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THE CORNER-STONE 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
By EDWARD LYTTELTON, 
 D.D. 
 
 MOTHERS AND SONS 
 
 TRAINING OF THE YOUNG 
 IN LAWS OF SEX 
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 
 
 SCHOOLBOYS AND SCHOOL 
 WORK 
 
 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
THE CORNER-STONE 
 OF EDUCATION 
 
 AN ESSAY ON THE HOME 
 TRAINING OF CHILDREN 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD LYTTELTON, D.D. 
 
 HEADMASTER OF ETON 
 
 Thus it is plainly conceivable that creatures without blemish 
 as they came out of the hands of God, may be in danger of 
 going wrong ; and so may stand in need of the security of 
 virtuous habits additional to the moral principle wrought 
 into their natures by Him. Bishop Butler 
 
 The youth, who daily farther from the east 
 Must travel, still is Nature's priest. 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 LONDON AND NEW YORK 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 1914 
 
Li 
 
 First Published March 1914 
 
 PRINTED AT 
 
 THE BALLANTYNE PRESS 
 
 LONDON 
 
TO 
 
 MY FRIEND AND FELLOW LABOURER 
 
 H. M. BURGE 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF SOUTHWARK, 
 LATE HEADMASTER OF WINCHESTER COLLEGE, 
 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 
 WITH RESPECT AND GRATEFUL AFFECTION 
 
 297568 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE PROBLEM STATED ii 
 
 II. THE HALCYON DAYS 34 
 
 III. THE PLACE OF STIMULUS 59 
 
 IV. CHRIST AND THE CHILD-MIND 68 
 V. DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 85 
 
 VI. TYPES OF FAILURE 119 
 
 VII. WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF VIRTUE ? 156 
 
 VIII. TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 168 
 
 IX. PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 228 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ^TpHIS book has been undertaken owing to a 
 request made that I should write on the 
 special subject of the " moral " temptations of 
 boyhood. I began hy trying to show how it 
 is a part of general moral training. But the 
 inquiry soon led into the deeper question. On 
 what is character built ? or what is the founda- 
 tion of a training in virtue ? This is my subject, 
 the more limited one being excluded. 
 
 Further, I have been obliged to leave on one 
 side the question between the collective (or 
 ecclesiastical) and the individual side of training ; 
 also the intellectual and artistic elements in 
 education. 
 
 As an excuse for the lack of conciseness, and a 
 certain amount of repetition, I must plead 
 manifold interruptions. 
 
 What there is of truth in the message I offer 
 to all those who are engaged in home training of 
 children, and commend this essay to them in a 
 spirit of hearty fellowship and good-will. 
 
 E. L. 
 
 Eton, February 1914. 
 
I : THE PROBLEM STATED 
 
 ^T^HE problem before us is the determining 
 of the parents' part in forming the 
 character of their children. Character ! WTiat 
 mysteries are called up in the mind by the mere 
 word ! Nobody can define it, yet the thing is an 
 unfailing source of interest and desire. No book 
 is dull which deals with the development of 
 character, even in a fictitious person : at least, if 
 it is, it betokens something of a triumph of dull- 
 ness in the writer. But in regard to oxir own 
 children the mystery and the interest are alike 
 deepened, and there is, or ought to be, no limit 
 to our desire. For everybody knows something 
 about goodness, and every one who is not de- 
 humanized earnestly desires goodness for his own 
 offspring. But it is, I believe, not uncommon for 
 people to be almost paralyzed in their endeavour 
 to secure this end, by the complexity of the 
 mystery. The bewildering conflict between 
 Creationism and Traducianism is vnih us stiU. 
 That is to say while some regard a new-born soul 
 as a new and unique product of the Creator's 
 
12 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 power, independent, as to its qualities, of all living 
 beings that have lived their lives on this earth ; 
 others are swayed by the theory of Heredity, and 
 start by believing that every child's mind and 
 sovd is a fixed predetermined product of his 
 ancestry. Who can forecast the solution of this 
 dispute ? But as long as it continues it is not 
 clear that any father or mother can be assured 
 that they are doing right from the very start of 
 their training of their own child.* 
 
 Yet while this and much more might be said 
 in support of the idea that character-building is 
 mostly pure guesswork, I wish to say as emphatic- 
 I ally as I can that in an immense number of cases 
 !the products of home training reveal by their 
 fcharacters the principles on which they have been 
 trained : and that this is true alike of good and 
 bad. I will not say in all cases, because there 
 are freaks — startling and unaccountable characters 
 which have developed quite contrary to all expec- 
 tations and apparently contrary to all rule. But 
 in the enormous majority of instances it is not so. 
 , The practice of certain principles in the home 
 'I makes for the growth of a certain kind of character 
 
 * An important discussion of this subject is to be found in 
 Mastensen's "Christian Dogmatics" (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh), 
 P- Hi> § 74- 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 13 
 
 in the children, in the direction either of virtue 
 or selfishness, of service or isolation, of weal or 
 woe. 
 
 However much or little assent the above pro- 
 position may win, I feel bound to repeat it in 
 more precise terms. It is one of the many 
 rewards of the schoolmaster's profession that he 
 gains — or ought to gain — an insight into the real 
 quality of home-life. He can judge it by its 
 earliest product. If the study of that product 
 teaches him the main truth on which the best 
 homes live and thrive, he learns something rich 
 and nourishing, which it is his duty to pass on to 
 others. No less clearly does that truth stand out 
 when the results of ignoring it, or of obeying it 
 half-heartedly, are noted. It comes to this : 
 Good home-training means bringing up children 
 in surroundings which quietly and persistently 
 illustrate the principles taught by word of mouth : 
 where unselfishness is not only heard of but seen 
 every day. If the surroundings are consistent 
 and of one type, the character which results in the 
 children is as a rule not only admirable but win- 
 ning ; '' lovely and of good report." Again, 
 where youth ends in moral collapse, or decorous 
 selfishness, it is nearly always the case that the 
 principles taught by the parents have been plainly 
 
14 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 contravened by the life lived. Thirdly, where 
 adolescence issues in a familiar blend of pleasure- 
 seeking which persists through manhood, and the 
 sort of dutifulness which always stops short of 
 self-sacrifice, we can trace the direct outcome of 
 a double-minded home : where some right 
 principles have been taught, but only sometimes 
 with conviction, and only obeyed when conven- 
 tion demands that they should be. I hold it to 
 be quite undeniable that whether the results of 
 home-training are good or bad or mixed, they 
 generally form a clear index of what the essential 
 quality of the home has been. 
 
 Now as this is so, a duty of quite inexpressible 
 I gravity rests upon parents to make clear to them- 
 selves, as far as in them lies, what these principles 
 are, and in what the practice of them consists. 
 We are beset nowadays by an ineradicable belief 
 in the value of human life and the eternal nature 
 |of the issues to which it leads. How can any 
 Iwords, then, overstate the responsibility of those 
 ^ who by their own act bring souls into the world : 
 into this phantasmagoric scene of bliss and misery, 
 darkness and light, which with all its uncertainties 
 gives the deep impression of being a time of 
 probation for something far more blissful or far 
 more miserable still ? 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 15 
 
 But as soon as this has been said the reader is 
 likely to be taken with a certain weariness of the 
 whole subject. He may admit the importance 
 of the matter, but will quail before the increasing 
 load of social activities to which he is called. 
 Every sort of useful life requires, we are told, \ 
 more energy than formerly, and more time. Any- 
 how, for men who are concerned for their country's 
 welfare the giving of attention to home-training 
 is becoming less and less possible, and even f or f 
 women more difficult than it was. 
 
 This contention cannot be wholly set aside. 
 It is very easy to drift into a set of activities, in 
 answer to professional claims or social needs, so 
 strenuous as to leave no time for anything else 
 whatever : and it is very commonly done. But 
 the facts make no sort of difference to the primacy 
 of the home. That is where it was. We are 
 confronted with far more claims than our fore- 
 fathers were, or anyhow so we believe. On the 
 threshold of life's prime every sane man measures 
 these claims according to his powers. His first 
 duty is to see how much of his care is needed for ;• 
 the welfare of his children, and then to give it, / 
 undistracted by any other call, to serve his fellow { 
 men. 
 
 Moreover, if the nature of our duty to our 
 
i6 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 children be carefully considered it will be found 
 to require a certain spirit, and but strangely little 
 of time, of anxiety and stress than is commonly 
 supposed. If this were otherwise the problem 
 would be too much for us. But we shall see 
 that it is not so. 
 
 In broad outline the problem may be thus 
 stated : 
 
 A child is born to all appearances a helpless 
 animal ; but we know that on the tabula rasa of 
 his mind may be impressed a certain view or 
 interpretation of life, which in all normal cases 
 will be the outcome of his experiences ; what he 
 finds life to be. Further, that according to that 
 view will be his dealing with his inclinations 
 towards self-assertion which as he grows will take, 
 roughly speaking, one of two forms : pride or 
 sensuality. Hence it is the parents' duty to 
 ensure that his experience will start him off on 
 life's journey with a true view of its meaning and 
 its issues. If that is wrong nothing will go right. 
 For this end they may adopt various means, the 
 chief of which will be providing the child with a 
 certain environment, and after they have seen to 
 his physical needs leaving him a good deal alone. 
 Occasionally they will interfere by precept and 
 positive guidance. 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 17 
 
 What happens ? For a few months the infant 
 develops like the young of other animals, con- 
 scious, first and foremost, as far as we know, of 
 his appetites and of nothing else. But after a 
 time it becomes clear that something has lifted 
 him above this animal level and given him a 
 sense of a life higher than his own. As far as we 
 can tell, this change is due to the knowledge of 
 his father's and mother's love, which shows itself 
 not so much by endearments — though they have 
 their place — as by the right sort of interference 
 which we call discipline. Then begins the up- 
 lifting process due to law and love^ and from that 
 time onwards the child looks up instead of down, 
 and becomes a human being. In proof of this 
 assertion we find that in the slums of our towns, 
 the children who know nothing of their parents 
 except kicks and curses, remain animals for years, 
 unless some one else shows them the meaning of 
 life through the experience of law and love. The 
 beginning of all true development is in the learn- 
 ing of a truth. 
 
 So things go on for a time ; a halcyon time of 
 training, because every instinct in the parents 
 and in the nurse too, combines towards the pro- 
 vision of the right kind of experience in which 
 the true relation to the parents is shown not only 
 
i8 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 by their affectionateness but by their guidance 
 which helps to subordinate appetite to obedience. 
 For even the most indulgent mothers check 
 the formation of intolerable habits, and for a 
 time the needful discipline is sure to be pro- 
 vided ; and so the development is orderly and 
 easy. 
 
 But some disturbing symptoms soon appear. 
 For instance, if the child sees his parents quarrel 
 he begins to conceive of life as a scene whence 
 love is banished. If, later, his parents' relation 
 to law seems a confused and fitful thing, his own 
 idea of law becomes blurred and feeble, and as it 
 becomes, or remains, feeble, it gives place to 
 another very different one ; the idea of obeying 
 inclination. Desires of various kinds are always 
 present in him, and as time goes on they tend to 
 increase in number and strength. Along with 
 this, as the time for public school life draws on, 
 personality asserts itself, antagonistic often to 
 parental control : and then it is that to the young 
 boy the life of his parents often shows itself as 
 based very largely on self-pleasing tempered by 
 social convention. That is its ordinary aspect 
 as viewed from below, since in England, at any 
 rate, it is common for parents to conceal their 
 higher motives of conduct from their children, 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 19 
 
 as well as from their neighbours. Adults can 
 perhaps divine these motives, and the best of 
 them do so : but the growing boy judges by 
 experiences, and those which, as far as he can 
 interpret them, tend to destroy the idea that life 
 is a harmony, are not rare. Unless he is an idiot 
 he is bound to construct some theory as to the 
 motives of his parents when they interfere with 
 his own desires ; also as to their main activities : 
 what are they at ? What is their purpose in 
 doing what they do ? Supposing, then, that the 
 father's life wears the appearance of being mainly 
 concerned with getting, and the mother's to be 
 guided by social convention or ambition, there 
 is little hope that the boy will grow into the 
 perception of a higher law dominating his elders, 
 and yet in harmony vdth that early law of 
 obedience which he was beginning at one time 
 to understand and practise. 
 
 So a history opens more tragic by far than it 
 appears to be ; life is before the boy with 
 wondrous potentialities of happiness and well- 
 doing. Of course if any reader of these pages 
 does not know that, the subject with which we 
 are engaged must be dull. But I am building 
 on that teaching of the Sermon on the Mount 
 which has been echoed and practised in countless 
 
20 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 lives since the opening words were spoken. They 
 told mankind that, no matter what buffetings 
 and weariness, what disabilities, what cruelties 
 and failure were in store for each one, blissful life 
 was and is a possibility for all : but that every- 
 thing depends on the true relation between man 
 and his Maker being apprehended and actually 
 lived. In short, for every child development 
 depends on the taking in of Truth. 
 
 But clearly this apprehension is not a process 
 that can be taken for granted. Practically it is 
 never begun without being definitely taught : 
 and teaching for such a pupil as an ordinary child 
 means teaching not only by precept, but by all 
 possible means summed up in our pregnant words 
 Example and Surroundings. More than that : 
 the two latter elements in home-training are 
 vastly more potent for weal or woe than the 
 former. 
 
 Supposing, then, that the surroundings of the 
 child's life bring home to him day by day the fact 
 that his parents, to whom he owes all life and 
 health and happiness, are themselves obedient to 
 the dictates of a life higher than that which is 
 seen, he grows up filled with reverence for law 
 and quickened by the encompassing power of love. 
 If the surroundings suggest anything else what- 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 21 
 
 ever, the child is bound to infer that, for him too, 
 obedience will in time give place to something 
 else : and that can only be the following of 
 inclination. We all know how prone children 
 are to imagine that adult life means release from 
 law : that is, they think of law as something to 
 which a temporary respect has for some inscrutable 
 reason to be paid. In other words a boy's inter- 
 pretation of life is built upon a foundation which 
 is itself shifting, disordered and unintelligible. 
 We shall consider in the following pages of this 
 book what this state of things means in actual 
 practice : how far meantime it is affected by the 
 intrusion of convention or public opinion among 
 the forces which have to be obeyed. But among 
 the facts which under certain common conditions 
 make for disorder and bewilderment the most 
 telling of all has yet to be mentioned. 
 
 We are supposing a home in which early 
 obedience to law ends in nothing particular, 
 because the parents' life exhibits to the child 
 little or no conformity to a higher law, little or 
 no perception of an encompassing love. If the 
 parents' lives are as they sometimes are, con- 
 sistently selfish, the child's life, in so far as the 
 home shapes it, is bound to be selfish too. It is 
 purely a matter of temperament whether it is 
 
22 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 governed by sensuality or pride, whether it heads 
 straight for a moral scandal, or for a far more 
 deadly subservience to public opinion issuing in 
 decorum. But generally the selfishness of the 
 parents is not consistent, but fitful and rather 
 timid, and of course very perplexing to the child 
 to interpret. Into these random uncertainties 
 there comes religion. Of all the influences which 
 have yet been considered, this is the most dis- 
 ordering. Why ? 
 
 Religion is generally taught to the child as a 
 series of maxims nominally bearing on daily life, 
 and connected with the story of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 So far, one would imagine, the lessons must tend 
 to be bracing and wholesome. But the effect 
 is very different if the maxims are ignored by the 
 teachers, and the love of GOD, which the life of 
 Christ is meant to illustrate, is disguised by the 
 harshness of the moral law. That is to say, parents 
 eager for propriety of conduct in their child secure 
 it by constant interference in daily life, and at 
 intervals insist on a religious observance which has 
 no living meaning either for the child or for 
 themselves ! 
 
 This is to throw the precepts of the Gospel 
 into the shade. For practical use they are not 
 alluded to. In a home of the better sort they 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 23 
 
 are trotted out at intervals, in a ceremonious 
 fashion, but they are not explained so as to be 
 understood. Meantime the religious observances 
 introduce another bewilderment into the child's 
 experience. All mention of GOD and of holy 
 things is carefully stamped with unreality, because 
 to the child the most serious matter in life,the con- 
 flict with desire, wears a non-religious aspect and is 
 in another department. Moreover it is in the 
 nature of things that to the childish mind that 
 which is invisible gradually becomes unreal. It 
 is true that fancies about the world of fairies are 
 common : but so is the experience which extin- 
 guishes them ; and where is the guarantee that 
 the thought of the unseen GOD does not dis- 
 appear at the same time ? That is to say the mass 
 of ideas which we call religious may be thought 
 of as natural to a child, but only if taught in a 
 natural way. Otherwise, all that he hears about 
 religion adds another element of confusion in 
 fundamentals. If it is not connected with his 
 moral life, it is dead, flat, and unprofitable as the 
 stories from the Metamorphoses of Ovid to a 
 schoolboy of ten : and if its introduction is not 
 followed by revolt, the reason is merely that he 
 is becoming accustomed to chaos, and gradually 
 giving up the attempt to interpret life at all* 
 
24 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 Nor is the result any better if the mother, 
 aware of this danger, vigorously undertakes to 
 base her moral precepts upon those of the Gospel. 
 I Not only are the latter far too difficult for the 
 child, but the attempt connects the subject of 
 religion with effort and with gloom. Moreover 
 it renders it ineffectual as well as repellent : for 
 it identifies the idea of GOD with that of a task- 
 master who imposes tasks which every well- 
 meaning child finds too hard for him. Thus the 
 love of GOD is disguised under the harshness of 
 the moral law, or made unreal by being dis- 
 sociated from it. If it is believed that the 
 harshness, i.e. the disciplinary element of religion, 
 is essential because it is true, I would agree : but 
 I would demur to any presentation of religion to 
 a child which makes severity its deepest charac- 
 teristic. We must not forget that all children 
 are in quest of joy. That is a symptom of 
 childhood, a natural and universal outcome 
 of the early years, and it is that which Christ 
 blessed when He said, " Of such is the king- 
 dom of Heaven." He set His approval, not 
 on children as many of us think they ought 
 to be, but on children as they are. Well, 
 then, they are all seekers of happiness : a fact 
 which it is fatal for parents to ignore when they 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 25 
 
 try to bring the idea of GOD into their child's 
 mind. 
 
 This, then, is the position. Failure in our 
 highest endeavour is evidently easy because while 
 common instincts urge us to surround the very 
 early years with love and law, their meaning 
 '^ dies into the light of common day " unless the 
 parents show that they themselves in an intelligible 
 way obey the same supreme influences. In trying 
 to show this we teach religion, but only so as to 
 deepen the confusion. 
 
 Yet when any of us succeeds in the upbringing 
 of a human soul, there is about it a kind of quiet 
 and steadfast power not to be mistaken : a sove- 
 reign simplicity which may be exacting indeed 
 for those who practise it, but has in it nothing 
 that is puzzling, or subtle, or perplexed. It is 
 found to be just that which the child-mind 
 demands : a child-like obedience on the part of 
 father and mother to something infinitely above 
 them ; so that life is conceived by the growing 
 boy as a harmony in which the inspiration of the 
 early years persists through all that come after. 
 This, in all normal cases, happens according as 
 the parents' lives are Godward ; that is in so far 
 as they exhibit the true perspective of conduct : 
 the dealing with passions and desires always 
 
26 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 according to a higher law than that of incHna- 
 tion : always in reference to a state of life more 
 real than the " fleeting show " with which we are 
 familiar, more abiding than that which is passing 
 away. 
 
 For parents, could anything be simpler or 
 more exacting ? The chequered controversies 
 about education are found to die down into one 
 supreme question : What happens when the 
 child begins to find mere dependence on his father 
 and mother too little a thing for his growing self ? 
 too finite a prescription for his soul's great 
 longings ? Broadly speaking, it is one thing or 
 the other : either the earthly law and love are a 
 presentation, intelligible to a child, of the 
 heavenly realities, or they are an utterly baffling 
 experience of a guiding to something which is 
 never clearly seen, never firmly spoken of, never 
 lived or known. In the latter case life is to the 
 boy an enigma, because its glory and grandeur 
 are all blurred by practice denying precept, 
 i.e, his parents' lives contradicting their teaching. 
 So the early harmonies die away into distressful 
 janglings. 
 
 Meantime proofs of the wonder and power of 
 the training which is sequent and self-consistent 
 are before our eyes. Whether we judge from the 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 27 
 
 principles of the matter or from practical results, 
 we reach the same conviction. The child grows 
 to be that which his view of life tells him to be : 
 and he must form that view on his parents' 
 sayings and doings. He is incurably rational, and 
 if it were not so, all human society would dis- 
 solve : that is to say if we bring before his eyes a 
 picture of lives lived in discord with the ideal 
 which we try to teach him, he rationally infers 
 that he is brought into a world of chaos. What 
 this comes to mean in his life I have tried to 
 illustrate in this book. 
 
 Two more remarks of an introductory character. 
 We are dealing with an immense subject — the 
 formation of human character in its earliest 
 stages. There are some to whom the matter will 
 seem very partially treated because little or 
 nothing is said about the training of the intellect, ; 
 the logical, the artistic and other faculties. I have 
 not forgotten them, but have designedly omitted 
 them from the following pages, because the subject 
 of character-building is more than enough for one 
 treatise. But in truth the moral and the intel- 
 lectual are by no means so distinct as they are 
 commonly supposed to be. When the Son of 
 Sirach wrote, '' the fear of the Lord is all wisdom," 
 or, as was said elsewhere, '' the beginning of 
 
18 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 wisdom," it was not meant that a faculty like 
 that for mathematics or engineering depends for 
 its growth upon Theism or Christianity: but 
 that the wise exercise of these and all other 
 faculties depends from the beginning on the owner 
 being moved and guided by a certain deep con- 
 viction as to what this life of ours is. And more 
 than this. Christ said the Holy Spirit would 
 lead His followers " into all truth." That mighty 
 promise assumes that there is a knowledge which 
 is not only necessary, but essentially satisfying 
 and sufficient, and which is given to man, as he 
 becomes aware of his relation to his Maker. In 
 other words, the greatest stimulus to the intellect 
 is the conviction that life is throughout orderly 
 and harmonious. 
 
 Lastly, in a matter so central, so near to our 
 deepest emotions and most sacred obligations as 
 the forming of our own children's character, it 
 is not likely that we should be free from the peril 
 of deadly error. The graver the issue, the more 
 likely it is that our efforts may be spoilt by some- 
 thing awry in our objective, our main aspiration. 
 In other words, a parent who rightly deems that 
 the duty of training up his child into a knowledge 
 of truth is a duty about which exaggeration is 
 hardly possible, is yet in danger of failing grievously 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 29 
 
 unless he subordinates this aim to the higher and 
 all-inclusive one of simply bringing the boy into 
 communication with GOD, He is like the poor 
 fellows who, because they pursue happiness for 
 its own sake, are, among all the wanderers on the 
 earth's surface, the least likely to reach their goal. 
 Indeed the effect of the wrong perspective in 
 education is sadly evident. It is to be seen in the 
 barren and repellent strivings of the " educa- 
 tionist " parent who thinks to achieve the 
 mystery by a busy adoption of cheap rule, a 
 harassing enforcement of various " maxims of 
 ashes " : while the contrary is set off for us in a 
 harmony between activity and silence, and is 
 marked by a surprising forbearance and a refrain- 
 ing from reproof and interference. This is the 
 outcome of a certain largeness of aim. The little 
 wayward mind has to be turned Godward : and 
 the direction has to be taught it through common 
 experience as a trend of living really natural to 
 it, and, in the deepest sense, rewarding. The 
 boy's journeying has to be guided on to a road 
 in which every step that is a self-renunciation is 
 also a joy ; and the earliest steps he takes in the 
 light and assurance of his mother's smile. For a 
 time no other beckoning is needed. But the day 
 comes when he must pass out beyond the four 
 
30 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 walls, and will discover, so we hope, that that 
 smile was but a ray from the eternal Sun of 
 Righteousness, which if he keeps in view he will 
 find his true self. 
 
 While this is in balance the most fatal 
 temper in the parent is insincerity : the next, 
 callousness: then fussiness and impatience; 
 and into this latter all those are prone to fall 
 who, without knowing it, rate harmlessness of 
 conduct before the fear of GOD ; and before 
 the living Wisdom of Whom it is said, " I am the 
 mother of fair love and fear and knowledge and 
 holy hope : I therefore being eternal am given 
 to all my children which are named of Him.- 
 They would hope to imbue their son with all 
 the meaningless adult proprieties before he is 
 twenty years old, and therewith, if they achieve 
 it, to rest content. They forget that, as an 
 equipment for life, conformity to rule is a minus 
 quantity. It may denote nothing but a want of 
 originality and high spirits. Yet during boyhood 
 it is a solace to a parent with nerves on edge, and 
 gives hope that the young man will be for many 
 years an acceptable figure in social circles where 
 life is dim; But if the boy has in him real 
 individuality, vigour, and a striving after the 
 highest, he is sure to be troublesome, more or 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED ji 
 
 less recalcitrant, and often baffling : and at each 
 collision of wills everything will depend on whether 
 the father is trying to lead him into the knowledge 
 of the Most High, or merely to drill him into a 
 pattern of his own devising. 
 
 For such is the alternative. Either we frame 
 for ourselves a picture of what we hope our son 
 to be and then if we are eager try to shape his 
 character accordingly, or we give him the know- 
 ledge of GOD and let it work in him, knowing that 
 it will issue in something of eternal worth but 
 different to anything that has been seen before. 
 But while we acknowledge this outcome to be 
 our great reward it must not be our one aim. 
 We must hope to bring Godliness into the human 
 soul not merely because we prefer vitality to 
 sloth and originality to dullness, but because our 
 own knowledge of GOD has taught us that the 
 divine thing which we can impart is, in and for 
 itself, enough. It must not be cramped by our 
 own narrowness, or soiled with our paltry ambi- 
 tions. In other words, we aim not at turning 
 out a good man, but at glorifying the Most High. 
 
 Those who feel obliged to enter on the sacred 
 duties of parenthood without the assurance of 
 religious truth which would enable them to 
 subscribe to any such formula : who think of 
 
32 HOME TRAINING [i 
 
 impersonal goodness rather than of GOD, and 
 doubt whether a special revelation was ever given 
 to man, I would urge that they shoiold clear their 
 minds as to the task before them. They have to 
 think whether the impersonal idea is possible for 
 the child's mind : and whether it is not eternally 
 laid down that the idea of the earthly parent 
 should lead to the conviction of our Father which 
 is in Heaven, Whom it is given to us personally 
 to know. If they persuade themselves that this 
 is not for them to feel and firmly to hold, then 
 let them deal sincerely. In the long run, the 
 worst of all policies is to bring in Christianity in 
 which we don't believe, in the hope of keeping 
 the nursery quiet, or of making our sons outwardly 
 like everybody else. 
 
 But what alternative an agnostic parent is to 
 adopt I confess I do not know. There appears 
 to be no programme naturally fitted for the 
 years when personality begins to assert itself, 
 except the story, taught by a Society, of a 
 personal Creator and Father, humanly revealed. 
 Where the daily home-life presents this truth to 
 the young they are fed by an inward happiness 
 which lifts them on to virtue and love of their 
 own kind and kills the workings of sin within 
 them. When we have set ourselves patiently to 
 
i] THE PROBLEM STATED 33 
 
 understand the message we cannot wonder at its 
 perfect congruity with the deepest needs of every 
 child, nor fret any longer at the fact that there is 
 no other secret of training fit to be set beside it. 
 
II : THE HALCYON DAYS 
 
 TXT'E begin by fixing attention on some 
 essential conditions of the problem of 
 training a virtuous character. " The world," 
 as a young child once remarked, " is full of things 
 I may not do " : by which he meant that he was 
 constantly being prompted by desires within 
 him towards certain actions, and constantly being 
 checked in the doing of them by those who were 
 guiding his life and who were too powerful for 
 him to resist. In the very early years this is 
 probably a complete statement from the child's 
 point of view. The checking is to him, not at 
 first a matter of love, still less of wisdom, but of 
 power. He has already, say by ten months old, 
 found out that resistance to it is futile. Now 
 without complicating the question at this stage 
 with other obvious considerations, let us bear 
 in mind that the child must and clearly does 
 frame a rapid and far-reaching induction from 
 the following facts : 
 
 (i) Some desires he may try to gratify without 
 any particular hindrance, but when he does, 
 
 34 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 35 
 
 nothing happens, e.g. when he tries to seize the 
 moon. (After a time, which varies in different 
 cases, he gives up the attempt.) 
 
 (2) Other desires he might gratify were it not 
 for hindrances purposely put in his way by 
 stronger people. These he judges to be within 
 his powers of attainment, for occasionally, owing 
 to the inattention of his elders, he surreptitiously 
 secures his object. 
 
 (3) Other desires he sometimes gratifies openly 
 and with the approval of his elders, but not always 
 — the question whether or no being decided, as 
 far as he can tell, quite capriciously. 
 
 (4) Yet another class he learns that he can 
 and does gratify without let or hindrance, save 
 that certain intervals between the occasions are 
 insisted on. 
 
 As regards training the will through control 
 of the appetites, it might appear as if the above 
 statement pretty well exhausted the facts. But 
 as a rule they are supplemented very early by 
 another, less concrete and vastly more important 
 than any of the foregoing, viz. the child perceives 
 that he is loved by his mother, and less obviously 
 by his father, and perhaps by his nurse. This 
 makes the whole difference. His life may be 
 conceived of as moving on a plane which is for 
 
36 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 a time on a level with that of puppies, ducklings 
 and other very young animals. That is to say, 
 for a time there is nothing thought about by any 
 living thing except the gratification of the senses. 
 This is only limited by want of opportunity, and 
 the two species so far are alike. But it may be 
 doubted whether in the case of the normal 
 human boy any such continence is ever shown as 
 is habitually by nearly all other living animals, 
 at least in a natural, not a domesticated, state ; * 
 the difference between them being indicated 
 very early in life. But we may suppose that if 
 the parental aflfection ceased before a year from 
 birth, the subsequent stage of the boy-child 
 would be very similar to that of an animal, only 
 with some faculties of intelligence more amply 
 developed. A neglected gutter-snipe differs 
 from a puppy chiefly because his desires are not 
 
 * This sentence touches a very obscure and interesting ques- 
 tion. Domesticated animals seem willing to over-eat ; certainly 
 pug dogs and other pet dogs will, such as Aberdeens ; but a parrot 
 in a cage, with nothing whatever to do but eat, and encompassed 
 with opportunity, seems never to suffer from indigestion. On 
 the whole, animals seem to be guided wholly by desire which 
 they do not stimulate either by imagination or by choice cookery. 
 A baby apparently stops feeding just as an animal does, when 
 it has had enough ; but suppose a child of, say, three or five 
 had access only to plain uncooked food, could he be trusted not 
 to exceed ? I should doubt it : but the relation of the excess 
 to the dawn of the higher faculties requires explanation. 
 
n] THE HALCYON DAYS 37 
 
 restricted to those of floundering and eating. 
 He is more inquisitive ; can remember things ; 
 can understand low gossip ; can be bemused by 
 the cinema. But morally there is no difference 
 whatever, because his life is quite devoid of law. 
 Whatever love his mother showed him was in 
 the pre- self-conscious age and probably taught 
 him nothing but a few precautions for self- 
 preservation which he would soon have learnt 
 unaided. Hence he lives a life of inclination, 
 tempered not by law but only by want of oppor- 
 tunity. In the case of the child of good parents 
 the dawning perception of the mother's love is 
 the beginning of the influence of spirit on the life. 
 Slowly he perceives that bound up with certain 
 prohibitions is a wonderful thing which he some- 
 how finds it easy to understand if he is not 
 hurried, namely, love : and that by degrees there 
 is a strange new thing called joy, which is prefer- 
 able to the sensation of sucking lollipops, because 
 it comes from a sense of having won the approval 
 of the loving mother ; and, odd to say, it has 
 nothing to do with any one of the five senses : 
 indeed it is occasionally secured most directly 
 by denying an appetite, for no reason except 
 that the mother wishes him to do so. Thus 
 experience lifts him up into a world of which 
 
38 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 the duckling, as far as we can judge, knows 
 nothing. 
 
 But even in this early stage the above descrip- 
 tion is incomplete. Suppose he is a child who 
 readily forgets what he is told, or who finds him- 
 self possessed by an overmastering appetite for 
 sweets, it is probable that on occasions he will 
 run counter to the expressed will of the nurse 
 or the mother, and become guilty of a trans- 
 gression. Now the better the home the less 
 likely is it that this occurrence should be passed 
 over, or the special opportunity for deepening 
 the child's view of life be misunderstood. What 
 takes place ? Not only a manifestation of the 
 parent's displeasure, but a punishment. The 
 theory of punishment is a most controversial and 
 perplexed subject ; and it will suffice here if I 
 point out one or two plain effects of its adminis- 
 tration. 
 
