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The Need

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 3, 1912

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 89, No. 40.

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The Need

By A. W. Spaulding

Come, Let Us Live With Our Children — No. 1

The Need

FROEBEL's plea, "Come, let us live with our children," was never needed more than to-day. The judicious observer can see that in the world the home is losing its influence. The scramble of the age allows the home no time to work its proper work upon character; and the influences of club, fraternity, institution, press, and public life are almost wholly substituted for the influence of home. If the Christian home is to copy its form or any of its discipline from the character of the worldly home, then woe be to the cause of Christ; for the Christian home is the citadel of the church. Thank God for the Christian homes there are, training their members as soldiers for Christ; but let none of us imagine that the home has yet won in the war, or that it has no need of being better fortified.
Our children, in school and church and home, may be taught the theory of the truth, without ever becoming converted; but if in the daily life they are taught by sympathetic parents and teachers to be honest and pure and self-controlled and unselfish, they are being converted.
"Come, let us live with our children." There are plenty of parents living alongside their children, living over their children in austere authority, living under the burden of their children, but how few there are who are entering into the life of their children, and living with them in spirit and thought and act! And I think that in this infinite and complex problem of child-training, if we come out of the high, thin atmosphere of theory, and seek for solid, practical causes of failure and disappointment, we shall find the basic cause in this,—that in so many cases we have not learned to live with our children. There are fathers and mothers who are vain of their children, or worried over their children, or afraid of their children, and all because their children are unknown to them. I do not know of a greater woe to the conscientious mind than the sense of helplessness before the enigma of the child, nor of any feeling that becomes more quickly and thoroughly the aggravation of the helplessness of which it is the effect. The teacher or the parent who faces the perverseness of the child, and understands at once its causes and its proper remedy, is upheld by the consciousness of mastery; but the teacher or parent who in the presence of evil sinks with the helplessness of ignorance, is tempted to the folly of impatience and abuse.
The one remedy for that ignorance is, through the grace and wisdom of God, to learn to know our children by living with them. To some parents this opportunity may be past, to others it is passing, to none is it yet in the future. It will be well for us, then, to study together some of the essentials—learned both in the school and in the home—of how to live with our children.
The success of God's work, I solemnly believe, depends upon the success of our homes; and that for two reasons: First, our families must every one be enlisted in carrying this message; it can not be completed without them; second, the influence of Christian home life upon the individual worker's character is vital. It can be recollected by every one of long experience that, with few exceptions, those who have been and remain powers in this message have been those who were successful in the training of their families.
The influence of an intelligent Christian family among non-believers is of incalculably greater value than any other power. And, on the other hand, the influence of an untrained, disorderly, but professedly Christian family, is the direst affliction to the cause of God. Therefore the training of homes is the mostvital work we have before us. It should be the concern of those who are already parents, so to correct their weaknesses and strengthen their powers as to become wise educators.
The days of the world's probation are fast closing. Our families, our children, ourselves, are needed, every one, to teach the message,—needed, O, so sorely! Let us, fathers and mothers, consecrate ourselves to God, not passively, not spasmodically, but earnestly and with determination, and let him teach us how to live with our children for him now, that we may live with them and with him in the kingdom of God.