Religious Instruction at Home.
A RECENT writer offers the following suggestion to parents:— “We must not forget the importance of striving to cultivate a frank confidence and sympathy in the relations of home. It has seemed to me, in many cases to which I have given some study, that the great privileges and opportunities which parents enjoy, are often destroyed by their allowing great walls of spiritual distance and alienation to rise between themselves and their children. It is sad to see the children of a family growing up into manhood and womanhood, and we often see them, having as little acknowledged communion of religious life with their parents as if they were a parcel of bears’ cubs; never hearing from father or mother a simple, earnest avowal of religious faith, much less the simplest words of worship; trained by their parents’ reserve to keep in their own bosoms whatever religious emotion the Spirit of God may have quickened there; and finding the first sympathy and mutual confession which will fan the faint sparks of worship and consecration on their hearts’ altars into a blazing flame—finding this, for the first time, after they have gone from their childhood’s home. While I appreciate the power of a religious atmosphere and of religious observances in Christian nurture, it seems to me that this habitual religious confidence is the most efficient and indispensable. Gain the perfect trust and affection of your child, in the early years when it looks to you with such religious awe as you look to God, and, when the quiet home is its only temple, opens its heart to yours in the deepest religious confession, and keeps it open through the changing years, and you can accomplish everything with that child for nurture and blessing. No Aladdin’s wonderful lamp, no magician’s potent wand, could be more sovereign in controlling the spirits of the vast deep, and in working miracles of beauty and majesty, than can the simple power of your hold upon the child’s love and confidence become, in controlling its most turbulent passions and building up in its soul the loveliness and grandeur of Christly character.”—Sel.