We have tried to set forth the Lutheran idea of a Christian home.  In such a home, called, “a Church in the House,” all ought to be Christians.  The children having been given and consecrated to Christ in holy baptism, and having had His renewing and life-giving Grace imparted to them through that Sacrament, are to be kept in that relationship with Him.

The popular idea that they must of necessity, during the most impressible and important period of their existence, belong to the world, the flesh and the devil, is utterly foreign to the Lutheran, or Scriptural view.  That the child is fated, for a number of years, to be under the influence of evil, and to be permitted to “sow wild oats” before divine Grace can reach it, is certainly a principle that is contradictory to the whole scheme of salvation.  Yet this seems to be the idea of those parents who will not believe that God can reach and change the nature of a child, and bring it out of the state of nature into the state of Grace, and keep it in that Grace.  These people treat their children much as a farmer does his colts, letting them run wild for a while, and then violently breaking them in.

This pernicious idea has also obtained sway to an alarming extent in the Sunday-school system of our land.  The children in the Sunday-school, whether baptized or not, whether from Christian or Christless homes, are looked upon as outsiders, impenitent sinners, utter strangers to Christ and His Grace, until they experience such a marked change that they can tell exactly where and when and how they were converted.  Hence the popular idea that it is the object of the Sunday-school to convert the children.  This seems to be the underlying principle of both the American Sunday-school Union and American Tract Society; institutions otherwise so excellent that we are loth to say aught against either.  This idea pervades also the undenominational helps and comments of the International Lesson System.  This is the undertone of the great mass of undenominational Sunday-school hymnology.  It is the key-note of the County, State, National and International Sunday-school Conventions and Institutes.  So popular and wide-spread is this idea that many Lutheran pastors, Sunday-school teachers and workers have unconsciously imbibed it.  Even our Church papers, professing to be strictly confessional, often publish articles setting forth the idea that it is the object of the Sunday-school to Christianize the children.  As though the baptized children of the Church, the children of devout Christian parents, had been heathen, until Christianized by the Sunday-school!  Many of our Sunday-school constitutions also set it down as the object of the school to “lead the children to Christ,” or to “labor for their conversion.”

Now we believe that this idea is un-Scriptural and therefore un-Lutheran.  If what we have written in the preceding chapters on baptismal Grace, the baptismal covenant, and the possibility of keeping that covenant, is true, then this popular idea, set forth above, is false.  And vice versa, if this popular view is correct, then the whole Lutheran system of baptism, baptismal Grace, and the baptismal covenant, falls to the ground.