With the Children on Sundays: Through Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate into the City of Child-SoulStall, Sylvanus
Religion
With the Children on Sundays: Through Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate into the City of Child-Soul
Stall, Sylvanus
Children -- Religious life; Children's sermons; Moral education
The idea which has been successfully demonstrated in hundreds of homes,
where the impulses and natural inclinations of childhood have been
turned into sacred channels on Sundays so as to enable the parents to
teach spiritual truths in the most effective manner, is the method which
is suggested by the author to the parents in the use, on Sunday
afternoons, of the fifty-two little sermons given in this volume.
The parent who fails to use wisely the opportunities of Sunday
afternoons for impressing the children with spiritual truths, loses the
greatest opportunity that family life affords. Among the different
instances known to the author, the following three may serve as
illustrations of what may be found in many communities:
I knew a mother who regularly on Sunday afternoons gathered her
children about her and read them religious books and literature. In her
considerable family, every child became eminently useful. One, who was a
university professor, told me that those Sunday afternoons with his
mother in the nursery embodied the most formative influences of his
life.
I know another family, of some seven or eight children, where Sunday was
always used for religious instruction with the children. With the
reading and other things, they always "played church", and the
experience of those early childhood days made the boys splendid public
talkers, and the girls were also very capable in the same direction. No
better school of oratory was ever organized.
I know another family of four children, where the entire family looked
forward throughout the week to the special and larger pleasure which
Sunday always brought. They grew up naturally into a religious life, and
developed that ability for public address and service which could not so
well be gained in any other way.
Sunday is about the only day in most of households where the father is
home with his family. It adds greatly to the pleasure and impressiveness
of the day and its services if the father, with the mother, enters
heartily into the spirit of that which will be all the more enjoyed by
the children. It will enable him also to stamp his personality deeper
into the character of his children than possibly any other opportunity
which may be afforded him in life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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