Godly Upbringing of the Young.*

By REV. J. OSWALD DYKES, D.D., Regent Square Presbyterian Church, London. I FEEL acutely the difficulty of handling, in the closing minutes of the Conference, a subject so vast, upon which we could better spend the whole time of the Conference than a few moments now. I feel also the difficulty of calling your attention away from the distant fields to which the Conference has been turned to-night, to consider what lies so near us as our own firesides and homes. At the same time I remember how very honourable is the place which the Christianity of Scotland has taken in the past with respect to the attention it has paid to the upbringing, in the faith of the Lord Jesus, the children of Scottish parents. I recall what our country has owed to this, and how, from the fireside teaching in the Holy Bible and in the Shorter Catechism, strong, manly, calm Scottish piety developed itself in generations gone by—how, indeed, as our national poet sings

"From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs."

The days I have alluded to were days in which the training of Scottish youth, in the faith of Jesus and in the maxims of His holy Gospel, was comparatively an easy matter. So long as our population lived a primitive and simple home life, and had their homes scattered over the fields and straths of the South and North, and were not yet gathered together in vast hives of industry, it was comparatively easy to supplement the instruction of the Church by the more kindly and loving instruction of the home. But it seems to me we have passed into a state of society where this problem has become indefinitely more complicated and difficult, both as it affects the training of our own Christian boys and girls in our homes for self-preservation, and also the Christianizing of the children of the neglectful and irreligious. I would ask you to keep these two points distinct in your thoughts.

The teaching of the young is the most important agent by which the Church preserves the ground it has already won, and trains into a full intelligent membership in her communion those who have been born within her pale. It is also, I think, although that is not quite so extensively recognised, her most effective agent for extending herself and widening her influence upon generations, to follow by training those who are not yet her members. To take the first first, will you try to realize in your own thoughts for a moment how very large the percentage of the membership of our churches is which is gained by the simple process of the education of our own children. Then compare the numbers that are gained in adult life from the world outside the converts in matured years called out of the world; compare these in number with those who are added from month to month, and quarter to quarter, to the fellowship of the Church by the simple process of growth within, and you will see *An address delivered at the Evangelical Alliance Conference, in October, 1885.

that out of all proportion the Church draws the great bulk of her membership, in point of numbers, to say nothing of other matters, by the godly upbringing of the boys and girls who have the happiness to be born and grow up in her Christian families. That is a point to which the attention of the Church ought to be addressed with unrelaxing care; because, if anything should occur to make the training of the Christian home less effective in its results than it ought to be, you see at once that we are in danger of leakage, great in amount, beyond all experience, and in its quality dreadfully to be deplored. Not only are these members who are gained by the education of our own boys and girls the most numerous part of our membership; they are the part that may be expected to exhibit the highest intelligence, and the ripest type of Christian character; because they are the children, in many cases, of a long succession of Christian generations. Though grace is not hereditary, yet there are features of character matured in the individual by the grace which may be communicated from father to son. There may be a gentleness and purity of mind, a power of self-control, which are communicable by the laws of heredity. And when you have the descendants of a long line of Christian ancestors, you have materials laid, from the very foundation of being, for a type of Christian manhood and womanhood—a type far better than you have any right to hope or expect from those who by God's grace are snatched out of evil and vicious surroundings.

Am I wrong in saying that the changes which have passed upon society throughout this country within the memory of our fathers of the last generation, if not this one, have all tended to increase the difficulty of home training, so as to produce the result of a well-defined Christian faith and a well-formed Christian character in the young men and women of our families? There are two factors entering into this education of the young-two pivots on which their godly upbringing turns-the home the one, and the Church the other. I am far from thinking that these two have co-operated in the past as much as they ought to have done. I think the Church has not been so careful of her baptized junior members in the past as she should have been. I think she has not made so much provision for them in her public services as she ought to have done. I think she has not provided helps to parents on the discharge of their home duties, and in other ways assisted them as she might have done. I think there is room for more effective co-operation between the home and the Church in this matter. But there are two things which must be attended to on the part of the home and the Church respectively if they are to fulfil their work here. The one is, that the Christian home must be not only Christian in the best sense; pervaded, that is, by a bright, assured, and cheerful intelligence-not a morbid, not an ascetic piety; but it should be also homely and homelike. It should be a true home; it should be made a centre of education and a place of nurture, in which all the nature of the children not only in childhood, but in ladhood, girlhood, as they grow up into young manhood and maidenhood, shall find full development and scope. But if the home should, from any cause whatever, become less dear to the children as they grow up; if it should become less their home,-a place to which they seek and find themselves at home, then be sure that, no matter how godly the parents may be, the

