6.  How would you promote community service in the family?

     7.  What are the dangers of unsocial and selfish lives growing in
     the home?

FOOTNOTES: 

[14] This chapter is, with the publisher’s kind permission, taken, with sundry minor changes, from the author’s pamphlet, The Home as a School for Social Living, published by the American Baptist Publication Society in the “Social Service Series.”

CHAPTER IX

THE CHILD’S IDEAL LIFE

The modern child is likely to miss one of the great character enrichings which his parents had, in that he is in danger of growing up entirely ignorant of the poetic setting of religious thought in historic and dignified hymns.  The great hymns have done more for religious thought and character than all the sermons that have ever been preached.  Even in the adult of the purely intellectual cast the hymn, aided by rhythm, music, repetition, and emotion, is likely to become a more permanent part of the mental substratum than any formal logical presentation of ideas.  How much more will this be the case with the child who feels more than he reasons, who delights in cadence and rhythm, and who loves a world of imagery!

Sec. 1.  SONG AND STORY

Very early life’s ideals are presented in poetic form; plays, school-life, love of country, friendships, all take or are given metric expression.  So, for children, hymns have a perfectly natural place.  The child sings as he plays, sings as he works, sings in school, and, as long as life and memory hold, these words of song will be his possession; in declining years, when eyes are failing and other interests may wane, fragments of childhood’s songs and youth’s poems will sing themselves over in his memory; while in the years between how often will some stanza or line spring into the focus of thought just at the moment when it can give brave and helpful direction!

Those years of facile memorization should be like the ant’s summer, a period of steady storing in mind of the world’s treasures of thought.  No man ever had too many good and beautiful thoughts in his memory.  Few have failed to recall with gratitude some apparently long-forgotten word of cheer, light, and inspiration stored in childhood.  The special virtue of the hymn, among all poetic forms of great thoughts, is that memory is strengthened by the music and the thought further idealized by it, while frequent repetition fixes it the more firmly and repetition in congregational song adds the high value of emotional association.