The child and God

Front matter

Copy 1

I erican Baptist Publication Society

I r

Preface

WHILE the following treatise was written primarily in the interests of the homeless and outcast child, the author has kept constantly in view children universally, of whom the majority have no Christian training, while the remainder, though in professedly Christian homes, are too seldom regarded as a sacred trust from God. It is exceedingly sad to contemplate the seeming carelessness of so many Christian parents as to the moral and spiritual surroundings of their children.

It seems to this writer that if the Christian people of our country could once get a clear view of the real situation — that every child within their reach is God's child ; that he is intensely interested in its future ; that to rescue and save it is the grandest mission and the highest and the largest and the most sacred that can be committed to any intelligent being in God's universe — such a conception would revolutionize all our methods of child-training and speedily transform this wicked, ruined world into a very garden of God.

To aid the reader in reaching up to this conception is the intent of this little volume.

THE AUTHOR.

Trenton, N. J., March i, 1905.

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Introduction

THE author of these pages has courteously placed his manuscript in my hands for perusal in advance. I have been greatly interested in what he has to say. The subject which he discusses is one of the very greatest importance, both to the individual and to society. It is evident that the writer has the two indispensable qualifications for presenting it. He has enthusiasm and he has experience. Without the former a perfect system, with the truest of conceptions and the wisest of methods, would prove a flat failure ; while without the latter the most devoted efforts, with the noblest of impulses and the highest aims, would go wide of the mark.

It is said that one-half of the world does not know how the other half lives. It might also be added of the upper half that it does not want to. And there is the trouble. Human nature is incarnate selfishness. Every one of us is the center of his own little world and he must look out upon the great world without through the green windows of his own little self. We are too easily content to stay within. It is easy to condemn, or to contemn, or to pity, or to patronize ; but it is not so easy to sympathize with and to help those who are less favored than we, We quickly turn philosophers and set to

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accounting for it all. The submerged tenth is a constant factor in the world, we say, and we must beware of nervous prostration in undertaking to correct what we cannot avoid. We have very good authority for believing that we are to have the poor with us always and we are not obliged to do much in the way of making the sacred doctrine untrue. This is the attitude of callous respectability. It is the complacency of the prospered. It is the selfishness of the well-clad, the well-fed, and the safe.

In this way the Good Samaritan is forced to give way to the haughty Pharisee and, by and by, "willing to justify himself," he hatches out a pretentious philosophy of society which is indifferent to the cry of need and coldly unresponsive to the bitter wail which comes up from the poor. It is one of the fine symptoms of the times that there is so much of earnest and organized effort in behalf of the unfavored and the neglected classes in society. I know of no movement which has in it more of the true spirit of humanitarianism, more of the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, than this very work for which this little book pleads. It has won its way to recognized merit and to signal success. It has reached its ripest form in the approved effort to find open homes for homeless children. The child was made for the home and the home was made for the child ; and each without the other is incomplete, unhappy, and sad. It is a work of priceless worth, in the name of the Seeker and Saviour of the lost, to bring these two hemispheres of home life together.

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Experience has brought its lessons to this work, as to many another. The almshouse, the institution, and the boarding-house have all been left behind on the way of progress. It is not enough to take the little waif — a bundle of undeveloped, immortal possibilities — and make of him a pauper, or a machine, or even a boarder. He must be a child if he is ever to be a man. He must be given a home if he is ever to reach his best. And this is the goal of the child-saving work. It is nature's method ; it is God's method ; of course, then, it is the true method.

The work of bringing the homeless child into the childless home is thrice blessed ; it blesses the child who is rescued from a career of idleness and aimlessness and vice ; it blesses the home which, without the prattle and the promise of childhood, though it be a grand and gilded palace, is only a house and not a home ; and it blesses the unselfish agency which, like some good angel, reunites those whom God hath joined together but whom some ruthless hand has torn asunder.

But the problem of the waif is not more important than that of the pampered and petted child in its comfortable home. The very foundations of our domestic life are threatened by some of the forces that are at work to-day. The home is menaced and the integrity of the family circle, with all its hallowing bonds of life and love, is imperilled. There are many pretentious, pedagogic ideas which are exploited by crabbed old bachelors and spinsters who viii INTRODUCTION

know far more about the laboratory than they do about the nursery, and who are more expert in handling an abstract theory than they are in handling a real flesh and blood child. Our good mothers knew more about the real art of training a child than their whole tribe !

The good old ideas and ideals of the Christian family will never be outworn or obsolete. As we go back nearer to them we are making progress of the truest sort. And there are no short cuts to that goal or patent twentieth-century methods of achieving it. It can come only by the recognition of the individuality, the responsibility, and the immortality of the child, the father to the man. The thought of what their little child is and of what it may come to be, is the great incentive and inspiration through all the years of patient instruction and training. Mr. Lamb's book presents this thought with great clearness and emphasis, and its effect can only be good upon Christian parents generally.

I am sure that it is well suited to do much good and I trust that it may come into the hands of many a reader who will be led to lend his aid to this work, which is no more a service to humanity than it is to humanity's Saviour and Lord ; for will not he himself say, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me " ?

Henry Collin Minton.

Trenton, N. J., March, 1905.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Child Demanding attention u

II. God's Child 25