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Charlotte Mason in Modern English
Charlotte Mason's ideas are too important not to be understood and implemented in the 21st century, but her Victorian style of writing sometimes prevents parents from attempting to read her books. This is an imperfect attempt to make Charlotte's words accessible to modern parents. You may read these, print them out, share them freely--but they are copyrighted to me, so please don't post or publish them without asking.
~L. N. Laurio
pg 92
Chapter 10 - Bible Lessons: Parents as Instructors in
Religion
In education, 'English history has been reduced to nothing more than a
card game. The problems of mathematics have been reduced to nothing
more than puzzles and riddles. We're just one step away from teaching
the Apostolic Creed and the Ten Commandments in the same way. There
won't be any more need for the serious face, deliberate tone of
reciting, and devout attention that used to be required of our
children.' --Waverly
Sunday
Schools are Necessary
Parents turning their children's religious education over to Sunday
Schools is as inexcusable as sending them out to eat at public soup
kitchens. Those of us in England aren't guilty of this particular item.
Here, our Sunday Schools are only used by parents who are so
over-worked and uneducated that they're willing to let more educated
classes of people teach their children religion. In other words, Sunday
School is a necessary evil of our day in response to parents who are
too over-committed and burdened to take care of their first priority.
And this should be the purpose of Sunday Schools: those
pg 93
parents who can should teach their children at home on Sundays, and
substitutes should step in on behalf those children whose parents can't
teach them.
But
Educated Parents Should Teach Their Own Children Religion: One Result
of the Parents' Union in Australia
With this purpose in view, Rev. E. Jackson, originally from Sydney, has
gone to work in Antipodes. It never seems to occur to him that children
from the upper and middle classes shouldn't have definite and regular
instruction in religion from their earliest days. He simply says that
they should be taught at home by their parents, not at Sunday School.
The main objective of his church-related Parents' Union is to assist
parents in teaching their own children. Here are some of the rules:
1. The Union's purpose is to unite, strengthen and help parents train
their own children.
2. By joining, members commit to supervising the education of their
children, and to encouraging other parents to take responsibility for
the training of their own children.
3. Lesson outlines will be provided every month to each family in the
Parents' Union.
4. Members must bring their children to the monthly religious class and
sit with them.
The lesson outlines are probably just to make sure that lessons are
taking place at home on Sundays, like they had previously been done at
Sunday School with teachers.
It seems to be assumed that if parents from every social class will
take
on their appropriate duties of teaching religion,
pg 94
Sunday School can be dropped. Instead of teaching Sunday School
classes, church workers can make sure that the specific work is being
done at home every month by leading question/answer catechism classes.
This plan seems promising. Nothing strengthens family bonds more than
children learning about religion from their own parents, and growing up
in a church that watches over your progress from infancy until beyond
confirmation, and into adulthood, will provide the right atmosphere for
the church community.
Parents
Are Suitable Teachers
It's true that there are individual churches and even entire
denominations that take hold of children from infancy to adulthood,
using pastors, teachers and class leaders to teach them. Some parents
appreciate having their children learn the most serious part of their
religious teaching at the hands of outsiders. What seems worth
imitating in this Australian movement is that the parents themselves
are recognized as suitable to teach their children the best things, and
they're encouraged to acknowledge some responsibility to the Church as
to what they teach.
One
Committee's Report on the Religious Education of the Upper and Middle
Classes
Are we so good at these things that we can't learn some tips from those
around us? Some of us may still remember that in May, 1889, a Committee
of Laymen in Canterbury was appointed to analyze the religious
education of the upper and middle
pg 95
classes. [See 'Report of the Committee of the House of Laymen for the
Province of Canterbury on the Duty of the church with regard to the
Religious Education of the Upper and Middle Classes.'--Nat. Soc.
Depository, Westminster.] The Committee thought that they might get a
good perspective by looking at how much religious knowledge boys had
when they first started school. They sent a questionnaire to 62 head
teachers, and most of them responded. From their replies, the Committee
concluded that, 'for the most part, the education that boys get before
school is below what we expected, and even the current low standard is
declining. The main cause for this deterioration is a lack of religious
teaching at home.'
Why
do Parents Neglect this Duty?
This is a serious matter for all of us. Although the investigation was
done by Churchmen, it naturally examined boys of various denominations
in secular boarding schools and public schools. Religious
schools were examined with a separate inquiry. There were undoubtedly
some beautiful exceptions from children brought up in quiet homes in
the nurture and admonition of the Lord. But if it's true, as many of us
fear, that middle and upper class parents tend to let their children's
religious education take care of itself, then it's worth our while to
ask Why? and What's the remedy? Many reasons have been suggested:
social commitments, the restless nature of our children, their lack of
patience for religious
pg 96
teaching, and many other reasons. But these reasons aren't the whole
story. Generally, parents are very eager to fulfill their
parenting responsibilities. There's probably never been a generation
more sincere and conscientious than today's young parents. Yet, these
thoughtful parents are neglecting to teach their children the one thing
that should come before everything else.
Scripture
is Being Discredited
The fact is, our religious life has already suffered, and sooner or
later, the character of our country will suffer, because hostile
critics are trying to discredit the Bible. We correctly regard
the Bible as the entirety of our sacred texts. The only thing we have
to teach is what's in the Bible. But we don't go to the Bible with the
same confidence anymore. Our religion is fading into an emotional
sentiment that's not easy to pass on to the next generation. So we wait
until our children are old enough to feel those sentiments for
themselves. In the meantime, we give them enough aesthetic culture to
develop a need in their soul that will lead them to worship. The whole
foundation of liberal religious thought is miserably shaky. No wonder
so many of us hesitate to expose it to the challenge of a definite,
searching young mind. We're comfortable in the flimsy house of faith
we've
built. It vaguely resembles the strong old home that our souls used to
live in, and we cling to it with a fond attachment that the younger
generation might not understand.