 We are thinking of a child about two years 
 old. He discovers and stamps upon a hedge- 
 sparrow chick sprawling helpless on the lawn, 
 after being ejected by a young cuckoo from the 
 nest. This is contrary to the mother's injunc- 
 tion, well understood, as to kindness to all helpless 
 and innocent animals. Jack's practice has for 
 some time been to take to his crib as a night 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 39 
 
 companion a small earthenware guinea-pig. After 
 careful thought and some delay he is sentenced 
 for one or two nights to sleep in solitude. What 
 takes place in his mind ? What is the intention 
 of the punishment, which may fairly be reckoned 
 as very lenient ? 
 
 At first it might appear as if the whole effect 
 would be as follows : The lawgiver imposes a 
 law ; the subject violates it and suffers poena 
 damni^ and, finding that this is the case, resolves 
 not to commit this particular transgression again,- 
 or if he does, to take care that he is not found 
 out. Everybody would agree that so far very 
 little good indeed has been done. But in a very 
 large number of cases something further is 
 achieved. The child learns not only that dis- 
 obedience brings a carnal loss, but that in the 
 region of his affections he suffers from a far 
 more serious thing, namely, the disturbance of 
 his relation to his mother : the threat of some- 
 thing like estrangement ; the looming horror of 
 a lonely life. From this feeling arises a certain 
 disposition with regard not only to acts of 
 aggression against fledglings, but to all acts of 
 disobedience whatever. Instead of the incident 
 being merely a coarse deterrent from a particular 
 line of action which in a year or two would cease 
 
40 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 to attract, it becomes fruitful in the spiritual 
 side of life, because it deepens in the child the 
 sense of the value of love, by his feeling the possi- 
 bility of its loss ; and it unites in his mind the 
 two grand conceptions which at first he is prone 
 to sever, love and law. Further, it may be noted 
 that in a changed disposition towards living 
 creatures he discovers a happiness which was 
 unguessed at before the murder of the chick. 
 This enables him to see that in his mother there 
 is not only fower to interfere vdth his propen- 
 sities, and love which concerns itself closely with 
 his doings, but wisdom too, in that by following 
 her mandates he is a happier child than before. 
 
 The triviality of this illustration may easily 
 blind us to the importance of understanding it 
 thoroughly. When a long-suffering schoolmaster 
 or one of those patient people who are prepared 
 to take charge of " difficult cases " at the end of 
 a curtailed school career, stands baffled and dis- 
 mayed before the problem in its teens, it is simply 
 and solely because through childhood certain 
 impressions about the meaning of life ought to 
 have been made deep and lasting, but they have 
 not been made at all ; and from fourteen years 
 onward the boy has been striving to act on the 
 false opinion with which he started, namely, 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 41 
 
 that the way of inclination and desire is the way 
 to happiness. Between his second and his four- 
 teenth birthday a good many things have hap- 
 pened which to an enlightened inquirer would 
 have undermined confidence in this view. But 
 a small boy is not enlightened, nor is he an 
 inquirer ; and even if he were, there is still a 
 good deal to be said for the theory he has adopted, 
 especially as towards the end of this period new 
 desires make themselves felt with a new prospect 
 of gratification ; and though some untoward 
 upsets of his arrangements have marked his recent 
 history, he sees no reason to conclude that he is 
 on the wrong tack altogether. He anticipates 
 greater liberty in the future, and it seems to him 
 opportune that just when the increase of liberty 
 is due his desires are multiplied ; and if he has 
 been fairly successful in the past in circumventing 
 a nurse, a governess and two parents, what is 
 there to prevent him from scoring a similar but 
 more decisive victory in the struggle against a 
 tutor ? 
 
 It will be noticed that I am choosing the years 
 fourteen to eighteen not so much as a time of 
 critical struggle as one when the struggle is vir- 
 tually over. This is true in the majority of cases. 
 No mistake is so frequently made as to conceive 
 
42 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 of the later teens as ordinarily the most impression- 
 able time of life. Much might be said for their 
 being the very reverse. Of course, if there has 
 been, as there sometimes is, an even balance 
 preserved in childhood between control and 
 neglect, so that the young boy has been unable 
 to form a definite conclusion as to which of the 
 two is best, law or lawlessness, he reaches his 
 teens — by which I mean puberty — ^in a wobbling 
 frame of mind, waywardness alternating with 
 indecisive efforts at sobriety ; and if at this junc- 
 ture some powerful influence supervenes such 
 as the tonic of sound public opinion in a good 
 boarding-house or the bracing personality of a 
 tutor, then something is done to mend the woeful 
 gaps of his early training. But it is likely to be 
 a patchwork, and indeed one of a very common 
 pattern. This point, however, will come up 
 later. We have not yet exhausted the lessons 
 to be drawn from the tragedy of the hedge- 
 sparrow. 
 
 It is important to note that the good results 
 so far traced all refer to the child's relation to 
 his parent. It is his mother's law which he 
 transgressed and the whole heinousness of his 
 action is really due to that fact. The world 
 would not be much the poorer for the dispatch 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 43 
 
 of an unfledged chick which in any case was 
 doomed ; nor is it at all certain that the act 
 denoted a ruthless temper. In itself it was trivial ; 
 but occurring when it did, at the start of life, 
 it was a momentous occasion, fraught with grave 
 results, especially if it is to be regarded as typical 
 of other conflicts of will between child and parent. 
 The effect is good if the opportunity is rightly 
 seized, not chiefly because the child is deterred 
 from a wrong path of conduct, but because his 
 belief in his parent is greatly strengthened. This 
 is the really interesting point, and it requires 
 examination. 
 
 The ordinary or popular account of this matter 
 would at once admit the importance of a child's 
 belief in his parent, by insisting on such belief 
 as the only safeguard against undesirable forms 
 of activity. " Of course a child must trust his 
 parent and learn to obey him, or he will grow up 
 to be a nuisance to everybody about him till at 
 last you have to send him to school to get him 
 out of the way. For my part," says Paterfamilias, 
 " I don't mind that way out of it, but somehow 
 it doesn't seem quite right, and anyhow the 
 boy's mother is a good deal worried about it all." 
 As in all popular views which are apparently 
 those of common sense, there is nothing in this 
 
44 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 statement which need be flatly contradicted. 
 The dicta are true as far as they go ; but they 
 proceed from the belief that the one thing neces- 
 sary in training is to secure outward actions of 
 the right kind, and " right " is frequently taken 
 (in spite of Vice Versa and Mr. Pope *) to mean 
 merely that which does not interfere with the 
 even tenor of the paternal life. But we have to 
 remember that character is not a list of activities 
 but a profound and inexhaustible mystery — one 
 of the invisible things which loses its meaning, 
 its interest, and its greatness as soon as we conceive 
 of it as visible and outward. I cannot think of 
 any definition of it which would not be ludicrously 
 inadequate to the subject ; but we may at any 
 rate see that the saying " By their fruits ye shall 
 know them," if applied to our child, does not 
 mean " You will know if he has been rightly 
 trained according as he does or does not wash 
 his face, control his voice, and say good morning,'' 
 but rather, " The right training will be known 
 by the development of a personality which can 
 be both loved and respected." How does this 
 bear upon our discussion ? 
 
 Simply in this way. Personality is evidently 
 bound up closely with the person's deep feeling 
 
 * The father in " Marriage," by H. G. Wells. 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 45 
 
 of what life means : what is its aim ? what its 
 hope ? We need not trouble about which of 
 the two forms the other, the theory of life or the 
 personality : suffice it that the former is an 
 unspeakably important factor in the development 
 of the latter. We have then to ask what effect 
 on the child's view of life may be traced to the 
 fact that he has learnt to believe in his parent's 
 love, wisdom, and power. In other words, 
 would it have mattered much if the murder of 
 the chick had not been noticed, or if it had been 
 noticed in the wrong way, or if it had not been 
 followed by a temporary loss ? 
 
 If it had not been noticed at all, then of course 
 an opportunity of enriching the child's view of 
 life would have been lost : but more than that, 
 the propensity to be active at the expense of 
 other living things would have been strengthened 
 by exercise not followed by correction. And it 
 would have been the result, not of deliberate 
 neglect, but merely of a lapse in vigilance on the 
 part of the mother or nurse. (Merely not watch- 
 ing is the cause of a huge amount of bad training, 
 even on the part of the most assiduous pastors.) 
 This tendency to be active at the expense of 
 others is selfishness, and we accordingly reach 
 this result, that instead of a|deepened belief in 
 
46 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 the mother's love, wisdom and power, the child 
 at the end of the day on which the murder took 
 place would be more inclined to be selfish and 
 inconsiderate than he was before. It must be 
 admitted that this is no small result ; and it is 
 easy to see what must come about in a few years, 
 supposing the lack of vigilance is a normal or 
 very frequent state of things — ^if, that is, this 
 occurrence is typical. 
 
 But there is another way in which the oppor- 
 tunity might have been not ignored so much as 
 misused. Suppose nothing had ever been taught 
 to the child either by precept or example about 
 kindness to animals or weaklings generally. This 
 would be a very probable omission, and the 
 difference is that after the tragedy the mother 
 would have been confronted by two courses of 
 action, both unsatisfactory. She might yield to 
 her impulse of anger at having her feelings dis- 
 turbed, as the mother in the slums, who snatches 
 her baby from under the wheels of a passing dray 
 and slaps it without reflecting whether the little 
 thing could possibly have known that a dray- 
 wheel is heavy, hard, and progressive ; or she 
 might suspect injustice in this policy and confine 
 herself to an admonition based on the occurrence. 
 The slum-mother's method needs no discussion. 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 47 
 
 If it succeeds as a deterrent, it only deters from 
 one particular offence ; that is to say, the formula 
 which we may imagine the father to use (possibly 
 a cat's-meat man, as Dickens would say), inter- 
 vening in his own person, " I'll teach you, you 
 idiot," expresses exactly what does not happen. 
 The child is not taught anything, but is merely 
 forced into the belief that his relation to his 
 parent is marked by unpleasantness. This is the 
 worst possible issue of the affair, but it must be 
 very frequent. It belongs to a state of things 
 where instead of there being too much talk about 
 duty, as often is the case among people with a 
 larger command of words, there has been too 
 little. That is, the law of kindness to the weak 
 has either not been mentioned at all or so hurriedly 
 that it has not been taken into the mind, and 
 remains a dead letter. The alternative of 
 admonishing for the first time ex post facto is 
 unsatisfactory because of what it misses. It 
 misses the rich opportunity of using experience 
 and trusts to words which, as we all know, are 
 often useless. 
 
 From the foregoing remarks it might be inferred 
 that a misuse or ignoring of such an opportunity 
 as is presented by a wilful transgression is serious 
 because it misses something good. But how good 
 
48 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 the thing is which is missed has not yet been 
 made plain. I will try to explain this point 
 first with reference to the object of our immediate 
 quest, viz. the secret of the training of the will. 
 
 What has been missed, then, is the opportunity 
 for enriching the child's idea of his relation to 
 his parent. That is exactly where the gain 
 would be if the opportunity were rightly seized. 
 Secondary advantages of one kind and another 
 have been hinted at, but this which concerns 
 the relation to the parent requires attention. 
 
 If things have gone right, the child begins to 
 perceive that his mother's injunctions are to 
 be obeyed, not only because unpleasantness 
 supervenes if they are not — this he hardly thinks 
 about — but because there is a positive gain of a 
 spiritual kind. Her pleasure is manifested at his 
 obedience and he learns to find a lofty satisfaction 
 in her pleasure simply because he begins to return 
 her love. The least hint of displeasure from 
 that quarter is more than he is prepared to face. 
 And then her wisdom ! Before many weeks are 
 out he has begun to substitute for his unreasoning 
 enmity against small feathered things a keen and 
 sympathetic interest in them, so that it becomes 
 to him a really regrettable fact that he ever put 
 his foot on that blind and sprawling fowl. Of 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 49 
 
 course he recognizes that he knew no better ; 
 but his mother did : all the time, and long before 
 indeed, she was possessed of the wisdom which 
 taught her a thing he could never have learnt 
 without her — the mystery that there is something 
 better than stamping on hedge-sparrows, and that 
 is tending them. Who would have thought it 
 possible ? He has reached that truth, and with- 
 out her it would have been impossible. Who 
 knows how many other wonderful things there 
 may be in store for him if he does what she tells 
 him ? 
 
 The child, in short, is now aware of a powerful 
 and abiding stimulus towards denying his inclina- 
 tions, not only in one matter but in all wherein 
 his parents' will is plainly shown him. He be- 
 comes willing also to make efforts for the achieve- 
 ment of some childish object, whereas if his 
 mother either did not show interest or (worse) 
 gave him his desire v^thout the effort, the stimulus 
 disappears. It is vividly present to his mind 
 when these conditions are fulfilled : 
 
 (i) That he believes in his mother, from 
 previous experience ; 
 
 (2) That she, knowing the secret of happiness, 
 would not call on him for an effort without 
 reason ; and 
 
50 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 (3) That the reason will become plain when the 
 thing is done, in the gratification which she 
 evidently feels. Think of this possibility when 
 the child, still two years old, we will suppose 
 wants to clamber up the seat of a railway-carriage 
 from the floor : it is just within his powers to do 
 so unaided (I am not sure if this would be the 
 case, but that need not matter), so he appeals to 
 his mother to be lifted up. That is what she 
 ought not to do, but unfortunately mothers 
 often err in this respect. It would be far better 
 if she utterly ignored the child and left him to 
 make the attempt. Perhaps the best thing would 
 be not to ignore him but to encourage him while 
 carefully refraining from helping him. Thus he 
 would learn not only something about climbing, 
 and the relation between mind and matter, but 
 a deepened trust in his mother's judgment. In 
 relation to the strengthening of the will, he is 
 discovering the priceless fact that difficulties are 
 meant not to be shirked or groaned over, but 
 to be surmounted. 
 
 More might be said about the gain to the child 
 from the use made by the mother of her oppor- 
 tunities ; but some of these are less likely to be 
 ignored because the importance of them when 
 set down on paper seems too obvious to need 
 
II] THE HALCYON DAYS 51 
 
 mention. For instance, in early years much 
 might be done not only for bracing the will, 
 but for implanting thoughtfulness for others, by 
 inducing the child voluntarily to forgo some 
 treat for the sake of relieving some local patent 
 case of suffering. There must be scores of ways 
 of doing this : scores of cases of suffering not very 
 far away ; and the age at which some such appeal 
 could be made would vary with different children. 
 I cannot imagine what excuse there is for the 
 very common practice of keeping all the sad facts 
 of life from the knowledge of a growing child. 
 One of the great difficulties about home life is 
 the vacuity of mind into which young people 
 very easily fall. But the bright fact about all 
 tragedies is that they furnish food for thought 
 and stimulus to wholesome action. 
 
 Meanwhile, owing to some crazy idea that the 
 happiness of childhood will be impaired by an op- 
 portunity of helping others — the very thing which 
 enriches it — parents often allow their offspring to 
 believe that life is not only meant to be a perpetual 
 holiday but in fact is one, not only for themselves 
 but for all other people. This is heinous folly, 
 and yet — such is life — any protest against it is 
 sure to be misunderstood. If I say that boys 
 when quite young ought to be gradually intro- 
 
52 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 duced to the fact of suffering, that their sym- 
 pathies may be quickened and their experience 
 of the joy of service begun, I shall be told doubt- 
 less that children ought to be happy and their 
 sweet young lives not overcast with the shadows 
 of maturity, and so forth. Of course, such talk is 
 deplorable nonsense, because everything depends 
 on the degree, and the gradual fitting of the 
 teaching to the mind that is only gradually able 
 to receive. And let it be noted that, as far as 
 possible, sympathy should only be evoked with 
 a view to some practical action, even if it be 
 only a word of condolence. Nobody wants 
 mawMshness or insincerity, but we all want in 
 young people some measure of understanding 
 in regard to the sombre facts of life and its rich 
 appeal from all sides to young and old alike for 
 succour and fellow-feeling. At present it very 
 often happens that young men and maidens are 
 grossly, barbarously callous about the suffering 
 of others because they have not a notion what it 
 means,* nor how it has anything to do with 
 themselves. Similarly people often grieve, or 
 
 * The following instance of a nurse's discernment has been told 
 before, but is well worth repeating. She observed that Tommy, 
 aged two, was given to biting his small sister, aged one, on the 
 arm when he found her unattended and assailable. Instead of 
 scolding him the nurse bit him on his arm, and in a moment a 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS S3 
 
 ought to, over the way in which young men miss 
 rich occasions of giving pleasure to old people, to 
 the deaf or the disabled. But how can they be 
 blamed as if the fault were altogether theirs ? 
 They have had no introduction to the subject or 
 to any part of it except through some abortive 
 exhortations from the school pulpit. Whenever 
 anything happens which calls for succour from 
 somebody in the home — ^whether it be the gar- 
 dener's son is ill, or the poodle's leg is out of joint 
 — young boys ought to know of these things and 
 be called upon to bear part of the burden accord- 
 ing to the measure of their powers. If not, the 
 belief which they are very ready to form is 
 confirmed, viz. that life is meant for them to 
 be untroubled. And if they once think this, 
 when and how are they to unlearn it ? 
 
 But I am digressing. Our subject is not the 
 awakening of the sympathies but the strengthen- 
 ing of the will. Yet before we leave the former, 
 let us note that in respect of the narrower 
 inquiry before us, the quickening of sympathies 
 plays an important part. If it takes the form 
 
 great lesson was learnt. The offence was not repeated. Cf. 
 Calverley's words put into the mouth o£ a cat : 
 
 " They call me cruel. Do I know if mice or song-bird feels ? 
 I only know they make me light and salutary meals." 
 
54 HOME TRAINING [n 
 
 of finding joy in service, it acts as a perpetual 
 taming of desires which are snubbed as they get 
 in the way of the nobler quest. A taste for 
 art may or may not operate in this saving 
 fashion ; but unselfish interest in others cuts at 
 the root of all faults which are the outcome of 
 egoism. 
 
 We must return to the conditions of right use 
 of opportunity at such an age as two years. One 
 very obvious is that the parent should as often 
 as possible be on the spot. If the best of all 
 the results of an act of disobedience being dealt 
 with wisely, justly, lovingly be the deepening 
 and strengthening of the relation between parent 
 and child — and there must be no doubt whatever 
 on this point — ^it is clear that a serious disturbance 
 in the training takes place if the conduct of the 
 matter is left to the nurse. If the nurse is 
 incompetent there is no saying what mischief she 
 will do. If she is a woman of character, of firm- 
 ness, decision and insight, there is urgent danger 
 of her usurping the parental authority and 
 muddling the child's earliest and deepest ideas 
 of order and discipline. Things often are not 
 what they seem to be ; and I am strongly inclined 
 to think that a weak-willed nurse who perpetually 
 refers nursery problems to the mother — even if 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 55 
 
 the latter be no genius at all — ^is in the long run 
 a more beneficent agent than the wise and strong 
 person who, like the governess, perhaps, later on, 
 becomes to the child the main embodiment of 
 law, order, and love. At this stage the relation 
 to the parent is everything. If it is blurred and 
 disordered, the temporary peace and tranquillity 
 in the nursery or the schoolroom are purchased 
 at a heavy cost, the payment of which cannot 
 be for ever deferred. The principle which is 
 here at stake must remain for treatment in a 
 subsequent chapter. 
 
 Another condition is that the little incident — 
 seemingly so trifling but pregnant with lasting 
 issues — should result in a curbing of desires 
 because a higher end is in sight. 
 
 Many of us go all awry in respect of this prin- 
 ciple. We fancy that mere deprivation of luxuries 
 encourages self-control. By itself it does nothing 
 of the kind. I see no evidence that the poor are 
 more self-controlled than the rich, or that their 
 bodily desires are less rampant. The splendid 
 instances of self-mastery, of faith in a high ideal, 
 of a straight, clean, simple view of life's problems, 
 such as are found in all classes of the community, 
 are the outcome not of the weakening of passion, 
 not of absence of opportunity for indulgence, but 
 
56 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 of patient, unceasing presentation of an opposite 
 principle of living, beginning in the earliest years. 
 Nature prompts always to self-indulgence ; if 
 not to the coarser, then to the more refined forms 
 of egoism. But the parental control starting 
 from the " transcendent dower " of love, power 
 and wisdom can make the little child feel that 
 there is something in life above and better in 
 every way than any gratification ; and while he 
 pursues this, interpreted as it is to him at every 
 stage by the parent, he forms a conviction as 
 to the goal of life and also as to the road in 
 which he is set to travel, which nothing after- 
 wards can altogether upset — though, as we 
 shall see, it is to be exposed to a real on- 
 slaught later on, and if the home training is 
 incomplete in one grand particular, the fair 
 issue of the present may easily be turned into a 
 sad travesty of all that is really noble, enduring, 
 and complete. 
 
 There is one delusion against which a stern 
 protest must be made. Suppose passions, desires, 
 appetites, and the like could be weakened by 
 stinting the diet (which is hardly possible), the 
 result would be a lapse from the ideal. Boys of 
 strong desires are the best ; and the way to train 
 them is not to weaken their desires but to reinforce 
 
ii] THE HALCYON DAYS 57 
 
 the spiritual side of life, which in childhood means 
 the relation to the parents, so effectually that 
 his motive for curbing the desires shall be even 
 stronger than the desires themselves. Then 
 there is some chance of his growing up a complete 
 man. Nothing is to be hoped for from any sort 
 of emasculation, but solely from a full spiritual 
 equipment. 
 
 Here again misunderstanding is almost certain. 
 I shall be taxed v^th advising a luxurious food 
 diet for boys, though I have often inveighed 
 against it on the ground of its tendency to inflame 
 the passions after childhood. The truth is, a 
 rich or over-abundant diet for boys is more 
 deplorable as a symptom of general self-indulgence 
 than as a stimulus to concupiscence. There is 
 some doubt about the latter, none about the 
 former. In both respects its mischievous working 
 is in the mental region first, and there it is far 
 more potent than merely in its effect on the bodily 
 tissues, whatever that effect may be. It is there- 
 fore vastly more important that the spiritual 
 effect be understood than that controversy be 
 started as to the physical effects of food, about 
 which Science at present speaks with no very 
 certain tone. If, then, abnormalities be put on 
 one side, our aim should be to dominate the 
 
S8 HOME TRAINING [ii 
 
 desire, however strong it be, by the power of a 
 mighty motive which is the simple outcome of 
 the filial relation and of no other. As to the 
 main aim of the training of childhood, the above 
 statement may suffice. 
 
Ill : THE PLACE OF STIMULUS 
 
 IT will be noticed that in the above analysis 
 a prominent place is given to stimulus, and 
 the subject here touches on a very interesting 
 controversy, which among schoolmasters and 
 other teachers, though sometimes dormant, has 
 never been quite laid to rest. But though 
 specifically it is a schoolmasters' question, any 
 parent who tries to act upon a rational principle 
 in his endeavours to train a child's v^U, must, 
 whether consciously or not, make up his mind 
 on one side or the other. Therefore I will try to 
 explain it for clearness' sake from the point of 
 view of a school teacher. Its connexions with the 
 problems of home-training will be brought out 
 more plainly, I hope, in that way than in any other. 
 There appears to be a gulf fixed between two 
 theories, and that no trainer of the will, be he 
 parent or teacher, can act on more than one of 
 the two, anyhow on any given occasion. The 
 two theories are as follows : it will be well to 
 define them rather sharply so as to show whether 
 they are irreconcilable or not. 
 
 59 
 
6o HOME TRAINING [in 
 
 The one may be called the old-fashioned 
 disciplinary view. A votary of it would express 
 himself somewhat as follows : " You must never 
 forget that whatever be the difficulties or the 
 ambiguities about intellectual and moral training, 
 a child will ultimately have to face a world where 
 a great many disagreeable things must be done 
 and ought to be done thoroughly. Therefore his 
 training if it is to fit him for his after-life ought 
 to provide for this by furnishing him with plenty 
 of tasks connected both with conduct and what 
 we call work, the benefits of which depend not 
 on the task being interesting but on its being 
 unpleasant. A well-brought-up child will go 
 through drudgery in work, and in conduct subdue 
 his inclinations not in the least because he likes 
 either one or the other, but simply because it is his 
 duty. 
 
 " Now when you people who are always talking 
 about interest and stimulus point to the sur- 
 prisingly rapid and perhaps brilliant results of the 
 modern system of psychological adaptation, of 
 assimilating work to play, of letting a child educate 
 himself and so forth, you forget that you are 
 trying to train his will by letting him pass days 
 of which morning, noon and evening are to him 
 days of pleasantness : you set his footsteps on 
 
Ill] THE PLACE OF STIMULUS 6i 
 
 the " path of primrose dalliance " and call it the 
 narrow way, or work : whereas it is the broad 
 way, subtly misinterpreted and fatally made like 
 to the other under all sorts of specious phrases : 
 but leading none the less to the destruction of all 
 virility and grit of character. It is as bad in its 
 own sphere as the mistake made in the training 
 of our young soldiers for war, in the matter of 
 rifle shooting. We give them for practice a task 
 which in reality is made ludicrously unlike the 
 real thing. Both in practice and in warfare the 
 soldier has to hit an object with his bullets, but 
 in practice he enjoys all sorts of aids which make 
 it far easier for him to hit the mark than it ever 
 can be in a battle. And then people are dis- 
 appointed, when it comes to real fighting, at the 
 waste of cartridges. The truth is, there is no 
 short cut to learning. Whether a boy be quick 
 or slow, unless there is a good deal of the patient 
 plodder about him he will never come to his full 
 stature. He will have learnt the deadly creed 
 that progress is possible without effort, which is 
 the most insidious lie that ever lodged in the 
 human mind." 
 
 If the disputant be, as he generally is, a school- 
 master, he will probably not have time to frame 
 anything like so long a contention as this, but 
 
62 HOME TRAINING [iii 
 
 will clinch the matter hy looking you straight in 
 the face and saying, "It's my business to make 
 the boys work : and the more they dislike it the 
 better for them. All this stimulus business is 
 bosh.'' 
 
 Readers interested in educational theory will 
 recognize in the above indictment the assault 
 which has been made on the " Montessori 
 system " of training young children of the 
 elementary school class. Briefly the system is 
 based on the principle of self-education which 
 was powerfully advocated by Pestalozzi and 
 Froebel, and something of which is to be found 
 in the theories of nearly all educational reformers. 
 We Public School masters to-day, if awkwardly 
 " cornered " by demonstration of success, gener- 
 ally reply: '^ Oh yes ; it may do fairly well for 
 children, but the difficulty is the training of 
 schoolboys of sixteen. Any such system trans- 
 ferred to a Public School would be a dreadful 
 fiasco." With these words we demittimus auricu- 
 las^ and plod along our jog-trot road, absolved, 
 so we think, from the appalling task of deciding 
 between two principles. 
 
 Meantime the advocates of all the numerous 
 systems and theories which are built up on the 
 basis of " self-education," " self-expression," and 
 
Ill] THE PLACE OF STIMULUS 63 
 
 kindred ideas have a good deal to say. If they are 
 wise they refrain from destructive criticism. If 
 they are not, they harp upon the undeniable fact 
 that the votaries of the " discipline " school are 
 encompassed by failure : that at the end of the 
 school course a huge number of children are 
 found to have assimilated nothing : and if some- 
 thing of the sort is urged against the Public 
 School system, the criticism provokes so much 
 choler as to suggest that there must be something 
 in it. But there is nothing very helpful in 
 quarrelling over our failures. It is more to the 
 purpose to think wherein the self-educational 
 theories are strong. The greatest argument in 
 their favour is that they follow Nature. We have 
 seen that a child up to six years learns rapidly 
 and victoriously when he is not being taught at 
 all, and indeed it is obvious that many school 
 dunces who turn out efficient men in later life 
 have been imbibing notions in their play hours 
 as readily as the prize-winners at their side. 
 Hence it is inferred that the play hours process 
 should be adopted in the schoolroom, and the 
 Montessori system is an attempt in this direction. 
 That is why choice is allowed to the children to 
 a far greater degree than in ordinary schools ; in 
 play hours and in ordinary life a young child 
 
64 HOME TRAINING [iii 
 
 selects with unerring instinct the objects and 
 concrete facts which for him constitute the best 
 material for fruitful experience. When a teacher 
 comes blundering in with a prescribed programme 
 it is many hundreds to one that it is ill-adapted 
 to any given child : and coercive methods of con- 
 straining him to attend to the programme are 
 signs of failure, and not only abortive but rather 
 cruel. 
 
 And so on. Much of this discussion, it is to 
 be remarked, concerns the effectiveness of certain 
 ways of training the intellect. Much more might 
 be said on this subject. But we are in quest of 
 principles underlying the training of the Avill, and 
 to that we must give attention, trying to answer 
 the question whether there is not some way of 
 reconciling the two rival theories. The question 
 may be better put as follows : Does the natural 
 system bar the disciplinary ? And again : "Is 
 discipline a natural or unnatural process of 
 training ? '' 
 
 The answer shows pretty plainly that as usual 
 the controversialists are wrangling over super- 
 ficialities and have not taken the trouble to get 
 at each other's meaning. It will be found that 
 when either of the two systems has been successful^ it 
 has borrowed largely from the other. In other 
 
Ill] THE PLACE OF STIMULUS 65 
 
 words, instead of snapping at each other as 
 partizans we ought to learn co-operation. 
 
 The most illuminating book bearing on the 
 subject is Hinton's " Mystery of Pain." Some 
 readers will remember how the gifted thinker led 
 people to understand that in all the highest, 
 truest joy there is an element of suffering which 
 not only is an essential condition of the joy, but 
 in a healthy nature must be absorbed into the 
 joy. Effort which to a sick man appears wholly 
 painful is to a strong man an essential condition 
 of the joy of exercise. This truth holds good for 
 mental exercise. The more a boy surmounts 
 difficulties in his work the more he enjoys stretch- 
 ing his brain in attacking other difficulties and 
 problems. There is no want of effort, but, 
 ideally, all the eifort is made in hope of achieve- 
 ment, and schoolmasters are often guilty of dis- 
 puting together without first making it clear 
 whether they believe in dogged eifort without 
 such hope. That is where the question lies. 
 Arguments from Nature are certainly against any 
 such belief: else a mountain climber might be 
 contented to save his ticket to Switzerland and 
 mount a treadmill. If all hope of reaching the 
 summit were lost would anyone go on climbing ? 
 If not, why do we try to force boys to work at a 
 
 £ 
 
66 HOME TRAINING [iii 
 
 subject which to them is as a treadmill because 
 it is dissociated from all idea of progress ? If, on 
 the other hand, we insist on the stimulus of pro- 
 gress, is there not a danger of the boys relying on 
 the kind of encouragement which in adult life 
 they cannot expect to enjoy ? No, not if the 
 problems set them are hard enough. There 
 must be a stimulus somewhere : either in the 
 hope of achievement or in some strong personal 
 influence which induces a boy to believe that 
 there is some profit to be got by plodding, though 
 he is far from hopeful of ever discovering it. 
 The Montessori system — if we may believe report 
 — provides both the personal influence and the 
 sense of progress, and no wonder the results are 
 surprising. Finally it may be remarked that 
 when, as often happens, we set boys to tasks 
 which we know and they know they cannot do, 
 the masters, who say they believe in unalloyed 
 drudgery as a discipline, themselves apply all kinds 
 of stimulus, sometimes unconsciously. 
 
 So much for intellectual work. The question 
 now arises whether the same principle holds good 
 in moral effort. The remainder of this book, it 
 is hoped, will supply the answer. We have to 
 determine whether resistance to inclination can 
 be expected from a human being as a lasting habit 
 
Ill] THE PLACE OF STIMULUS (>^ 
 
 unless it is begun in childhood, and in the power of 
 some motive which supplies the needed stimulus 
 through life. There are two schools which face 
 the problem differently : the one by shielding the 
 child as far as possible from all trials hopes to 
 secure for him happiness and immunity from 
 lapse. This course normally ends by spoiling 
 him. The other believes in effort and the sur- 
 mounting of difficulties unaided. They often 
 forget, however, to plant the lasting and indis- 
 pensable motive, and expect the conquest of self 
 to be achieved without the knowledge of GOD. 
 
IV : CHRIST AND THE CHILD 
 MIND 
 
 /^UR Lord's recorded utterances about 
 ^^ children are among the greatest guiding 
 sayings in the history of mankind. They are so 
 supremely attractive and winning that some men, 
 unable to rise to any clear perception of the 
 claims of His personality upon our belief, have 
 pinned their faith to Him as a Teacher on the 
 strength of these words alone. But if they appeal 
 with strange force to our deepest instincts it 
 clearly behoves us to understand their drift. 
 They involve large principles, as is evident to 
 anyone who reflects on what a little child essen- 
 tially is. 
 
