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Page 19
The second great pillar of the portal of noble life seems to me to show
still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration,
and that pillar is reverence,--that heaven-eyed quality which Dr.
Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that
crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a
mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call
their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when
they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the
table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning
genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are
allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would
have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks
which are anything but reverent on sacred things--have I not some reason
to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine
issues is threatened with extinction? Do you think that the boy who has
never been taught to reverence his own mother's womanhood will reverence
the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice
guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at
his hands, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have
done it unto Me?"
Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil
tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its
agnosticism is due,--that deadening down and stamping out of the
spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul,
which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their
basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be
choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and
cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character
estimable in many respects, but for the most part without noble
aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms--a
character, to use Saint Beuve's expressive phrase, "tout en fa�ade sur
la rue," whose moral judgments are no better than street cries; the type
of man that accepts the degradation of women with blank alacrity as a
necessity of civilization, and would have it regulated, like any other
commodity for the market; that very common type of character which,
whatever its good qualities, spreads an atmosphere of blight around it,
stunting all upward growing things and flattening down our life to the
dead level of desert sands.
If you would not be satisfied at your boy rising no higher than this,
then, again I say, guard the springs of reverence. Do not let your pride
in your child's smartness or any momentary sense of humor make you pass
over any little speech that savors of irreverence; check it instantly.
Exact respect for yourself and for the boy's father, the respect which
is no enemy, but the reverse, to the uttermost of fondness. Insist upon
good manners and respectful attention to the guests of your house. Do
not despise the good old fashion of family prayers because they do not
rise to all that we might wish them to be. At least they form a daily
recognition of "Him in whom the families of the earth are blessed"--a
daily recognition which that keen observer of English life, the late
American Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, pointed out as one of the great secrets
of England's greatness, and which forms a valuable school for habits of
reverence and discipline for the children of the family. Insist upon
the boys being down in time for the worship of God, and do not allow
them to get into the habit indulged in by so many young men of "sloping"
down with slippered feet long after breakfast is done and prayers are
over.
Only let the springs of reverence well up in your child's soul, and
then, and then only, will you be able to give your boy what, after all,
must always be the greatest safeguard from shipwreck in this perilous
world--religious faith, that stops him at the very threshold of
temptation with the words: "How can I do this great wickedness and sin
against God?" Your very attitude as you kneel by his side with bowed
head and folded hands while he says his little evening and morning
prayer will breathe into his soul a sense of a Divine Presence about our
bed and about our path. Your love--so strong to love, and yet so weak to
save--can lead his faltering childish feet to that Love which is deeper
than our deepest fall, "which knows all, but loves us better than it
knows." You can press your child against the very heart of God, and lay
him in the Everlasting Arms, that faint not, neither are weary; and,
with the mother of St. Augustine, you may know that the child of such
prayers and such tears will never perish.
"Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
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