CHRISTIAN NURTURE
"It is significant of every great new birth in the world that it turns its face toward childhood, and looks into that image for the profoundest realization of its hopes and dreams. In the attitude of men toward childhood we may discover the near or far realization of that supreme hope and confidence with which the great head of the human family saw, in the vision of a child, the new heaven and the new earth. It was when his disciples were reasoning among themselves which of them should he the greatest, that Jesus took a child, and set him by him, and said unto them, ' Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me.' The reception of the Christ by men, from that day to this, has been marked by successive throes of humanity, and in each great movement there has been a new apprehension of childhood, a new recognition of the meaning involved in the pregnant words of the Saviour." - HORACE E. SCUDDER, Childhood in Literature and Art, p. 102.
"The theological substratum of Puritan morality denied to childhood any freedom, and kept the life of man in waiting upon the conscious turning of the soul to God. Hence childhood was a time of probation and suspense. It was wrong, to begin with, and was repressed in its nature until maturity should bring an active and conscious allegiance to God. Hence, also, parental anxiety was forever earnestly seeking to anticipate the maturity of age, and to secure for childhood that reasonable intellectual belief which it held to be essential to salvation; there followed often a replacement of free childhood by an abnormal development. In any event, the tendency of the system was to ignore childhood, to get rid of it as quickly as possible, and to make the State contain only self-conscious, determined citizens of the kingdom of heaven. There was, unwittingly, a reversal of the divine message, and it was said in effect to children, Except ye become as grown men and be converted, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." - Ibid., p. 128.
WE pass over the journey to Europe and other incidents of Bushnell's life in order to speak consecutively of the theological treatises which came one after another from his busy pen. The most important of all, "Christian Nurture," was published in 1846. It had been, however, ten years in preparation, having had its genesis in an article on "Revivals of Religion," published in 1836 in the "Christian Spectator." Its specific aim was to establish the proposition, "That the child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being otherwise." A very simple statement, but it shook New England theology to its foundations. The phrase, by its very form, challenged the extreme individualism into which the churches had lapsed, and recalled them to those organic relations between parents and children which are recognized in the historic churches, and which also had been recognized to a certain extent by the churches of New England before Edwards. As has happened before in theological controversy, the heresy with which Bushnell was charged in connection with this subject was in fact a return to an older orthodoxy. It is also a fact that those who were
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loudest in making the charge regarded themselves as upholders of this older orthodoxy. They identified Bushnell with the "New Light" party, but his book in the main fell within the lines of the older school to which the critics supposed that they belonged.
The critics were deceived by the modern tone in which Bushnell discussed the ancient thesis, and by the free use made of nature and social laws and relations. In this respect they were justified in their criticism. Bushnell was working in a world of which they had little knowledge and great suspicion. The fact that his thesis coincided with an older orthodoxy was a matter of chance; in reality it sprang out of the heart of nature. Christian experience had become non-natural. Bushnell, without excluding the agency of divine grace, brought it within the play of the natural relations of the family. It was here that he always took his first look at any subject, the nature of the matter in hand, - not waiting to ask what is the accepted view. It is this first-hand investigation that lends to all his work the charm of nature itself. It is also at times an occasion of suspicion, for the direct study of nature is the most difficult workmen ever undertake. Nature is so full of light that it dazzles and of shadows that it hides; it is so near that its proportions cannot easily be measured; it is elusive and runs quickly into mystery; it is so one with us that to see it is like the eye trying to see itself; its processes are long
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and its phases are many; it is the part of an immeasurable whole. Bushnell did not always escape these snares, yet few writers have looked on nature with a more single eye and more careful reflection.