 It is certain that all the beautiful and most 
 childlike qualities of the human child postulate 
 the filial relation and a home. It is a mistake 
 to make much of any quality which might at 
 first sight seem to be independent of this relation : 
 such as innocence, fair beyond words though this 
 quality is. For innocence, without the protec- 
 tion afforded by the mother, is too fleeting a 
 
 68 
 
iv] CHRIST AND THE CHILD MIND 69 
 
 quality to be worth talking about. If a gutter- 
 snipe of six years is innocent he must be quite 
 abnormal. But under the shelter of a home and 
 a parent's care the beauty of innocence is plainly 
 to be marked for many years later. Innocence, 
 however, cannot have been in the Lord's mind 
 when He bade His followers to become as little 
 children, because it is a quality far too much 
 bound up with ignorance to be conceivable in 
 an adult. It may be supposed that incalculable 
 loss has been the outcome of a shallow, indolent 
 view of such words as these, " Except ye become 
 as little children ye shall not enter the Kingdom 
 of Heaven." Because innocence seems to be the 
 prominent quality of children, adult listeners to 
 the Bible in Church, if they think about the 
 words at all, imagine they are being exhorted to 
 put away their wrongdoings and become blameless 
 members of society, and it is not a matter for 
 wonder that the words, though they charm for 
 the moment, run idly off their minds. Perhaps 
 some of their attractiveness is due to their 
 seeming to call for no effort except one which 
 Nature tells us is impossible. 
 
 As addressed to adults the saying must, of 
 course, refer to the one essential quaHty of the 
 typical child : that is his trust in his parent — 
 
70 HOME TRAINING [iv 
 
 the sense of dependence, and joyful acquiescence 
 in it. Suppose this quality absent, the child 
 becomes dehumanized and unnatural, no longer 
 childlike, as we say. In place of the glad and 
 frequent appeal to the mother to come and 
 watch the tiny efforts to do something, sometimes 
 we find reserve, taciturnity almost indicating 
 mistrust. All that is winsome and truly natural 
 to childhood disappears. The characteristic 
 which Christ commended to His disciples was 
 not innocence but trust : the difference being 
 that the former is not meant to last through 
 life, while the latter is to grow not only with a 
 man's growth, but also with his decay. 
 
 Now trust and dependence and all the charac- 
 teristics of childhood which may be classified 
 with them postulate a home and parents. If 
 for a time other relations or guardians can manage 
 to preserve such a quality in the child it is only 
 because a simulated parent is better than none 
 at all, but it is not the divinely ordained thing 
 and need not be considered as affecting the broad 
 statement. This being so, it is not too much 
 to say that Christ in these words teaches the 
 overwhelming importance not only of home life, 
 but of monogamy which it requires : herein 
 giving His imprimatur to what has justly been 
 
IV] CHRIST AND THE CHILD MIND 71 
 
 called the crowning achievement of civilization. 
 But we are not now concerned with the teaching 
 as addressed to adults, but with the main fact 
 of the child-nature to which it calls attention : 
 that is, a perfect readiness for the Jllial relation ; 
 not the relation to other adults or to other 
 children, important and interesting though that 
 may be. 
 
 As soon, then, as we picture the small human 
 being in relation to his parent, another charac- 
 teristic of the normal child comes into view, 
 that is, his faculty of learning by experience. 
 When things are as they should be, the mother 
 is the one teacher for the first few years, the 
 only exception being the father. But it is just 
 during those years, say, up to six, that the growth 
 in knowledge is most rapid and the gains most 
 permanent. Much of what I have to say through- 
 out this discussion presupposes the great lesson 
 of science about human life, viz. that the impres- 
 sions received in the nursery are the strongest 
 and most durable of any. Experience could be 
 appealed to, and there is plenty of it to hand to 
 support the scientific view ; but it would be 
 superfluous, as the proposition is not, as far as I 
 know, seriously disputed, and all analogy from the 
 world of fauna and flora goes to corroborate it. 
 
72 HOME TRAINING [iv 
 
 It is worth while, therefore, to remark that 
 during the first six years the qualities that are 
 to be noted are those which our Lord wished us 
 to think about when He commended the child 
 nature as our pattern if we are to be recipients 
 of the Kingdom ; and among the essential 
 qualities we must reckon that of eagerness to 
 learn, and a power, which in most cases dwindles 
 very soon, of learning quickly and retaining 
 through life. Hence we gather that a " little 
 child " is a very young human being, gifted for a 
 short time with a remarkable power of mental 
 growth which itself to a large extent depends 
 on the proper exercise of trust in the parent's 
 love, vdsdom, and power. 
 
 Next, we find that as to growth, there is between 
 the mental and the physical a correspondence 
 indeed but always a difference too, and our interest 
 in the subject springs from our perception of 
 both. It is the blending of the two which 
 arrests attention and enthrals our imagination, 
 because while the differences manifest the working 
 of the inexhaustible mystery of life, the corre- 
 spondence indicates a subjection to a higher 
 Power. If life were working, so to speak, untram- 
 melled, we should expect to find its manifestations 
 were not only infinitely various but utterly incal- 
 
iv] CHRIST AND THE CHILD MIND 73 
 
 culable and random, and so divergent from each 
 other that there would be nothing to be gained 
 from any comparison between them or any sort 
 of juxtaposition of them in our thought. But as 
 it is, the differences between living things are 
 so supremely interesting, partly because they 
 reveal the unending variety of life, but quite as 
 much because they seem to be only allowed within 
 something like a definite boundary-line. They 
 are not wholly incalculable, but yet always fresh 
 and somehow original, not mechanical or in the 
 least rigid, fixed, certain. Both elements con- 
 tribute to our unfailing interest — unfailing, that 
 is, in normal cases. Occasionally one comes 
 across an unpleasing phenomenon : a parent who 
 finds his little boy's company dull " because he 
 has no topics " ! That is to say, the wrong- 
 headed father desiderates a faculty in the child 
 which if developed would give dismal evidence 
 of the premature death of child-likeness, and 
 that too in his own offspring. He is, in short, 
 the sort of man who is blind to the workings of a 
 glorious thing, a new life, fresh, quick and spon- 
 taneous, and grumbles covertly because, rather 
 than observe it and refresh his own arid soul by 
 communion with it, he is tjie victim of a crass 
 and diseased wish to talk about society scandals or 
 
74 HOME TRAINING [iv 
 
 Tariff Reform. But simple human nature feels 
 no such want. A child ought to be interesting 
 first to the parent because he is a reproduction 
 of the parent's personality with differences that 
 cannot be foreseen ; then to anyone who knows 
 the parents well, so that he can judge of the 
 originality of the new human being ; then again 
 to anyone who can see, though less clearly, the 
 working of the satisfying contradiction, spon- 
 taneity and law. 
 
 Spontaneity and law : self-impulsion within 
 limits. At first one is inclined to believe that 
 the interest of a new life appearing to us is due to 
 its unlikeness to others, that is to its originality. 
 But it is not so. The limits set to the originality 
 are just as essential to the winsome lovableness of 
 the young child. Suppose the contrary, that 
 there was no foretelling to the very slightest 
 degree what wild variation from the normal type 
 might be in store for the parents when a child 
 was coming into the world, the first result would 
 be that no one would be bold enough to face 
 parenthood. As it is, each father trusts that his 
 son will be born with a smaller measure of his 
 own weaknesses and an ampler endowment of 
 his virtues ; but if he must, as it seems, bring 
 faults with him into life, the father secretly hopes 
 
iv] CHRIST AND THE CHILD MIND 75 
 
 they will be his own and not another's — so 
 powerful is the wish for a reproduction of the life 
 of the stock. 
 
 Thus in His injunction about children our 
 Lord bids us notice carefully what are the essen- 
 tial characteristics of a child, those without which 
 he would not be a child at all ; and we find them 
 to be originality within certain limits, the limits 
 being his inheritance from his parents, his readi- 
 ness to learn, his power of trust ; and these not 
 only help to constitute a child-nature, but they 
 are necessary to the child being lovable. But 
 the important point to notice at present is that 
 all these qualities, though in a different measure, 
 are bound up with the fact of parenthood, and 
 in practical life presuppose a home. Hence we 
 notice in passing that Christ in these words tells 
 us that if we lose the home out of our national 
 life we lose the truest pattern of character- 
 development. 
 
 But let us notice also — because we shall need 
 the fact later — that one of the characteristics 
 which seems to have least to do with the filial 
 relation, the power of learning, is bound up with 
 the most childlike, filial quality of all, viz trust. 
 Where trust is undermined the peculiar activity 
 of the learning power is at once checked, because 
 
76 HOME TRAINING [iv 
 
 single-mindedness and concentratioiij both neces- 
 sary to true learning, are partly spoilt. This is 
 obvious. It is true also that the growth in trust 
 means a growth in power to learn. 
 
 Other characteristics of children are worth 
 mentioning, not only because we adults are 
 charged to keep them all in mind, but because 
 they enter into the question of the training of 
 character and will-power. 
 
 Imaginativeness is certainly one. Anyone who 
 has never listened to children weaving pictures 
 of fairyland, and seen them acting the whole scene 
 with the utmost gusto, is greatly to be pitied. 
 He may go on to the end of his impoverished life 
 never realizing that in the mind of every healthy 
 child there is a deep affinity for mystery, a native 
 thirst for things which no one can explain and 
 which are only what we call half true. Moreover, 
 a universal trait is the steady refusal to look into 
 the question whether the belief in fairies, goblins, 
 Father Christmas, and Santa Claus is well or ill 
 grounded. Doubtless a superior person of more 
 than twelve years old looks upon this as a defect 
 in the child's mind ; but fortunately there are 
 very few superior enough to try to remove it. 
 It need not concern us to ask whether it be a 
 defect or not ; the important thing to remember 
 
IV] CHRIST AND THE CHILD MIND 77 
 
 is that Jesus Christ said " of such is the Kingdom 
 of Heaven " ; and " such " includes the qualities 
 w^hich are most essentially childlike, and among 
 them this naive acceptance of the hints and 
 suggestions from his environment, together with 
 total lack of interest in the question of evidence, 
 must be reckoned. If it survives, as it sometimes 
 does, to years of " discretion," it takes the form 
 of gullibility, which we are told by a learned man 
 was a characteristic of the Christians in the second 
 century a.d. 
 
 Another, of the utmost importance, is the 
 readiness of the child to accept one of the doctrines 
 either that life is a time of privation and hardship 
 or one of pleasure and indulgence, or compounded 
 of both. This readiness is surprising when one 
 reflects that to act on the first doctrine is 
 unpleasant ; to accept the second is speedily 
 disastrous ; and the third is generally quite 
 illogical. But it is one of the immense facts, 
 connected with the progress or deterioration of 
 the race as no other fact is, that nearly every 
 child, if his parents are united in their desire to im- 
 print any one of these doctrines firmly on his mind, 
 imbibes it so deeply into his being that it is for 
 the most part proof against the assault and battery 
 of all sorts of counteracting influences in later life. 
 
78 HOME TRAINING [iv 
 
 Is this really so ? Undoubtedly. The proofs 
 are very numerous and are to be found on every 
 hand. " Spoilt " children are still common 
 enough to corroborate what I have said about 
 the second of the three theories. I suppose we 
 have all known men, and perhaps some women 
 too, who are quite firm about one thing only, 
 viz. in their refusal to face anything whatever 
 that strikes them as unpleasant, no matter what 
 the stimulus may be. In a carriage accident, 
 their nearest and dearest may be entangled in 
 the wreck and the horse kicking, but when some 
 one suggests to one of these that he should sit 
 on the animal's head he replies quietly that 
 nothing could induce him to do it. If he gets 
 a fly into his eye, not all the womenkind in the 
 house, each armed with a separate emollient, can 
 persuade him to sit still while it is extracted. 
 Loss of eyesight in a year's time would be annoy- 
 ing, but to prevent it by a moment's fortitude 
 now is to him quite inconceivable. And so on. 
 But all this softness is derived straight from the 
 nursery. These people cannot face discomfort 
 because they have never experienced the joy of 
 doing so in response to a worthy stimulus. Thus 
 when the chance is presented to them they only 
 know that to take it would be immediately 
 
iv] CHRIST AND THE CHILD MIND 79 
 
 painful ; they are ignorant of the subsequent 
 reward. 
 
 As to a child's acceptance of the hard theory of 
 life, I would remind my readers that up to about 
 182O5 comfort — as we understand the word — was 
 almost unknown in English life. Many of us 
 have been staggered by the records of dirt, under- 
 feeding, and neglect in which schoolboys were 
 dragged up to manhood one hundred years ago. 
 But the surprise is increased, though the pity is 
 lessened, when we learn that the homes were 
 very nearly as rough as the school ; and in one 
 respect there seems to have been no difference 
 whatever ; that is to say, neither at school nor 
 at home, except here and there, was anything 
 done by anybody to provide pleasures, amuse- 
 ments, or excitements for the young. Now, 
 though much is suggested by this interesting 
 fact, all that has to be noted here is that the view 
 of life presented was accepted by the children 
 and acted upon by them when they grew up. 
 How do we know this ? Simply because that 
 state of things lasted for centuries. Discomfort 
 must have been wonderfully prevalent, and not 
 only did children grow up to perpetuate it, but 
 they did so apparently without the smallest 
 reluctance or protest. It is true that society 
 
8o HOME TRAINING [iv 
 
 ultimately changed its ways ; but that fact, in 
 reahty a very surprising one, must not blind us 
 to the long years that elapsed first. The assertion 
 that the normal thing is for the home training to 
 be passed on as it was received, does not mean 
 that there is no influence powerful enough to 
 modify it. Let us observe meantime how late 
 the change was in coming. 
 
 If it is seriously asserted that the third doctrine, 
 which is an illogical jumble of the other two, is 
 seldom or never taught, I would say in answer 
 that it is by far the most prevalent of the three ; 
 and that, in spite of obvious disadvantages, it is 
 handed on, and shows every symptom of holding 
 its own victoriously. 
 
 An illogical " jumble " means here a mixture 
 of the doctrine that life means a constant denial 
 of natural desires with that which asserts that 
 it provides means of self-indulgence, and that 
 there is no reason why these means should not 
 freely be used. Now by mixing them I mean 
 acknowledging the first and acting on the second. 
 There is a deep and unassailable instinct in the 
 Teutonic peoples and in the Eastern races which 
 prompts them to recognize the moral worth of 
 asceticism or resistance to natural desires "per se^ 
 and a disposition to believe that the highest life 
 
iv] CHRIST AND THE CHILD MIND 8i 
 
 will always exhibit some form of asceticism. But 
 individuals are remarkably ready to show by 
 their lives that along with this instinct they take 
 the pleasurable element in life to be the thing 
 really worth striving for. For instance, it has 
 been said that nobody " works " unless he is 
 obliged. Omitting for the present the deeper 
 significance of this indictment, let us notice that 
 if it is approximately correct it supports my 
 contention completely. I do not say that literally 
 everybody is able without misgiving to hold these 
 two opposing theories at once, but that very 
 many people can and do, and that of these very 
 many are parents, and that the power of being 
 inconsistent in a vital matter without being 
 unhappy is passed on to the children so effectively 
 that schoolmasters, if they try to correct it at all, 
 try for the most part in vain. 
 
 One of the ways in which parents succeed in 
 passing it on is by giving lollipops to a child if he has 
 been " good." This particular practice is perhaps 
 less common than it was, but it is far from being 
 extinct. Has anyone ever adequately explained its 
 effect ? Many people, like Almond of Loretto, 
 have attacked it on the ground that it increases the 
 power of sensual desire. This may be, but it is 
 a trifle compared with the underlying fact that it 
 
 F 
 
82 HOME TRAINING [iv 
 
 lowers duty to God and man to the level of 
 common, coarse gratification. It tells a child 
 who is engaged in forming an estimate of human 
 life on which he may act, that the pleasurable 
 element in life is vastly important, so worthy of 
 his highest regard that it may be used for the 
 very noblest purpose conceivable, viz. is a reward 
 for that which we call moral effort, that mysterious 
 and wonderful thing which, however ready we 
 are to shirk it ourselves, we are fain to worship in 
 others. 
 
 Doubtless some reader will say that this is over- 
 stated : " We have come to see the folly of this 
 sort of thing and nowadays avoid it. It may be 
 admitted that the last fifty years have seen a 
 reaction against the old-fashioned discipline of 
 the home, which perhaps has gone too far, but 
 recently there has been a check, and it is only 
 you cranky idealists who see much amiss in modern 
 methods. Moreover, your criticism assumes that 
 a child of four is strictly rational — an absurd 
 assumption when it is remembered that, as 
 Provost Salmon, an eminently sane observer, 
 once said, ' The older you grow, the less you will 
 think of logic as a force in human affairs.' " 
 
 The answer to this objection will require a 
 new chapter. For in so far as my appeal is a 
 matter of argument, it depends upon certain 
 
iv] CHRIST AND THE CHILD MIND 83 
 
 broad truths about the human mind being 
 admitted. The first is that as soon as we begin 
 to have any individuality at all we begin to form 
 a theory of life, and to act upon the theory. It 
 is impossible for it to be otherwise, since to have 
 no theory at all is to be an idiot, and I suppose 
 individuality and idiocy are not compatible. 
 At any rate, every symptom points to a certain 
 theory being formed and consistently acted on, 
 provided that we take the word " consistently " 
 in the Greek sense of o/iaAcS? avcojuLoXog. In 
 other words, if a young boy is presented by his 
 parents with a picture of life in disorder, he will 
 conclude that for him too a disordered life is 
 the only one possible. But this conclusion is 
 not reasoned out, but drawn from the only facts 
 available to the child. If in some land visited 
 by Gulliver we could imagine a child living with 
 three fathers representing severally and with 
 equal consistency one of the three views of life 
 under discussion, that child would be obliged to 
 choose one of the three, and probably he would 
 follow whichever of them seemed to promise 
 most speedy gratification. But he would be in 
 a position favourable to impartiality and reasoning, 
 being obliged to choose between equals. 
 
 Ordinarily, however, his choice is not between 
 equals at all, but between things so unequal that it 
 
84 HOME TRAINING [iv 
 
 almost ceases to be a choice. If his two parents 
 live a life predominantly unselfish, the son will infer 
 that such is the life for him to lead, because no 
 other is shown him with anything like the same 
 clearness and authority. Similarly if their life is 
 one of gratification and self-indulgence. That 
 too he will follow, and so far I describe him as if 
 he were logically minded, though in reality it is 
 far more a matter of compulsion than of logic, 
 as we admit when we say, " Poor fellow, he never 
 had a chance." But the third hypothesis is the 
 important one. Suppose the parents' two lives 
 are divergent — one selfish, the other not, or both 
 pretty evenly mixed : the child is not in the least 
 surprised, but is bound to believe that a mixed 
 and inconsistent theory of life is the one to follow ; 
 he is as ready to be inconsistent as the opposite, 
 and in point of fact is quite consistent in choosing 
 inconsistency, since no other course has been 
 presented to him, and it is far too early for him 
 to see that there is anything to object to in 
 contradictions. If a wayfarer starts from the 
 meeting-place of three roads, there is little doubt 
 which he will adopt, supposing two of them are 
 hidden from his eyes. 
 
 How these principles work out we have now 
 to consider. 
 
V: DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND 
 DRIFT 
 
 T MUST remind the reader of the point we 
 -■■ have reached. We found that there are 
 three views of the problem of desires (or inclina- 
 tion or temptation or sin) which are presented to 
 a child: either they are to be resisted, or they 
 are to be indulged, or life is a mixture of the two. 
 It should be observed that the last wears a sinister 
 likeness to the theory denounced by Christ in the 
 words " Ye cannot serve God and Mammon " : 
 " serve " means attach yourself loyally to, as to 
 a master. A man may very often do something 
 to please B, C, or E, but if all the time he is the 
 servant of A the question of where his true 
 allegiance is is settled. So taught the great 
 Teacher of the foremost peoples of the earth. 
 The inference is that the theory which jumbles 
 up the two doctrines, that of inclination, or 
 resistance to inclination, really comes in practice 
 to a sort of alternation between the two : an 
 obedience first to one then the other : while all 
 the time there is a numerical advantage being 
 
 85 
 
86 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 given to one : the number of concessions made to 
 one is never equal to those made to the other, or 
 if it is it is only for a moment. Very soon the 
 one draws ahead of the other ; and as life goes 
 on, the distance between the two numbers 
 increases till even the most purblind spectators 
 can detect it. The allegiance meantime to one 
 or to the other is in reality determined very early 
 in life. Acts of obedience to desire or of self- 
 yielding to goodness may be nearly balanced 
 arithmetically: but the preference of one over 
 the other begins to be a fact in a young life, who 
 can tell when ? 
 
 What I am contending for is that the third of 
 these, the jumble theory, is probably the easiest 
 to learn, certainly the easiest to practise, and, in 
 reality, is not a compromise between the other 
 two, but a feeble and stupid form of subservience 
 to desire such as interrupts the character-growth 
 of all men more or less, but is most deadly when 
 it is not discerned. In trying to establish this 
 contention I hope to set the two objections 
 stated above in their true place. 
 
 There are certain dispositions and powers in 
 children which at the cost of some repetition 
 must be enumerated, (i) A tendency to yield 
 to inclination. (2) A desire to interpret life. 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 87 
 
 (3) A faculty for so doing ; (4) according to the 
 facts presented. (5) A tendency to give a primary 
 place to those presented by his parents. 
 
 These are sufficient for the present. Let us 
 consider the effect of a very common incident, the 
 child hearing his father grumble about things he 
 has to do. 
 
 A mild and genteel form of grumbling is among 
 educated people almost universal. The prominence 
 in ordinary minds of the idea of necessity, the 
 frequent sound of the word " must," are signifi- 
 cant of an underlying doctrine of life, which to 
 the child, if he were rational, would be puzzling 
 enough. Apparently his father is eager to obey 
 his inclinations, which are generally of a simple 
 kind, easily understood by the diminutive but 
 observant critic ; they are ordinary appetites, 
 demanding a scientifically cooked and quite ample 
 meal, the time of which must not be altered if it 
 can possibly be avoided : if it cannot, a loss of 
 temper is looked upon not only as justifiable but 
 praiseworthy. Inclination also prompts to fairly 
 frequent light reading and spells of time from 
 which mental effort is carefully banished. But 
 to secure these ends the purpose to which the 
 main current of life is directed is frequently and 
 seriously interrupted. The making of money, 
 
88 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 obviously necessary for the hire of a competent 
 cook, or the command of accelerated locomotion, 
 is very often set aside quickly but firmly for many 
 days together, till it might be thought that it had 
 never been a serious object at all. But at length 
 this anomaly is explained : either the money is 
 already made, or there is a partner, a Mr. Jorkins, 
 who works the obscure machine of business in the 
 background, producing enough gold pieces to 
 pay for the necessary, that is, the pleasant things. 
 Meantime in the father's view of life, which of 
 course is right, the comparative importance of the 
 pleasant things as againt the dull working of the 
 machine in some unattractive edifice away from 
 home is manifested first by frequency of the 
 interruptions to which the latter is exposed; 
 secondly, by the grumbling protests with which 
 he resumes his work. 
 
 So far the keynote of the father's life is to the 
 child not very difficult to catch. It is the principle 
 of obeying the inclinations, though the inclina- 
 tions of the adult are curiously diilerent in some 
 cases from the child's own, but not more than can 
 be accounted for by the lapse of time. But there 
 are some really baffling questions that start up 
 frequently. Why does his father so often do 
 things that make him grumble ? He himself soon 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 89 
 
 becomes accustomed to having his own desires 
 sometimes thwarted, sometimes indulged by his 
 mother, but why either of them should ever do 
 things they evidently dislike remains quite in- 
 explicable : for instance, just as his father has got 
 settled down to his newspaper or a pipe on Sunday 
 after breakfast he is summoned off to church and, 
 oddly enough, goes, though the only result of 
 such effort seems to be recurrent dissatisfaction 
 with the sermon. Or when begging letters come, 
 it is very singular that this pattern of conduct 
 should always growl at them, and yet often give 
 something or say that he will. Two questions at 
 least are now mooted in the boy's mind. If the 
 thing is worth doing, why grumble about it ? If 
 it is not worth doing, why does he do it at all ? 
 After some few years, the boy discovers that the 
 adult's life is spent not only in providing for his 
 inclinations and toiling to make money for the 
 purpose, but in a third quite different endeavour, 
 viz. to satisfy a vague, fickle and shifting set of 
 demands which he ultimately learns to call 
 " public opinion," or " propriety," or the " right 
 thing." It is a somewhat tyrannical force not 
 unfrequently interrupting the life of desire, as 
 when his mother tells the father that he must 
 come and call upon Mrs. Tompkins with her ; 
 
90 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 and should the matter reach the stage of a dispute 
 the boy sometimes hears it closed by an appeal to 
 what people will say. This sheds some light on 
 the situation, but what in the world does it all 
 mean ? 
 
 Or again, as his own wishes are sometimes 
 rudely thwarted, the boy — whom we will call 
 Jack — gradually learns that this happens when his 
 own gratification would interfere with his father's. 
 Jack happens to enjoy banging doors or whistling 
 " Rule Britannia " out of tune on the stone stair- 
 case. The father happens to dislike both, and 
 checks the two activities with an energy more 
 summary than is spent on any other incident of 
 family life. So far this conduct, though it coerces 
 Jack into thinking about other people, deepens 
 his belief in the paramountcy of inclination as the 
 ruling force in every one's life. So he suits him- 
 self to these various claims rapidly ; foreseeing 
 the time when he can shake them off, as a yoke, 
 and submit himself instead to the milder sway of 
 public opinion, supposing he should find that 
 obeying the latter made life easier than dis- 
 obeying it. 
 
 Religion as an influence in the boy's life remains 
 to be dealt with later ; but we must imagine that 
 along with the exhibition of the above principles 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 91 
 
 of conduct which the father gives, Jack has for 
 years been taught something about an unseen 
 Being and has heard a good deal sporadically 
 about His power. His justice and His love. But 
 since he was an infant, though there have been 
 allusions to this Almighty Father at uncertain 
 intervals of time in the ordinary family life, there 
 seems to have been a steady and successful effort 
 to keep this whole subject apart from that which 
 begins to trouble Jack not a little (for he is now 
 twelve years of age), viz. the growth of new 
 inclinations and a constant recurrence of the old 
 ones, making it often necessary for him either 
 to indulge them surreptitiously so as to avoid 
 collisions, or to go through quite unnecessary dis- 
 comfort in denying them. But this remoteness 
 of the idea of GOD from the boy's trials cannot 
 be called a very serious perplexity, since he sees 
 that to his parents it is quite easy to acknowledge 
 the existence of an Unseen Father, respectfully 
 and even reverently, as long as no very searching 
 problem of conduct has arisen. As soon as it 
 does, the upshot is a compound of deference to a 
 rather troublesome public opinion, and to certain 
 strong personal desires which occasionally conflict 
 with propriety but as a rule have been taught to 
 conform. 
 
92 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 By this time Jack's notions of life are chaotic, 
 and though he is very young the difficulty of 
 interpreting things sometimes causes him uneasi- 
 ness from which he only escapes temporarily by 
 giving up the attempt. But the result of course 
 is to inspire him with doubt as to the existence of 
 anything which really can be called law in the 
 universe. He began his conscious life with busily 
 trying for many hours in the day to unify his 
 experiences. It was a delight to him to realize 
 that the stickleback and the shrewmouse were 
 creatures possessed like himself of the never- 
 ending wonder called life : and to hear stories of 
 unseen men who lived long ago and were evidently 
 very human like himself : and as long as he could 
 go on unifying things, all learning was a pleasure 
 to him and he felt in himself a growing perception 
 of law everywhere. But the time came when this 
 process was strangely interrupted, first by the 
 intrusion of public opinion into his horizon, next 
 by the influence of his school-studies, which in 
 some cases tended to be powerfully subversive of 
 his previous notions of the reign of law. And 
 yet these influences all added together are far less 
 disordering to his mind than the impossibility of 
 making anything of his father's ethics combined 
 with the vigour of the desire for pleasure within 
 himself. 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 93 
 
 It is worth while to lay hold as firmly as in us 
 lies of the effect of a chaotic view of law in a 
 young mind. In the persistent attempt to inter- 
 pret life, which is the evidence of all sound 
 vitality in childhood, nothing positive comes out 
 clear except the power of inclination, and the 
 check of public opinion on it. That is to say 
 public opinion or propriety first appears on the 
 scene as a check, but of course it is not very long 
 before the mystery of its intrusion is practically 
 solved by the growing boy. He finds that con- 
 flicts with it are not worth while, either at home 
 or at school. This is an early discovery, prompted 
 by his parents' example ; but by degrees as he 
 practises conformity he learns that concession to 
 the intruder is only another form of self-indul- 
 gence. 
 
 The next stage is the acquiring the knack 
 of concealing the selfishness of his life. After 
 all, propriety is an easy master, because there 
 are so many of his desires with which it 
 hardly interferes at all — and, in fact, liberty in 
 regard to these is best purchased by decorously 
 bridling the others. When propriety is positive 
 in its demands, this lesson is learnt soon after the 
 nursery, because the nursery, the schoolroom and 
 the school all combine to enforce it. There was 
 
94 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 a time when Jack found a pleasure in bodily mal- 
 treatment of others, but that was some years ago, 
 and now {atat. sixteen) it is easy to abstain. 
 Indeed he finds it pays to go farther and occa- 
 sionally put himself out a little for the con- 
 venience of others. It is odd, no doubt, that to 
 a certain point complaisance makes life pleasanter, 
 but it does, and so in strict moderation he 
 practises it. 
 
 Now comes the really bewildering time. 
 Propriety has proved itself a good guide when 
 she speaks ; but in regard to many problems she 
 is as mute as the grave. Long before sixteen, 
 Jack has found means of gratifying his sensual 
 appetite as his father does, with strict regard to 
 public opinion which in much of this matter says 
 nothing. As to over-eating, a great deal of 
 gratification can be got in that department, and 
 public opinion seems to think it quite natural for 
 boys : and in grosser pleasures too with a little 
 caution Jack finds himself able to indulge his 
 inclinations almost undisturbed. 
 
 Or he may be a boy to whom sensuality is 
 not at all a snare. He may be ansemic, and 
 listlessness is to him the easiest way of solving 
 the problem of life. Listless therefore he is, 
 and except for occasional objurgations from the 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 95 
 
 '^Governor" and some exhortations from the 
 captain of his house football eleven at school, 
 all of which he soon learns will be practically 
 ineffectual, nothing occurs to make him think 
 that listlessness is not as good a thing for him 
 as activity. 
 
 Or he may be a boy of fine physique and 
 full of energy. By degrees he discovers that 
 if he uses this quality first in winning distinction 
 at cricket and football and then in a rather 
 aimless hustle of manifold activities with phil- 
 anthropic names, he can fill up his time pretty 
 weli, gain something of a reputation, and occupy 
 his mind enough to banish reflection as to what 
 all this means. But meantime he has imbibed 
 the notion that he must make a livelihood, and 
 so he seizes the opportunity of an ' ' opening in 
 the city '' and begins to earn money. Soon his 
 eagerness is quickened by a certain excitement 
 belonging to the pursuit : and he joins the vast 
 army of those whose time, energy, and faculties 
 are all devoted to the pursuit of gain : ignorant 
 of the saying of a very wise man, " the desire to 
 get more is the worship of a phantom." * But a 
 phantom he ultimately finds it to be, and the 
 
 * Such is a literal rendering of the Greek words translated 
 " Covetousness is Idolatry." — Col. Hi. 5. 
 
96 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 discovery is fraught with an unspeakable yearning 
 after something, he knows not what. Or worse 
 still, he never discovers that the object of his 
 quest is not solid reality, and so he continues in 
 it with unabated zest till his life ends. 
 
 The upshot then is that if Jack is by nature 
 sensual he will become a decorously sensual man ; 
 if he is inclined for a quiet life he ^m\\ quietly 
 amuse himself, offending nobody and doing 
 nobody any good ; if he is vigorous he will 
 spend his strength on some bustling endeavour 
 to win either fame or money. And so on through 
 the gamut of activities or non-activities. Human 
 egoism chooses its own line. What is certain is 
 that there is nothing whatever in the training 
 described to counteract its all-pervading, subtle, 
 and devastating power. A few sporadic hints, a 
 little impulse towards higher things due to the 
 mother's love in very early years are quite 
 impotent to arrest the general drift of the life 
 which is inevitably of the inclination order. 
 
 The singular fact which emerges is that public 
 opinion, the chameleon-like guide and guardian 
 which the boy accepts in default of anything nearer 
 or more personal, not only speaks with tones vary- 
 ing from one time to another, but contradicts its 
 own assumptions so glaringly that by the time he 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 97 
 
 comes to think at all about the real meaning of 
 this jumble of principles and convention he 
 cannot help discerning its uselessness to him as 
 an interpreter of anything. More than that, he 
 may be led finally not only to distrust its guidance 
 but to assume more and more that when it says go 
 to the right, he had better go to the left, and vice 
 versa^ simply because the most striking instances 
 of heroism are the lives of men and women who 
 have not only ignored public opinion but reso- 
 lutely combated it, and because they combated 
 it have in the long run captured it, and by abjuring 
 worldliness have brought the world to their feet. 
 This startling paradox it is true fails to startle 
 some ; and startles others only for a time and 
 with diminishing power ; but as a boy is a reason- 
 ing being it cannot fail to deepen the bewilder- 
 ment with which he looks out on life. 
 
