be the truth amidst the rival claims of conflicting opinions after an unprejudiced and sober, a painstaking and prayerful examination. Even when these conditions are complied with —as complied with they certainly ought to be the inquirer starts out with the weight of presumption vastly preponderating in favor of opinions sanctioned and, as it were, consecrated by parental authority and by filial obedience and love. Here again we cannot fail to be struck by the responsibility of the parent. But it is a fact that in the great majority of instances no guilt. such investigation is instituted. The man is content with the views which as a child he received from the lips of his father and mother, lips, perhaps, mute in the grave, and he goes on treading the path beaten by the generations which preceded him. Like herds of cattle following other herds of cattle, the mass of men tramp on until the light of eternity blazes upon them and reveals, when too late, their suicidal folly and In this view of the subject no language can exaggerate the awful accountability resting upon parents for the instruction they communicate to their children.

In connection with this strain of remark we cannot but be impressed by the thought that in the family school, more by far than in any other, the force is peculiarly felt of teaching by example. Allusion is not here made to the concurrence of example with didactic precept, though that is worthy of serious reflection, but to the powerful teaching of example itself. The child is imitative, and very naturally copies the example of the parent. It is to this law Paul adverts when he exhorts Christians to be “imitators of God as dear children.” The life of his parents is a daily study to the child. It is ever before him. The words spoken, the acts done by the father and the mother in the unrestrained freedom of the family circle are like a steady rain falling, not upon the rock, but upon the thirsty earth. They are drunk in and appropriated by the imitative and assimilating powers of the child. This aspect of the subject might be copiously illustrated, but time would fail, and it is so plain to the barest observation as to render expansion almost needless.

I cannot dismiss this special topic without calling attention to the enormous diffusive and traditional influence of the family as an institute of instruction. Each family tends to diffuse its influence by ramifying its connections through intermarriage, until a congeries of circles is formed intersecting one another and widening out, who can calculate whither? The ideas and doctrines asserted in one family may in this way receive a dissemination which will reach to the ends of the earth.

The traditional power of the family is equally incalculable. The sacrifice offered by Noah in the bosom of his family on Mount Ararat has by this power impressed itself upon the nations, and continues to affect their religious views and rites to the present hour. The usages of Abraham’s family are observed by the Jews to this day. The ideas and doctrines once taught in the family school are handed down from father to son to distant generations. Those, my brethren, which we deliver to our families will project themselves into the future, and will affect the immortal destinies of souls. The stream of traditional influence, running through successive family lines, will not cease until it ripples against the judgment throne; nor will it be arrested there, but rolling around it, it will flow on forever, either mingling with the waters of the river of life proceeding from the blest seat of God and the Lamb or with the Styx and the Acheron of Hell.

Who was John Girardeau?

Who Was John Lafayette Girardeau? (Ligonier)