children will not grow up imitating their example and imbibing their piety as we would wish them to do.

You and I, who live in the heart of great cities, know how numerous and attractive are those inducements which lead to the dissipation of home life, the spending of the evening hours by a portion, if not the whole, of the family away from home. May we not carry that a great deal too far? May we not be incurring danger because there are so many meetings, -some good, some more dissipating and relaxing in their tendency; but some so attractive that, night after night, this member of the household is away—here, there, and everywhere—and the head of the house is away at the claims of fashion or society, or other forms of enjoyment, so that the home is thus less a home than it ought to be? 1 utter this warning for the consideration of all Christian parents, especially with regard to those children who are no longer children, and who are at an age which should be carefully studied.

But, besides taking care that the Christian home should be truly homelike, we should take care also that the Christian Church should be a spiritual mother to her children, and furnish them with a spiritual home. This will not be done by the mere formal service of the Lord's day, or the sitting out of the formal prayer-meeting, at which a few are gathered together on a week night. There must be a great deal more in the Church to suit the tastes of the young people, and to find them occupation,—to form in them a deep interest in God's work, and so gather them together in the Church as well as around the fireside. The one is the natural, the other is the spiritual home to which their affections ought to cling. I believe it is by the union of these two, intelligently harmonizing, and gathering together their forces, that we shall best train up within our own Christian families that seed of God which shall give us a stronger and more robust Christian generation to come than that which we have now.

There is another remark I should like to make in this connection. I think that Christian parents, and the Church also, ought to remember, in dealing with the growing youth of our Christian families, that we are passing through an age of change, which, as regards its rapid and revolutionary character, few generations have had to live through since the world was. We live in an age of change, which specially affects religious questions. The word of suggestion I would utter is this,—the parents should be careful to remember, in their dealing with the youth of their families, that they are dealing with a new generation, and that the new generation, in times like this, cannot possibly be precisely the same as the old, even if it were desirable-I don't say it would be desirable. God is guiding the world forward, and I believe that the generations to follow will be better than those that have gone before. But if it were desirable -and of course those who take a strictly conservative view will think it is-it is not possible. They are the lads and maidens of a new age. They are growing up with its thoughts stirring their hearts, and its questions before their minds. Their faith is taking its form in order to be ready to do its work, as we in our form do our work. To attempt to force into the old mould, in all its details, the precise modes of conduct, the precise habits of thought, which have been traditional with us, only

ends in alienating the sympathies and driving away the intelligence of our young people from us.

I turn to the other side of the question-the value of Christian training, and modes of it for Church extension purposes; that is to say, for operating upon those who do not belong to Christian families. Here I think the right key-note to strike is this-that our hope lies with the next generation. I presume there are many here who have given much attention to work among the indifferent and godless classes of this great city (Glasgow), or of other cities similarly circumstanced. I think they will agree with me, that the success which attends all our most earnest and laborious mission work among the adults is comparatively slight. That is to say, the men and women of formed character, and habits, and modes of opinion, whom we succeed by the grace of God in drawing out of darkness into light, are units rather than hundreds or thousands. We gather them up one at a time, and God knows we gather too few. Well now, that is a slow process, and if we had nothing but that to look to, to create hope for the future, I should not be very hopeful. But I believe the most hopeful fact is this, that while we find it extremely difficult to get access to the adult population who are away from Church ordinances, and even when we do get access to them we find it difficult to change their habits of life and induce them to turn to the Church of God,-v -we have in our hands actually, almost to a single individual, the children of these very people. The working classes of this country, to a very large extent, -I know it is so in England, especially with the lower classes of working men and women, are so alienated from the Church, or from habits of Church attendance, that they are very seldom to be seen there, and it is with the greatest possible difficulty we can induce them to attend the mission service, or hear the Gospel in any form. That is a great fact, which staggers and perplexes us. Yet here is a countervailing factor on the other side, viz., that these men and women are not only willing that their children should go into our Sunday schools, but they send them there and offer them to us; they give them gladly to us, and seem anxious that they should come. They have no misgivings about the Sunday school teacher, whatever they may have as to the parson.

