READING FOR CHILDREN

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 18, 1889

FromThe Signs of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 7

READING FOR CHILDREN.

To give a child a true and noble thought of God and its own life, a thought which will deepen with knowledge and widen with experience, without forcing, later on, the painful and dangerous process of doubt and reconstruction, is a duty which no intelligent father and mother will surrender to another. Above all things, keep books which teach religion on a low plane, or present it as a morbid experience, or vulgarize it by familiarity, or falsify it by untrue illustration, off your table and out of your house. An immoral book is not necessarily a shocking book; but it is always an untrue book. There are more immoral books in the hands of children than parents suspect, for the reason that many people confound the substance of immorality with its representations. There are numberless episodes in the Old and New Testaments, and numberless great works of literature which portray immorality, and which are yet profoundly moral, because they exhibit the working out of sin into its inevitable losses and penalties. There are, on the other hand, multitudes of books which do not touch flagrant sin of any sort, but which are both immoral and demoralizing, because they are untrue pictures of life; because they furnish low instead of high motives of action; because they separate actions from their consequences; because they substitute a weak sentimentalism for the health and vigor of deep principles; because they make an easy and magical thing of something which all experience declares to be a very difficult thing, to be attained only by patient and faithful struggle. A story which deals honestly with repulsive sins, and shows how they issue in inevitable misery and degradation, is not a book for children, but at bottom it may be a much more moral work than one in which the hard and fast lines of real life fade out in an atmosphere of sentimentalism. Stories for children of a distinctively religious tendency need especially to be scrutinized with the utmost care, and no book should ever go into a child's hands which substitutes familiarity for reverence, a magical piety for downright faithful living and working, and an abnormal experience for sound, healthy, natural growth.—Christian Union.