 Consider if this can be othervdse. For years 
 Jack has learnt to yield to his inclinations of 
 whatever kind they be, either towards sensuality 
 cautiously and decorously practised, or towards 
 some gratification of his natural impulses with 
 which public opinion interferes hardly at all 
 except to encourage and approve, i,e. he abandons 
 himself to some form of the quest for fame or 
 popularity or ease or wealth. But his allegiance 
 
 G 
 
98 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 to public opinion has been undermined gradually 
 and gently by certain recurrent presentations of 
 lives led in gallant and attractive obedience to a 
 different master : sermons in school pulpits, 
 books about brave men, possibly some teaching 
 about Scripture v^orthies, show him a more 
 excellent way : but what do these things mean ? 
 How can they be right if they contradict the 
 steady, powerful influence of his earlier years at 
 home ? 
 
 But the old objection will be once more urged 
 that all this assumes too much rationality in 
 children. They don't infer and think things out 
 and then calmly adopt a certain line of action ; 
 their lives are shaped we know not how. 
 
 On the other hand, we must beware of dogma- 
 tizing about children's minds unless the evidence 
 is with us. My contention is that the rough 
 sketch which I have given of the tendency of the 
 moral training of many homes is borne out by 
 the evidence of later years. The general drift 
 of the majority of young lives is exactly what we 
 should expect to find it, starting as we do from 
 this assumption. They are strongly egoistic, 
 dominated by inclination but for a long time 
 pushed hither and thither by the currents of 
 public opinion. 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 99 
 
 Could any influence be much more dominant 
 than that of the doctrine of the " right thing '' 
 in the public school ? You may argue against 
 it, you may deride it, you may try to crush 
 it but except here and there you will be dis- 
 regarded. Boys will meekly accept a code of 
 galling restrictions on their liberty if once they 
 believe it is the voice of public opinion. In 
 short their lives are, broadly speaking, divided 
 into two allegiances : the one to inclination, the 
 other to propriety ; the second being the great 
 modifier of the first. As to the first, let us never 
 forget, though it often has been forgotten, that 
 many youngsters are not sensual, but yet very 
 selfish ; but as their selfishness is of the tame 
 civilized order, or attractive in its whimsical 
 waywardness or fresh vitality, it is spared the 
 animadversion that is meted out freely to coarse- 
 ness, sloth, or dishonesty, when detected; and a 
 deeply selfish character may gain much credit 
 under these conditions all through the time 
 of youth, especially if its owner has caught 
 enough linguistic facility to win prizes. But 
 this remark trenches upon the opportunity of 
 the school ; of which more anon. Let us at 
 present observe that given a great variety of 
 temperament, there is a striking conformity of 
 
100 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 observed results to antecedents such as I have 
 described. 
 
 It is possible for parents, nay, it is not un- 
 common, to abandon the attempt to understand 
 these matters, and let things take their course. 
 Many think that the results of home-training are 
 too uncertain to form the basis of any principle ; 
 and when once this opinion is formulated indolence 
 of mind prompts to " letting things slide." Give 
 the child the ordinary sort of environment, and 
 if he comes of a fairly good stock, which of course 
 the parents are inclined to believe, things will 
 turn out fairly well, and anyhow educational 
 faddists are to be avoided ; so the father goes 
 back vnth a tranquil mind to business and the 
 mother finds social life more and more exacting, 
 and both are accordingly spared to a large extent 
 the painful task of reflecting what is to be the end 
 of it all. 
 
 It may be that in England we talk more than 
 we need of education ; we certainly quarrel to 
 excess over it ; but no one can accuse us of over- 
 estimating its effect. We habitually under- 
 estimate it, and this is owing to a certain blindness 
 to facts. A friend of mine years ago, after taking 
 charge of guttersnipes in East London — the real 
 raw material of humanity who had never darkened 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND' DRIFT l6i 
 
 the doors of any school — remarked that if people 
 would give more heed to beings of this sort they 
 would understand what an immense difference 
 education makes. In what respect ? Less intel- 
 lectually than morally. These East End boys 
 lived the inclination life in its most unmitigated 
 form ; till they were taken in hand and drilled 
 they knew of no reason why they should not 
 shop-lift except the policeman at the street 
 corner : between right and wrong they drew no 
 distinction whatever, and had never conceived of 
 one. This is really instructive testimony, and it 
 enables one to imagine what the world would be 
 if children were not trained at all. But more 
 important by far than that, it allows us to trace 
 pretty clearly the power of the two grand ingre- 
 dients of all sound training, law and love ; and to 
 discern in the conventional easygoing home-life 
 exactly where the shortcomings are, and how 
 powerfully and permanently they affect the 
 output. 
 
 But I wish to testify out of the experience of a 
 schoolmaster that by the time a boy is fourteen 
 the real wonder of home-training can be seen — 
 not in the cases where it has been marred and 
 muddled by double-mindedness or, as Bishop 
 Ridding expressed it, by " craziness, haziness and 
 
m HdME TRAINING [v 
 
 laziness," but where it has been based on sound 
 principle and faithfully carried out. I maintain 
 that the products of a really good home-training 
 in this country are still as they always have been : 
 a grand evidence of what can be done. It is 
 fashionable to acquiesce in the opposite extreme ; 
 to impute our worst failures to the disorder of 
 Nature ; tut it is absurd to suppose that the 
 noble manliness of self-mastery that is to be found 
 in quite young boys is to be ascribed only to 
 natural endowment. It gives evidence, even so 
 early, of conflict against desires and victory won 
 not without effort. But I must leave this 
 fascinating theme to a later chapter. 
 
 So much then briefly of the evidence. To 
 those who still feel that this picture of children's 
 development postulates too much reasoning power 
 in them I would urge that quite apart from such 
 evidence as I have given, it is not a matter of 
 reasoning power, but of yielding to overmastering 
 influences which insist on life being interpreted 
 in a certain way. We must never lose sight of 
 the fact that the child is only unreasoning in the 
 sense that he has tested very few facts for him- 
 self ; but where he does test them he draws the 
 correct inference without fail, though he often 
 cannot explain why. 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 103 
 
 If then for several years, during which he is 
 gradually forming a working theory of life, he 
 sees double- mindedness in those whom by nature 
 he is bound to imitate, the result must be that 
 he commits himself to this kind of Ufe simply 
 because he knows of no other. As already implied, 
 this double-mindedness means paying of respect 
 to a certain principle and in practice conforming 
 to the opposite. The respected principle is that 
 of unselfishness, and we are all ready to show not 
 only respect but homage to it when it is enforced 
 up to a certain point by public opinion. But 
 beyond that point we refuse to go, no matter how 
 unstinted is the admiration with which the mass 
 of mankind, after a due interval^ set themselves 
 to worship those who have carried unselfishness 
 to an extreme. 
 
 Now as soon as the conformity to public 
 opinion which demands unselfishness is practised 
 for a selfish reason, either to avoid collisions, or 
 to secure favours later, or to gain fame or votes, 
 etc. etc., the life outwardly betrays double- 
 mindedness, but the motive of action is single- 
 mindedly selfish. The behaviour is a blurred 
 picture of inconsistencies. We imagine Jack's 
 father as giving to charities because he must ; 
 because if he refrained the philanthropic peer in 
 
104 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 the neighbourhood would cease to ask him to 
 dinner ; but he grumbles as he pays. Then he 
 takes Jack to church that he may hear the words 
 " It is more blessed to give than to receive," and 
 if he did not think the words true he would surely 
 stay away when they are to be read ; but none 
 the less as soon as the opportunity for giving is 
 put straight before him he grumbles ; as if it 
 were really more blessed to receive than to give. 
 It is easy for some adults to see that such conduct 
 when it is not their own is stupid, hypocritical 
 and fatal to all peace of mind and growth in 
 virtue. But the point to be emphasized is that 
 it is astonishingly common, and in thousands of 
 instances no life which is outwardly and inwardly 
 single-minded is ever presented to children. A 
 child is so far irrational that he cannot detect the 
 hypocrisy of this life or consciously compare it 
 with what he may hear about Moses or St. Paul, 
 Damien or Havelock. But he is quite rational 
 enough to conclude that if there is no other 
 interpretation of life but a muddled one, then the 
 muddled interpretation is the one to follow : 
 since the one thing he cannot do is not to interpret 
 at all. 
 
 But before embarking on the next topic I will 
 notice a criticism ordinarily made at an early 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 105 
 
 stage in this subject, viz. that the schoolmaster 
 ought to set all this sort of thing right. 
 
 Doubtless there is much said and written at the 
 present day which implies that if only school- 
 masters were men of ordinary common sense 
 there is no limit to the splendid effect they might 
 exercise on the life of England. Whether Public 
 Schools, for instance, are praised or disparaged, 
 flattered or sneered at, this singular and quite 
 baseless idea is assumed. People tend either to 
 maunder over schoolmasters as having wrought a 
 mighty work, or to deride them because though 
 it is so easy they have done nothing at all. But 
 it is forgotten that the one view no less than the 
 other involves the huge assumption that a pro- 
 fessional outsider can counteract the influence to 
 which Nature has given the prime opportunity of 
 laying the foundation-stones : in other words it 
 is wildly supposed, without challenge or demur, 
 that the school is stronger than the home. This 
 requires examination. 
 
 A male child leaves his home for three-quarters 
 of the year and mixes with other male children, 
 and after four or five years passes on to a society 
 in which adolescents are included, whom by a law 
 of Nature he finds himself bound to imitate. 
 This imitation, however, only to a limited extent 
 
io6 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 takes an outward form. Jack junior of course 
 hopes to make school-life interesting for himself 
 by doing well in games in which he sees his seniors 
 excel. But the hope which is in him quite un- 
 quenchable is that he will learn to think about 
 life in general the same as Jack senior. Among 
 the small fry in a large school no topic is of such 
 interest as any incident which throws light on the 
 big fellows' opinions : of course that means 
 opinions on matters within the small boy's ken, 
 In short the fact on which rests the unique system 
 of law and liberty, evolved nobody knows how. 
 in the English Public School is simply this : that 
 small boys are imitative animals, and that the 
 big boys are big enough and old enough to be in 
 their eyes worthy of imitative effort. From the 
 master's point of view this means that he can 
 entrust the big boys with a great deal of responsi- 
 bility in school government as their influence is 
 unassailably strong ; and it may be remarked that 
 in the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge there 
 is no fact parallel to this. The senior under- 
 graduates have no authority whatever, simply 
 because the freshman thinks himself as good as 
 any of them. 
 
 But these youths who dominate public opinion 
 in the school world are themselves the product 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 107 
 
 of homes where, as already described, public 
 opinion is the ruling force, in most cases superior 
 to that of the parents, because it obviously sways 
 even them : and the upshot is that in the school 
 community the collective voice is irresistible ; it 
 is unlike that which sounds among adults, because 
 whereas among the latter an emphatic pronounce- 
 ment of opinion in one county generally awakes 
 up an opposite pronouncement from another, 
 and the air is alive with discord, in a school 
 society the few who have misgivings about any- 
 thing said are mostly too immature and un- 
 influential to criticize openly with any chance of 
 being listened to. Hence the ordinary attitude 
 towards public opinion is that, be it wise or foolish, 
 easy or tyrannical, the grand secret of a tranquil 
 life is to obey it. 
 
 What is the effect of this state of things on 
 the question before us — namely, how a growing 
 boy forms his ideas of the right attitude to be 
 adopted towards his desires in general ? The 
 answer is that whatever was the effect on his mind 
 of the intrusion of public opinion within his 
 horizon at home, that effect is immensely 
 strengthened at school. At home in very early 
 years the first perception of the power of public 
 opinion must have sowed the seeds of disorder 
 
io8 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 in the mind long before Jack could have put his 
 thoughts into words. Disorder, because in spite 
 of his instinct for unifying phenomena, for 
 classifying and distinguishing everything he sees, 
 his natural interpretation of life is upset as soon 
 as he sees his parents doing the two incongruous 
 things : laughing at their neighbours behind their 
 backs and yet slavishly and grumblingly obeying 
 their collective voice. The laws of conduct 
 become from that time onward inexplicable. The 
 boy will obey them and contradict them because 
 he has no choice but imitation, but he will never 
 get an answer to the riddle why do his parents 
 behave so, because there is none. At school he 
 finds certain human beings in loco parentis for 
 three-quarters of each year. If the school is in 
 good order, the interferences with his inclinations 
 will be more frequent and more summary than 
 at home, and some of the requirements will 
 remain utterly bewildering. But he is allowed a 
 great deal of liberty, and after all the most 
 important thing for his own peace of mind is to 
 adapt himself to the general demands of the society 
 in which he moves. If he has the temperament 
 which allows him to do this easily he will have a 
 very happy school life. But obviously he learns 
 a lesson which corroborates the teaching of the 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 109 
 
 home, viz. that boys who conform to what others 
 demand will have a good time : those who cannot 
 conform will have a bad time. But this is 
 exactly what I am contending for. Life for Jack 
 now growing up is in an ever increasing measure 
 a probation in which he has to exercise a certain 
 skill in indulging his inclinations and seeking his 
 own idea of pleasure. Public opinion fluctuates 
 up and down, now being slightly puritanic, anon 
 very easygoing : as he finds this is the case at 
 school, so still more when he first travels about in 
 the outer world. 
 
 But the masters, we are asked, cannot they 
 stop this sort of thing and give the boy something 
 of an ideal ? 
 
 It is best not to reckon on any such uplifting 
 power from this quarter. There are of course a few 
 very exceptional cases on record in which lasting 
 influence of the idealistic kind is ascribed to some 
 strong personality like Thring, Arnold or Temple 
 among schoolmasters : but it is certain that the 
 law of nature is the influence of the home ; the 
 normal outcome of education is the outcome of 
 the home. But as a rule the school cannot plant 
 what the home has neglected to plant, viz. a 
 certain view of life and its responsibilities which 
 is above the dictates of public opinion. Speaking 
 
110 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 deliberately, I can testify that I have hardly 
 come across one such where there is not a strong 
 presumption that the seed was sown in the early 
 years. I hope this will become plainer in the 
 second part of this book. 
 
 But meantime people generally forget that the 
 masters themselves are the fruit of double-minded 
 homes. Some of the silliest utterances to which 
 sane men are condemned to listen are those of 
 rhetorical persons who assume that schoolmasters, 
 parsons, and the like are a class apart from the 
 society in which they have been born and bred. 
 If society as a whole, or nearly a whole, inculcates 
 with all its might a selfish view of life, it is ludicrous 
 to suppose that all schoolmasters should be wholly 
 unaffected by the teaching : especially as all 
 humanity is more or less double-minded. Further, 
 the school according to English ideas is, even in 
 theory, bound to be to some extent a mirror of 
 the world. That is to say, society demands that 
 on the whole the worldly view of life shall prevail 
 in every school : that canons of conduct based on 
 convention and propriety shall on the whole be 
 the guiding rule of life there as elsewhere : the 
 idea being that if they did not so prevail the 
 school would not be so good a preparation for 
 after-life as it now is. It would not be difficult 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT in 
 
 to find arguments in support of this contention, 
 and, as will be admitted, if school-life were really 
 free from temptation, and boys in their tempera- 
 ments and disposition the same as they are — 
 an unthinkable condition, of course — certainly 
 it would be a poor preparation for the larger 
 world. 
 
 But more than that. Society has its own way 
 of enforcing its own standard on the schools, viz. 
 by refusing to send the boys there. Let us take 
 a rather Utopian case of a school in which a 
 marvellously high level of purity and industry and 
 Christian charity prevailed among the boys, but 
 which maintained this level by a strict system of 
 Confession, strong sacramental teaching and 
 numerous chapel services — is it likely that the 
 school would be financially stable ? Suppose, 
 further, that a large majority of boys were as 
 virtuous as the small minority is — I mean posi- 
 tively powers for good, not negatively free from 
 blame — ^would their parents all feel comfortable 
 when they returned from school for the holidays ? 
 I doubt it. The truth is that when the life 
 aimed at and achieved by the father and mother 
 is thoroughly mediocre, cautiously respectable 
 and decorously selfish, they would not tolerate a 
 school, if such existed, which transformed their 
 
112 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 offspring into the splendid type of youth still, 
 thank GOD, to be found in every big school. 
 They would be proud of him perhaps, in certain 
 company : but they would be a little uneasy in 
 his presence ; and the vague misgiving which now 
 and then flits across their hearts at the signs of 
 selfishness, not yet well- dissembled, of their very 
 ordinary son, is preferable to a self-reproach which 
 they could never understand. 
 
 Of course these suppositions are impossible, 
 but they indicate the simple fact very often 
 ignored, that what the society is, such will the 
 school be. The schoolmasters, themselves pro- 
 ducts of the society, have to undertake the 
 raising of youthful souls in a singularly cramped 
 and straitened position. The first thing they 
 must not do is to wake up in a young boy any 
 dissatisfaction with his own home : so imperative 
 is the divine law of honouring the father and 
 mother : so necessary is it to delay to the last 
 possible moment the sad disillusionment as to 
 the adequacy of the home view of life and 
 the failure of the home-law to interpret to the 
 eager young mind the divine law. That tragic 
 time must not be anticipated, and so the teacher 
 is compelled to abstain from denunciation, which 
 is more than any prophet has ever done, and find 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 113 
 
 a refuge in that which doubtless is better, positive 
 precept and example. 
 
 Again, not only is the public opinion of boys 
 acting on each other the dominant influence in 
 the vast majority of cases, but it is right that it 
 should be. A school can do much in the way of 
 secondary preparation for life : it can teach a 
 young fellow how to get on with his equals — 
 a most valuable lesson : it can provide him with 
 a mass of interests which keep him, if he is not 
 abnormal, from introspection for many a year and 
 postpone the awakening of self-consciousness — 
 a very common and debilitating infirmity of 
 young England ; it can give abundant oppor- 
 tunity for vigorous social action and consideration 
 for others ; but it cannot plant the idea that 
 service is the best thing in life, if the ground is 
 already occupied with the conviction that it is 
 only second ; pleasure (interpreted according to 
 the age reached) being the first. Now if the 
 school is to go on in the future doing this valuable 
 work for the character, the social influence of 
 young mind on young mind must be vigorous and 
 vital. Many a strenuous schoolmaster has begun 
 his work by thinking to interfere with this, the 
 grand natural law, that boys learn readily, deeply 
 and permanently from each other, but in all 
 
H4 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 normal cases only with hesitation, fitfully and 
 temporarily from men. Nature has planted a 
 very deep gulf between the boy and the adult, 
 and our young " beak/' as he is commonly called, 
 if he has a respectable endowment of common 
 sense, comes to discern this fact before it is too 
 late ; learning, not without real enlargement of 
 his horizon, that though he has a power of doing 
 widespread and visible harm, he must not look for 
 evidences of his doing any considerable good, and 
 yet he may be sure he can help in the spreading 
 of something invisible and very precious, and in 
 exceptional cases perhaps sow the very seed of 
 the higher life itself. Thus in the hope of doing 
 a very humble unnoticed subordinate work for 
 the Highest and with the Highest he loses his 
 own soul in the steadfast endeavour to which the 
 noblest of all lay-professions summons him. But 
 one of the conditions of all true success is that he 
 recognizes before very long the limitations of his 
 own sphere. The school public opinion, super- 
 ficial though it always is, silly though it often is, 
 low though it sometimes is, not only will be but 
 ought to be the main influence in school life. 
 If it were otherwise, school would be an artificial 
 hothouse training for the after-life which is an 
 affair of variations of temperature and pretty 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 115 
 
 sharp storms, and a man who has to walk thinly- 
 clad along bleak hill-sides will fare ill if he has 
 passed his youth encased in cotton-wool. In the 
 main we shall be judged according as we have 
 dealt faithfully with our equals and contempo- 
 raries ; and it is from and through his contem- 
 poraries that the English schoolboy gets the 
 buffets and ought to get the encouragement 
 needful for his manhood. 
 
 And all the time the public opinion which 
 expresses and wields this influence is the direct 
 outcome of many single homes. Most of the 
 children have unconsciously, but in very truth, 
 made up their minds for good and all, before they 
 go to the Public School, as to the main character 
 of the life that lies before them. It is to each 
 one a stage either for the gratification of his own 
 desires, whatever they may be, or for a closer 
 conformity to the highest thing he knows. Nay, 
 even at nine years, as any discerning master of a 
 preparatory school can tell us, there are indica- 
 tions which show in which direction the main 
 stream of life is beginning to flow. " He is a 
 rare troublesome pickle and always getting into 
 mischief, but at bottom sound and loyal " : such 
 is the verdict not unfrequently passed on a 
 vigoorus little scion of the big- jawed, bright-eyed 
 
ii6 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 men of thought and action whose portraits are to 
 be seen in our surviving cathedral windows ; and 
 what do the words mean ? They mean that the 
 child's outfit for living is an endowment of 
 vitality which disposes him to think little of all 
 that is tame, humdrum and inert ; those episodes 
 in boy-life which are still described in words as a 
 '^ high old time " appeal to him. His estimate of 
 the value of the repressive side of school or home 
 is not extravagant, indeed he is ready to ban it 
 as an indescribable nuisance, were it not that it 
 comes into his experience strangely blended with 
 something mysterious and winning and not to be 
 forgotten ; the love of father and mother which 
 has never been the outcome of weak surface 
 emotion or fitful sentiment, but of tranquil deeps 
 of character and yearnings after all that is noble 
 and true. They have from time to time revealed 
 to him an element in life so august and high, so 
 stable and severe, that even the large freedom of 
 his father's doings is subject to it ; and more- 
 over it passes into his thoughts with increasing 
 vividness as the years go by as something springing 
 from an unseen world by which he finds visible 
 things are encompassed and controlled ; the dim 
 region of the divine, so remote and sublime, yet 
 so potent, so personal and so near. This element 
 
v] DOUBLE-MINDEDNESS AND DRIFT 117 
 
 in human life is called Law, and though the active 
 youngster often fails to measure its far-reaching 
 and irresistible dominion ; though he is sur- 
 rounded hy strange barriers against which he will 
 often run his head in vain, a grand truth lights up 
 whole reaches of that which on Sundays is spoken 
 of as the Narrow Way : viz., that the grave, 
 stern presence overshadowing all the joyousness 
 of school-life is the same imperious thing which 
 he has been learning to recognize at home, though 
 there its aspect was milder and more benign. 
 This is enough. Inexplicable as it often is, 
 inconsistent as it sometimes seems to be, yet Law, 
 as his boyhood slowly learns, is in truth that by 
 which his childish mind was overawed. 
 
 As an outcome of this somewhat lengthy 
 discussion of school-life I make bold to affirm 
 that the following conclusions hold good : 
 
 (i) That when, as often, the school-age is 
 spoken of as the most impressionable time of a 
 human being's life, evidence which ought to be 
 familiar to every one in contact with boys and 
 girls is ignored. In all normal cases school does 
 not plant, but only fosters, the seed of the higher 
 life. Nature dictates that the planting should be 
 done at home. 
 
 (2) That this curtailing of the power of the 
 
ii8 HOME TRAINING [v 
 
 school is due not only to human infirmity among 
 schoolmasters, but also to certain permanent 
 characteristics both of school and home. 
 
 (3) That these characteristics cannot be sud- 
 denly changed without the spoiling of some dis- 
 tinctive and highly prized influences of the English 
 Public School. 
 
 (4) Hence that in all normal cases not only does 
 the allegiance to something higher than inclina- 
 tion begin in early childhood, if it is to begin at 
 all, but, conversely, if it is not begun then, the 
 ideals of boyhood cannot be expected to rise 
 above the teaching of public opinion, v^hich very 
 seldom demands anything more than a prudent 
 and pleasing selfishness. 
 
VI : TYPES OF FAILURE 
 
 13EF0RE entering on the deeper parts of 
 our subject, it is necessary to guard 
 against the indictment that the picture is too 
 dark. It will be certainly thought and possibly 
 said that among our young men there is a con- 
 siderable and perhaps increasing number who 
 give a good deal of time and energy to 
 grave subjects. Social problems occupy more of 
 their thoughts than ever before in English 
 history. The standard of " morals " has risen 
 and is still rising. " Temperance " is so common 
 as to attract little notice; and, in short, the 
 influences of the ordinary home must be more 
 vigorous and inspiring than they have been 
 represented. No one denies that there are bad 
 homes in all classes of society, but they constitute 
 a small minority except perhaps among the very 
 poor, where the sense of parental responsibility 
 is languid, indeed hardly exists ; but it is a pity 
 to make things out worse than they are. 
 
 This sort of criticism raises an issue which must 
 
 be made quite clear. In the first place, we have 
 
 119 
 
120 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 got into a foolish way of judging a home training 
 by the tone of character shown by a youth of 
 eighteen or nineteen, instead of the man in his 
 prime, say from forty-five to sixty. The fruits 
 of the early trainings are somehow supposed to 
 be mature in the teens, and what comes after is 
 vaguely ascribed to an inherent perverseness of 
 the man himself, or to the goodness of his stock 
 or the influence of his professional work upon him. 
 But this is sheer wrong-headedness and blindness 
 of vision. The fact which alone gives warrant 
 for any such inquiry as that whereon we are 
 engaged is quite undeniable. It is that the early 
 training has a "pre dominating effect for life : other 
 influences tell in their measure, but this is the 
 strongest of all, and where it is single in aim and 
 conviction its effect is visible to the very end, 
 whether it be good or evil. My contention is 
 that this is generally the case. But lest any 
 readers be inclined to shrug their shoulders in 
 contempt of such opinion, I would remark that 
 there is not the slightest occasion to dispute over 
 the exact amount of result that ought to be 
 ascribed to the home, so long as it is agreed that 
 the effect is very deep and permanent. That is 
 enough for any discussion on the subject which 
 does not profess to be exhaustive or metaphysical. 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 121 
 
 My conviction is that no limits can be set to the 
 home influence as a factor in the building of 
 character. If others shrink from going quite so 
 far, that is no reason why we should not put our 
 heads together in consultation on the bettering 
 of home training — by far the most important 
 social question of this or of any other day. 
 
 But perhaps the question before us will be 
 clearer if we quietly contemplate the result in 
 a very large number of cases, and ask ourselves 
 if that is the kind of thing which we parents 
 really hope for, as the best attainable, when we 
 first set about ordering the training of our 
 children. 
 
 I will for the present select what is to me the 
 more intelligible of the two sexes. Poets and 
 other observers have written eloquently and not 
 unconvincingly on the difiiculty men have ordi- 
 narily found in understanding the working of 
 women's minds. Contributions to this tempting 
 theme could easily be culled from such writers as 
 Euripides, Shakespeare and Pope, but we must 
 resist the temptation to dabble in it and be 
 guided by the fact that, for men writers anyhow, 
 it is a simpler task to trace the development of 
 a man's character back to its early training than 
 it is to explain a woman's in the same way. There 
 
122 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 is something in men's lives which seems to betray- 
 more conformity to a law of sequence from ante- 
 cedent influences, and so men's lives and conduct 
 become more available for the purposes of this 
 inquiry. It may, however, be remarked that 
 even those who are most baffled by the conduct 
 of women would agree that fundamentally their 
 characters must be largely the outcome of train- 
 ing, or at least, that if girls are brought up on 
 principles which have been proved sound for boys, 
 we may feel assured that on the whole we are on 
 the right lines, though it may not be possible to 
 prove it by statistics of results as we can to some 
 extent in the case of their brothers. 
 
 Again, the very good and the very bad homes 
 may be left on one side : no one, however obtuse- 
 minded, doubts the lasting influence of both one 
 and the other. The matter on which we must 
 form a clear opinion is the power of the average 
 home. 
 
 I take, then, an ordinary man's history in this 
 country of ours to be something of the following 
 kind. As already described, the child has been 
 taught to bridle some of his inclinations very 
 early in life ; and if they have been of the coarse 
 and obstreperous order, the little person has 
 endured a good many buffets before his tenth 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 123 
 
 year. But by that time he begins to detect two 
 reasons which account for this undesirable state 
 of things : the first is that his parents and other 
 adults do not relish some of his activities, which 
 they call tiresome and disgusting or cruel or 
 impolite, so they insist on their suppression ; the 
 second is that in so doing they are obeying public 
 opinion. This discovery he carries away with 
 him to school. There he finds a very coercive 
 public opinion exercised by men on boys ; and 
 for himself a very jolly time if he conforms, and 
 many raps over the knuckles if he does not. His 
 parents seem to think it is all right, so without 
 more ado he conforms, and the years pass quickly 
 by, tolerably free from care. 
 
 Then comes the plunge into University life, or 
 business or the Army. The main operative prin- 
 ciples whereby his ideas of right and wrong have 
 been formed continue to stand him in fairly good 
 stead. He is young and strong and growing 
 stronger, and by degrees begins to appreciate that 
 people will think well of him if he takes an active 
 part in combating some of the social disorders 
 of the time. So he picks up what knowledge he 
 can and, joining this kind of activity to his earning 
 a livelihood, he becomes a bit of a philanthropist. 
 Associations for benefiting the poor or the weak 
 
124 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 or the sick, or for stirring up patriotism or pro- 
 mulgating particular political views, attract him, 
 and life promises to be a lively and fairly whole- 
 some experiment. Suppose that things go well 
 with him, there develops in him quite naturally 
 and reasonably the feelingwe call self-complacency. 
 Reasonably, because he is conscious of having put 
 out a great deal of effort and is now receiving a 
 desirable reward. 
 
 He has a digestion at present unimpaired ; 
 enough to live on, most of which has been acquired 
 through his own sagacity and industrious habits ; 
 and more than all this, he has become to some 
 extent an object of respect among his neighbours. 
 Now and then newspapers of repute devote a 
 short paragraph to his sayings and doings ; he 
 aspires, not without confidence, to a place in 
 " Who's Who ? " and occasionally (seldom, we 
 may say) reflects that there will be a tablet to 
 his memory in the south aisle of the parish 
 church. 
 
 Which reminds us that through these years 
 there has been a certain ingredient of what people 
 call religion in his life ; that is to say, he was 
 taught some prayers by his mother very early 
 indeed, just a sentence or two of monosyllables, 
 and though nothing has ever been added to them, 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 125 
 
 he has never altogether discontinued them, but 
 when he has time in the morning and occasionally, 
 from old associations, and if not too sleepy, in 
 the evening as well, he will repeat them on his 
 knees. But at no other time does he consciously 
 refer to them. Indeed, it is curious to reflect 
 on a few experiences in his school life, when he 
 had definitely made up his mind to do something 
 he knew at the time to be wrong, and once 
 something that he is now ashamed to look back 
 on, he still used the childish little formulas : you 
 couldn't expect a lad in his teens to know better, 
 and of course at the time there was no one he 
 could speak to about the matter as his father 
 had once told him that on certain subjects he 
 was to hold his tongue ; and though there was 
 no reason why this injunction should prevent him 
 from picking up what he could of interesting 
 knowledge from his school-fellows, it made him 
 very careful not to mention anything of the sort 
 to his parents. Now and then a man guest would 
 come to the house and the boy somehow detected 
 that he was the sort of person who did not mind 
 talking a little about the matter : but what he 
 learnt from him was rather unpleasant and in 
 a way alarming ; so he never followed the subject 
 up, and of course, never dreamt of definitely 
 
126 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 connecting it with his morning and evening 
 prayers, especially as once or twice his tutor at 
 school — a thoroughly good chap, a fair football- 
 player and without humbug — took him to task 
 very seriously about his conduct but made no 
 allusion whatever to GOD. On this latter subject 
 there were at that time some obscure instincts 
 within him which would have led him to inquire 
 further, had he not once made an attempt in this 
 direction with disagreeable results. 
 
 It was at the time of his confirmation, 
 which his " people '^ decreed should be in 
 the holidays because his only sister was to 
 be confirmed at the same time, and also because 
 his father thought the local parson was a 
 good sort — that is, he worked hard, preached 
 good practical sermons never more than twenty 
 minutes long, and was the sort of man who, if he 
 had not " gone into the Church," might have 
 been quite a " sportsman." So for three weeks 
 before the confirmation the boy attended the 
 vicar's classes and heard a good deal about the 
 Catechism, which, as was natural and no doubt 
 right, was couched in scriptural language, and 
 therefore meant nothing particular, till one day 
 the parson saw him alone and asked him if there 
 was any difficulty in his life which he would like 
 
VI] TYPES OF FAILURE 127 
 
 to speak about. Whereupon Jack — for all the 
 time it is our old friend again — felt strongly 
 inclined to say, " Swearing " : to tell the truth, 
 he had rather frequently given way in moments 
 of excitement to this habit, but found that people 
 generally looked on it as rather bad manners, 
 though with a savour of something mysterious 
 about it which made Jack think it would do nicely 
 to fend off the parson's curiosity. 
 
 But it so happened that there had been a 
 curious experience of Jack's not long before, 
 which may be briefly narrated in order to 
 explain what followed : Patrick, the son of 
 a neighbouring squire, a jolly sort of rather 
 reckless boy, suddenly in the middle of the 
 summer term appeared at his own home in a 
 most crestfallen state and was hurried off by 
 his father in three days to a stranger a long way 
 off and Jack did not see him for quite a year, but 
 picked up from some one that he had been " sent 
 away" from his Public School in disgrace and it 
 was feared that he would not get into the Army. 
 Indeed, some one had discovered the poor fellow 
 one day at home weeping by himself and quite 
 broken down ; but after a year he came back 
 and there was a surprising change in him. He 
 was quieter and more industrious, but in talking 
 
128 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 to Jack would generally speak of things from the 
 point of view of right and wrong, and just now 
 and then showed that what he had heard about 
 GOD was helping him enormously in his ordinary 
 life. 
 
