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 How to Provide 
 Oood Readmg | 
 For ClhiiMreini 
 
 
 By LADY SCH5JLTZ 
 
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 Read at the National Council of Women of 
 Canada, at Toronto, 1895. 
 
 To be sold in aid of the Talent Fund for the 
 debt on Hply Trinity Church, Winnipeg. 
 
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 PRICE 10 CENT^. 
 
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 HOW TO PROVIDE (U:)OD READ- 
 ING FOR CHILDREN. 
 
 Some one has said : " Tell nie what 
 you read, and I will tell you what you 
 are" ; and hardly a greater truth could be 
 enunciated, for there is no greater agency 
 in the world in building up or destroying 
 character than the books read ; it is, to a 
 great extent, the pabulum on which the 
 mind is fed, and it is the material from 
 which either strength or weakness is drawn; 
 and if mature minds can be affected by 
 what is read, how much more so must it 
 be in the impressionable time of child- 
 hood, and how lasting the consequences ! 
 The children are either stimulated to 
 admire and imitate high and noble char- 
 acters, or they are weakened and dwarfed 
 by the bad example of the people set 
 before them, and who have been absorb- 
 ing their attention. It 1:)ehooves all, 
 then, who have the welfare of the young 
 at heart, to watch with care everything 
 
that can affect the youthful imagination or 
 injure the tender mind. 
 
 As a natural starting point, we will 
 begin with the birth of the young soul 
 sent fresh from the realms of creation, and 
 confided to the care of virtuous parentage. 
 God has entrusted the little creature 
 entirely to the father and mother, as if 
 saying, ** Here is one of the most precious 
 of all gifts committed to your care — a 
 priceless human soul, to be trained for 
 eternity." The little creature is very 
 helpless ; it rests upon its mother's bosom. 
 Soothing tones address it. warm love pro- 
 tects it, and every one is fully alive to the 
 importance of guarding and caring for it 
 physically. But do they as often realize 
 the importance of guarding the opening 
 intelligence of the immortal soul, which 
 begins as early as, and keeps pace with, 
 the development of the body ? The whole 
 being is like a piece of plastic wax, or the 
 snowy pages of an unwritten book, and the 
 mother or nurse in charge is leaving indel- 
 ible impressions which are to last forever, 
 for good or evil, for weal or woe. How 
 the little body is guarded from all danger 
 of contagion ! How alarmed and dis- 
 tressed would they be if fever or skin 
 disease should fasten itself upon the tender 
 
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 Hesh, sdiile, all unconsciously to them, 
 the first insidious poison of a deadly dis- 
 ease may have already made its first 
 attack upon the soul. The dearly loved 
 child, the beautiful little creature, is, aftei 
 all, but the casket of a priceless jewel. 
 Surely the jewel must be of more conse- 
 cju'ice than the casket I Indeed, how 
 often is the finest and loveliest physique 
 maired by the unruliness of the spirit 
 within I Hence by far the most impor- 
 tant duty which the parent or guardian has 
 to perform is to guard the mental growth 
 and spiritual welfare of the child. 
 
 The first question asked is how to pro- 
 vide good reading for the child. We 
 should say, in order to pave the way for 
 it at as early an age as possible, begin with 
 a softly-breathed lullaby, for this is the age 
 when impressions are possible, before there 
 is any responsive intelligence. Let it be, 
 then, spiritual as well as tender, so that 
 the ear may gradually grow accustomed to 
 the blending of sweet names with equally 
 
 sweet strains, as : 
 
 " Our Father in heaven, we hallow Thy name, 
 May Thy kingdom holy on earth be the same," 
 
 etc., sung to a suitable air. Unconscious 
 impressions are thus made which are after- 
 wards to influence the tastes and inclina- 
 
tioiis of the child. Then, as intelligence 
 increases, the little one is told that it must 
 l)e good, because a loving Father, an all- 
 seeing Presence, is ever about it. It con- 
 fides and has implicit faith in these early 
 instructors, nnd believes and trusts what it 
 is told, and we know that the very founda- 
 tion of the future character of a child can 
 only be well and ha)3pily laid on the prin- 
 ciples of tnith. 
 
 Never to tell a child anything but what 
 is true is an exceedingly safe course. I 
 will, I fear, be challenging the prejudices 
 of many when I condemn entirely all fairy 
 tales and fictitious literature until the age 
 of at least eight or ten years, when a child 
 is old enough to understand what fiction 
 means. A sensitive child can never for- 
 get the rude awakening it receives when 
 it learns for the first time that the enchant- 
 ing creatures for whom its heart has 
 throbbed have no real existence. The 
 child, never before having doubted any- 
 thing that parents have told it, when 
 awakened to the fact that these stories, so 
 sweetly read and told, have no foundation 
 in truth, is in a maze of perplexity and 
 doubt, wondering that the teachers of truth 
 have themselves told them things which 
 were not true. It is a trying time to a child, 
 
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 and may tend to shake its belief in ihinj^s 
 of more lasting; imjicirlance, and prove a 
 shock diflicult to lecover froni. 
 