It is not wholly unfortunate that in the study of Christian nurture he came to it without a thorough knowledge of its place in the history of the church. Whatever technical knowledge of it he had was pushed aside by his own necessary mental habit, and by the circumstances in which he found himself as a pastor. He was confronted by a situation, and at first did not trouble himself about the past. Hence, it was with half surprise that he found himself unfolding a more ancient orthodoxy. The fact became convenient as a defense against criticism, but it had slight weight in the elaboration of his thesis. The book was a criticism of revivalism, and incidentally of the prevalent theology which gave rise to it. Bushnell seldom attacked this theology as a whole, but only in detail and as it came in his way. He wrote as a pastor in conflict with a system, which hindered him in his work. He could not correlate the teaching of his pulpit with the prevailing method of propagating the life of the church. The "improvements" in theology had subordinated the "older orthodoxy" of the subject to a view of the will, which led to those special features of revivals that Bushnell most disliked. The will had not only been declared free, but was made to cover
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nearly the whole matter of becoming a Christian.1
The revival was an active epitome of the newer doctrine of the will. The emphasis laid upon it and the intense individualism it developed, while it favored strength of character, tended to obscure that field where character has its roots and is mainly determined; namely, the child. The people of New England have never been wanting in logic. It was this mental honesty in conforming the revival to the theology that at last weakened each, but the revival was the first to lose ground.
The question may arise why "the more ancient orthodoxy" with which Bushnell found himself in partial accord did not conflict with the practical treatment of children in the same way, as did the orthodoxy of his own day. The Puritan movement, in its early days, was chiefly a protest against corruptions. The place of children in the historic church was not in itself an offense in the eye of the Puritan, and it was protected by a doctrine of the covenants which brought the Abrahamic and Jewish institutions that pertained to
1 Mrs. Stowe, who ought to be classed as both an apologist and a critic of the New England theology, for few have understood and none have described it so well, in Oldtown Folks (vol. ii. p. 48, and many succeeding pages) has put this point in its best light: "The keynote of Mr. Avery's mind was 'the free agency of man.' Free agency was with him the universal solvent, the philosopher's stone in theology; every line in his sermons said to every human being,' You are free, and you are able.' And the great object was to intensify to its highest point, in every human being, the sense of individual, personal responsibility."
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them over into the Christian Church, - a relation that was sustained by ineradicable common sense. The covenants may have been made in Holland, as Professor Park said, but the covenant that embraces Abraham and his seed was true before the dikes of Holland were built. Baptism made the child a member of the church, and Christian training was expected to fulfill and perfect the relation so far as it could under the limitations of the theology.1
These were stringent and perplexing enough;
1 The relation of baptized children to the church has never been clearly defined by the Congregational churches of New England. The system, as embracing a theology and an ecclesiastical order, is at war with itself. The Cambridge Platform in 1648, under the still fresh reaction from the state church, allowed none to be members of the Church but such as gave evidence of spiritually renewed character. But as baptism was a requisite to citizenship in most of the colonies, It was found that the State was limiting its citizens beyond the bounds of safety. Hence the Synod of 1662 created the Half-way Covenant, which provided for the baptism of the children of those who held only a speculative faith; it was purely a measure of State, This device induced a reaction and a debate which may be traced throughout the pages of Cotton Mather's Magnalia. It reveals the fact that children were regarded as sustaining some organic relation to the church by virtue of baptism. Anabaptism also had begun to cast its shadow on the churches, inducing the necessity of making a contrast with it as to the relation of children to the church. The confusion of the subject was plainly recognized by Hopkins, who took what might be called a high church view of baptism, as Bushnell shows in his Argument for Christian Nurture, pp. 70, 71, a book now out of print. But the confusion lingers still, and will linger until the theory of the nature and I growth of the church taught by this treatise is accepted. It is needless to say that it will be a return to the historic view and practice.
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but as in the Ptolemaic astronomy an epicycle was added whenever a difficulty was encountered, so provisions were created out of the assumed purposes of God for relieving children from the full stress of absolute and unconditional election. Moreover, magical conceptions of the ordinance lingered long and overbore logic. (Consistent Calvinism allows no place in the church for children. Whether it be old or new, it breaks down over them, as Dr. Prentiss showed long ago.1 It cannot dispose of them in such a way as to preserve its consistency and command the assent of the human heart. As the heart makes the theologian, so it makes and unmakes theologies. Any system must at last go under that gives color even to an inference of the non-election of infants. If it endeavors to escape its inhumanity, it sinks under the weakness of its subterfuges. The later theology, by the very force of its logic, could not allow children to lie in the bosom of its church, as in the historical churches. Its inwrought individualism and the freedom, which more and more I put into the will, were carried into the domain of childhood. The revivalism known as the "Great Awakening " invaded the precincts of the church where the young reposed in the security of baptism and the parental pledge, and brought them forward as candidates for its process. In attacking revivalism, Bushnell stormed the weakest point of the theological citadel. It should not be