 This rather startling episode made Jack wish 
 to discover whether anything in " religion " 
 would be of any use to himself, because, to be 
 frank, there were some secret troubles in his moral 
 life which were causing him a good deal of 
 uneasiness in the background. So on the vicar 
 assuring him kindly that he need not be afraid, 
 he made a vigorous effort and conquered his 
 shyness and asked what he should do to get rid 
 of " bad thoughts." The vicar looked a little 
 uncomfortable but gave him some advice, very 
 like what he had previously said, from which he 
 remembered afterwards that if he read the Bible 
 and said his prayers everything would come right ; 
 and Jack was convinced that he had played the 
 fool in talking about the matter at all, as the 
 vicar seemed to think it was not really serious and, 
 anyhow, need not be mentioned again. Jack 
 being but sixteen, was unable at the time to make 
 anything whatever of this. He had a vague but 
 very fitful sense that somehow he had asked for 
 a piece of bread and been given a stone — not a 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 129 
 
 scorpion, it is true, but certainly not a pearl. But 
 being an English boy, he had no difficulty in 
 stowing his uneasiness away into a sort of lumber- 
 room of his inner being, where it remained like 
 a brown-paper parcel in an attic full of unused 
 knick-knacks, and grew more and more dusty as it 
 was more and more forgotten. 
 
 In this way, there came about a divergence in 
 Jack's life between his moral feelings and the thin 
 driblet of religion which, derived from his earliest 
 years, did not quite cease to trickle through the 
 variegated pebbles of his mental water-course till 
 he was about nineteen years old. By that time, 
 or soon after, a certain desire for reality slowly 
 woke within him. He began to feel more dis- 
 tinctly the irksomeness of religious observances, 
 but by itself that would have hardly been suffi- 
 cient to make him discontinue them. The wish 
 for reality reinforced the spiritual indolence which 
 had never been conquered or indeed combated, 
 because nobody had ever told him that there was 
 anything to combat, and his experience of boy- 
 hood had taught him now that, unlike some 
 unfortunate young people, he could conform to 
 the social canons of respectability which he found 
 in vogue ; also that to achieve this, it was not 
 necessary to draw upon his lean religious resources. 
 
 I 
 
130 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 Hence Jack entered upon his manhood with 
 religion already, though unavowedly, discredited ; 
 and he finds, rather to his surprise, a large warrant 
 in contemporary example for ignoring it altogether 
 as far as outward observance is concerned. So 
 he follows suit ; but not immediately. The first 
 thing to go is attendance at the Holy Commu- 
 nion. Jack had made a practice of attending 
 with fair consistency about once a month since 
 his confirmation at sixteen years old ; but he 
 now finds some leaders of society, evidently " good 
 fellows " and likely to be successful in after life, 
 who continue to attend college chapel or some 
 fashionable West End church in London once a 
 week, but never communicate. And it only 
 seems reasonable that something of his religious 
 practice should go by the board because he is 
 learning that there is such a thing as mental 
 grov^h in certain kinds of mental effort, and that 
 to him, therefore, these are real^ that is, produc- 
 tive of growth, stimulating and lively, while other 
 kinds are dead. 
 
 For instance, at seventeen years old he had 
 been allowed at school to change the normal 
 literary course of studies for mathematics, where- 
 by his faculty for reasoning and observation 
 had been stirred to activity and he became able 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 131 
 
 to distinguish between sets of ideas which to him 
 were lifeless and arid and those which gave 
 promise of vitality. Thus, in cutting down his 
 religious observances to a bare minimum of 
 church-going, Jack not only obeyed his inclina- 
 tions — though he still likes some hymns or some 
 sermons — but conformed to the example of men 
 who seemed to him worth imitating because they 
 were more genuine, somehow, than the parsons 
 he happened to have met, and, anyhow, decidedly 
 more interesting ; while as for his women rela- 
 tions, they were, it is true, all of them commu- 
 nicants, and his mother was slightly distressed at 
 his ceasing to be one, but only slightly, " because," 
 as she said to herself and occasionally to the vicar, 
 " one must be liberal-minded in these days, and 
 after all, some very good, hard-working men are 
 not communicants, and perhaps when Jack is 
 married and has a family of his own it will come 
 right again ; so there it is." Moreover, mathe- 
 matics or something else had lately taught Jack 
 to reason for himself, and to tell the truth, this 
 growth of a new power within him made him 
 hold his nose a little higher in the air than he 
 had ever done before. He was not distinctly 
 aware of any problems in life which did not seem 
 likely to yield in due time to this new faculty ; 
 
132 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 and as he found that the special kind of logic 
 which appealed to him was apparently uninterest- 
 ing to women, he blandly relegated them all to 
 a position of inferiority to that of himself and 
 a few male friends, making up his mind that he 
 would postpone the question of matrimony to a 
 convenient season. For the present, anyhow, 
 female society bores him and he cannot imagine 
 falling in love. 
 
 Having thus put religion into its proper place, 
 whence it is not likely to intrude on a well-ordered 
 life, he continues his private prayers for a curiously 
 long time considering his strong antipathy to 
 things unreal. But at last they go too, and such 
 religious instincts as he still retains are fairly well 
 satisfied by intermittent church-going, some 
 sacred music, and a few bazaars ; and, as already 
 mentioned, he dabbles in social work of various 
 description in addition to his professional routine, 
 which is punctuated by fairly good holidays. 
 
 Now so far I have traced, in the most scanty 
 and general outline, a fairly typical young man's 
 character-development, that is to say, the kind of 
 way in which a very common attitude towards 
 the deeper of life's questions comes to be assumed 
 by a man between twenty-five and thirty. In 
 scores of ways, of course, outward framework of 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 133 
 
 individual lives varies, but I have no hesitation 
 in calling this development typical in respect of 
 the two grand claims made upon every civilized 
 human being in modern England, viz. to adopt 
 some policy toward his various inclinations and 
 desires, and to take up a certain position toward 
 religion, since the latter word applies not only 
 to outward observances, which might of course be 
 wholly ignored, but to some dim, inarticulate 
 instinct within him which insists on a measure of 
 recognition : very little, it may be said, will 
 keep them from troubling, but it is seldom that 
 they allow themselves at this stage of life to be 
 quite disregarded. 
 
 We have seen what the answer to the two 
 claims so far has been. Jack has found that a 
 certain amount of snubbing of some kinds of 
 inclination has been necessary to save unpleasant 
 consequences, which might have ensued from 
 the annoying and not quite calculable action 
 of public opinion. But as his desire to stand 
 well with people whom he likes is stronger 
 than his inclinations to sensuality or cruelty or 
 blatant selfishness, he has firmly adopted the 
 policy of denying these desires when they definitely 
 conflict with the claims of public opinion ; and 
 being what he is, it has not been difficult for him 
 
134 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 to be quite consistent so far. That is to say, he 
 is able to congratulate himself because, in regard 
 to sensual temptations, for instance, he is better 
 off than his cousin Tom. Tom is obliged to 
 dodge public opinion by consorting with the laxer 
 sections of society where his immorality is winked 
 at ; and this Jack disapproves of, though he 
 cannot at present say why : he is always expecting 
 that in a year's time he will be able to tell you, 
 but no one yet has ever heard him open his lips 
 on the subject. His attitude towards Tom mean- 
 time is official and guarded. In his heart of 
 hearts he is well content with his own unim- 
 peachable upbringing, since he has learnt to 
 " deny himself " to the required extent, and 
 poor Tom has not. So while Tom can only 
 get along by surrounding himself with associates 
 who demand little or nothing in the way of 
 conduct, Jack is quite at home with the recently 
 knighted solicitor George Mundane, who has 
 given two thousand pounds to a scheme thought 
 of by somebody else for keeping rustics " upon 
 the land " ; and more than that, he doesn't mind 
 dining with the rather eccentric banker, Mr. 
 Excelsior by name, who never seems to think of 
 public opinion at all, though Jack would be the 
 first to admit that there is something about 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 135 
 
 Excelsior which makes him always a little uncom- 
 fortable in his presence. While Jack is tending 
 to be more and more interested in his financial 
 ventures and the house he is planning near the 
 excellent golf links at Woking, Mr. E., though 
 not without knowledge of such things, talks of 
 them in a curiously detached way as if his real 
 interest lay elsewhere, and yet it is hard to con- 
 ceive that they do. 
 
 So Jack "muddles along" in this matter: and 
 though in other respects unlike Lord Dun- 
 dreary, he dismisses the problem with the widely 
 used formula, " There are some things which 
 a fellow cannot understand." However, his self- 
 complacency is an abiding fact, notwithstanding 
 these recurrent and baffling experiences ; and 
 it is also quite reasonable, because, as far 
 as Jack can tell, he has, in choosing public 
 opinion as his main ethical teacher, chosen 
 something eminently sane, reasonable, and withal 
 satisfactory ; that is to say, it has required of him 
 a measure of self-control which after all is not 
 excessive, especially as it freely allows him an 
 ample indulgence in the good things of the table. 
 Jack would be horrified if anyone hinted that he 
 was becoming a glutton, but he always has enjoyed 
 his meals consistently, and now, cet, thirty-five 
 
136 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 he can look forward to this form of recreation for 
 many years to come. 
 
 But the '' iron hours " go by. This undeniable 
 fact suggests the reflection that in judging of the 
 training of a human being, we should scan the 
 result, not at twenty, as is generally done, but at 
 fifty-five. Some wise man has said that at a 
 stage between forty-seven and fifty-five the 
 human male goes through a deep physical and 
 mental change. As regards the physical, it need 
 not detain us now. As to the mental, I would 
 only remark that, however deep it be, it wears 
 the aspect of tranquillity more often than the 
 corresponding change at fifteen. He further 
 observed that a man of forty-seven begins to 
 settle down on to those principles which are going 
 to guide his conduct and aims for the rest of his 
 life. This I can well believe, in the sense that 
 no fundamental change need ordinarily be looked 
 for after this stage. Only it is a far too daring 
 assumption to suppose that the principles which 
 often begin to be formulated at forty-seven have 
 no connexion with those which in an unformu- 
 lated fashion reigned at thirty-five. Probably, 
 every sane inquirer is convinced that normally 
 there is no point between childhood and fifty-five 
 at which you can say that new views are acquired 
 
\ 
 
 vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 137 
 
 as to the great decision between GOD and 
 Mammon. Observation surely teaches that the 
 oft-misued word evolution has a real meaning 
 here, that thirty-five is the outcome of twenty- 
 five as that age is of ten : the only doubt, then, 
 is whether fifty-five is the time of a real fresh 
 start. I see no evidence of it whatever. Possibly 
 the middle-aged man takes a stronger hold on the 
 old principles, whatever they may be. But is it 
 not more likely that what takes place at this age 
 is a strengthening of the disposition to formulate 
 and preach those principles in and out of season ? 
 To put it bluntly, are not most middle-aged men 
 who are prosperous and fairly healthy, prone to 
 talk too much rather than too little ? I do not 
 wish to dogmatize, but to point out that if as 
 has been supposed new principles are grasped, it 
 must be owing to quiet reflection and special 
 experience. Now quiet reflection is just what 
 busy middle-life forgoes ; and I submit that the 
 somewhat noisy interpreting of life, common at 
 fifty-five years of age, is merely the expression of 
 views which were formed previously when the 
 human being was less eager to explain them to 
 his neighbour. Garrulity, I take it, is antagonistic 
 to the deepening of the spiritual life, and I jdoubt 
 if the talkative age often enriches the mind. But 
 
138 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 none the less it is a good time to stud/ the 
 character, since it is a time when processes are 
 revealed which have been going on long before. 
 
 At any rate these interesting speculations must 
 not divert us from the main proposition of this 
 part of the discussion, viz. that fifty-five is not 
 only the outcome of the antecedent years, but 
 gives the best evidence available as to the choice 
 which every man must have made about his 
 natural inclinations. Is he to humour them, and 
 so strengthen them ? or is he to give free play to 
 some higher principle of living which tends to 
 " kill " these desires ? * 
 
 The above brief and simple analysis of some 
 of the fundamental needs of human nature leads 
 us to the discernment of the sheer necessity of 
 the ideal element in this life of struggle, and we 
 
 * What does " kill " in this connexion mean ? In the recent 
 reaction from something which may be called Puritanism, under 
 the influence o£ a kind o£ Renaissance, voices have been heard in 
 outspoken revolt against St. Paul's teaching, " Mortify therefore 
 your members on the earth." It is well for us to take note 
 that when the great Apostle used a very strong word to make 
 plain on which side of this dilemma his sympathies lay, he was 
 speaking as he always did, not as an anaemic monk, but as a richly 
 endowed human being. No one can fairly charge him with 
 being a mere " repressionist " : whatever we may think of his 
 actual instructions about marriage, they at least deal most sympa- 
 thetically with the fact that man's nature is animal as well as 
 spiritual. Indeed, his whole ethical outlook was coloured by 
 the sense that the sublime spiritual relationship in which he and 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 139 
 
 come soon to the question of what it is and how 
 it is to be presented to the growing mind. There 
 should be by this time no lingering doubt as 
 to the insufficiency of the equipment to which the 
 ideal is wanting. I must again and again warn 
 the reader that, while sensuality is one deadly 
 form of selfishness, it is only one, and that there 
 are other forms quite as deadly but even more 
 insidious because less repulsive and less decried 
 by public opinion. They are those roughly 
 summarized under the word pride ; and as 
 compared with the simple, coarse, limited sin of 
 sensuality, they are exceeding subtle, complex, 
 and manifold. I will indicate as briefly as 
 possible the kind of infirmity of character of 
 which we are all bound to take heed. 
 
 his converts were placed was powerful enough to transcend and 
 absorb the antinomy between flesh and spirit : that man, instead 
 of timidly and doubtfully weighing the possibilities of stopping 
 short of sin, is called to fix his mind on the glory of his position 
 as a son of the Most High, and to begin by realizing that every 
 desire can be brought into captivity everywhere and always to 
 the standard of Christ and to the constraining love of GOD. 
 Even so, we should hardly be able to understand what he meant 
 that our practice should be were it not that we have before our 
 eyes the record and sometimes the living examples of men who 
 have in this spirit dealt with the problem of our manhood, not 
 as weaklings nor half-developed anchorites, but as full-blooded, 
 rich-natured men. For what we find to be possible is the sub- 
 servience of natural desires to a nobler set of thoughts and aims, 
 till they are not destroyed, but caught and lifted up into a higher 
 atmosphere where for the first time their meaning becomes plain. 
 
I40 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 Jack's development we have traced to middle- 
 life, and it only needs to be added that he has 
 become a very " ordinary," fairly prosperous sort 
 of man : he has made many friends of sorts ; 
 has enough money to retire from business at 
 fifty- five, lives near a golf links, and, thinking that 
 marriage on the whole would be rather an encum- 
 brance, has remained a bachelor. He still plays 
 two rounds a day, devotes an hour to reading the 
 newspaper, three hours to the consumption of 
 food, and meantime prevents his English vocabu- 
 lary from dwindling by commenting daily on the 
 Government in power. As he finds pleasure in 
 absorbing more and more of the fruits of his 
 mother earth, so he adds to the weight of the 
 burden which he lays upon her as he heavily 
 tramps the links, and does less in return for the 
 State which enables him to exist in peace and 
 quiet ; but though this existence is not living, 
 but dying, it lasts a long time owing to the salu- 
 brious properties of golf as a bodily exercise and 
 to the good open air. It is quite likely that he 
 will go on like this till he is nearly eighty, and 
 that when he finally dies a tablet will be put up 
 to his memory in the parish church because he 
 has always found it easier, on the whole, to go 
 to church than to stay away, and at one time 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 141 
 
 there was some talk about his being a church- 
 warden. 
 
 Most of us, I trust, would say this picture is 
 dismal enough, but many would think it over- 
 drawn, that is to say, that the number of young 
 men who turn out so is, after all, very small. We 
 must not quarrel over that question ; the number 
 is, anyhow, large enough to make any lover of 
 his kind quake as he thinks of the future. This 
 mean and sorry finish to the visible existence of a 
 human soul is the outcome of a very prevalent 
 form of home-training ; and the picture is that 
 of a thoroughly commonplace man. 
 
 Yet there must have been times during Jack's 
 boyhood when some inkling of the higher life 
 was felt. Facts came from time to time to his 
 notice which seemed to hint at a divine control 
 of things, and from the mist which encompassed 
 him voices occasionally were heard which for a 
 moment filled him with an awe and wonder 
 unspeakable. But there was nothing in the 
 ordinary routine of life to reinforce or interpret 
 their message, and he had never got into the way 
 of speaking about intimate subjects with anyone. 
 So he had remained in the rut into which he had 
 floundered, and more and more acted on the 
 principle of humouring his inclinations except 
 
142 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 when he could add to his popularity by denying 
 them. 
 
 Now the character thus roughly sketched is 
 the effect of home-training on an ordinarily 
 simple, rather sensual nature. If the reader is 
 satisfied that it reaches as high as we mortal men 
 need aspire, he may, I think, conclude that the 
 problem of character-building is solved, as far 
 as men such as Jack are concerned ; that is to say, 
 cause and effect are patently connected. There 
 may be other wholly untraceable influences at 
 work which in some cases disturb the forecast. 
 But a common-sense parent will see that the 
 training must have had a great deal to do with 
 the output, and, discarding conjectural theories 
 as to this and that, he will confine himself to 
 matters within his ken. " I'm not going to bother 
 about what I don't understand," he will say : 
 " this is the kind of man I want my son to be ; 
 and, neglecting uncertainties, this is the way to 
 train him." 
 
 There is no need to contest this opinion. Only 
 I would beg all young parents, in whose power 
 the son's future life still rests, to make clear to 
 themselves that the outward aspect of the life 
 at twenty-five may be very attractive and yet it 
 may be drifting on irreversibly to the paralytic 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 143 
 
 Philistinism of fifty-five. Respice finem ; unless, 
 that is, you believe that the start of the journey 
 is more important than the goal to which it tends. 
 If, on the other hand, you think there is some- 
 thing wanting in this not uncommon form of 
 prem^ature senility, then let us consider together 
 if, and how, our methods of training may produce 
 something a little less like a dismal decay of 
 soul. 
 
 But (again postponing our final chapter) I can 
 fancy a rather heated rejoinder to all this talk, 
 something to the following effect : " You school- 
 masters are always prone to believe that common 
 self-indulgent propensities are universal in boy- 
 hood. They are to you the sum total of human 
 infirmity, and where you are wrong is, not in 
 combating them, but in supposing them to be 
 inevitable. Why, it is absurd : my Harry is 
 completely free from anything of the sort. He 
 never showed the smallest inclination to sen- 
 suality, and his pleasant manner and popularity 
 are pretty good indications that everything has 
 gone right with him. He has never given me 
 a moment's anxiety ; and look how well he is 
 getting on at Oxford.'' 
 
 Parents are too courteous to use such plain 
 speech often ; but I have a suspicion that they 
 
144 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 often think something very much in accordance 
 with these words. Certainly since the revival or 
 new birth of earnestness in character-building 
 dating from Arnold's time, there have been many 
 eager trainers of boys who have blundered heinously 
 by supposing that gross sins of the flesh are all 
 they need reckon with : that the growth of pride 
 is not their concern. Some of them, we may 
 even say, have fallen into danger from this sickly 
 and one-sided view of human boyhood. But 
 what we have now to consider is whether the 
 parental apologia for this new type of boy, called 
 Harry, is not just as one-sided and even more 
 dangerous for the lad striving for a character than 
 the schoolmaster's partial creed. On the face of 
 it, it definitely pleads that all is well with the 
 young man because he is popular and successful. 
 But this is a doctrine against which experience, 
 honestly interpreted, brings a formidable mass 
 of evidence. We must look more closely into 
 the matter. 
 
 Unlike Jack, Harry has enjoyed as a child 
 a wisely stimulating intellectual training. His 
 mother was not only tond of flowers but something 
 of a botanist, and the father, though a busy man, 
 used to find time to read aloud to the child all 
 sorts of delightful and '^ improving " books, and as 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 145 
 
 he possessed the too rare faculty of reading aloud 
 really well, Harry's little mind was soon well 
 stored with healthy anecdote : Church's " Stories 
 from Homer " played their unfailing part ; well- 
 chosen biographies. Lamb's " Tales from Shakes- 
 peare," Kingsley's " Water Babies," selections 
 from Kipling, and a score of other sound books 
 gave something like nourishment to his inner 
 being. Moreover, his mother, being a thoroughly 
 cultivated woman, had taken steps to see that he 
 learnt his Bible stories equally well ; and as 
 Harry's memory has always been retentive, he 
 went to school and soon established a reputation 
 for quick and accurate work, a fondness for 
 reading, and some readiness of observation. To 
 games he was indifferent, but being by tempera- 
 ment cheerful and not without a natural tact, 
 he was among the most popular boys in the 
 preparatory school conducted by Dennis Maxford, 
 Esquire, at Southborough-on-Sea. 
 
 But, it will be asked, what of Harry's previous 
 moral training ? Has he been taught by expe- 
 riences, such as that of the murdered hedge- 
 sparrow in chap, i, to rejoice in his parents' 
 love and wisdom even as he could not help 
 respecting their power ? The answer is that 
 Harry was a happily constituted child in regard 
 
146 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 to appetite and free from all propensity to cruelty. 
 His early years had been so full of things of the 
 mind that his bodily desires were easily kept in 
 check, and by the time of school life were " tame 
 and humble and waited on the judgment." He 
 discovered very soon that his parents were keenly 
 interested in him, but to say that they loved 
 him would be too strong an expression to use. 
 When they were not teaching him, they seemed 
 to be thinking of other things. His father was 
 an authority on some of the problems connected 
 with labour and capital, and his mother, besides 
 being socially a success, spent much time in the 
 garden, but was able to find room in her life for 
 reading and intellectual talk — often about educa- 
 tional theories — by keeping rather aloof from 
 her neighbours, who were much like other people, 
 she used to say, and inviting down smart talkers 
 of various interests for her week-ends. Harry 
 was an only son and his younger sister was not 
 much of a companion for him, though of sweet 
 disposition and quite free from display, but too 
 little given to logical thought or analysis to care 
 much for " subjects " such as her belongings 
 loved and not a very ready talker. She was of 
 the " ministering angel " type, her father used 
 to say, with the slightest soupgon of scorn in his 
 
VI] TYPES OF FAILURE 147 
 
 tone, and though the brother and sister never 
 quarrelled, he formed the idea early in life that 
 for the most part women v^ere dull creatures ; 
 indeed, this v^as the adjective freely applied by 
 both his parents to their neighbours with little 
 discrimination — the one exception being Mr. 
 Caelebs, who lived alone three miles away, a 
 conchologist, but with an attractive bizarrerie 
 of manner and eccentric humour which made 
 him quite worth asking to an occasional dinner. 
 He was a retired Cambridge don. Harry's parents, 
 meantime, were civil to the vicar and somewhat 
 frigid to his wife. His mother attended church 
 on Sunday mornings, because she had come across 
 cases where the banishing of religion from the 
 home life had had disastrous effect on the chil- 
 dren, and she was too much of an educationist 
 not to see that morals without a religious basis 
 were insecurely planted, though in the main she 
 trusted to general healthy influences. The father 
 was a parcus deorum cultor et infrequens^ being 
 generally too busy, and unable to repress his 
 dislike of the ordinary sermon. There were no 
 family prayers. 
 
 On going to school, Harry found himself in 
 the company of many boys who in some ways 
 were like his neighbours at home. Of course, 
 
148 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 till he was about sixteen he was not clearly con- 
 scious of this likeness, and had his critical faculty 
 not been renewed every time he went home and 
 by the acid remarks of his father on some reported 
 incidents of school life, it is possible that he might 
 have drifted into doing as others did — that is 
 to say, taking his schoolfellows simply as he found 
 them, settling that some were " asses," some 
 few quite impossible, and a good many " decent: 
 chaps " worth knowing. But Harry was unlike 
 the common run of boy in that he came early to 
 prefer subjects of the mind to games, as indeed 
 his father had often hoped he would. At Mr. 
 Maxford's, he had been a collector of butterflies 
 and had pursued the winged creatures in the 
 holidays, sticking pins into their spangled thoraces 
 with the same avidity as Arthur Heaviside potted 
 rabbits on a neighbouring farm ; and his mother 
 encouraged him to believe that he had chosen 
 the better part. Thus when at school the 
 leading boys in the house talked earnestly of 
 winning the house football cup, Harry was mildly 
 bored. Now and again, it is true, he felt some- 
 thing akin to an uprush of emotion in the fray 
 itself, but found on going home that his mother 
 very soon led the talk on to other subjects, as 
 she had been convinced by a pungent article in 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 149 
 
 the " Educational Forecast " that athleticism was 
 absurdly overdone in schools, and besides, John 
 Trevor, the captain of the house-team, was not 
 a really well-bred young fellow : you could tell 
 he came from somewhere near Sheffield and 
 cared nothing about biology, in which Harry was 
 making good progress. 
 
 So things went on till Harry went on to Oxford 
 and gained a first-class in science without being 
 at all an ignoramus in literature. He got a post 
 au lecturer in one of the colleges after travelling 
 with a scholarship for research to the Canary 
 Islands, and not long after married a young lady 
 who was making a name as a writer of " problem 
 novels." The two lived a quiet life on the 
 Banbury Road, confining themselves to a very 
 select circle of friends, lost in amazement how 
 some of them seemed happy in the company of 
 quite ordinary people. Harry and his wife enjoyed, 
 though less and less after forty years of age, short 
 runs to the Continental picture galleries ; but the 
 difficulty was the life in hotels, as they were 
 expected apparently to talk with their neighbours 
 at table d'hote, and this was really going too far. 
 In religious matters Harry became an eclectic. 
 Theism seemed to him a creed quite possibly 
 true, and he refrained from making any overt 
 
ISO HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 attacks on religion generally, though how anyone 
 could " find peace " in a set of propositions 
 obviously incapable of proof was more than he 
 could conceive. One son was born of this 
 marriage — a healthy, not to say loutish boy, who 
 hated science except in what concerned aviation ; 
 and after his parents had done their utmost to 
 make him less commonplace, he baffled all their 
 hopes by developing into a coarse, rather extrava- 
 gant youth, who refused to go into any profession 
 and seemed likely to become a victim of drink. 
 Harry grew more and more embittered about it 
 all, and died of disgust at sixty, after publishing two 
 rather considerable books on sub-tropical Crustacea. 
 So concluded a life full, for a time, of a certain 
 thankfulness, viz. that he, the owner, was not as 
 other boys are, lumpish, carnal, empty-pated. 
 But it was noticeable that after about thirty- 
 eight years of age this bland self-satisfaction 
 seemed to evaporate in presence of domestic 
 disappointment and decline of health. Harry 
 was quite unprepared to find his general keenness 
 suffer so heavy a rebuff. His few friends lived 
 away or died. He could not fill their places, for 
 other people were as dull as ever, indeed bored 
 him all the more as they grew more talkative ; 
 and golf, his one recreation, began to lose its 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 151 
 
 mysterious charm as progress seemed to be denied 
 him. Yet he lived on, if living it can be called, 
 though his friends remarked that after forty the 
 lines of bitterness and gloom in his face per- 
 ceptibly deepened, and those who knew him best 
 were fain to admit that the story was tragic and 
 the life barren and unhappy. 
 
 The difference between Jack and Harry is 
 important. Jack is the type of the ordinary 
 sensual man whose proclivities have been to a 
 large extent thwarted in early life by public 
 opinion and coercion at home. Harry is of the 
 cold, anaemic type for whom intellectuality has 
 bred a temper of scorn and criticism of others. 
 This temper blossomed late, and so failed to draw 
 on itself the animadversion either of parents or 
 schoolmasters, since about it, in its early stage 
 at any rate, there was nothing disgusting, nothing 
 that led to conflict with school rules ; but at the 
 end there were one or two observers who sadly 
 remembered that in the verdict pronounced on 
 man by Christ, as far as we can tell from the 
 records preserved, the scornful type is treated 
 with far more severity than those whose bodily 
 appetites have them in thrall, notwithstanding 
 that to us the latter seem more startling and 
 arresting as warnings. 
 
152 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 Yet again. One of the men who had had 
 some influence upon Jack at one time was Will 
 Church, the son of a well-known prebendary in 
 a northern manufacturing town. Will had in 
 his boyhood the benefit of his father's example, 
 that of a busy, zealous parson, a noted preacher 
 and pamphleteer of vigorous health, who en- 
 joyed his work but was extremely sensitive to 
 criticism, especially if he was accused of being 
 confused or inconsistent in his teaching. This 
 infirmity, if such it can be called, led him to 
 devote time to theological and other disputation ; 
 indeed, he found it necessary to put away more 
 and more of his ordinary work for it. 
 
 Now Will grew up a keen Churchman, 
 imbibing his father's moderately high opinions, 
 and without ostentation and parade he devoted 
 the time he could spare from his profession, 
 that of architect, to supporting church work 
 in the neighbourhood. He had never been 
 troubled by religious doubts, and his reputa- 
 tion for integrity was unblemished ; but it was 
 remarkable by the time he was thirty, how 
 acrid were many of the criticisms of his 
 actions on the part of quite good people. The 
 truth is, he trod on people's toes, and may be 
 said not only to have trodden but to have 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 153 
 
 remained standing on them, because he had an 
 ugly way of letting Tom, Dick, and Johnnie 
 know when and where he disagreed with them. 
 He was incessantly absorbed in trying to make 
 other people good, but good in his own way, 
 ready to adopt the same view of life and its 
 manifold issues, ready to cast their deeper con- 
 victions into the same form of words and to 
 practise the same traditional methods of carrying 
 on converse with the Unseen. 
 
 Filling thus his day with absorbing occupa- 
 tion, and being something of a pachyderm. 
 Will never laid hold of the meaning of the 
 great warnings about the mote and the beam, 
 or about those who compassed sea and land 
 to make one proselyte, nor of the positive 
 precept that we are to commend our gospel 
 to our fellow men. He somehow presented 
 it as an intrusive, rasping thing, provocative 
 of barren strife in the cathedral town where 
 he lived ; and so praiseworthy all the time was 
 his zeal that he left himself no time to read or 
 think if he were what he professed to be, " a 
 witness to Christ," and so ended his days almost 
 fit to be a subject for the portrait gallery of a 
 modern Dickens — cranky, harsh, uningratiating, 
 unloving, and unloved : a man whose arrival 
 
154 HOME TRAINING [vi 
 
 at one of Mrs. Banister's tea-parties was like a 
 puff of March east wind accompanied by banging 
 of doors and clattering of crocks on every side, 
 such as drew down the corners of every mouth 
 and enveloped men's minds closer than ever in 
 their reserve. 
 
 Small wonder was it that the healthy, solid 
 Britons in the manufacturing portion of the 
 town said openly that they found more Christian 
 charity in the hunting- field than in the cathedral 
 close or the church itself, and quietly ignored 
 Will and all his works, till at last they could not 
 have told you whether they were agnostics or 
 believers. 
 
 And so we might go on studying failures. But 
 enough. We have sufficient material to form a 
 judgment on the pressing question whether these 
 melancholy outcomes of ordinary human low- 
 mindedness or perverted aims are directly derived 
 from the home training or not. If there is reason 
 to believe that the home training in the early 
 years has had a good deal to do with the result, 
 then in these days, when English men and women 
 are gathering together their forces to war against 
 the power of evil and the stealthy spread of 
 corruption, when from every section of society 
 there goes up a cry for more character, more grit. 
 
vi] TYPES OF FAILURE 155 
 
 more disciplined lives, more faith, hope and love, 
 how urgent does the question become ! There 
 is a general yearning for reality in all these matters 
 among all those whose souls are not starved beyond 
 renewal by the pursuit of material goods. That 
 is to say, men dimly conceive how boundless is 
 the promise of a coming uplift if only in any 
 community could be shown forth the power of 
 real unselfishness, true single-mindedness, trans- 
 parent charity born of the feeling for the inherent 
 worth and dignity of every human soul. With 
 growing insistence all earnest people are giving 
 themselves to this lofty quest. 
 
 If, then, society needs, with such an urgent 
 need, qualities of this sort for its quickening, 
 what can we say as to their source, and the 
 methods of drawing them forth and of fostering 
 them into power ? 
 
VII : WHERE IS THE SOURCE 
 OF VIRTUE ? 
 
 TT is always possible to take the view of human 
 goodness that it is wholly mysterious in its 
 origin and its growth, a gift from GOD which 
 comes to us independent of any law of sequence, 
 and operates to the benefit of society in ways 
 which cannot be traced or foreseen. Among those 
 who so estimate it will be many who believe 
 that such a feeling is simply reverence for a 
 wonderful and beautiful thing ; and further they 
 infer that any inquiry into law in such a thing as 
 goodness, e.g. to raise the question how far its 
 appearance on earth is the result of human 
 endeavour, forethought, watchfulness, concentra- 
 tion, betokens a profane and prying spirit ; and 
 that the only right course of action is to pray for 
 the gift in our children and make the utmost of 
 it when it has been given. 
 
