“Dr. Bushnell, in his
admirable book on ‘Christian Nurture,’ does not put the case a whit too
strongly when he says: ‘It is the very character and mark of all unchristian
education to train up a child for future conversion.’ And he is no less correct
when he adds, ‘The true idea of Christian education is that a child is to grow
up a Christian, and never to know himself as being otherwise.’ These opposite
aims will not only control the hopes of parents, and the instructions through which
they seek to be realized, but they will make themselves felt with peculiar
power in our treatment of children's faults. It must make a vast difference in
our discipline whether we regard their shortcomings and misdoings as the
lingering remains of sin in a young Christian, or as the living seeds of all
evil in one who is still in the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity.
The assumption that they are already within the covenant, regenerate and holy,
that grace is struggling in them for mastery over sin, will give a Divine
tenderness to our rebukes. It will make us pray with them in the assurance that
they are partakers with us of the same grace, even as we share with them in the
same passions and infirmities. It will bring us together to Christ in the faith
of the Syrophoenician woman, saying, ‘O Lord, have mercy upon us’ Our sympathy
will be to the child the sign and seal of Divine mercy, and our kiss of
reconciliation the sacrament of God's loving forgiveness. But if we assume that
the faults we would correct are the evidences of their unregenerate state; if
we constantly tell them that they are wicked, and drill into their tender souls
the unevangelical falsehood that ‘God does not love naughty children;’ if we
warn them continually that they are in great danger of growing up reprobates
and are in perishing need of a new heart, — such religious training will
discourage and harden their sensitive nature more effectually than the
indiscriminate use of the rod. Even under the kindest personal treatment,
multitudes of the children of the covenant are placed by the inexorable logic
of the popular creed in the most anomalous and hopeless condition. They are
taught to believe that the mark of the Lord Jesus is upon them, but that they
are still excluded from His fold. They are bound by all the obligations of
religion; but they are warned not to claim its privileges until they have
undergone a change of whose nature they can form no clear conception, for which
they can discover no necessity in their present simple and childlike religious
experience, and the symptoms of which they are taught not to expect until that
ill-defined period shall come when they will be ‘old enough to join the church.’
“The telling of experiences,
the fixing of the time, the discovery of the causes, and the description of the
process of conversion, have become, to a large extent, synonymous in the mind
of the Church with the tests of piety and the evidences of Christian character;
while the value or even the possibility of a true Christian experience running
back into springs that are hidden and Divine, gradually developed, like a grain
of mustard-seed, under the steady influence of Christian culture, and eluding
by its very depth and pervading power all attempts to fix its times and seasons
or describe the successive stages of its growth, is ignored, undervalued, and
even condemned as unevangelical. Our children are afraid to claim their
birthright privileges, because they have no experiences to tell, and can give
no account of their conversion. Instead of being taught that they already
belong to the Church, and that if they love the Saviour it is their privilege
to come to His table as soon as they understand the meaning of the ordinance,
they hear the changes rung about being converted and joining the Church; and
getting their ideas of conversion from what they hear of the experience of
adults brought into the Church from the world, they sadly number themselves
with Christ's enemies, even while their hearts ache to be recognized among His
friends.”
Van Dyke, Henry J., Lecture
VII, The Church, Her Ministry and Sacraments (1890)
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