1 See page prefatory to next chapter.
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forgotten, however, that the moderate Calvinism, especially as taught at New Haven, in which the full freedom of the will was brought to the front and made the chief factor in the first experiences of the Christian life, was the source of great religious activity and usefulness. Upon the whole it was an advance, and almost a reform. But the emphasis it laid upon the will, taken in connection with other parts of the system, necessarily favored the revival, and, incidentally, its excesses.
The ground of Bushnell's contention lay first in the system itself, then in the form it had assumed, and lastly in the methods to which it gave rise. More than he himself was aware of, he departed from the Calvinistic standards, and pursued his way in a region where the heart and common sense prescribed both path and bounds. The fact which he first encountered in his survey of the current revival was that the experience of conversion presupposed adult years; and even the adult was called to pass through waters too deep for him. He must begin, not with a sense of personal sin, but of a lost condition through original sin in Adam; he must feel a guilt not first his own, but of the race; he is not a sinful child of the Father, but a child of wrath lying under the righteous condemnation of God; he is totally depraved, and already doomed to everlasting punishment. The whole matter was complicated by a doctrine of sovereign decrees, election and reprobation, ability or inability to repent, often a ter-
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ritorial distinction, held here and denied there; the inefficacy, or, as Hopkins and Emmons declared, the wickedness of prayer by the unregenerate; different kinds of grace and of love; the use or uselessness of means, and the order of the human and the divine activity in the process of conversion. Child and adult alike were, in one way or another, involved in this network of doctrine. Much of it was necessarily waived in the actual revival; some regard was paid to the personal equation; common sense could not be wholly expelled from people who were full of it. But seldom has an ideal been more fully carried out, and never was a pulpit truer to itself. The result was that the people were saturated with the doctrines as they happened to be held at the time and in the region.
Under such conceptions of religion the child had little place. Nature was fairly driven off from the field of its life, and it was made the battleground where ponderous doctrines marched up and down, trampling under foot its native growths, and using its eternal destiny as a factor in working out the glory of God. The child filled a passive part in the system; the adult was both passive and active. His experience was expected to tally with the system and run the round of its several members in a fixed order. First came the question of the possibility of non-election, by which all efforts were left to turn on chance. Then came the question of ability under a doctrine of total depravity, start-
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ing the puzzle of, "You can and you can't;" then the horrible question of the possibility of having grieved away the Holy Spirit, for two centuries the nightmare of the piety of New England; then the beclouded subtleties of the relation of the atonement to personal character, - all chiefly forensic. Still the experience was sharply individual. Each soul was isolated from every other, and almost from God, and left to wrestle alone for salvation.
The chief feature of this phase of religious experience was its unnaturalness. Great truths were involved in the system, and great results sprang out of them, but they were so defined and used that they almost lost the features of a gospel and wore the cast of a doom. It dealt with human nature only as depraved, and hence took little account of its varying characteristics or special needs, but loaded it with burdens that did not belong to it, and then required it to throw them off by processes that were drawn out of metaphysical subtleties buttressed by random quotations from Scripture.
Bushnell writes of it as follows: -
"It is a religion that begins explosively, raises high frames, carries little or no expansion, and, after the campaign is over, subsides into a torpor. Considered as a distinct era, introduced by Edwards, and extended and caricatured by his contemporaries, it has one great merit, and one great defect. The merit is that it displaced an era of dead formality, and brought in the demand of
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a truly supernatural experience. The defect is that it has cast a type of religious individualism, intense beyond any former example. It makes nothing of the family, and the church, and the organic powers God has constituted as vehicles of grace. It takes every man as if he had existed alone; presumes that he is unrecognized to God until he has undergone some sudden and explosive experience in adult years, or after the age of reason; demands that experience, and only when it is reached, allows the subject to be an heir of life. Then, on the other side, or that of the Spirit of God, the very act or ictus by which the change is wrought is isolated or individualized, so as to stand in no connection with any other of God's means or causes, an epiphany, in which God leaps from the stars, or some place above, to do a work apart from all system, or connection with his other works. Religion is thus a kind of transcendental matter, which belongs on the outside of life, and has no part in the laws by which life is organized, a miraculous epidemic, a fireball shot from the moon, something holy, because it is from God, but so extraordinary, so out of place, that it cannot suffer any vital connection with the ties, and causes, and forms, and habits, which constitute the frame of our history. Hence the desultory, hard, violent, and often extravagant or erratic character it manifests. Hence, in part, the dreary years of decay and darkness that interspaced our months of excitement and victory." (Christian Nurture, p. 187.)