 Such a view was very common before 1870, 
 and there is much in it which would appeal to 
 anyone who had given attention to the things of 
 
 the Spirit in man, and more particularly had 
 
 156 
 
VII] WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF VIRTUE ? 157 
 
 thought upon the beginnings of lovable and 
 excellent characters wherever they have come into 
 being. But it was corrected, rather violently 
 perhaps, hy the influence of the Scientific move- 
 ment in the last half of last century, and by the 
 deep longing for reality and truth and for social 
 betterment which has characterized the last 
 thirty or forty years. Science has extended its 
 sway so victoriously over human life that we are 
 now indisposed to believe that anything impor- 
 tant necessarily lies beyond the reach of man's 
 discernment, or is outside the traceable working 
 of cause and effect. Of course this view has 
 itself been corrected by the vigorous onslaught 
 on materialism which has brought to light the 
 tenuity and feebleness of man's grasp of law in 
 spiritual things. We have come to see that 
 unless Science recognizes the limits of her own 
 area she stultifies herself by asserting claims fatal 
 to her own basal assumptions. None the less, 
 thoughtful folk are unable to leave the origin and 
 history of fine characters unscanned and un- 
 explored. However much we may feel that it is 
 holy ground, the question how such characters 
 are produced and fostered is too vitally bound up 
 with the saving of society itself to be left on one 
 side, even though it is not indolence but awe 
 
158 HOME TRAINING [vii 
 
 which might prompt us to refrain from looking 
 into the Ark. 
 
 In what follows it is assumed that along with a 
 due recognition of the mysteriousness of all good- 
 ness we know enough about it to lay down some 
 important principles. They are these : 
 
 {a) That at the bottom of all the phenomena 
 of character-decay and failure of promise lies the 
 master-vice of egoism, as a principle warring 
 against loyalty to the ideal or the serving of 
 GOD, This is only putting into slightly different 
 words Christ's great axiom, " Ye cannot serve 
 GOD and Mammon " : for I hold that 
 Mammon means egoism. 
 
 Q?) That if we could see into the secrets of 
 every heart we should learn that every human 
 life is a drama of infinite, thrilling interest, since 
 in it is enacted the struggle between the two 
 allegiances, GOD or self. 
 
 (c) That though much is hidden from us, it is 
 possible to discern that the ultimate issue of this 
 antagonism is determined in a vast majority of 
 cases by something that takes place in childhood. 
 
 {d) That this is a self-committal either to GOD 
 or self : to the latter when things go wrong ; but 
 in cases where things ultimately go right the 
 choice is sometimes reversed by later experiences. 
 
vii] WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF VIRTUE ? 159 
 
 (e) That the good effect of such later experi- 
 ences is far more inexplicable than the bad effect 
 of a faulty training in childhood : in other words, 
 the effect of home-training is so far certain that it 
 is foolish to put any trust in any other influence 
 such as school life or the personal influence of 
 some teacher or friend after school life is over : 
 for if a human life begins in egoism, a conversion 
 wears the aspect of a special divine interposition 
 on which we have no right to reckon. 
 
 (/) Therefore that if we are in earnest about 
 the training of the lives we have brought into the 
 world we shall give the best of our efforts and 
 attention to the planting, firmly and deeply, the 
 sense of the unseen ideal in the earliest years, 
 as the best and indeed the only antidote to 
 various forms of egoism on which we can securely 
 rely. 
 
 {g) That the method of so doing is for parents 
 to exhibit continually to the child a life devoted 
 not to self but to the service of GOD (which 
 inevitably takes the form of labouring to increase 
 the happiness of our fellow men), combined with 
 such teaching as shall explain the motive of such 
 a life and its hope. 
 
 Doubt, I imagine, is more likely to settle at 
 once upon the fifth {e) of these propositions 
 
i6o HOME TRAINING [vii 
 
 than on any other. That is to say, in a large 
 number of cases in which there is a divergence 
 from these lines on the part of parents who are 
 sincerely anxious to attain the same good, as 
 that which is here sketched out, the reason is 
 that they have formed a less exalted estimate of 
 the power of the parental guidance than is here 
 assumed. 
 
 I trust, however, to the common sense of my 
 readers in this matter, so as to hope that con- 
 troversy on the particular question may be 
 avoided. There need be no over-readiness on 
 the part of the " parental school," if we may be 
 so called, to ignore other influences. We recog- 
 nize, for instance, the great value of the boarding- 
 school as a fosterer of the seed sown at home, and 
 the giver of a certain equipment for the daily 
 life of citizenship which is almost indispensable 
 and on any showing most valuable. But the 
 main question is whether this or any other 
 influence outside the home is to be depended on 
 for the greatest results with as much good reason 
 as that of the parental life lived in presence of the 
 child day by day : and I assert first that the best 
 evidence to hand is that afforded by the study of 
 boys' development at the age when the deeper 
 things of character begin to disclose themselves 
 
vii] WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF VIRTUE ? i6i 
 
 in the face of gathering trials ; that is from 
 fourteen to twenty-two years of age. 
 
 Secondly, that by such study the primeval view 
 of the whole matter is emphatically and undeniably 
 confirmed : viz. that the most effective trainer 
 of the child is his parent ; and that if for any 
 reason whatever we cause a huge number of 
 people to trust to other trainers than the parents, 
 or to other surroundings than those of the home, 
 or to a later time of life than early childhood, we 
 are forsaking the method taught to us by nature 
 {i,e. science), by revelation, and by the agreement 
 of the deepest instincts of mankind, and have no 
 warrant for believing that we are on the way to 
 securing the end on which our hopes are set, 
 viz. that our children shall grow into unselfish 
 men. 
 
 Thirdly, that this evidence is drawn not only 
 from the study of the failures of human de- 
 velopment, shown by the premature withering 
 up of bright hopes, by cynicism in middle life, 
 by apathy or despair, but by the contemplation 
 of one of the very fairest of all the beautiful 
 growths which our Creator's bounty allows us to 
 witness. I mean the growth in strength, in the 
 power of unselfish choice, of quiet single-minded- 
 ness, which is to be discerned in varying degrees 
 
 L 
 
i62 HOME TRAINING [vii 
 
 among the best-favoured of English boys at an 
 age which still reveals in no uncertain colours the 
 working of the spirit of home-life : the responsible 
 ratifying of that early start on the upward narrow 
 path of devotion to the unseen ideal to which 
 the child was guided by his parents. I cannot 
 say which is the more eloquent witness to the 
 power of the home, the gradual irreversible set- 
 back as years go on of characters which begin 
 their history in all the glory of a bounteous 
 endowment, in fresh gladsomeness, alertness of 
 brain and bodily grace ; or the wonder of the 
 Christian interpretation of life working in the 
 h^concealed depths and winning that lasting 
 conquest over common desires, that unassuming 
 freedom from convention and thoughtless talk 
 which we all long for in our children and heed- 
 lessly pervert and spoil. I say that it is not only 
 the facts of nature, the a priori reasoning on the 
 laws of mental growth and the rudiments of 
 psychology which guide us to our conclusion, but 
 the plain teaching of experience, guided by which 
 we can trace the outcome either in its splendour 
 or its pitifulness to the training of the early 
 years. 
 
 But the question will be asked again : " Are 
 you sure of your evidence ? Granted much of 
 
vii] WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF VIRTUE ? 163 
 
 what has been said as to the connexion between 
 early defective teaching and the failures of later 
 life, yet surely there are a good many cases of 
 men turning out satisfactorily whose parents have 
 been quite commonplace, not to say convention- 
 ally selfish and overborne by unthinking public 
 opinion. It is this fact which prevents married 
 men and women from being so deeply stirred in 
 this matter of home-training as you would have 
 them be." 
 
 In answer to this contention I would point out 
 that we are concerned here not with perfect 
 theory but with practice. Doubtless if it were 
 possible in such a matter to evolve a formula or 
 two which would fit all the facts, it might be 
 that the need for careful observation and thought 
 would disappear ; but if it did, the practice based 
 on the formula would soon lose all its vitality. 
 We arc engaged in a quest which is far too great 
 to admit of formulas. Anything of the nature of 
 a law to do with character must be difficult to 
 understand and, as far as we can tell, impossible 
 to fix with precision ; but that is not the same 
 thing as to affirm that we are without guidance, 
 or that when there is a great and increasing desire 
 for men of strength and uprightness we can 
 safely ignore the light that is given to us. The 
 
i64 HOME TRAINING [vii 
 
 parenthood of English people is beset by subtle 
 dangers. The first is utter want of thought. 
 Men and women marry ; children are born : 
 and it seems to be taken for granted that the 
 purely conventional way of going on, the conven- 
 tional reticence about deep things or the occasional 
 talk about them, dissociated from moral training, 
 the conventional coldness towards the outward 
 acknowledgment of the divine presence in the daily 
 home-life, the conventional mixing of profession 
 towards GOD with nervous anxiety about public 
 opinion and material goods, will somehow do. 
 But we do not seriously put before ourselves what 
 must be the influence of such a home-life viewed 
 as a child must view it, interpreted as a child 
 must interpret it ; and how far that influence, if 
 satisfactory for a few years, will persist till the 
 days when the silver cord is broken and the grass- 
 hopper becomes a burden. And yet at the present 
 day there is more heed given to these matters than 
 there was : and a fair number of people among 
 the educated classes are trying to see a little 
 further into the mystery of character-growth than 
 their fathers did. The result sometimes is that, 
 baffled by the complexity of the problem, they 
 waste their strength on discussion ; on airy 
 questionings of principles which they cannot 
 
vii] WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF VIRTUE ? 165 
 
 understand except by vigorously practising them. 
 To these the indubitable truth that some of the 
 phenomena of the growth of goodness in the 
 young seem to be independent of the early 
 training is a sufficient warrant for scepticism as 
 to there being any law in the matter at all. They 
 talk about it perhaps, and read a little and join 
 conferences : but all the time the years are going 
 by, and the question with which their sons are 
 occupied is being silently settled in the wrong 
 way. " Is life a stage for the gratification of 
 desires or for something higher ? " And it is 
 being settled by an unremitting scrutiny of the 
 parents' life, and by a continuous imbibing of 
 the principles and motives which appear to be 
 at work. For we must remember that what the 
 parents' deepest motives may be is not the 
 question : the question is what motives the child 
 can discern. 
 
 Now it is by one of the educated and perhaps 
 academic class that we may suppose the question 
 about evidence has been put. But it is not a 
 question which ought to detain us ; the problem 
 before us is too urgent, and time fleets by too 
 quickly. I say that even if we grant a certain 
 amount of untraceable result in a minority of 
 cases, the evidence that character is more certainly 
 
i66 HOME TRAINING [vii 
 
 formed by the influence of home-life in the early 
 years is abundantly sufficient for our needs. 
 Further, that where the resiilts are most dis- 
 appointing and incomplete they have generally 
 been the outcome of a training which has pre- 
 sented a decorous conformity to public opinion 
 as the summum bonum of conduct. Where, on 
 the other hand, the issue has been a character 
 marked by strength and simplicity and the faculty 
 of growth through many long years, that issue is 
 due to a home atmosphere in which daily obedi- 
 ence to the unseen ideal has been steadily mani- 
 fested by the father and mother. In other words, 
 I maintain that both the a ^nmand the a posteriori 
 reasons for believing that the home-training is by 
 far the most potent of the determining influences 
 are amply strong enough to settle the practical 
 principle for all sensible people who are in earnest 
 about the kind of man they wish their son to be. 
 I will next take the proposition named {a) 
 above, as requiring a word of explanation. The 
 reason why it is important to use the word egoism 
 is that it covers the two kinds of aberration from 
 virtue to one of which all of us are prone and 
 some apparently to both : the one kind is broadly 
 denoted by Sensuality, the other by Pride, (t 
 imagine that when the Psalmist spoke of the 
 people with a " proud look and a high stomach " 
 
v!i] WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF VIRTUE ? 167 
 
 he was thinking of both.) For all parents who 
 are guided chiefly by public opinion it is a tempta- 
 tion to suppose that if they somehow steer their 
 offspring through the shoals of sensuality there is 
 no reason to trouble themselves about the deep 
 currents of Pride : because if the vessel is dashed 
 upon the first it makes a scandal ; if it is caught 
 by the second no one seems to notice what is 
 going on. In other words, a visibly sensual man 
 is buffeted by society and his parents pitied or 
 blamed : the proud man is unmolested. Yet in 
 the teaching of Christ there is no doubt which of 
 the two declinations from good is treated as the 
 more deadly: and perhaps for this reason, that 
 if a man errs from pride and is left unmolested by 
 public opinion, he is less likely to reform than a 
 poor fellow who is treated as a pariah and con- 
 stantly reminded of his disastrous choice. More- 
 over, the sense of shame which is the essential 
 preliminary to repentance is impossible to a 
 proud person, who is always inclined to congratu- 
 late himself on his character and actions, per- 
 ceiving meantime less and less of their quality 
 and motive. 
 
 We now come to consider in its more positive 
 aspect the central principle of home-training 
 which has been hinted at more than once in 
 previous chapters. 
 
VIII : TRAINING IN SINGLE- 
 MINDEDNESS 
 
 ^TPHE problem of healthily developing the 
 growing character of a human child has 
 hitherto been stated roughly, and as some would 
 think ignorantly, as if it were a matter of getting 
 the child to make a right choice, viz., between 
 gratifying natural inclinations and snubbing them 
 at the dictates of a higher law. In case, however, 
 some philosophic person may chance to read the 
 present chapter, it seems advisable to state with 
 greater precision wherein lies the root infirmity 
 of all human beings ; because it may be the case 
 that such a statement of the problem will affect 
 the way we conceive of the solution. 
 
 In the volume entitled " Foundations," Mr. 
 Temple thus states the mystery and central 
 paradox of sin. He is discussing it in relation to 
 the Atonement and has just given St. Augustine's 
 view, which differed from that of the great Eastern 
 theologians in being far more concerned with 
 man's will and with the moral side of our relation 
 to GOD. " The moral struggle itself shows that 
 
 i68 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 169 
 
 (our will) is a faculty to be slowly built up out of 
 numberless conflicting impulses. To speak of 
 the opposition of the Will and the desires is, 
 strictly speaking, nonsense, though it may be 
 provisionally useful. When Augustine prayed 
 ' Give me chastity, but not yet,' he really wanted 
 to be pure, and he also really wanted to indulge 
 a little longer ; and it was the same he who 
 wanted both. To say to such a man that he 
 must strengthen his will is mockery ; his will is 
 just himself, and how shall a man strengthen 
 himself except by coming deliberately, when the 
 good desire is uppermost, under some external 
 influence ? . . . The self which determines is 
 the same as the self that is to be determined ; the 
 self which, according to Pelagius, is to make me 
 good is the bad self that needs to be made good. 
 We can be good if we altogether will to be made 
 good ; for that act of will is itself the being good. 
 But the whole difficulty is that we only will in 
 part to be good ; we do not altogether will it. 
 The disease is in the will — not in some part of 
 ourselves other than the will which the will can 
 control. I can only be brought to will what now 
 I do not will by some external power — and this 
 Augustine calls Good. It is a free gift, for ex 
 hyfothesi I cannot deserve it ; it is just because 
 
170 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 and in so far as I am sinful and have no merit 
 that I need it. It is the free gift of GOD in 
 Christ." 
 
 Now perhaps to some this statement of the 
 problem may seem less intelligible than that given 
 above (ch. i). If so it will be, I fancy, because 
 it is deeper and nearer to the truth. But the 
 points to be noticed are these : 
 
 (i) It brings out the terrifying fact that a 
 wrong choice means a diseased will ; and a diseased 
 will means a diseased self. 
 
 (2) The point at which the main difficulty 
 begins is the same in the two statements : in the 
 one it is contained in the idea that the child may 
 obey a higher law ; in the other in the words 
 " under some external influence." 
 
 We may pause for a moment to notice that, 
 however true this last expression may be, it 
 touches on a mystery which we can only in part 
 and by experience begin to understand. Suppose 
 we conceive of some one suffering from physical 
 weakness, it is certain that no " external power " 
 can do more than help the vital force in the body 
 to act, and liberate the strength which is there 
 all the time but is in some way impeded. Now 
 suppose the weakness is spiritual, what we call 
 weakness of will, but which Mr. Temple would 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 171 
 
 call a diseased self, is the law the same ? Can 
 any external influence add to the strength, or 
 cleanse the spiritual being, or renew the foun- 
 tains of spiritual life, or whatever other metaphor 
 we prefer to use ? This question must be faced, 
 and as parents of children we ought to have a 
 fairly clear idea of the answer to it. 
 
 First, as to the expression '' a diseased self " : 
 there will, of course, be umbrage taken at it not 
 only by those whose experience of life has led 
 them to believe that as to themselves it is a gross 
 and offensive exaggeration, but by those who 
 sincerely hold that in regard to such a human 
 being as their own child of eight years it is plainly 
 incredible. The objections of some would stop 
 short at this point. Others would extend them, 
 and include, among beings to whom the words 
 cannot apply, other people's children. It is worth 
 noting that the excluded persons would generally 
 be young children, or those rare people who retain 
 the childlikeness far on into adult life. 
 
 But the objection, however sensible and indeed 
 attractive it may sound, comes to very little when 
 we take in the significance of the metaphor of 
 disease. The word has been defined as follows : 
 " All disease is life out of place," and in the 
 spiritual sphere, when the word is understood, 
 
172 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 it loses its repulsiveness and ceases to express 
 what is commonly felt to be abnormal and loath- 
 some. It merely expresses the tendency in human 
 beings to choose the wrong thing, knowing it to 
 be wrong. This is not primarily a description 
 of something dead and mouldering and foul with 
 the foulness of corruption, but of a wrong kind 
 of activity which, so far from being loathsome, 
 often is in a way attractive. For instance, it is 
 quite possible for a young man, knowing that 
 deep solicitude about other people's concerns, 
 their joys and their trials, is of the essence of good, 
 to choose deliberately, and almost putting a 
 constraint upon himself, such a narrowing of his 
 own sympathies and interests as leads inevitably 
 to the uttermost selfishness before the end comes. 
 And yet such a man may be for a long time quite 
 attractive. He is free from a sort of angularity 
 which is often painfully observable in good folk 
 who are striving, and successfully striving, to 
 become less selfish as they grow older : he is 
 no Pharisee as the word is ordinarily understood ; 
 that is, you know when he comes into the room 
 that he will not begin by finding fault with persons 
 or things. But it may be the case that with his 
 eyes open he is engaged in gradually starving his 
 higher instincts and in becoming the kind of man 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 173 
 
 to whom cruelty of a refined sort is no longer 
 objectionable. If this be true — and who can 
 deny it ? — we are not really disputing about the 
 facts but only interpreting them differently. The 
 expression " diseased " cannot be repudiated so 
 long as it is allowed that disease can exist in an 
 organism very fair to outward view ; and this no 
 one doubts. 
 
 We are now in a position to answer the question 
 raised by Mr. Temple's phrase about an " external 
 influence " being the only hope for a diseased self. 
 As in a man's physical life there is no evidence 
 that any treatment can add to his bodily strength 
 but only liberate what is naturally inborn, are 
 we to conclude that spiritual life lives only on its 
 inborn vitality ; or is there hope of strength taking 
 the place of weakness, humility growing instead 
 of pride, steadfastness instead of indecision, single- 
 mindedness instead of double-mindedness, purity 
 instead of concupiscence, and so on ? If there 
 is no hope, then there is no educational problem 
 for parents to perpend. If there is, then there 
 is one problem which puts all others into the 
 shade, viz. how to subject the child to the 
 influences which will bring about this most blessed 
 result. 
 
 As I am addressing professing Christians, there 
 
174 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 can be no hesitation about the answer. Our 
 belief in the Incarnation of the Son of GOD and 
 the Redemption of the world makes it impossible 
 for us to hold that any form of spiritual infirmity- 
 is incurable if it is taken in time. The difference 
 between the spiritual and physical spheres is quite 
 distinct, no matter how dim the line of demar- 
 cation may be, because, whereas in the one what 
 we call a cure is merely a restoration to the healthy 
 from the abnormal or unhealthy state, in the 
 spiritual sphere something often takes place which 
 has all the aspect of a new creation, an addition 
 of vital power from outside, not merely a libera- 
 tion of forces already within. Even for those 
 who do not see eye to eye with Christians in the 
 matter of the Incarnation, there is always a 
 chance that they may admit this wonder if they 
 contemplate the same facts. By the time the 
 Fourth Gospel was written some observers in 
 Palestine certainly agreed with the statement 
 reported as made by Christ, that " except a man 
 be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of 
 GOD." But the familiarity of the words blinds 
 us to the truly astonishing statement itself. The 
 deepest thinker in the country either reported 
 what the Saviour said or summed up in these 
 words what he saw going on around him, namely 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 175 
 
 spiritual lives re-created^ that is, not merely 
 restored to their normal level like a sick man after 
 a fever, but renewed, the recipients of a nev^ 
 endowment of vitality. What was undoubtedly 
 going on then has been going on since. Countless 
 witnesses testify to the marvel as having taken 
 place both in themselves and others. 
 
 There are therefore three remarkable differences 
 between the physical and the spiritual lives of 
 men. 
 
 (i) There is evidence of the physical condition 
 normally beginning in health, but of the spiritual 
 condition always beginning in disease. If this 
 latter statement is doubted I would ask why 
 in all cases childhood requires discipline — not 
 guidance only, as a nurse shows a child what to 
 eat and how to chew, &c., but a process whereby 
 natural tendencies are reversed, or rather domi- 
 nated by the mind and spirit. Physical training 
 is nearly always nearer to a following of nature 
 than intellectual training, and intellectual training 
 is far oftener according to natural inclination than 
 spiritual and moral training, which practically 
 never is. 
 
 (2) As already explained, curative processes in 
 bodily matters restore the health to what it 
 ought always to be, or they liberate a certain 
 
176 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 portion of the organism so that it can act unim- 
 peded ; but in the spiritual life what happens 
 can only be described as a " new birth," and the 
 Gospel message is that every human being must 
 undergo it or perish. This is the truth which 
 parents are called upon to grasp when a new life 
 is born. 
 
 (3) The physical life is merely a resisting for a 
 time of the forces of disintegration. For a few 
 years, growth has the appearance of a taking in 
 of new strength, but it is in reality only the 
 evolution or unrolling of vitality already in the 
 organism, and it soon begins to decay. But the 
 spiritual vitality of the newly quickened man is 
 immune from the law of decay, which reigns 
 supreme over other forms of life. It waxes 
 stronger as the years run out their course. 
 
 Now I have no hesitation in appealing to all 
 parents who profess Christianity to consider 
 nost carefully if they are not constrained to this 
 view of human nature by the principles which 
 they profess. Others who reject the principles 
 I would ask if they do not think the view corro- 
 borated by observable facts in the life around 
 them. All who think it is in the main truly 
 stated are bound to appreciate to some extent the 
 thrilling nature of the drama which opens when 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 177 
 
 a child is born. What is at stake is simply 
 Salvation ; and unless we are mad there can be 
 no doubt about the first question in life for every 
 parent is this : " How can I learn to behave 
 towards this child of mine so as to place him 
 under the saving influences at work in the world ?" 
 
 This I will try to answer. Let us notice first 
 that the whole theory of the issues lying before 
 each human being depends on the world being 
 viewed as a redeemed place. We may admit 
 that the great remedy is harder to understand 
 than the symptoms of the disease ; but none the 
 less, if facts point to there being a remedy, it is 
 lunacy not to do all we can to learn what it is 
 and to apply it. 
 
 Doubtless to many it is supremely difficult to 
 view this world in any such hopeful light. They 
 come to admit that each human life is a drama 
 which may end in a tragedy inconceivably piteous. 
 But they do not see that every life may end in 
 a glory which no mind can picture or tongue 
 describe. Both are difficult because " the things 
 that are seen " are curiously deceptive and 
 suggest the very opposite of the truth ; but we 
 can trace the first, as I have already attempted to 
 do in one or two typical cases, far more precisely 
 than the second. That is to say, you can follow 
 
 M 
 
1 78 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 the degradation of Macbeth, or Tito, or King 
 Saul with a better understanding than the story 
 of those who " go from strength to strength " ; 
 and yet it is better for our soul's health that we 
 should learn the secret of the latter than of the 
 former. It is well, at least so I think, to shake 
 ourselves clear of the pathological, and study with 
 awe and delight the divine working in men, 
 women, and boys which lifts them out of egoism, 
 its sloth or its harsh criticism or its drab acquies- 
 cence in the humdrum things, into a growth and 
 development too wonderful to analyse or even 
 to imagine. 
 
 For in reality there is no excuse at the present 
 day for a laissez aller temper in home training. 
 The last fifty years have produced plenty of 
 evidence to startle all who are not of the incurably 
 contented sort. I would add the following from 
 a long experience of schoolboys. 
 
 Take a boarding-house in a big school full of 
 the sons of the successful. It is evident to the 
 housemaster that his boys are the recipients of 
 a great wealth of affection — ordinary, natural 
 affection — from their parents. They have come 
 to him from homes where this love is a visible 
 patent fact of life. Probably in most cases it 
 has not been blended with any unusual amount of 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 179 
 
 wisdom, but still the ordinary precautions have 
 been taken against certain manifestations of 
 egoism such as move any respectable adult to 
 fear or disgust, and the precautions have suc- 
 ceeded : by fourteen the child is apparently 
 obedient, nice-mannered, keen to do right, and 
 begins to learn the useful qualities which allow 
 him to get on well with his contemporaries. The 
 house, say, of forty boys is full of such, and as 
 long as unceasing vigilance, insight, and tact are 
 exercised by the housemaster, working through 
 his eldest boys, things go quietly. 
 
 But supposing the said housemaster becomes 
 detached from his work in life, either by the 
 enthralment of ease or of domestic anxieties 
 or even by literary or scientific preoccupation ? 
 The result is not flaccidity or stagnation in the 
 youthful society but pandemonium. Egoism 
 asserts itself triumphantly against unity, and 
 those who are not coarsely vicious are cruel and 
 quarrelsome. A few choice spirits keep apart in 
 helpless dismay at the scene of human wreckage. 
 This state of things reveals itself within a year, 
 brought about not by blundering or injustice 
 but simply by neglect. 
 
 It is fatuous to wring the hands over this 
 tendency among the young, it is perilous to study 
 
i8o HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 closely its workings : our duty is to learn from it, 
 and I assert that the inference to be drawn is that 
 there is a widespread, ever-active disease of self 
 spread among the young as elsewhere. We may 
 note its symptoms because dissimulation is but 
 feebly practised in a public school. But it must 
 be remembered that, startling though this evidence 
 is, it only reveals a lesser portion of what is going 
 on. Collapse among boys is often taken to mean 
 the development of coarseness, the reappearance 
 of the barbaric vices, lust and cruelty ; but more 
 fatal than these is the steady, unnoticed, unre- 
 buked growth of a comparatively decorous selfish- 
 ness, that is, the effect on a self-regarding character 
 of the sight of unabashed lawlessness in others. 
 ''If they indulge themselves in their way, why 
 not I in mine ? " In other words, in the sphere 
 of the visible we can check to some extent the 
 conquests of egoism when it is left alone ; we 
 shall be held accountable for a peculiar form of 
 stupidity if we do not infer from it what is going 
 on — for the present — unseen. 
 
 Such is the challenge to parents, stated in its 
 harshest form. Its gravity, however, cannot be 
 fairly understood unless we take into our reckoning 
 the other side of the picture. If neglect 
 added to a wrong interpretation of life given in 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS i8i 
 
 childhood brings about a widespread havoc, what 
 happens when things go well ? Is there no 
 evidence to be gained from growth of goodness ? 
 
 We may thankfully say there is, and we may 
 profitably use it for our guidance if we bear in 
 mind always that, whereas evil among the young 
 is fairly open to view, what we call goodness may 
 be nothing more than a specious conformity to 
 certain requirements, and that when these require- 
 ments cease, the old egoistic Adam asserts himself 
 in his primeval strength. But where this does 
 not occur, and where the development goes 
 forward in a normal fashion, what are the symp- 
 toms useful to note ? We have given much 
 attention to common forms of aberration. Let 
 us now contemplate the walking in the narrow 
 way that leadeth to life ? 
 
 It will be remembered that one of the main 
 influences before which weak characters succumb 
 is a thoughtless public opinion which at school 
 is more thoughtless, of course, but also more 
 insistent than among adults. What is the policy 
 of the best boys towards this formidable fact ? 
 Do they palter with it or resist it ? truckle to it 
 or flout it with scorn ? 
 
 In the very best cases they conform to what is 
 harmless without thinking, just as they eat and 
 
1 82 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 drink because it is necessary, and not for the sake 
 of personal satisfaction. Probably it is impos- 
 sible for any boy who is not an athletic Titan to 
 flout convention openly and derisively ; and even 
 if he be such he will lose incalculably in public 
 favour. But after all, needless eccentricity is a 
 silly thing ; it strews numerous obstacles in the 
 path, but sows no seed. A boy of strong, inde- 
 pendent character, and more than that, simple- 
 hearted, will not trouble his head about how far 
 public opinion is wise or erratic. He selects with 
 a fine heedlessness what is wholesome or at least 
 innocent to follow, and similarly he turns his 
 back on what is corrupt or merely childish : 
 unconcerned about himself, he probably conforms 
 so far as to avoid collision, just as some adults not 
 wholly foolish wear garments like tall hats which 
 are not ideal, because to forgo them would mean 
 a loss of peace not balanced by any certain gain ; 
 and if they are the best sort of people they do 
 this unthinkingly, because there are other matters 
 of more obvious importance.* 
 
 * Archbishop Temple when Bishop of London is reported to 
 have gone into a hatter's to buy a new episcopal hat : not a day 
 too soon. Being short-sighted, he mistook a dandified Belgravian, 
 who was standing bareheaded near the counter, for a shopman. 
 Says the Bishop : " Have you got a hat like this ? " Belgravian : 
 *' No, by Jove, and if I had I wouldn't wear it." 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 183 
 
 Meantime, if evil comes directly across his 
 path, the sound-minded schoolboy does not pause 
 to examine it or dally with it, but kicks it cheer- 
 fully to one side as something alien to his nature 
 about which he knows and cares nothing except 
 that it is repellent. If he is one of those on 
 whom the gods have lavished their very finest 
 gift, he will naturally and easily adopt this clean 
 and knightly attitude towards all forms of egoism, 
 even if they are not in the least revolting but 
 rather attractive than not. Such a character is 
 not that of a crusader against evil, but, what is 
 better and decidedly more lovable, it is that of 
 one who healthily and objectively ensues what 
 is good. 
 
 Now it is of the utmost importance for us 
 parents to recognize that, while this sort of 
 character is captivating, it is also very rare ; and 
 also that, even if it persists through childhood, it 
 often gets warped in adolescence ; and again, if 
 it survives adolescence it has to face the deadly 
 perils of self-contentment in middle life and 
 cynicism in early old age. The enormous majority 
 of young people require that a principle of good 
 within them be deeply and firmly planted, on 
 which they can face the baffling problems of right 
 and wrong; not as our young knights, in a gay 
 
i84 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 masterfulness, and unconsciously choosing the 
 best without blunder, but through trial and 
 sometimes tribulation, having learnt by experience 
 that there is a path of duty independent of public 
 opinion, which is also a path of happiness ; and 
 the gradual growth into this knowledge cannot 
 and must not be left to chance. The question, 
 then, that confronts us is, briefly, thus : Why is 
 it that in scores of cases the disease in the self 
 seems to be pretty adequately dealt with for a 
 certain number of years from infancy, but reasserts 
 itself in adolescence or later ? In other words, 
 what is the healthy influence which operates for 
 a time but apparently ceases just when it seems 
 to be most needed ? 
 
 There can be no doubt about the answer. As 
 already hinted, there are many of us sensible 
 enough to bestow on our young children a training 
 which consists of a blending of law and love and 
 which never fails to work its effect in disciplining 
 the little mind towards what we call virtuous 
 habits and self-control, but at the same time we 
 are foolish enough to persuade ourselves that that 
 is all that is required or, anyhow, to imagine that 
 the subsequent stages may be left to the random 
 influences of school-life, social opinion, professional 
 claims, and so on. Yet it is patently obvious that 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 185 
 
 during the years when real progress is being made 
 against the disease of wrong choice, it is made 
 because the parental control is exercised in a 
 peculiarly effective manner in the right direction, 
 through a blend of irresistible power and the 
 tenderest affection ; but that later this control 
 rather rapidly is withdrawn and nothing definite 
 enough for so young and fluid a thing as the 
 mind of a boy of fourteen is put in its place. 
 Or in cases where the parents remain a force up 
 to nineteen or twenty, it very often happens that 
 the youth silently withdraws himself from their 
 intellectual and spiritual guidance, begins to 
 think for himself, and finds that he has got hold 
 of nothing stable except the advisability of con- 
 forming to public opinion or of gaining cheap 
 applause for eccentricity by defying it. Broadly 
 speaking, this very common result comes from the 
 parents keeping from the boy all real knowledge 
 of their own good principles, and, as already 
 described, substituting for them the shoddy 
 principles of conventionalism. How this is to 
 be avoided is the practical question before us. 
 
