The general conversation of the family group has more to do with character development in children than we are likely to realize, and the table is peculiarly the opportunity for general conversation.  Here, most of all, we need to watch its character and consider its teaching effects.  Where father scolds or mother complains the children grow fretful and quarrelsome.  Where father spends the time in reciting the sharp dealing of the market or the political ring, where mother delights in dilating on the tinsel splendors of her social rivalries, they teach the children that life’s object is either gain at any cost or social glory.  But it is just as easy to do precisely the opposite, to speak of the pleasures found in simpler ways, to glory in goodness and kindness, and to teach, by relating the worthy things of the day, the worth of love and truth and high ideals.  The news of the day may be discussed so as to make this world a game of grab, inviting youth to cast conscience and honor to the winds and to plunge into the greedy struggle, or so as to make each day a book of beautiful pictures of life’s best pleasures and enduring prizes.

Sec. 2.  DIRECTING TABLE-TALK

But table-talk, helpful, cheerful, and educative, does not occur by accident.  It comes, first, from our own constant and habitual thought of the meals in social and spiritual, as well as in physical, terms.  And it reaches its possibilities as we endeavor to create and direct the kind of conversation that is desired.  “Let all your speech be seasoned with salt,” wrote the apostle, and we might add, let your salt be seasoned with good speech.  That is the quality we must seek, the seasoning of healthful, saving, and not insipid, speech.

One of the great advantages of “grace before meat” lies in this:  it gives a tone to the occasion.  Its chief meaning is surely that we remind ourselves of the ever-present guest who is also the giver of all good.  Where the grace is not a perfunctory act, but rather the welcoming of such a guest, the meal has started on a high level.  We cannot do better than so to act and speak as those who take the divine presence for granted.  We need not preach about it; we need only to assume it and move on the level of that friendship.  Children will feel it; they will seek to answer to it, and will find pleasure in the very thought which they have perhaps never expressed in words.

The central idea of the grace suggests another means of helpful influences at the table, by bringing into our homes, for the meals, the friends whose lives will lift these younger ones.  It is worth everything to live even for an hour with good and broadening lives.  There are obligations to our guests to be considered, and their wishes should be consulted, but one always feels that children are being cheated when they are sent to eat at another table and deprived of the peculiar intimate touch with lives that bring the benefits of travel and experience.  Ask your own memory what some persons who ate at the table with you in childhood meant to you.