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The full purpose of the treatise was to discuss the divine constitution of the family as the means of securing Christian character. It maintained that the unit of the church as well as of society is the family, and that in both it is organic; that character can be transmitted, and thus Christianity can be organized into the race and the trend of nature be made to set in that direction. The presumption should be that children may be trained into piety, and that it is not necessary that con-version should be awaited and secured under a system of revivalism that is without order as to time and cause.
The book consists of two parts, - "The Doc-trine" and "The Mode." The first defines the nature of Christian nurture; the second refers to practical methods of securing it. He introduces his thesis and debates it as follows: -
"That the child is to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being otherwise.
"In other words, the aim, effort, and expectation should be, not, as is commonly assumed, that the child is to grow up in sin, to be converted after he comes to a mature age; but that he is to open on the world as one that is spiritually renewed, not remembering the time when he went through a technical experience, but seeming rather to have loved what is good from his earliest years " (p. 10).
After asserting the possibility of "seeds of holy principle" and its signs in children, and of possible fault and mistake in parents, he says: -
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"You must not assume that we, in this age, are the best Christians that have ever lived, or most likely to produce all the fruits of piety. . . . We have some good points, in which we compare favorably with other Christians, and Christians of other times, but our style of piety is sadly deficient, in many respects, and that to such a degree that we have little cause for self-congratulation. With all our activity and boldness of movement, there is a certain hardness and rudeness, a want of sensibility to things that do not lie in action, which cannot be too much deplored, or too soon rectified. We hold a piety of conquest rather than of love, a kind of public piety, that is strenuous and fiery on great occasions, but wants the beauty of holiness, wants constancy, singleness of aim, loveliness, purity, richness, blamelessness, and if I may add another term not so immediately religious, but one that carries, by association, a thousand religious qualities wants domesticity of character; wants them, I mean, not as compared with the perfect standard of Christ, but as compared with other examples of piety that have been given in former times, and others that are given now.
"For some reason, we do not make a Christian atmosphere about us, - do not produce the conviction that we are living unto God " (pp. 11-14).
"This is the very idea of Christian education, that it begins with nurture or cultivation. And the intention is that the Christian life and spirit of the parents, which are in and by the Spirit of God,
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shall flow into the mind of the child, to blend with his incipient and half-formed exercises; that they shall thus beget their own good within him, their thoughts, opinions, faith, and love, which are to become a little more, and yet a little more, his own separate exercise, but still the same in character. The contrary assumption, that virtue must be the product of separate and absolutely independent choice, is pure assumption. As regards the measure of personal merit and demerit, it is doubtless true that every subject of God is to be responsible only for what is his own. But virtue still is rather a state of being than an act or series of acts; and if we look at the causes which induce or prepare such a state, the will of the per-son himself may have a part among these causes more or less important, and it works no absurdity to suppose that one may be even prepared to such a state, by causes prior to his own will; so that, when he sets off to act for himself, his struggle and duty may be rather to sustain and perfect the state begun, than to produce a new one. Certain it is that we are never, at any age, so independent as to be wholly out of the reach of organic laws, which affect our character.
"All society is organic, - the church, the state, the school, the family; and there is a spirit in each of these organisms, peculiar to itself, and more or less hostile, more or less favorable to religious character, and to some extent, at least, sovereign over the individual man. . . . The child is only
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more within the power of organic laws than we all are. We possess only a mixed individuality all our life long. A pure, separate, individual man, living wholly within, and from himself, is a mere fiction. I need not say that this view of an organic connection of character subsisting between parent and child lays a basis for notions of Christian education, far different from those which now prevail, under the cover of a merely fictitious and mischievous individualism " (p. 80).