 Something, or rather everything, in the sur- 
 roundings of childhood must present the idea 
 of the Presence of GOD, as vitally affecting all 
 conduct, all choice, all interpretation of life's 
 
1 86 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 problems. Against this canon you have the 
 obstacle of our infirmities, shyness and ignorance, 
 and the obstacle planted in our way by nature, 
 viz. the fact that if this is unwisely done we turn 
 our children into prigs. 
 
 The last monosyllable exercises an incalculable 
 influence on English education. The little word 
 denotes not only a superficial veneer of folly, 
 pretence and conceit, but a disposition to take 
 the Name of GOD in vain by using it to cover 
 human selfishness. A prig is an " actor " or 
 hypocrite who has not acquired the art of con- 
 cealing what he is doing : he is a dissembler 
 found out ; and though his selfishness may be 
 only slight, supposing even that he has yearnings 
 after the high and wholesome, if he expresses 
 them by using phrases far too sublime for his 
 meaning, he lapses at once into priggishness, 
 anyhow as far as his speech is concerned. And 
 this habit somehow rubs our countrymen the 
 wrong way more decidedly than other infirmities 
 which may be more dangerous. It looks as if the 
 fear of its being implanted in young boys had 
 induced many fathers to keep total silence as to 
 all that is best within themselves. They dread 
 the premature use of the sacred Name ; but 
 most unfortunately, acting on that dread, they 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 187 
 
 suppress it so completely that its mighty and 
 august meaning is never taken in by the child at 
 all ; and later on, the teaching that he receives 
 assumes the knowledge which has never been 
 imparted, and the interpretation of life, into 
 which the little boy is insensibly led, is funda- 
 mentally confused. 
 
 But the danger is woefully exaggerated. The 
 timid apprehension of it in reality means that we 
 have no trust in Truth itself, having committed 
 ourselves so feebly to its guidance. Once weigh 
 well the immortal utterance " The Truth shall 
 make you free," and we must feel some shame at 
 our mistrust. Why should we be so nervous of 
 the effect of the only thing more beautiful than 
 a human child, that is, the message we have 
 received from heaven ? Freedom ! Let us 
 picture the evangelist penning that utterance 
 and try to imagine the facts on which it was built. 
 Modern scholars are inclined to think the words 
 did not come straight from Christ Himself, but 
 are a summary of what the writer had seen happen 
 since the Day of Pentecost. People had come 
 under the influence of a divine revelation, and 
 the effect on them was not priggishness but 
 freedom. There were shams, no doubt, as there 
 always have been : some of these were prigs. 
 
i88 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 and others prided themselves on not being prigs ; 
 but the broad result of the reception of the 
 message in an honest and true heart was the 
 bringing in of freedom where before there had 
 been bondage — freedom from base desires, free- 
 dom from all kinds of hampering egoism, freedom 
 from the ineptitudes of conventional thought. 
 That was the verdict of what must have been a 
 singularly penetrating mind, on things taking 
 place in the first century a.d. round the shores 
 of the Levant. It is a verdict that expresses a 
 noble confidence, and it would be to our gain if 
 we made clear to ourselves why that confidence 
 has after 1 800 years often given way to something 
 more truly to be called paralysis or the tyranny 
 of the dumb devil. 
 
 Our survey has shown us that, put as briefly 
 as possible, the drama of the young human life 
 is the working out of the conflict between egoism 
 and the loyal obedience to the one antidote of 
 egoism, the love, that is, of something not the 
 self : only therein can be found a force deep and 
 intimate enough to outweigh and absorb the 
 various desires which self-love pertinaciously 
 and stealthily breeds in the soul. For some 
 years the parents supply the need. But the 
 time comes when both nature and custom 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 189 
 
 insist that their influence shall cease ; and what 
 then ? 
 
 Ideally, the parents' influence only gives way 
 to a growing sense of allegiance to the Unseen. 
 The reality of the idea of GOD will have 
 been brought home to the boy's mind by the 
 lives lived by his parents ; and what is required, 
 then, is the translating of the idea into ordinary 
 life. Where that is faithfully and patiently 
 carried out there is abundant hope of the founda- 
 tions of character being laid deep, solid, and 
 stable. 
 
 At this point we come upon a division in men's 
 minds which for clearness' sake must be noticed 
 but need not be discussed here. Quite briefly, 
 it is this : One man conceives of his relation to 
 GOD as that of a member of a divine Society to 
 the Eternal ; the other thinks of himself as an 
 individual whose heart has been turned by the 
 revelation of GOD'S Love and the indwelling 
 Spirit. To the first the Society, called the 
 Church, is the body of believers to whom has 
 been committed the deposit of the Faith. His 
 attitude is that of a son to a mother, from whom 
 he receives in an unquestioning temper the 
 precious treasure handed down to all believers 
 from the Day of Pentecost. The other finds 
 
190 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 the soul's individual commerce with GOD suffi- 
 cient ; or at least we may say the collective 
 ecclesiastical side of Christianity has for him less 
 meaning. The former, in short, is the Catholic, 
 the second the Protestant position. 
 
 The Catholic parent will make more of what 
 is sometimes called the Institutional side of 
 religion — Confirmation, the Eucharist, and the 
 Church anniversaries : the Protestant may or 
 may not be more intellectually inclined, trusting 
 in scholarship and Biblical research ; what he 
 mainly trusts in is prayer and the sincerity of 
 conversion. 
 
 The home life will obviously be coloured by 
 these prepossessions. I will pass by the whole 
 question except to note that the Catholic home 
 in respect of any given child's training starts fair. 
 It is able to present the idea of GOD'S Presence, 
 and the life of allegiance in an aspect congenial 
 to a growing mind and wholesome because devoid 
 of self-consciousness and the wrong sort of intro- 
 spection. Outward forms, though of course 
 capable of being abused, are a great help in 
 planting the abstract idea of religion, and viewed 
 only in this light, give the Catholic an advantage. 
 But whichever line be adopted, the educational 
 aim is the same — ^the training in the realization 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 191 
 
 of the truth of GOD'S Love and the Redemption 
 of the World. 
 
 Thus in all truly Christian homes a certain 
 atmosphere for the boy to breathe brings it about 
 that he comes into contact with the Author of 
 all life and hope and good understanding. Hence 
 there is nothing for which we may not expectantly 
 strive. The gradual drinking in of the trans- 
 cendent truth that the Source of all that is 
 beautiful and happy and well ordered in the life 
 that he sees lived by his parents, works the miracle 
 in the child. It weans him from selfishness 
 because in itself it is irresistibly winning ; and he 
 learns that in obedience to his father's dictates, 
 few in number but the outcome of the highest 
 law his grown-up mind can conceive, lies the 
 road to happiness, even though unimagined 
 privations are to be faced meanwhile. 
 
 But we shall be told that all this requires 
 nothing short of the parents' conversion to Christ. 
 The picture is one of a divine allegiance translated 
 into family life, and that is only to be met with 
 very rarely. Doubtless. But the profession of 
 the principles on which such home training rests 
 is not rare at all, but practically universal. And 
 if I am told that it is a drawback that successful 
 training can only be given when both parents 
 
192 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 are converted Christians, I cannot agree. It 
 would make conversion doubly difficult if the 
 training of our children could be complete without 
 it. It fits in with all that we know about GOD to 
 find that the increasing knowledge of Him and 
 His Law and His Love works wondrously in the 
 training of children, especially if both parents 
 have felt its power. 
 
 But yet this confusion of thought is exceedingly 
 common, and requires a little disentangling. 
 When a parent says to himself, " I admit that if 
 my wife and myself were both converted, things 
 would go better, but as we don't pretend we are, 
 what we want is some counsel on a lower plane, 
 better fitted for an ordinary English citizen," 
 what is he assuming ? He is assuming that a 
 conversion to GOD is only one of various prelimi- 
 naries to the training of an immortal soul, that 
 others as good might be found. But how can a 
 Christian admit this ? The true view of the 
 position must be as follows : It has been revealed 
 to us that salvation, whether in this world or the 
 next, is bound up with that kind of mental and 
 spiritual turning to our Maker which is called 
 Conversion. The doings of His will is not the 
 taking up a fad, but is the one condition of 
 entering into that which Christ called the 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 193 
 
 Kingdom of Heaven ; for we are to do the divine 
 will in the same unquestioning spirit as that of a 
 little child who is in a perfect relation to his 
 earthly father and does his will. Let that stand 
 for the central obligation of the family of GOD'S 
 children. Now one of the most wonderful 
 privileges allowed to us on earth is that of parent- 
 hood. We bring at our own will an immortal 
 being into the world. Is there anything strange 
 in the fact that on the sincerity of our conversion 
 to GOD it depends whether we can train that 
 child aright ? If, on the other hand, this were 
 not the case, if the supreme problem of setting 
 that child's feet in the right road could be as 
 well solved without conversion as with it, cer- 
 tainly the result would be to make it almost 
 impossible to believe Christ's words, " Except 
 ye be converted and become as little children ye 
 cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." At 
 least it would mean that a parent outside the 
 Kingdom is as well fitted for the task as if he 
 were in it. And if for this task, why not for 
 others ? In short, it would matter nothing if 
 we were in the Kingdom or outside of it. We 
 could do our duty as well in one state as in the 
 other. 
 While, then, I could not admit that anything 
 
 N 
 
194 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 short of a true conversion and real godliness of 
 mind in both parents can do what we want, it is 
 worth noting that a home-life based on Christian 
 ethics alone is hopeful as far as it goes. There 
 are men and women who are able to strive after 
 righteousness without knowing why ; and some 
 of these despair of ever knowing more than they 
 now know. Let us see how the problem is 
 modified in their case. 
 
 This is a profoundly interesting question. 
 Practically it may be worded as follows : Granted 
 that many parents have a deep and sincere love 
 of goodness but little or no personal relation to 
 GOD5 what are they to do ? The others who 
 have the personal relation will, of course, institute 
 ordinances in the household — family prayers, 
 Grace at meals and church-going, saints' days, etc. 
 But what are the others to make of all this ? 
 
 Let them first recognize the value of these 
 outward things to the child. It must not be 
 forgotten that a child learns very little from 
 grown-up people's talk (except facts from stories) 
 but a great deal from experience. So a father 
 eager for his children to grow up lovers of goodness 
 must consider whether he is wise in foregoing 
 any particular institution merely because it is 
 hardly congenial to himself. He wishes the 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 195 
 
 children to seek after goodness, but he is stripping 
 it of its personal character ; in other words, 
 turning it into an abstraction. Is the child as 
 likely to grasp the idea under these conditions 
 as he would be if by the whole household, every 
 day, something were done which is a corollary 
 of the Presence of GOD ? Has he any ground 
 for supposing that in this one subject alone 
 outward action can be dispensed with ? If he 
 wishes to teach patriotism he gets the child to 
 observe anniversaries before he knows their 
 meaning, feeling sure that the meaning will be 
 learnt in due season. If he had the chance he 
 would get him a seat to see the Coronation 
 procession. But why, then. Why does he fight so 
 shy of Holy days in the Church's calendar ? I 
 am not thinking of men who see nothing divine 
 in the Church's life, but of those who are perfectly 
 willing to live that life in the household if they 
 can be persuaded that it will help the children 
 to grow up into good men and women. Well, 
 the point is that with most of his surroundings 
 encouraging his egoism, the child requires some- 
 thing simple, strong, and continuous to make 
 him realize that his true happiness lies outside 
 of himself ; that those over and around him in 
 the home are subject to the same law ; that 
 
196 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 obedience to duty means a fulfilling of his own 
 true life, in so far as it is a serving of a Heavenly 
 Father. You may turn him out, if you like, an 
 adolescent with a vague idea that dutifulness is 
 a better thing than lawlessness. Every educated 
 young man in England knows this : but if you 
 are to save him from himself, that idea must not 
 be vague, but vivid ; not fitful, but abiding ; 
 not an uneasy feeling which he can't get rid of, 
 but a constraining power, irresistibly gentle,* at 
 any moment imperceptible, but to be noted by 
 its movement like the turning of the tide in a 
 calm sea. That is what it must come to sooner 
 or later, and if you acquiesce in anything short of 
 this as your aim, you will do nothing. The issue 
 is so wonderfully great, not chiefly because of 
 the ruin that is possible for your boy, but because 
 of the glory that is a certainty if you will only 
 see it. 
 
 Now whether you believe in the Christian 
 doctrines or not, nothing can alter these facts. 
 Your son may be great as GOD counts greatness, 
 as the conqueror of his own selfishness and so the 
 bringer of life to others ; but against that mass 
 of self-regard we have to set the appeal of a 
 Personality before which even his earthly father 
 
 * Cf . a saying of Lacordaire (?), " La douceur est une force." 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 197 
 
 bows, the finite before the Infinite. Remem- 
 bering, then, that we must not fob off the child 
 with empty words, are you sure that you are right 
 in saying that you can dispense with outward 
 forms ? If there is the slightest hope that by 
 their means you may plant the knowledge of an 
 unseen world, of a growth in happiness possible 
 for him in a life which is not that of self nor of 
 the senses, but for which he will be willing to 
 sacrifice all that he has, it is madness for you to 
 neglect the chance. You have no evidence that 
 it is not one of the very best open to you. 
 
 The institution of family prayers is worth con- 
 sidering from another point of view, that of 
 discipline. The father's task is to make the 
 attendance regular, and he will have no great 
 difficulty if he makes the prayers a reality. But 
 conceive what they often are ! Ill-chosen, 
 mumbled, lifeless ; the passage from Scripture 
 not explained, no reference made to any events 
 in the locality or in public life — to sickness or to 
 healing, or to any anxieties that may have befallen 
 one of the household. If it were in any way 
 necessary that this should be the procedure, 
 certainly servants would be right to protest and 
 the sooner the farce were given up the better. 
 But if all is done that can be to make them real 
 
198 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 and alive, then the disciplinary side of them 
 must not be forgotten. 
 
 But let the duty be done joyfully, and with 
 confident hope.* We should be better parents 
 than we are if we bore in mind that children 
 can understand joy but make nothing of grief ; 
 that duty performed gloomily is a deterrent from 
 all right living, all vital hope, all true belief in 
 GOD. This may, in short, be a challenge not 
 only to lovers of goodness who cannot pretend 
 to be religious, but to all professing Christian 
 parents. Are your principles such as constrain 
 you to feel an increasing happiness in living, no 
 matter what trouble may abound ? If so, do you 
 
 * Compare as a hint from another world this passage in Father 
 Congreve's " Christian Progress," p. 276 : " Every common thing 
 is regarded among the sons of S. Patrick and S. Columbia as 
 in the blessing of GOD. Is it good manners in Ireland among the 
 peasants to-day to name any friend without GOD bless himF If 
 we meet a man on the road and exchange a friendly word about 
 the weather it must end with Thank the Lord. The well is holy 
 and the tree that overshadows it ; the field is blessed, and the 
 sea, and the boat. Who ever forgets there to make the holy 
 sign, and to say Grace before meat ? And is there not still 
 somewhere at the lighting of the evening rush-light in the cabin, 
 the grace for light ? " Who are we, poor impotent adults, that 
 we have come to withhold all this Celtic thankfulness from our 
 children ? Our Lord implied that it was against nature for a 
 father to give his children a stone instead of bread. But in the 
 spiritual world we contrive to disappoint them in ways more 
 deadly because less easily checked ; by giving them instead of 
 nourishment, aridity ; instead of salvation, sawdust. 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 199 
 
 hold to them faster each year ? If not, are you 
 right in thinking they are Christian principles at 
 all ? In other words, if there is not a predomi- 
 nating element of tranquil joy in a home, it is 
 not informed by the Spirit of Christ, and it is 
 most unlikely that the children will learn that 
 the service of Christ is worth while. 
 
 In presence of this plain fact it is wonderful 
 that the ideal of many of our countrymen should 
 be a life of faithful but grumbling and reluctant 
 dutifulness. Such a life is a prolonged denial 
 of our sonship. If the doing of duty is the doing 
 of GOD'S will, can it be a matter for grumbling ? 
 Only if we turn GOD into a hard taskmaster : an 
 idea of Him clean contrary to that given us in 
 the New Testament. There is indeed something 
 strangely dusty in many conscientious English- 
 men's view of life. It is as if we took it for 
 granted that the thing which has been called 
 the Life Eternal, or the Living Water, or the 
 Bread of Heaven, must be and ought to be to 
 our famished souls like a cracknel biscuit to the 
 mouth : something stodgy and unsatisfying, 
 which when consumed means the maximum of 
 effort and minimum of nourishment, but which 
 brings about one certain result, an increased 
 difficulty in speaking so as to be understood. It 
 
200 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 is hardly credible that after listening in church 
 to what we call a beautiful passage, " The fruits 
 of the Spirit are Love, Joy, Peace," we can emerge 
 from the sacred building and before we are 
 twenty yards from the porch talk to each other of 
 our life as if it were what M. Arnold calls a raking 
 among the stones, and nothing more ; further, 
 that we should rather plume ourselves for so 
 doing, and dub anyone who does not as unsympa- 
 thetic. If we were all bachelors and old maids 
 this conduct would spread weariness far and 
 near ; but suppose we have children at home ! 
 We are cutting them off from all that is glorious 
 and uplifting. They are one and all endowed 
 with a deep instinct for two elements in life, 
 towards which they must press continually onward 
 or perish — ^joy and the harmony of order. But 
 when we present to them a religious life as a 
 dark, dry, unsatisfying thing, we not only tell 
 of drought instead of refreshment, but we bring 
 disorder where there ought to be peace, con- 
 tradiction where there should be reason. And 
 who can wonder at the outcome, when it is seen 
 that we have been making the water-springs into 
 a dry ground and " turning salvation into saw- 
 dust " ? 
 
 So much for the joyousness of the home, as an 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 201 
 
 indispensable evidence of the higher life : won- 
 derful in its effect on adults, but a sine qua non 
 for the children. It should be observed, hov^ever, 
 that the joyousness w^hich tells on the soul as an 
 evangelizing force is not the heedless merriment 
 which sometimes reigns for a few years in an 
 opulent household, merely the outcome of games, 
 jollity, and good health; rather it is the inward 
 peace which nothing can disturb — neither illness 
 nor bereavement, nor the failure of plans, nor 
 the malevolence of neighbours. Wherever parents 
 can bear these blows without bitterness, from a 
 conviction that whom the Lord loveth He 
 chasteneth, they there and then become preachers 
 of the Gospel to those nearest them, their own 
 kith and kin. So too if they refrain from every 
 kind of railing against the most tiresome of their 
 acquaintances, even the snobs and the bores. 
 If their forbearance stops short of this, as it 
 nearly always does, then the home atmosphere 
 fails to teach the wonder and the 'power of the 
 godly life. Again, if the father presses forward 
 in his life's work, whatever it is, obviously not 
 from hope of ordinary gain, but as ministering 
 in some way to others, and faints not though health 
 fails and success is denied him, he too is a preacher 
 of the Gospel to his children, and effective so 
 
202 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 long as he lifts up his heart to his Lord and Master. 
 If he tries to do his duty with teeth set, grimly, 
 doggedly, because he must, it is probable that 
 the harder he goes at it the more repellent his 
 virtue becomes, and he preaches anything but 
 the story of the Cross because he has forgotten 
 the joy. The joy that transforms suffering is 
 the great Evangelistic force. That which merely 
 consists in youthful roystering may be innocent, 
 but is pretty sure to be unfruitful. 
 
 If any parents think they can attain to this 
 pitch of virtue without any belief in the Christian 
 doctrine of the revelation of the divine Love, let 
 them try ; or let them do their best to lift their 
 children's minds out of themselves by other means. 
 Every right-minded man will give them his 
 warmest sympathy. Only let them never forget 
 that they have to consider not whether their 
 principles are satisfying to themselves but how 
 they will be taken by their children. If these, 
 as is probably the case, have nothing to do with 
 an unseen Person, how do they strike the 
 child-mind ? If the father finds that his own 
 vitality and eagerness to help others survive the 
 loss of friends, the decay of youth's prime, and a 
 downward trend of politics, that is not all. This 
 constancy may be due to the godliness of his own 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 203 
 
 parents, from which he learnt the secret of living, 
 but which he somehow fails to pass on. There 
 is, then, this broad consideration about which 
 he would do well to clear his mind. 
 
 But besides joy there is the harmony of order 
 which a child instinctively craves. 
 
 In the home life, while there are no limits to 
 the demand made upon parents to exhibit not 
 only self-control, wisdom, firmness, and love in 
 all their dealings v^th their oflFspring, yet it is 
 wonderful how lasting an effect may be discerned 
 in even a partial obedience to the law. What 
 law ? The law that unless the child can see and 
 feel the submission of his parents to GOD he will 
 in time establish for himself public opinion as the 
 grand criterion of conduct. Now submission to 
 GOD is shown not necessarily by heroism, but by 
 scores of little graces in act, thought, and speech 
 which all of us love and believe in, and all of us 
 do actually practise in a measure. Every little 
 conquest of temper, every ungrudging act of 
 kindness to dim and unprepossessing neighbours, 
 every effort at any kind of peace-making, every 
 endeavour to reach the truth in controversial 
 politics, every word of sympathy with sufferers 
 in the antipodes, each and all of these things do 
 something towards informing our children's little 
 
204 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 minds with a truth which nothing afterwards will 
 ever entirely upset, namely, that above and 
 beyond all that is best in average public opinion 
 there is a law of living so far beyond public opinion 
 that it often seems to contradict, whereas it really 
 ratifies, men's best instincts. That law is the 
 law exhibited in fullest perfection on Calvary : 
 a self-committal to the will of GOD complete 
 enough to set at nought all the virulence of human 
 antagonism, and to overcome that antagonism 
 by the power of love alone. Now I say that in 
 a measure we parents of the present generation 
 of " educated " English boys and girls do live 
 lives which suggest the existence and the claim 
 of this higher law to a certain point ; but we fail 
 to enforce it with the highest sanction because 
 we separate it disastrously from the realization 
 of a Personal GOD : that means we enforce an 
 ideal stripped of hope, and I challenge any critic 
 of these pages to maintain and prove that the 
 normal outcome of our training is not exactly 
 what under these conditions we should expect it 
 to be. 
 
 We pass out into the world a swarm of young 
 men who are not dreaming of dealing with 
 life in the spirit of victorious serenity offered to 
 them without measure : rather they timidly 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 205 
 
 aim at a conformity to a part of that moral law 
 which they dare not dispute, grasping meantime 
 at the hope, not of going on from strength to 
 strength, but of reaching a sort of contentment 
 in spite of daily shortcoming. The goal set 
 before them is a meagre and dismal compromise, 
 a beggarly travesty of the Christian forecast ; 
 it is a watered-down version of certain rules of 
 conduct which their parents have previously 
 watered down before them : morality dealt out in 
 driblets at the bidding of convention ; and such, 
 in England at any rate, it is bound to be as long 
 as the father's main demand is for a kind of 
 propriety without any background of the promises 
 of a Personal Unseen Father. On this latter 
 belief being planted along with the belief in the 
 earthly parents' love, wisdom, and power, depends 
 the issue of life and death when the days come 
 for the young man finally to determine how he is 
 to guide his footsteps between the cradle and 
 the grave. 
 
 But we are going a little too fast. We have not 
 exhausted the question how in childhood the 
 great abstract idea can be made alive and potent 
 in the young mind. Can anything more definite 
 be said than that the parents have to live as 
 nearly as they can in conformity with the Christian 
 
2o6 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 ideal ? Perhaps not ; but the formula has to be 
 translated. 
 
 It is really important to understand that 
 certain features in the Christian household which 
 are all but essential from the point of view of the 
 child's requirements demand no great unattain- 
 able saintliness on the part of the parents, but 
 common sense and perseverance, the kind of 
 qualities on which John Bull prides himself. I 
 am addressing certainly a very large number of 
 people — those who profess Christian beliefs and 
 have faith in the main proposition of this book, 
 viz. that the implanting of those beliefs depends 
 on the home. Another point on which there 
 can hardly be any dispute is that what gives the 
 living conviction of a Present Loving GOD is the 
 general life of the home ; what gives that living 
 conviction strength and ineradicable firmness is 
 the bringing of it into contact with moral problems 
 as they arise. In thousands of modern house- 
 holds both of these two vital requirements are 
 ignored. The general life of the home is not 
 ordered at all, except with a view to the con- 
 venience of the grown-ups and the pleasure of 
 the children ; and if moral lapses occur, the only 
 principle which is enforced is propriety. 
 
 Let us see if this is so. First as to the general 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 207 
 
 home life, what details may be regarded as 
 essential for the planting of the idea of GOD in 
 the children's minds ? At this point I can hear 
 the objection of the modern John Bull. He 
 says : " Here is a man who has nothing better 
 to recommend than the antiquated custom of 
 family prayers, which if it ever had had any value 
 would have ensured a larger number of Christians 
 than modern England can show." I will remark 
 on this that there is nothing sillier than to call 
 a custom antiquated merely because your par- 
 ticular neighbours seem to be giving it up. If 
 there is anything sillier it is the heedless assump- 
 tion that because the practice is being given up, 
 therefore it is useless. When Dr. F. W. Forster, 
 whose forcible work on marriage should be read 
 by every one,* was girded at by his sceptical 
 friends in Germany because he, originally an 
 advanced free-thinker, advocated old-fashioned 
 '' orthodox " views on the subject, his answer 
 was, " If the Christians are right, why shouldn't 
 I say so ? " Parents who give up such a practice 
 as family prayers mainly because they know of 
 many other people who have done the same, are 
 
 * " Marriage and the Sex Problem " ; Forster : Wells Gardner, 
 Darton and Co. The favourable reception which this powerful 
 work seems to have received in Germany is one of the encouraging 
 symptoms of the present day. Vide Preface, p. xiv. 
 
2o8 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 just as much the slaves of pubHc opinion and 
 ignorant cant as the narrowest Lowlander who 
 forbids his children secular history on Sunday. 
 I ask that the question be considered from the 
 child's point of view, who is slowly forming the 
 ideas on which he is going to live and die, as to 
 whether his mother's talk about a Heavenly Father 
 is an unintelligible jumble, or food for his soul. 
 Whatever efforts you may make, it is impossible 
 that a large part of the impression of the daily life 
 should not, as a rule, be colourless, in respect of 
 teaching the Divine Presence. To the child much 
 of what goes on must seem to be purely mundane. 
 The question, then, is, what provision can you 
 make to secure that every day something should 
 happen which has no meaning except that it 
 bring the family life into touch with GOD ? If 
 you clearly see the problem, how to make the 
 Unseen more potent in its influence than the 
 usual compromise between desire and propriety, 
 you will go on to the next step and acknowledge 
 that if family prayers are becoming unfashionable 
 there is an additional reason for you to keep them 
 up at all costs. The less the practice is observed 
 in other houses the more meaning it will have 
 in yours ; or perhaps I should say, the more 
 clearly will its true meaning stand out. It is a 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 209 
 
 gain that a good thing should be independent of 
 the feeling of the majority. 
 
 The same observation applies to Grace at meals. 
 The more irksome, that is the more unfashionable, 
 you find it is to acknowledge the Divine Presence 
 at such moments, the more value the observance 
 v^ill have. It is a practice based on a very simple 
 but easily forgotten fact, viz. that our true relation 
 to GOD depends primarily on our expressing our 
 gratitude. I should not venture to say -primarily 
 if it were not for St. Paul's teaching on the 
 subject.* But if we think of the home problem 
 we cannot fail to see the grand danger. It is 
 that the frima facie view of the world, of life, 
 of time is utterly untrue. Our Creator is not a 
 Being who sets before His children tasks they 
 cannot fulfil. Suffering is not a thing to be 
 shunned at all costs as if it were the ultimate 
 
 * This is not the place for an exposition of Scripture, but I 
 must refer to Romans i, where the reader can verify for himself 
 the conviction of the Apostle that the piteous degradation of 
 the nations round the Mediterranean was originally caused by 
 their refusing to give thanks to GOD. If this arresting utterance 
 is well weighed, we shall soon see that it bears most particularly 
 on home life. Contrast also the miracle of the ten lepers : one 
 of the occasions, deeply to be pondered on, when Jesus with all 
 His unrivalled knowledge of human nature was surprised. Another 
 occasion was after the Transfiguration {^ide Luke, ix. i). What 
 shocked Him most was not our frailty but our refusal to behave 
 as if life eternal were really within our reach. 
 
 O 
 
210 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 human ill, but a source of the deepest joy and 
 , the indispensable condition of spiritual growth. 
 Pleasure is not the same thing as happiness ; but 
 the one soon palls, the other is attainable, but 
 only if it is not pursued. And so forth. Now 
 the one grand antidote to the poisonous error 
 with which our atmosphere is full is the faith, 
 deep in the mind, that in spite of appearances, 
 and even because of its lowering skies, life is a 
 glorious thing full to overflowing of a hope that 
 never fails. If the best chance of this faith being 
 planted is given by the home life, the means by 
 which this is done is by the daily expression to 
 GOD of a thankful spirit, uttered by the assembled 
 family and friends, and no opportunity is better 
 for the purpose than meals. Food is the suste- 
 nance of our physical life, and we are thankful for 
 food because the life which it sustains is a Divine 
 gift incomparably precious for the uses to which 
 it can be put. The only person who would 
 rationally omit Grace is a would-be suicide. This 
 view of food is true and displaces the false and 
 desperately common view that food is merely 
 for our pleasure, and in displacing that false view 
 it saves us from bondage to appetite, the first kind 
 of bondage to which growing boys are liable. 
 Like all truth, this truth makes us free. 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 211 
 
 Next, I would mention the respect due to 
 elders. There are many homes where a notice- 
 able decline in this matter has lately come about. 
 I would hazard the following explanation. About 
 1870, and for many years subsequently, alarm 
 began among serious-minded people concerning 
 the moral question, especially in connexion with 
 school-life. It came to be felt that one safeguard 
 consisted in the establishment of a confidence 
 between fathers and sons ; and in the effort to 
 secure this relation of confidence, many fathers 
 allowed the old respectful tone of their children 
 to die away. This was a grievous mistake. 
 Whether they gained in intimacy may be doubted ; 
 what they lost was the constant reminder to the 
 children that all authority comes from above, 
 the constant presentment of the truth that the 
 majesty of law rests upon something unseen. 
 What is most deplorable also is that even if a 
 familiar intimacy is secured, and even if it is 
 employed for giving of help against some early 
 school trials, it is a poor, uncertain, and temporary 
 aid in difficulties which can only be surmounted 
 by deeply rooted principle. That principle is 
 the Divine majesty of law. It is easily weakened 
 by worldly influences ; but unquestionably the 
 old-fashioned respectful behaviour to parents 
 
212 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 tended to corroborate it and give it a lasting 
 value. Any father who thinks that his advice 
 can meet the need as v^ell, is wrong. 
 
 Another ingredient in the picture of the 
 Christian home is the absence of worry and hurry. 
 I am very loth to write on such elementary matters 
 as if I knew better than other people how to deal 
 with them ; but there is little doubt that if we 
 all habituallyjthought of the effect on our children, 
 of our little infirmities, we should combat them 
 manfully and persistently, and with excellent 
 results. There are homes to be found where a 
 vast amount of work is got through, the industry 
 is unremitting, and yet there is no sign of fuss 
 and scramble. If this is combined, as it some- 
 times is, with plenty of mirth, though the adults 
 are known to be wrestling with dark and baffling 
 problems, the atmosphere is that which nothing, 
 as far as I know, can produce, except a firm and 
 lively faith in the goodness of the Unseen GOD. 
 There is nothing wonderful in its influence. It 
 is the corollary of all the religious teaching which 
 the children have received, and helps to bring 
 the great mystery down into ordinary life in its 
 most attractive form. For suppose the contrary. 
 When the father of a family is always on the rush, 
 always lamenting the shortness of his leisure time, 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 213 
 
 querulously detailing the many good and useful 
 things he would do if he had time, he is very 
 effectively preaching ungodliness to his children : 
 he is showing them that he has forgotten his 
 fundamental beliefs, which his children cannot 
 learn unless he practises them. He professes 
 that he and others are living in GOD's Presence 
 and that their lives are ordered by Him. If that 
 is so, it is certain that there are many limits set 
 by Him, not by Satan, to our freedom of action. 
 There are many things the man would like to 
 do, but he can submissively renounce many of 
 them, as Christ did, because the equipment of 
 time and power which GOD has given him only 
 allows him a certain number of activities. Every 
 minute of railing at this state of things is railing 
 against the Most High, a complaint against the 
 ordering of human life. Brought into contact 
 with that, a child puts away the misty notions 
 he may have gathered from his mother about 
 religion, and proceeds to interpret the world, 
 not as a redeemed place or a scene of law and 
 order, but as a moral chaos. Behaviour enforces 
 on him its own meaning; abstract teaching 
 does not. 
 
 A Christian, on the other hand, remembers the 
 great solemn words : " Are there not twelve hours 
 
214 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 in the day ? If any man walk in the day he 
 stumbleth not because he seeth the light of this 
 world. If a man walk in the night he stumbleth 
 because there is no light in him." 
 