'Miracles
Don't Happen'
So then, if our house of faith is flimsy, are we homeless? In one area
we are. We're exposed and
unsheltered in the area of the assumption that a brilliant novelist has
stated very blatantly: 'Miracles don't happen.' The educated mind is
more essentially logical than we think. If you remove the
pg 97
cornerstone of miracles, the whole arch of Christianity crumbles around
our heads. The
showy respect for the Person of Jesus, when separated from the miracles
that have been deemed as mythical, turns out to be nothing more than a
false sentiment for a concept made up in our own minds. Once miracles
are eliminated, the whole fabric of Christianity unravels. Not only
that, but what do we do with the old revelation of God as 'the Lord, a
God full of compassion and gracious'? Do we say, No, we'll keep this;
it's no miracle? Do we keep Christ's excellent Sermon on the
Mount and allow it to claim our allegiance for Christ? No, we
don't. Within that one Sermon, we learn to pray, to consider the lilies
of the field, the birds of the air, and to remember that the very hairs
of our head are numbered. This embodies the doctrine of personal
dealing, God's specific providence, which is the very essence of
miracles. If 'miracles don't happen,' then it's foolish and
presumptuous to pray and expect some faint disturbance of the course of
events that are fixed in place by natural law. An educated mind is
severely logical, although a deliberate effort can prevent us from
following our conclusions to the bitter end. Without miracles, what's
left? A God who can't possibly have personal dealings with you or me.
After all, such dealings would be a miracle. What's left is a world of
events so determined and certain that prayer becomes blasphemous. How
can we dare approach the Highest with requests that would be impossible
for Him to grant, if the nature of the world is so fixed?
Our
Concept of God Depends on Miracles
In a world without miracles, prayer is useless, and trust is
meaningless. But maybe we still have a use for God. We can still
admire, adore
pg 98
and worship in uttermost humility. But how? And what are we going to
adore? We can only know God through His attributes. He is a God of love
and a God of justice; full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger,
and abounding in mercy. But these attributes are only manifested and
recognized by action, when God acts towards us. How can God be gracious
and merciful unless He's bestowing grace and mercy on someone who needs
it? If you admit that grace and mercy are capable of modifying even the
slightest circumstance in a person's life, spiritual or physical, then
you've just admitted the existence of miracles. You've just admitted
that it's possible for God to act in ways outside the limits of the
inevitable laws that we recognize. If you refuse to allow for miracles,
then you remove the possibility that the Good Shepherd can be present
in our midst, and we're left alone, like orphans in a world that's
falling apart.
That's where the question of 'miracles' leads. We fail to recognize how
serious the issue really is. Yet we're fond of toying with the question
casually, with a smile and a shrug of our shoulders as if it was no big
deal, even sneering at the tale of the swine who ran violently off a
cliff because we know how dim-witted animals are--we can see with
our own eyes how different they are from us. But if we admit that
miracles might be possible, that a Personal God might be capable of
acting voluntarily, how can we put limits on what can or can't happen?
Natural
Law and Miracles
How long will we waver between two opinions, between law and testimony?
Let's be bold enough to entertain David
Hume's proposal, even if we consider it with some reserve. What if
it's true that 'no testimony is enough to prove a miracle, unless it's
more amazing that the testimony might be false than that the miracle
happened that
pg 99
it's claiming to prove.' Which is easier--to accept that Jesus rose
from death on the third day and went back to heaven, or to accept the
even more incredible theory that God doesn't exist, or that He isn't
the personal God who reveals His loving Personality to us? It's one or
the other, we can't have it both ways. Natural law, as we know it, has
nothing to do with these issues. I don't mean that God disregards His
own laws. I mean that our understanding of God's natural laws is so
finite and limited and shallow that we can't possibly be capable of
distinguishing whether an event that's different from what we normally
experience is an unusual exception, or a common occurrence of a law we
know nothing about. (Carlyle wrote, 'How well do we really understand
the laws of nature? How do we know that rising from the dead isn't a
violation of the laws of nature, but a confirmation of an even deeper
law, and the power of its spiritual reality has forced its influence on
the material world?')
We shouldn't brush aside the real discoveries we've gained from
Biblical criticism, even when they appear to cast doubt on Scripture.
It can
be an added benefit to our spiritual life to recognize that a miracle
is confirmed, not only by the Biblical record, but by the way it fits
with God's character. To put this divine truth in terms of the physical
world, we might say of a friend, 'He would never do such a thing!' or,
'Isn't that just like him!' When we test miracles against God's
character in this way, we see how unpretentious, simple, humble and
practical Jesus' miracles are. It's incredibly divine for Him--
'To have all power, and yet be as though He had none!'
Christ's
Miracles are So Appropriate
A mind that's filled with the the resonableness of the Gospel story
pg 100
in the New Testament and which has absorbed the more confusing,
broken rays of light that the Old Testament sheds on the Light of the
World, will be less tempted to entertain 'honest doubts.' Such doubting
is actually disloyal to the most intimate and sacred of all
relationships, even though it must be admitted that noble minds are
more likely to be plagued with such doubt. If we believe that faith
comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God, and that people are
established in the Christian faith depending on how they were taught in
childhood, then our question is, how can we make sure that children are
well-grounded in Scripture by their parents, and how can we make sure
that they pursue the study of religion with diligence, reverence, and
joy?
Paraphrased by L. N. Laurio
Please direct any comments or questions to me by emailing me at cmseries-owner at yahoogroups dot com.
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