"Something has undoubtedly been gained to modern theology, as a human science, by fixing the attention strongly upon the individual man, as a moral agent, immediately related to God, and responsible only for his own actions; at the same time there was a truth, an important truth, underlying the old doctrine of federal headship and original or imputed sin, though strangely misconceived, which we seem, in our one-sided speculations, to have quite lost sight of. And how can we ever attain to any right conception of organic duties, until we discover the reality of organic powers and relations? And how can we hope to set ourselves in harmony with the Scriptures, in regard to family nurture, or household baptism, or any other kindred subject, while our theories exclude, or overlook, precisely that which is the base of their teachings and appointments?" (p. 39).
His criticism of revivals, though close and searching, still has charity and breadth, for which we must refer the reader to pages 59 and onward.
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In chapter third, under a significant title,-- "The Ostrich Nurture," - the prevailing methods of religious education are discussed, and especially the claim that children should be left to grow up in a spontaneous way, and to "generate their own principles." He also criticises an over-use of " free moral agency, by which the distinction between manhood and childhood is slurred over," and parents are led to say, "Must not our children answer for themselves?" He protests also against "notions of conversion that are mechanical," and against drilling children "into all the constraints, separated from all the hopes and liberties of religion," thus making "their nurture a nurture of despair," and a source of "fixed aversion to religion." He again protests against bringing up children in expectation of revival seasons, and on the other hand against "a mere ethical nurture" that neglects the God-ward side. This strenuous chapter closes with a tender vindication of the claim that as Christ is the Saviour of children, they have an inherent right to a place in his church, which is to give character to their nurture.
In the fourth chapter - perhaps the weightiest - the "organic unity" of the family is discussed. He repudiates again the excessive individualism of the day: -
"The state, the church, the family, have ceased to be regarded as such, according to their proper idea, and become mere collections of units. A national life, a church life, a family life, is no
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longer conceived, or perhaps conceivable, by many. Instead of being wrought in together and penetrated, to some extent, by historic laws and forces common to all the members, we only seem to lie as seeds piled together, without any terms of connection, save the accident of proximity, or the fact that we all belong to the heap. And thus the three great forms of organic existence, which God has appointed for the race, are in fact lost out of mental recognition " (p. 91).
He claims for the family a power that is more than influence, springing from "organic causes," which act unconsciously prior "to the age of rational choice," yet formatively on character. He defends his position by a series of arguments which now need no defense, but deserve attention on account of their practical value. In these pages he anticipates much that is being said on heredity as an element in evolution, and on sub-consciousness as treated by the new psychology. The questions of original sin and federal headship are inevitably involved, and are accepted as containing truths, but rather on natural than on theological grounds.1
But he puts these doctrines that spring out of
1 In the numerous criticisms, which followed this treatise, none is abler and more generous than that of Professor C. Hodge, in the Princeton Review, 1847. He agrees, with hut slight dissent, in Bushnell's treatment of the organic nature of the church and the practical inferences drawn from it, hut disagrees with his views of conversion as leaning towards mere naturalism. They were both farther apart and nearer than either knew; the next half-century might have brought them to see eye to eye.
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"organic unity" to a new use, making them tributary to grace as well as to evil.
"That an engine of so great power should be passed by, when every other law and object in the universe is appropriated and wielded as an instrument of grace, and that in a movement for the redemption of the race, is inconceivable. The conclusion thus reached does not carry us, indeed, to the certain inference that the organic unity of the family will avail to set forth every child of Christian parents in a Christian life. But if we consider the tremendous power it has, as an instrument of evil, how far short of such an opinion does it leave us, when computing the reach of its power as an instrument of grace?" (p. 111).
After taking pains to avoid what he deems the superstition of baptismal regeneration, he finds the reason for the ceremony in the "organic unity" of the parents with the child, who "is taken to be regenerate, presumptively on the ground of his known connection with the parents' character, and the divine or church life, which is the life of that character." This undoubtedly is the interpretation that reason and charity require us to put on the rite as it exists in the historical churches. Bushnell cherished an invincible dislike to the Church of Rome, and it is a sign of his mental honesty that he could come so near to one of its central features without stronger aversion.