 " He stumbleth not." The gradual conform- 
 ing of a man's will to GOD'S brings tranquillity 
 and joy into his life no matter how much it be cur- 
 tailed and hampered. Every effort is made to 
 put away all hindrances ; but those which can't 
 be put away he transforms into helps, and learns 
 that, according to the revelation of Christ's story, 
 his own work is fruitful in proportion as he turns 
 his disabilities into evidences of trust, and into 
 stepping-stones of progress. Of course it will 
 be objected that all this is very difficult, and 
 means the discipline of a lifetime. I have never 
 denied its difficulty, nor the length of time that 
 for most of us is required before we can bring 
 anything worthy to be called tranquillity into 
 busy lives. All I insist on is that if we fail in 
 this endeavour we are spoiling our children, by 
 showing them either that our religion has no 
 bearing on ordinary life, and is therefore mere 
 talk, or that we ourselves are too weak to practise 
 it. Both lessons are deadly. Because it takes 
 so long for most people really to order their lives, 
 we can understand why schoolmasters like to take 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 215 
 
 charge of boys who have been brought up by 
 their grandmothers. 
 
 DisabiUties of all kinds, it seems, are judged by 
 people in one of two ways, and it is worthwhile 
 to get this point clear. (We are passing now 
 from Hurry to Worry.) A hard-working county 
 councillor has made all his arrangements for a 
 three weeks' holiday in the Dolomites : being 
 only forty-five years old, he looks forward to 
 some fine rock-climbing. Rooms are taken in 
 the right hotel, his wife and children are coming, 
 and every detail fixed ; but on the day before 
 starting he puts out his knee, slipping on an orange- 
 peel in Bermondsey. Now if he can treat this 
 most galling disappointment with serenity and 
 without marring the home life, among other rich 
 blessings which everybody reaps, his children's 
 vital belief in GOD is strengthened. That man 
 is really alive, and you cannot be in his company 
 — though he says not a word about it — without 
 learning something about the highest thing man 
 can know. In seeing this thing grow before his 
 eyes in his children's inner beings, he reaps his 
 reward. That, we may observe, comes of his 
 recognizing the traces of GOD'S ordering his daily 
 life. His neighbour, on the other hand, the 
 retired colonel, takes the view — though he too 
 
2i6 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 says nothing about it — that this sort of nuisance 
 comes from the devil, and according to that 
 conviction he deals with it — by clamour, railing, 
 upsetting of plans, fuming on the journey, fretting 
 in smoking-rooms, perversely snatching at the 
 pleasures of the table to make up for his dis- 
 appointment, and so spoiling the lives of every- 
 body within reach. 
 
 Who can measure the harm done at home by 
 the elders reviling the weather ? We come out 
 of church after lustily singing the harvest hymn 
 which ascribes "the soft refreshing rain" to GOD, 
 and if the said rain upsets our picnic we speak of 
 it as if it came straight from Satan. Of course 
 good manners demand some self-control, this 
 being one of the instances where godliness helps 
 to make a pleasant afternoon. But it often 
 happens that some one is downcast and glum and 
 will think us unsympathetic unless we are the 
 same. However, it must certainly make things 
 worse if we sympathize, as many people pride 
 themselves on doing, not wisely but too well. 
 
 Similarly, we undo all our teachings of Chris- 
 tianity by revealing our paganism at the slightest 
 hint of the approach of death.* Paganism is 
 
 * A paper which deserves to be widely read is to be found 
 in one of the numbers of the " Parents' Review " for 191 3 : the 
 title is *' The Fear of the Microbe." 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 217 
 
 the correct word, because our conventional 
 behaviour expresses exactly the same feelings as 
 are portrayed on a Greek sarcophagus : the 
 unalloyed, hopeless sadness at parting ; the keen 
 anguish at the sight of beauty marred by the 
 finger-prints of the dread enemy, and all the 
 spring promise of young lives cut off before their 
 summer prime ; all the melodious melancholy 
 which poets and musicians have uttered for us 
 about the loss of our dear ones : — if all this is 
 unrelieved by any sincere hope, every death is a 
 fresh bewilderment to the children of the house. 
 Why ? Are relatives to be expected to feel as 
 happy as if nothing had happened ? Certainly 
 not : the question is foolish. I would try another 
 line of approach to the truth. Imagine young 
 people hearing on Tuesday their elders singing 
 with deep emotion a hymn in the churchyard 
 like " On the Resurrection-morning," and then 
 for weeks after not speaking one word on the 
 subject which implies any belief in a life here- 
 after ; what are they to make of it ? I daresay 
 this is natural and conventional conduct, but it 
 is worth while to remark that whereas a death 
 ought to be, and sometimes is, a wondrous lesson 
 in the apprehension of the Unseen, it generally 
 is little but a flat contradiction to all a child has 
 
2i8 HOME TRAINING [vin 
 
 learnt about GOD. Strength of character in the 
 long run is the result of the deepest beliefs being 
 firmly planted and consistently fostered into 
 growth. But what is there consistent in solemnly 
 imparting to a child a tenet about an after-life 
 and then calling on him to act exactly as if no 
 after-life had ever been imagined ? The aboli- 
 tion of hearse-plumes from our highways has 
 been a gain ; but I fear it is rather due to a dislike 
 of gloom than to a more robust faith. Matthew 
 Arnold was not reckoned an Orthodox Christian. 
 But there is a finer tone of hope in " Rugby 
 Chapel " than in much of our condolence to-day. 
 It is thought to betray a want of sympathy not 
 to enter fully into the most heathenish kind of 
 grief, whereas the only true sympathy is to pass 
 on the knowledge that this earthly life is not all. 
 There is much more that might be said, but 
 unless we ourselves have had proof of what human 
 sympathy can be when it is enriched with a sense 
 of the life to come, it would only be speaking to 
 deaf ears. Let us, then, pass on to a very different 
 subject. 
 
 What is snobbery ? Something out of which 
 we reap a rich harvest of jokes and a store of telling 
 incongruities. But we often forget that snobbery 
 would be a most rational kind of conduct if it 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 219 
 
 were not for a prevailing belief in GOD. I take 
 snobbery to be an avowed worship of successful 
 people as soon as they have been decked with 
 titles. But consider : Society agrees to dis- 
 tinguish those who have attained what it calls 
 success. Those who cultivate the acquaintance 
 of these distinguished ones and plume themselves 
 thereon are laughed at for being snobs. But 
 what is there to laugh at ? Our countrymen 
 tell us in plain and picturesque language, " Here 
 is a man who has done better than other people. 
 So let him put a coronet on his writing-paper." 
 Suppose, then, we are of a docile turn of mind, 
 we catch Society's hint, and, without questioning, 
 take the man at the valuation of others and do 
 our best to gain his notice and enter his circle. 
 (We treat the titles as certificates : they save 
 us from the exertion of determining before we 
 are told who the successful are.) This is not 
 conceit but a form of humility, a bowing to the 
 opinion of the community. There is no apparent 
 reason why we should be thought ridiculous for 
 acting so. 
 
 But if, on the other hand, we have a conviction 
 somewhere deep down in our minds that He 
 who made this world " seeth not as man seeth " ; 
 that His requirement has little or nothing to do 
 
220 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 with the making of good investments or the 
 inheriting of suburban land, but simply with 
 obedience to His Will and a growing likeness to 
 the character of Christ, then it is impossible not 
 to feel the snob is ridiculous — not humble nor 
 docile, but simply ridiculous. Experience, how- 
 ever, shows that this feeling is liable to interrup- 
 tion ; and when the conviction about the Divine 
 ordering of life is triumphantly quenched, 
 incidents like the following are bound to happen, 
 and if they ever become normal we should all 
 come to take them as a matter of course. Thirty- 
 four years ago I was learning German in a pension 
 in Dresden full of English people : among them 
 was a lady who lived on a storey above ours, and 
 one day I paid her a ceremonious little visit, and 
 it happened we set to talking, languidly, about 
 the Ashantee War. I made the safe remark that 
 the Ashantees were thought to be good fighters. 
 " Yes," was the reply, '" my friend. Lady X., says 
 they fight very well indeed." This mention of 
 Lady X. is only to be explained by the speaker's 
 determination that I should realize she had a 
 titled friend, though there was no evidence that 
 Lady X. had any first-hand or other knowledge 
 of the Ashantees which we could not have con- 
 tributed ourselves ; and I went away with a 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 221 
 
 suspicion that if we had been talking about 
 deep-sea fishing or the transit of Venus, Lady X.'s 
 opinion would have been no less readily quoted. 
 Yes, it is certain that where the belief in the 
 Divine Being is too weak to affect ordinary life 
 such incidents will occur. But let it be noted 
 that the humour of them will disappear. Snob- 
 bery will abound but will no longer be amusing. 
 Some of us owe a debt to Mr. Mallock for pointing 
 this out in a magazine article written about the 
 same time as Lady X. was quoted, when, like 
 other young men, we were disposed lightly to 
 question the foundations of our religion. He 
 explained that if religion died away humour 
 would go with it. There were many things then, 
 as now, which we did not understand, but we 
 knew what it was to laugh heartily at snobbish- 
 ness, an infirmity not unknown at Cambridge in 
 those days ; and the prospect of the thing itself 
 continuing but all that was ludicrous in it dis- 
 appearing was lurid enough to give us pause. 
 Fancy snobs increasing on every hand while those 
 who were able to laugh at them became fewer 
 and fewer, till at last there would be only one 
 left, and he would become grave simply because 
 it is hard to laugh alone ! This picture of a 
 possible world forced us to reflect on the greatness 
 
222 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 of the issue at stake, like some of the noble writings 
 of Dean Church, but from a more secular point of 
 view. We shuddered at the thought of " Punch " 
 growing thinner and thinner, till at last only 
 the cover was left, a dry husk of something once 
 nourishing and powerful to move. 
 
 Thus we may gauge to some extent the effect 
 of snobbery prevailing in a home. It waxes 
 when religion wanes, because we are so made that, 
 while we cannot serve both GOD and Mammon, 
 we must serve one or the other. Religion 
 proceeds from the acknowledgment of GOD ; 
 snobbery from the acknowledgment of man and 
 his judgments, as supreme in human life. One 
 principle must oust the other, though in many 
 cases it is hard to distinguish the offspring of the 
 two ; but I fancy the reason snobbery is so 
 laughable is that it is patently opposed to the 
 ideal, but is as yet, among adults, harmless. But 
 from children it drives out the knowledge of GOD, 
 because to them incongruities are painful and 
 impossible. Again much more might be said. 
 But if a certain American dentist was approxi- 
 mately right in saying that we English are all 
 snobs, there is something for parents, at any rate, 
 to think quietly over, though the subject seems 
 at first sight merely material for fun. 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 223 
 
 One more instance and I have done. Bearing 
 in mind the fundamental requirement of the 
 case, that the child should see round him day 
 by day a home in which life is lived according to 
 a law higher than and wholly different from what 
 he knows of inclination and pleasure, what are 
 we to say of the following state of things ? The 
 father is a vigorous and successful man of business, 
 wherein he finds his energies become more and 
 more absorbed. Like most Englishmen, he 
 nourishes an unassailable conviction that the 
 very first thing he has to do is to do " his job." 
 Other people seem often to find attraction in 
 speculation, in building castles in the air, in 
 forwarding rather idealistic schemes for the 
 bettering of rather remote people ; but for 
 him " his job " is sufficient. It is true he gave 
 no great thought originally, nor did anybody, 
 to the previous question whether he was right in 
 choosing that job at all ; but now that he is in it, 
 he has no doubt whatever that his main work in 
 life is to do it. So he does it. Now business 
 to an alert, vigorous man is often interesting, 
 sometimes exciting, and he finds it more difficult 
 every year to give undivided attention to any- 
 thing else. Meantime its intricacy increases, so 
 that when he comes home in the evening he is 
 
224 HOME TRAINING [viii 
 
 unable, even if he tried, to tell his wife and 
 family anything about it which they can under- 
 stand. This work of his is now quite sundered 
 from his home, and all that his children know 
 about it is that it has to do with the making of 
 money — that when money is being plentifully 
 made their father is cheerful, and when some is 
 likely to be lost he comes home harassed and 
 mother tells them not to worry him with chatter 
 next morning at breakfast because " things are 
 going badly in the City." Or it may be that this 
 little difficulty does not exist because father has 
 to start too early for his business to allow him to 
 see his children at breakfast, and returns too late 
 in the evening, and perhaps often goes off on 
 visits for the week-end ; so that all they know 
 about him is that they are bound to respect and 
 honour and obey him, and that with all possible 
 diligence he is making money. Meantime the 
 mother, whose face betrays the same anxiety or 
 relief according as the last financial venture is 
 prospering or not, conscientiously teaches the 
 children day by day the story of One who showed 
 quite consistently by His life and words that 
 money is almost nothing in comparison with the 
 doing of GOD'S will; that is, with maintaining 
 true peace of mind through manifold changes of 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 225 
 
 fortune, and growing to be more and more eager 
 in making every one around us happier. 
 
 Is it to be supposed by any sane-minded man 
 that those children start life with a fair prospect 
 of understanding the relative importance of 
 things, or of resolutely giving themselves to 
 the course of living which leads to love, joy, and 
 peace ? 
 
 By way of forestalling criticism, let me contem- 
 plate for a moment the contrary picture. John 
 Pritchet at sixteen years of age has learnt how to 
 make all matters of interest matters of prayer to 
 GOD. It never occurs to him when his uncle 
 offers him an opening in a thriving broker's firm 
 that he should accept it without thinking care- 
 fully whether it was the best line of life for him, 
 and thinking carefully always meant for him 
 prayer. So before long, and somehow with a 
 sense that he was doing the right thing, he entered 
 on the business, and gradually found that there 
 were in it many opportunities of guiding all sorts 
 of people in their financial affairs, of keeping 
 needy but excitable folk from rash ventures, and 
 helping the preoccupied with solid advice as to 
 their mundane concerns. Meantime his leisure 
 hours have been naturally more and more occu- 
 pied with matters of moment — chiefly local 
 
m6 home training [viii 
 
 concerns, undertaken with the object of liberating 
 poor hampered lives from distressing conditions 
 so that he might spread happiness everywhere. 
 Thus Pritchet gradually becomes a centre of 
 quiet beneficence, though a steady-going, fairly 
 prosperous business man. 
 
 Now what is the difference in his home life 
 from that of our friend just described ? 
 
 It is too great to be fairly portrayed. In the 
 first place, all his behaviour makes it clear that, 
 whatever takes place in his professional work, he 
 is profoundly content owing to his sense of being 
 engaged in the task which he was called into 
 the world to do. As a very young man he showed 
 less and less inclination to grumble — not, appa- 
 rently, because a grumbler fails to get other 
 people to do what he wants, true though this is, 
 but because he has always kept alive in himself 
 the feeling of service, not primarily to his fellow 
 men, though outwardly it takes for the most 
 part that form, but to GOD. And this in spite 
 of the fact that a good many things occur to 
 distress him ; indeed for a few years his income 
 was brought very low owing to some fraud prac- 
 tised upon him, never clearly explained. When 
 it became known, some of his City friends hurried 
 to his office to press their condolences upon him ; 
 
viii] TRAINING IN SINGLE-MINDEDNESS 227 
 
 but to their amazement they found him just as 
 he always had been, merely remarking that he 
 would have to live extremely quietly for some 
 years in order to educate his three boys, " but 
 none of us will be any the worse for that.'' Of 
 his friends one or two saw on what this self- 
 possession was based, but the remainder feared 
 he was a little mad. As to his wife and children, 
 though they had the highest respect for him 
 before, they now learnt that godliness not only 
 keeps a man from doing wrong and blundering, 
 hustling, and criticizing his neighbours, but that 
 it is simply the manifested power of the Holy 
 Spirit to bring immeasurable good out of appa- 
 rently irreparable evil. The effect on the children 
 has been that they have set before themselves a 
 standard of conduct which is not of this world. 
 
IX: PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 
 
 TT is possible that some who have followed 
 this discussion so far may be tempted to 
 believe that it does definitely lead to one con- 
 clusion, viz. that of all ways of saving and purifying 
 English society and rescuing the Empire from 
 decay, the most hopeful and most effective is the 
 consistent presentation of the Christian life in the 
 home. As a corollary from that conclusion, they 
 would advocate the practice of Christianity for 
 the benefit of the country. 
 
 It is on this state of mind that I feel bound to 
 offer some final remarks. 
 
 With regard to the similar problem in France, 
 it has been stated that numbers of the most 
 patriotic of the young men to-day are committing 
 themselves to the guidance of the Church, not 
 because they have come to believe more than the 
 last generation believed of Catholic doctrine, but 
 because they are staggered at the spectacle of their 
 country sinking into the abyss from general cyni- 
 cism and a too rampant questioning of principles. 
 
 In the conviction that the only cure is the re- 
 
 228 
 
ix] PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 229 
 
 establishment of ecclesiastical discipline, the 
 patriots are now ardent Catholics who abstain 
 from speculation and give themselves to such 
 pursuits as a military career, aviation, &c. This 
 movement is supported by two organs of the 
 Press, one of which falls in v^th the tone of the 
 young men and confines itself to patriotism and 
 practical affairs, while the other argues in favour 
 of Catholic dogma. This state of things reminds 
 us of de Tocqueville's impressive remark that his 
 country's vocation was to make experiments for 
 the rest of Europe. The experiment now being 
 made is, I believe, novel in its extent and in its 
 quasi-nsLtiomii character. It is an attempt to use 
 religion for the support of patriotism ; or rather, 
 to obey GOD because to do so is beneficial to 
 man. The question which is at stake is whether 
 religion can thrive under such conditions ; 
 whether its vitality does not wholly depend on 
 its being practised and fostered and handed on 
 solely for its own sake. If, as I decidedly believe, 
 any ulterior motive for the supporting or preach- 
 ing of Christianity must sooner or later undermine 
 it altogether, it is clear that we in England may 
 be inclined to make a disastrous mistake. It 
 is anyhow a very common experience to hear 
 religious practices advocated because they will 
 
230 HOME TRAINING [ix 
 
 make this world a better place to live in ; they 
 will pacify the labour unrest, or restore the 
 declining birth-rate. The point is of capital 
 importance and demands a paragraph or two. 
 
 Are we Christians in order to benefit men : or 
 do we benefit men because we are Christians ? 
 The first answer comes from the Lord's Prayer. 
 Many people are like Talleyrand, not doctrinal 
 Christians, yet inclined to repeat that prayer on 
 their death-beds. There is something in it 
 which corresponds to our deepest sense of our 
 relation to GOD. But it is often overlooked that 
 the leading petitions concern His glory, not 
 the benefit of men. Moreover, if the message 
 and claim of Christianity are calmly considered, 
 it will be felt, I am sure, that normally there 
 must be a priority of one of the divisions of the 
 religious life to the other. A knowledge, however 
 rudimentary, of the love of GOD must come before 
 the fulfilling of His will in practical life, else the 
 latter will fail for want of discernment and motive. 
 The little child whom we are bidden to copy is 
 not expected to obey till he has learnt to love his 
 parent, and so dutifulness is not the source of 
 gratitude but its offspring. Thus our Lord's 
 work may be summed up shortly in this way : 
 He began by reminding men of their ideal 
 
ix] PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 231 
 
 (Repent ye) and announcing that something in 
 relation to that ideal, corporate and spiritual in 
 its essence, was to be found. (The Kingdom of 
 Heaven is at hand.) Then followed the teaching 
 and healing of the multitudes and the choosing 
 of the Apostles : the teaching being an insistence 
 on the Fatherhood of GOD and all that that 
 implies in ordinary life ; the Apostles being 
 trained to carry this message abroad and let it 
 spread to all men. Then the Saviour lived out 
 His principles, showing what they involved of 
 triumph over uttermost suffering and death itself. 
 Thus the message is news of GOD 's attributes ; 
 the claim is that our life here should be a response 
 to the good news, made in a spirit of thankfulness, 
 trust, courage, and large-hearted love. Unless 
 this perspective of Christianity is utterly wrong, 
 it warns us against confusing the effects of 
 obedience with its motive, and putting obedience 
 before thankfulness. The child first discovers he 
 is loved ; then returns the love : and in doing so 
 gladly gives his obedience, for a long time without 
 a thought as to whether that obedience is good 
 for him and for others, or not. So when the 
 modern Christian urges his countrymen to 
 practise Christianity because it is salutary for 
 the country and a tonic for children's characters, 
 
232 HOME TRAINING [ix 
 
 he is reversing the order observed by the New 
 Testament throughout, and by every child in a 
 well-ordered home. 
 
 Thus parents who are sincerely anxious for a 
 child's highest welfare are called upon, first, to 
 establish their own relation of gratitude to GOD, 
 through Christ ; secondly, to enable him to do 
 the same, confident that the results will be the 
 strengthening and uplifting of that ineffable thing 
 which they have been allowed to transmit to him 
 and which we call his soul. Only so can we 
 reasonably hope that against all the various spells 
 of desire his heart will be " established and will 
 not shrink." 
 
 Having done that, our next duty is to leave the 
 character to follow its own bent, knowing that 
 there is a positive gain in the negative policy of 
 non-interference when not foolishly pursued. 
 It leaves the confidence in us which was planted 
 in the mind of the child unweakened for the 
 years that are coming. But there is much more in 
 it than this, and here we touch upon the point of 
 contact between the fear of GOD and a common- 
 sense home-training. People are more anxious 
 to-day about their children than they were, and, 
 like all anxiety, this particular kind often issues 
 in fussiness and bootless meddling. 
 
ix] PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 233 
 
 But what we call meddling is not only bootless, 
 but plainly and positively mischievous in that it 
 disparages the central message with which parents 
 are charged on each child's behalf. For him we 
 embody a higher rule of life than inclination, 
 viz. that true happiness lies in obedience to the 
 will of the unseen Being who has revealed enough 
 of Himself, His being and His attributes and His 
 love to show us what that will is. But even 
 as so worded the message is too abstract for 
 the child's mind : it can only be conveyed 
 through the personal relation in which the parents 
 stand to him. If that relation is marred by their 
 constraining the growing character into their 
 own groove by a too-watchful repression, by 
 needless harangues, by over-readiness to show him 
 where he is wrong, the result is that the Divine 
 rule of life comes to him clothed in the garb of a 
 nuisance. We often forget too that he has not 
 the wherewithal to check this impression. If 
 goodness to him is mainly associated with inter- 
 ference with his freedom, he is bound to grow into 
 the idea that GOD is a hard taskmaster, and on 
 that idea is easily built the grim unsightly super- 
 structure called Pharisaism. Or, perhaps more 
 likely, associating as he must the idea of GOD 
 with the curtailment of his self-development. 
 
234 HOME TRAINING [ix 
 
 he finds that idea — the only one he has — in 
 startHng conflict with another which is prior to 
 it in time and more deeply rooted, viz. that of 
 the expansion of his own nature, or, as we put it, 
 the fulfilment of the law of his own being, the 
 living of a natural spontaneous life. 
 
 Here, in short, we come upon a fact deserving 
 of close attention on the part of parents who are 
 inclined to be anxious. The careless and all who 
 are disposed by temperament to let things take 
 their course are perhaps already convinced of its 
 truth. But to the anxious businesslike parent, 
 the man who has learnt in his profession that 
 when evils exist it is his duty to extirpate them, 
 it is a vitally grave matter that the best-inten- 
 tioned check on the child's spontaneous activity 
 may be to him merely a poisoning of his idea of 
 GOD'S will. Somehow we must learn that the 
 Truth will make us free. That means that if 
 truth is fairly presented to the child it will only 
 for a time give him the impression of a needless 
 interference. At such an age as ten, for instance, 
 experience ought to have taught him that when 
 his father forbids him a gun, or a lawn tennis 
 party, or a help of lobster salad, it means not less 
 but greater freedom in the long run ; that what- 
 ever the reasons for the prohibition may be, he 
 
IX] PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 235 
 
 will ultimately learn that they were good in that 
 they were concerned with furthering his happiness, 
 not with making " Jack a dull boy.'' Whereas, if 
 this is not so, it is necessary to remember that 
 we are introducing a contradiction into his mind 
 concerning the deepest things about which he 
 knows something : the divine will and his own 
 liberty. This is the explanation of the plain fact 
 that in all really successful instances of home- 
 training parental interference has apparently been 
 rare rather than the reverse. But if rare, it has 
 only been successful when the true relation of 
 the child to GOD has been first implanted.* 
 
 There is one corollary of a practical character 
 vdth which I v^U conclude. 
 
 If the above estimate of the dominating 
 influence of the early training is not wholly 
 
 * Evidence for the broad truth of this generalization can be 
 culled by observation and from novels. One lately out, and 
 much discussed, comes to our aid in this matter. I refrain from 
 naming it for fear of being quoted as a whole-hearted admirer 
 of the work ; the truth being that it is marred throughout by 
 the writer's obsession with sexual problems, and in places it is 
 nauseating. But it shows a grasp of some principles of training. 
 The heroine is born with an unusually vigorous craving after 
 self-assertion, self-development, and hence shows a fine rebellious- 
 ness against interference. But in the home no deep principle 
 of life is taught either by precept or example. Consequently her 
 life is a random search for gratification amid the most risky 
 surroundings, and the picture is singularly vivid, often repellent, 
 but in the main undoubtedly true. Like many modern novelists, 
 
236 HOME TRAINING [ix 
 
 wrong, if, that is, it may be truly conceived of 
 as the normally deciding factor in character- 
 building, then plainly the most hopeful line for 
 social reformers to take is to restore and re- 
 invigorate the general idea of the English home. 
 It is to be feared that among the multitudinous 
 parents of elementary school children the notion 
 of a home-life as a blending of discipline and 
 unshakable love has almost wholly disappeared : 
 that among many other sections of society it is 
 held to in theory, but in practice is grievously 
 traversed and flouted because the thought of the 
 ever-observant, ever-learning child has been 
 faint ; his share in the matter has been forgotten : 
 and that while we have been imagining ourselves 
 worthy of respect we have been giving him stones 
 for bread : and instead of being guided into the 
 Truth that makes free, he has been dulled and 
 bewildered by a blurred picture of GOD — that 
 is, by a muddled interpretation of life. 
 
 If this is so, there is something to be done. 
 
 the writer has a gift for portraying decay, not to say putrefaction, 
 but seems singularly ignorant of the processes of renewal. Hence 
 the reader's hope for some encouragement in his view of life is 
 almost starved. But there are two true details on which he 
 should fasten his attention. The ballet girl is saved from the 
 uttermost abyss by two influences — one the recollection that her 
 mother once stood firm against temptation ; the other, the 
 winsomeness of her infant child. 
 
ix] PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 237 
 
 We are being guided into more rational action 
 while we strive to make our countrymen happier : 
 for, while not ceasing to collect statistics, to make 
 practical experiments, to recast and readjust our 
 social fabric, it is required of us that we should 
 give the best of our thought and energy to that 
 department of life from which all that is quicken- 
 ing, as well as all that is degrading and awry, 
 ultimately proceeds. For instance, nothing could 
 be apparently more necessary than rational action 
 in settling the relations of Labour and Capital : 
 but consider how far more manageable this 
 problem would be if a larger number of parents 
 were stirred by a true sense of their responsibility 
 in being called upon to present to their children 
 the picture of a consistent and unselfish life. 
 Omitting all that may be imputed to ignorance 
 and muddle-headedness — about the prevention 
 of which in the home much might be said — the 
 really baffling fact is the huge number of men 
 who take it for granted that ease and affluence 
 are the most desirable things that men can hope 
 to secure. If this is a delusion — and in the bottom 
 of our hearts we all know it is — then the positive 
 truth must be taught ; and it can only be taught 
 hopefully in the homes. 
 
 But, I shall be told, this means that the mass 
 
238 HOME TRAINING [ix 
 
 of parents of all classes must be converted from 
 worldly to godly views of life before any good is 
 done. How quixotic ! How Utopian ! 
 
 If this criticism is to prevail, the country is 
 doomed. What I am contending for does not 
 mean that we are to sit still dreaming of a day in 
 the future when every slum-home will be a centre 
 of training in godliness ; nor need it mean that 
 every active man is to give his energies to nothing 
 but exhorting people to be good parents. But 
 it does mean that a good deal more attention 
 should be given to this problem than is now given. 
 The years pass by and swarms of children grow 
 into manhood with the Divine spark within them 
 quenched by the opinion that mundane goods 
 are the real goods and all else is flummery and 
 talk. There is no remedy for this evil except in 
 the homes. But there are thousands and thousands 
 of homes where the intentions of the parents are 
 on the whole good and the children really docile, 
 really ready to receive the truth of things and 
 the beginnings of the higher life, and yet the 
 opportunity is spoilt because the message is 
 muddled or withheld. 
 
 Meantime, till the right view of life, of its 
 desires and hopes and appetites, is imparted in 
 childhood, most of our practical endeavours are 
 
ix] PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 239 
 
 spoilt by selfishness. We toil to give the working 
 man a decent cottage and separate sleeping- 
 rooms, &c. Why does he ruin it by sub-letting and 
 living in piggishness as before ? Because in his 
 own sphere he is imitating all that he has under- 
 stood of the life of the rich and great, viz. the 
 gratification of ordinary desire. Or a society is 
 formed for some admirable object, great names 
 are collected, money comes in, a big meeting is 
 held, and a committee elected. Everything looks 
 promising at the start, but after a year or two the 
 attendance falls off because the shrewdest men on 
 the committee prefer to play golf or because they 
 come without any knowledge of the facts. The 
 thing dribbles along feebly and fitfully, its power 
 for good almost entirely spoilt because the people 
 who are running it still cling to the belief that 
 comfort and amusement come first in order of 
 desirability, and the lifting the lives of others 
 second or third. There is no way likely to be 
 successful of counteracting this natural opinion 
 except in the homes. 
 
 Similarly we quarrel unceasingly about the 
 religious education in our elementary schools, 
 forgetting that whatever it is it will be too weak 
 to counteract the endless evils of home-neglect. 
 If we diverted some of the energy now spent in 
 
240 HOME TRAINING [ix 
 
 sectarian quarrels to appealing to the natural love 
 of children in the parents, calling on them to 
 teach by practising the fear of GOD, the beginning 
 of wisdom, instead of grumbling because some 
 one else is better off ; to insist on obedience to 
 law and response to love, instead of alternating 
 roughness and neglect with more disastrous indul- 
 gence, there would be a lift in our school-training, 
 and even our platform wranglings might cease. 
 
 I am not able to suggest the machinery for 
 carrying this out : but not long ago I heard a 
 striking testimony from a schoolmistress who had 
 managed to get all the parents of a large school 
 of slum children to come together and listen 
 willingly to her earnest appeal for co-operation 
 and help. It looks as if some of the noble 
 unselfishness of those school teachers who now 
 devote themselves to old scholars' clubs and the 
 like would be profitably spent on making friends 
 with the best parents and gradually spreading 
 sound ideas in wider circles. Of course there are 
 difficulties ; but at least the teachers can appeal 
 to sound instincts which it takes a great deal of 
 vicious-mindedness wholly to kill. 
 
 But in the main, and as far as we can see, 
 progress depends on those who now instinctively 
 and unconsciously fashion the home-life so that 
 
ix] PERSPECTIVE AND FREEDOM 241 
 
 it becomes to the children a daily reminder of the 
 Divine Presence. That is to say, it is for them 
 to understand what they are doing and to pass 
 on the message to others who know it not. It is 
 said that there are many thousand homes in 
 which the parents' responsibility for the children 
 is almost dead ; and as long as that is the 
 case there is a rich mission-field on which any 
 true lover of his own kind can sow the seed of 
 life. 
 
 Those who know the work of the Mothers' Union 
 testify that when speakers are brought into contact 
 with the parents to whom home-life is a real 
 difiiculty, stifled, that is, by grinding necessities 
 and degrading sights and sounds, they yet can 
 appeal with confidence to the response of deep 
 natural instincts. For years and years, perhaps 
 always, there will be among us many other calls 
 to service of a wholly different sort. Schools 
 must aim at filling gaps which ought never to 
 have been left empty, and at fostering the seed 
 which perhaps has never been sown. If some- 
 times their work is blessed and the teachers are 
 tempted to believe that they have done the 
 unspeakable thing and given the child his first 
 feeling of GOD, let them beware of the self- 
 complacency which may spoil all their zeal, and 
 
 Q 
 
242 HOME TRAINING [ix 
 
 of the delusion which may be the beginning of a 
 life's undoing. 
 
 Now and again, it is true, the miracle seems 
 as if it happened in later years, and as if it 
 were wrought by the hands not of kinsfolk but 
 of strangers. Such may be the experience, not 
 only of teachers but of rescue workers, lec- 
 turers in men's clubs, even by labour exchanges. 
 But I cannot believe that the call to service which 
 is pealing louder and stronger throughout our 
 land is telling us that the planting of the Divine 
 thing and the first hint of the sacrifice of self are 
 normally to be the concern of those who only help 
 adolescence or later life. These things tell of the 
 achievement of the father and mother in the home : 
 they are its accompaniment and its crown. 
 
 PRINTED AT 
 
 THE BALLANTYNE PRESS 
 
 LONDON 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed. 
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