 The story is told of a brijrhl little ])oy 
 who was once teased at Sunday-school for 
 helievinii in Santa Claus. l^ein^ an only 
 child, he was no doubt kept more petted 
 and under the influence of childish fancies 
 than he otherwise would have been. I le 
 protested that he believed in Santa Claus 
 and knew it wa • true about him — " because 
 his father and mother had told him, and 
 they would not tell him anything that was 
 not true." (ioing home, he demanded of 
 his mother about Santa Claus, and she had 
 to tell him it was a fiction : the child was 
 greatly grieved, and said: "Oh, mother, 
 you have told me about God^ too ; how am 
 1 to believe that that is true ? " 
 
 I would advocate that the first reading 
 for the young should always be taken from 
 the Bible, that marvellous book, the 
 grandeur of whose imagery and the purity 
 of whose diction is unrivalled in all the 
 world. In it can be found incidents of the 
 most stirring and interesting character, 
 well suited to please and satisfy the most 
 exacting and imaginative of children, and 
 which are at the same time true and unde- 
 niable, and more interesting than any that 
 
could he woven from the fanciful l>riin of 
 man. Wc can read or tell them'*of the 
 little child from heaven, lK)rn in a stal)le, 
 an<l laid in ;i manger, with a star placed in 
 the heavens to "keej) sentinel over His 
 birthplace, while, not far from it, the gates 
 of heaven opened, and the shepherds he- 
 held the angels, and heard them singing 
 and praising (iod. Or we can read to 
 them of Joseph and his coat of many colors ; 
 of the shepherd king, David, the sweet 
 singer, who, with his pebhle and sling, 
 went forth and slew the giant who had 
 defied the armies of Israel— surely no 
 giant of fairyland could equal the thrilling 
 narrative connected with this one ; of 
 Daniel, and of Samuel, that sweet child, 
 who, as soon as he was weaned, was pre- 
 sented to Ine Lord, and became of such 
 an exalted character that, when in his old 
 age, challenging Israel to bear witness 
 whether he had ever injured any one or 
 not, they had to declare his blameless life. 
 There is also the story of Moses, placed in 
 his little ark of bulrushes, watched by his 
 sister and found by a princess. (What 
 fairy tale contains more to excite the im- 
 agination than this ?) My firm conviction 
 is, the early years should be entirely filled 
 with Bible st y, so that the good obtained 
 
 I 
 
I 
 4 
 
 may l)e tlic nv>st laslini;. Charles Dudley 
 Warner says " he believes that the present 
 state of ij^norance of the Bible on the part 
 of collejre students is to be corrected only 
 by attention to the fundamental cause of 
 this ipjnorance — the neglect of th<i use of 
 the Bible in the home in childhood " ; and 
 he adds, *' In the family is where this edu- 
 cation must begni, and it will then be as 
 it used to be, an easy anrl unconscious edu- 
 cation." We are I old that in old age, when 
 incidents of the moment make little or no 
 impression on the mind, the aged person 
 lives again in whatever constituted the 
 earliest impressions of his or \v^\' life. Thus it 
 is a safe thing to begin and end with the 
 teachings of the sacred book. 
 
 But when the little one has come to the 
 age when you must tell it of the things 
 which pertain to material life, why not 
 substitute for the "Babes in the Wood " 
 the story of the " Princes in the Tower," 
 and, instead of fairy princesses, let them 
 learn of our own '* Victoria the Good," 
 who, when a little princess, was trained 
 day by day to fit her to rule the greatest 
 empire the world has ever seen ; and so on, 
 making history easy for them ? Then there 
 is fairyland in nature. You can let them 
 read of all the wonders of the field and 
 
forest, of which there are innumerable 
 graphic and entertaining writers, of r'ver 
 and lake, of bird and l)ee, ever keeping 
 closely to the truth, and I do not think the 
 little ones will ask for anything more inter- 
 esting or exciting if they should teach 
 them of the starry heavens above, with its 
 myriads of worlds and suns, and there 
 surely will be enough in all this to feed the 
 most ardent imagination. We have be- 
 gun with the theory of keeping closely to 
 the truth, and I believe it will bear fruit. 
 An eminent divine has said, " Give me the 
 first seven years of a child's life, and I will 
 not feel so anxious for the future." 
 
