Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XII THE RELIGIOUS LIMITATIONS OF CHILDREN The respective educational consequences of a theory of moral continuity in child growth and a theory of moral discontinuity. The view of child nature that has now been sketched is different from certain opinions that are widely held at the present moment. The last two chapters have shown that, though antisocial instincts are active in the early years, socially constructive ones also are present, and that even the particular instinct out of which spring the finest and most difficult things in social progress begins its functions in infancy. Here we found natural capacity for entering into the great and fundamental motives of the Christian religion, fatherhood and brotherhood, and therefore a natural basis for Christian education. If this view is well founded, there is no necessary break, in moral quality, between the life of an adult Christian and that of a child who receives Christian nurture. The necessary difference between them concerns their respective range of experience, firmness of habit, and extent of foresight. An adult who is already well trained knows better how to be kind to a dog, a baby, a tuberculous family, a foreigner, a laboring man, a capitalist, a wife. With this wider knowledge of human relations there goes, of course, the possibility of profounder emotional appreciation of the character of God. Moreover, the welltrained adult Christian has so many times resisted his unsocial instincts, and indulged his social ones, and he has so often experienced the joy of Christian fellowship, that habit forming has borne its fruit in the weakened power of some temptations, the actual extinction of others, and relative ease in carrying high impulses into effect. This difference...