I venture to think that is a very large and significant fact at the present moment. It lays upon the Christian Church a very peculiar responsibility, to be careful as to how she uses this immense engine which God has put in her power, and which we may call her last weapon against the indifference and unbelief of these classes of society. It is not generally known, but I believe it to be a fact, according to the latest statistics which have been gathered together, that the number of children in the Sunday schools in England is at this moment larger than the whole number of scholars who are forced into your primary schools under the statute law. In other words, the State has not, by a compulsory Act, driven into the day-schools so many children as the parents, whose ungodliness and indifference we all lament, are actually pushing into our schools of their own accord. We ought to lay that to heart to this extent, that we make our school accommodation as extensive as we can, that we rise to the occasion, and have as many schools as possible.

But we ought to do more. We ought to try to make the schools as effective as we can for their purpose. There are two reasons why, I think, the style of the education in our Sunday schools should be improved, so far as it is possible for us with voluntary agents, who, of course, are busy during the week. First, the State, by the form which it has given to its Education Act, in England at any rate, and I presume it is something similar here, has so far declined the responsibility of giving distinctive Christian or religious teaching of itself, and has virtually left that in the hands of the Christian community-in the hands of the Churches of Christ throughout the land. So that we are by the whole nation actually invited to take up this work as we never did before. When education was left so much more than it is now to the day-school, the day-school teachers were supposed to teach religion in its dogmatic form, and the Church was able to say that religious instruction was given in the schools; but we cannot be sure of that now. Therefore the responsibility is laid upon the Christian community to care for the instruction of the young. Then, as to the best possible way of doing it, here is another consideration: You are having your children put into the schools for five working days of the week, where they are taught by teachers upon whom every care has been expended to train them for their work in the most recent modes of education. These teachers have been taught the science of education; they have been drilled in the art of education; and the whole machinery of the school is subjected to the most minute and careful investigation, in order to make it as perfect as possible. As the children are accustomed to order, they know good teaching when they get it. My contention is, that if they go to the Sunday school, and do not get good teaching, although they get teaching which is warm, loving, and full of the Spirit of Christ, still, if it is unlike what they get in the day-school in efficiency of method, the children will not come to care for the school so much, and will cease to respect the teacher. Therefore it seems to me imperative that the best intelligence of our Christian people and our Christian churches ought to be turned to this point-how we can raise the standard of educational efficiency in our Sunday schools.

Another point is this-it is confessed on all hands that there is a great lack of continuity between the average age at which children leave the Sunday school, and the average age at which they are expected to become communicants. They leave the Sunday school at about fourteen or fifteen. There are many, no doubt, who remain in the senior classes; but the great bulk drop off at that age, and they are not expected to become communicants until they are seventeen or eighteen. You therefore have a gap of four or five years, during which the school has lost them, and the Church has not gained them. The school cannot get them, the Church does not know how to win them. They consequently drop into this great gulf. Is that not the experience of all our Churches and Sunday schools? That is the point to which attention should be called. I shall not say anything beyond a passing word of earnest commendation of the most energetic effort, probably on the largest scale known anywhere, that has been made in Glasgow to solve that problem-by the Foundry Boys Society. I am happy to believe that great Society, which has enlisted so large an amount of valuable co-operation, has done very