The interplay of lives in a family should be consciously directed by those who control them to the cultivation, to the bringing out of the best that is in them.  Education means the drawing out of the innate powers of the personality and the training of them for the highest purposes.  It is the deliberate direction of personal powers to the highest ends, the discipline of them for the performance of those ends.  The life of a child should be shaped with reference to its final destiny from the moment of its birth.  It should be surrounded with an atmosphere of prayer and charity which would be the natural atmosphere in which it would expand as it grows, and in terms of which it would learn to express itself as soon as it reaches sufficient maturity to express itself at all.  It should become familiar with spiritual language and modes of action, and meet nothing that is inharmonious with these.  But we know that the education of the Christian child is commonly the opposite of all this.  It learns little that is spiritual.  When it comes to learn religion it is obviously a matter of small importance in the family life; if there is any expression of it at all, it is one that is crowded into corners and constantly swamped by other interests which are obviously felt to be of more importance.  Too often the spiritual state of the family may be summed up in the words of the small boy who condensed his observation of life into the axiom:  “Men and dogs do not go to Church.”  In such an atmosphere the child finds religion and morals reduced to a system of repression.  God becomes a man with a club constantly saying, Don’t!  He grows to think that he is a fairly virtuous person so long as he skilfully avoids the system of taboos wherewith he feels that life is surrounded, and fulfils the one positive family law of a religious nature, that he shall go to Sunday School until he is judged sufficiently mature to join the vast company of men and dogs.

Nothing very much can come of negatives.  Religion calls for positive expression; and it is not enough that the child shall find positive expression once a week in the church; he must find it every day in the week in the intimacy of the family.  He must find that the principles of life which are inculcated in the church are practiced by his father and his mother, his brother and his sister, or he will not take them seriously.  If he is conscious of virtue and religious practice as repression, a sort of tyranny practiced on a child by his elders, his notion of the liberty of adult life will quite naturally be freedom to break away from what is now forced upon him into the life of self-determination and indifference to things spiritual that characterises the adult circle with which he is familiar.