Holy Spirit, as an earnest of salvation, to ratify and confirm His own choice. Likewise they should piously promise, that if God will bestow on their child life and health, they will withdraw it from all worldly yanity and carnal corruptions, training it up piously for His glory. So Hannah in fervent prayer devoting her son Samuel to God, before and after conception, and after his birth, obtained a blessing for him. For it is not in the nature of the Divine mercy to repel from Himself that which is consecrated to Him in humility and fervor. On the contrary, if parents treat this matter with carelessness, God gives them disobedient children, that it may be obvious to the eye that those blessings are gratuitous and bestowed by Him alone.
7. The efficacious initiation of children into piety may be begun in the second year,[1] when reason, as a little lovely flower, begins to unfold itself and to distinguish things.[2] For then the tongue is loose, they begin to utter articulate words, their feet acquire strength, and they prepare themselves for running. This is now the most favorable opportunity to begin the exercises of piety; yet little by little; the steps by which this may be done I will now indicate.
8. First, when the elder children pray or sing before and after meals, it should be provided that the infant be accustomed to silence, to sit or stand quietly, to compose the hands and keep them so. Children may easily be accus-
- ↑ Rousseau delays religious instruction until the sixteenth or seventeenth year. “When the imagination has once seen God,” he says, “it is very rare that the understanding conceives Him.”
- ↑ “The faculty of reasoning,” says Locke, “seldom or never deceives those who trust to it.” Dr. G. Stanley Hall says: “Logic has a very high educational value as reason approaches its maturity, and may become a passion as early as the high school; but with young children the prime, if not the sole, question is to know what the soul is ripe and eager for.”