In the last chapter of the first part he brings his plea for Christian nurture to a conclusion by
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striving to show that the church is to possess the world through "the out-populating power of the Christian stock." The chapter is a characteristic mingling of spirituality and naturalism, each running into the other even as they coexisted in his thought. "Wherever else he looked, he always had an eye open to nature. His argument is keen, comprehensive, and well buttressed by Scripture, but there is an excess of a priori speculation, and a somewhat too easy dealing with questions about which little was known at that time and hardly more at present. But within certain limits his contention has weight, and there is no doubt that it has enough of unquestioned truth to render it of immense importance, both speculatively and practically. It is along such lines that thought now runs.
In the second part, which pertains to mode of Christian nurture, the treatise loses its theological and disputative character, and wears a psychological cast. But these characteristics sink out of sight under its overwhelming practicality. With some slight editing, it might again be made a handbook on Christian training. When first published, it was needed to correct false methods of Christian nurture; today, it is needed to supply a lack, and to stimulate thought in right directions. The first chapter of part second discusses the question, "When and where, at what point, and how early, does the office of a genuine nurture begin?" Little could be added today to the force of his
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discussion except stronger emphasis. Starting with "a kind of ante-natal nurture," he asserts that "the nurture of the soul and character is to begin just where the nurture of the body begins," and then makes the distinction, now so prominent in pedagogic studies, between "the age of impressions and the age of tuitional influences." He sharpens the distinction by connecting the former with "the will of the parent," and so proposes the way for a full examination of the reach arid power of "early impressions;" and concludes by saying that "more is done, or lost by neglect of doing, on a child's immortality in the first three years of his life than in all his years of discipline after-ward." The remaining chapters refer to "Parental Qualifications," "Family Government," "Holidays and Sundays," "Family Prayers," and kindred topics, with a mingled breadth, subtlety, strenuousness, common sense, and spirituality that put it at the head of all treatises of the kind. Now and then it may be slightly out of date in respect to scientific accuracy, but even here it is oftener prophetic than incorrect. The heavy belaboring of the revival system is no longer much needed, but the main body of the book is one of the richest treasures in religious pedagogies, which this century can offer to the next. Whatever theology prevails in the future, this treatise represents a standing need of humanity, and its lessons are so grounded in eternal principles and unalterable facts that they will always be timely, while its
form should make it a classic. In its theological significance it is a rejection of an individualistic theory of the church, and, incidentally, of its method of growth, and a return to the corporate theory of growth by nurture.
"We cannot better close this chapter than by quoting from a letter written to one of his children, as showing how his thought and the yearning love of his heart sustained each other. His treatise carried in it the life of his life: -
"You have been religiously educated, and you are come now to an age when you must begin to be more responsible to yourself. Our prayer for you is, every day, that God would impart his grace to you and draw you on to a full choice of himself, and perform the good work which we trust He has begun in you. This would complete our happiness in you. I would recommend to you now that you set before you, as a distinct object, the preparing yourself to make a profession of the Saviour. Make this a distinct object of thought and of prayer every day. And do not inquire so much what you are, whether truly a Christian in heart or not, as how you may come into the full Christian spirit, to become unselfish, to have a distinct and abiding love to Christ. Unite yourself to Christ for life, and try to receive his beautiful and loving spirit. You will find much darkness in you, but Christ will give you light. Your sins will trouble you, but Christ will take away your sins and give you peace. Pray God, also, to give
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you his spirit, and do not doubt that his spirit will help you through all difficulties. In all your duties and studies, endeavor to do them for God, and so as to please Him. Make this, too, your pleasure, for assuredly it will be the highest pleasure. It may not so appear at first, but it will be so very soon. Nothing, you will see in a moment, can yield so sweet a pleasure as the love and pursuit of excellence, especially that excellence which consists in a good and right heart before God. And you will be more likely to love this work and have success in it, if you set before you some fixed object, such as I have proposed.
"We gave you to God in your childhood, and now it belongs to you to thank God for the good we have sought to do for you, and try to fulfill our kindness by assuming for yourself what we promised for you."