 When they have arrived at the stage 
 when it is better for them to vary their 
 reading, and they must have fiction, let 
 them read such conscientious writers as 
 '* A.L.O.E.," Elinor Lewis, Hesba Stret- 
 ton. Miss Mulock, Sir Walter Scott, Mrs. 
 Stowe, and many others. The Rev. Dyson 
 Hague tells us in Parish and Home of 
 some of the dangers of reading fiction, even 
 of tLe best. In the first place, he tells us, 
 it is a waste of precious time to give as 
 much as is frequently done to a custom, 
 which, when indulged in, creates a slavish- 
 ness of anxiety for a still greater waste of 
 valuable time, to the exclusion of serious 
 
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 engagements and duties. In concluding 
 the article, however, he says that he does 
 not condemn the reading of fiction alto- 
 .gether, but begs that wise selections be 
 made from such writers as Dickens, Thack- 
 eray, George Eliot, Stanley J. Wfjyman, 
 Lew Wallace, and others. I would include, 
 such stories as "Black Beauty" and 
 *' Beautiful Joe," stories which interest the 
 youthful mind, while teaching them to 
 know more of the nature of dumb animals, 
 and to be kinder to them than they other- 
 wise would. Annie E. Chase, in her 
 *' Stories from Animal Land," gives a 
 pathetic little incident, which may not be 
 inappropriate, and of which many thou- 
 sands must occur daily, and which could be 
 averted by making the children more fami- 
 liar with their lives and habits. Then 
 there is that sweet songstress, Frances Rid- 
 ley Havergal, who must not be forgotten, 
 and whose ** Little Pillows" are read by 
 myriads of children to-day ; I would also 
 advise selections from the poets Words- 
 worth, Longfellow, Whiitier, Tennyson, etc. 
 There are also the church papers and parish 
 magazines, of which we cannot speak too 
 highly. I again repeat that the power for 
 good or evil which good or bad literature 
 
 exerts over the youthful mind cannot be 
 
 9 
 
f)ver-estimatecl. A writer in the Methodist 
 Protestant said : " A pastor found many 
 of his parishioners who were too poor to 
 take their church paper, but who took 
 several secular pa])ers and tales of fiction, 
 that cost four or five times as much. 
 Cause : they had little relish for religious 
 reading. Effect : their relish for religious 
 reading lessened every year. Mystery : 
 they wondered why their spirituality was 
 so dull, and that their children loathed 
 everything of a religious character. Re- 
 sult : those children who married and 
 left home ceased church attendance alto- 
 gether." 
 
 A deeply pious clergyman told me that 
 one of the greatest men of the age, and a 
 seeker after truth, had told him that he 
 would give all he was possessed of if he 
 could disabuse his mind of the evils in- 
 stilled into it by the early reading of skepti- 
 cal works, but there is no room for skepti- 
 cism, and no taste to read of it, if the mind, 
 in its opening years, has been fed upon the 
 Word of God. Shaftesbury, the great 
 philanthropic earl of that name, was con- 
 verted by his pious nurse at the age of 
 seven years, and dying at the age of eighty- 
 four years, after a life of usefulness, would 
 fain have lived longer, there was still so 
 
 lO 
 
much to be done in the Master's vineyard. 
 One of our own bright jewels in the philan- 
 thropic field, Miss Bertha Wright, of 
 Ottawa, who has achieved so much in the 
 service of God, told me that she was 
 deeply impressed at the age of eight years. 
 Lincoln, the great emancipator of millions 
 of slaves, lost his mother at the age of 
 seven years, and yet he tells us, after over- 
 coming,, with herculean strength and cour- 
 age, the many difficulties that beset his 
 path, that he owed everything to his 
 mother. To mothers and to those who 
 have the care of the young, I would beg, 
 begin with the prayer at the cradle, thus 
 seizing the first and earliest opportunity 
 for impressing good ; with the sacred hymn 
 for a lullaby, and the Book of Books for 
 primary instruction ; and the character 
 thus built on truth will be strong and self- 
 reliant. The tastes formed aright will 
 guard them for the future. And I urge upon 
 the parents, at the same time, to be as 
 vigilant in guarding what their children 
 shall read as though the child was to pass 
 through a plague-stricken country, and 
 could only escape by the most watchful 
 care of mother or guardian. Sin is a 
 hydra-headed monster, ever on the alert to 
 ensnare the innocent and capture the un- 
 
 II 
 
wary and unsuspicious, and thoughtful 
 womanhood can have no higher aim or 
 object in life than to do all in their power 
 to protect and guide the helpless and to 
 form the tastes and inclinations of the 
 young aright, so as to keep their minds 
 pure and spotless, while being intelligent 
 and well-informed, and to fit them to take 
 their places in the world, when the time 
 shall arrive for it, as young men and wo- 
 men, strong, intelligent, pure, and se'."- 
 reliant. A. S. 
 
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 12