"Life's Stages: Their Duties and Opportunities." By James Stark; Minister of Belmont Congregational Church. Aberdeen: 1889.
(1b.) But as if to show us that childhood is an integral part of that humanity of which Christ is the glorified embodiment, and also to impress us with the beauty of a holy and ideal childhood, we obtain one or two glimpses of the child Jesus. Those side-glances are a most helpful contribution to the general impression Christ makes upon the world. They show that the Divine One incarnate was the same being at one stage that He was in another; the birth, the youth, the manhood, correspond with each other; the only effect of time’s developments and changes being to make more striking the matchless consistency, the ineffable unity of His personality and character. He who in manhood was said to be “holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners,” was at birth “that holy thing.” He was also a child, unpolluted with the touch of sin. “And the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him.”
(1c.) In choosing “Life’s Stages” as the theme of this book, it is necessary that we should keep the Son of Man before us, under the manifold aspects of His history and character, as the ground and security of that regenerated humanity of which we should all desire to be examples. It is also fitting that we begin with the stage of childhood, not merely because that is humanity in its first development, but also for the reason that what is seen at the outset should be regarded, in some very important respects, as the criterion and pattern of all that is subsequently to appear. The child is the man beginning to be. He is more than that. The child is not the mere embryo of the man. The child in more than a poetical sense is the father of the man. He is the type of the man that is to be in the spirit he should cherish and the attitude he should take before the transcendently sublime facts of life. In wondering, pondering, revering, clinging, in simplicity and sincerity of heart, he should be a child at the end as at the beginning, emptied of the ideas but never of the spirit of the child.
(1d.) A human being is a many-sided unity. You cannot know perfectly what man is if you confine your attention to any particular period of his growth, as isolated from what goes before and after. All that he was and is and may become must be kept in view, if you would know the diversified capability and character which makes man. Just as you cannot know what humanity is by looking exclusively at man or woman, but must take the salient characteristics of both sexes into account: so neither can you know man or woman, as man and woman ought to be, unless, as Jesus did to the disciples, you set a little child before you. Just, too, as a man of full-orbed excellency exhibits that gentleness and tenderness which we expect to find in shining prominence in the woman, and the woman we respect is ever allowing resolution and aspiration, without any masculine hardness, to take a deepening hold of her nature; so the child is ever present in the noble man, and still more so in the loving woman. We outgrow the notions, the intellectual limitations, the childishness of the child. We can never transcend child-likeness. “Except ye humble yourselves and become like little children ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Lovely, ingenuous, transparent, unworldly childhood, suggestive of Eden’s innocency and heaven’s smile--that, stripped of its crude excrescences, is what we have to grow up to and into.
(1e.) A child is a beginning, an independent conscious entity. Can that be maintained? Is not rather the new-born child, within its own measure, the sum and product of the past? Can it be affirmed that a child comes into the world like a clean sheet of paper without a line or syllable upon it, or like a spring that is pure and becomes polluted only with surface sewage? To be thus addressed causes one to pause and ponder, and raises a host of staggering questions, for which, though they are more easily put than answered, an answer must be attempted, in order that our views may be sifted, and that we may not confound our error, which need not be, with God’s system, which cannot fail to be for ever and ever.
(1f.) Is the child as it enters this world as much adrift from the past morally as the arrival of an angel would be unconnected with the annals and genealogies of mankind? If so, a child is unlike every other part of creation. Had not the present its origin in the past? Each leaf we see in the spring is but the outcome of a long series of processes we cannot explore. Every wave that breaks upon the shore is what it is on account of the ocean from which it is an emanation.
(1g.) There are some who hold that birth here is but a reappearance in another form, that each soul descends from a pre-existent state, and enters into the body which by natural process has been prepared for it. Plato and other venturous thinkers favoured that notion of pre-existence. Wordsworth seems to countenance it in his famous ode, though that may be doubted, if not denied:- -
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life’s star
Hath elsewhere had its setting; And cometh from afar
Not in entire forgetfulness; And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come; From God who is our home.”
May not the poet in those precious lines, which reach the high-water mark of human speculation as well as poetry, be regarded as merely setting forth in his own fashion the soul’s intimacy with the great Eternal Spirit from whom all conscious life is an emanation. Be that as it may, the opinion of a pre-existent state for any moral is unsupported by the teaching of Him who came from above. Scripture, indeed, explicitly contradicts this philosophic fancy by such a text as this: “By one man sin entered the world.”
(1h.) Yet it cannot be denied that each one who comes into the world has a connection of some kind with the past. The child is undoubtedly part of the generic whole, the member of a race, a participator in the conditions and fortunes of mankind. We do not come into the world by a direct and immediate act of the Creator. Whatever opinions may be held as the origin of the soul - - and opinions do differ- - all must admit that as regards the physical nature at least we come upon the scene of life through the medium of our fellow-creatures. We are not isolated units. We are members one of another. We are not as if none had been before us. We are links in a chain, parts of a succession, heirs of an estate.
(1i.) What is the estate? What do we have which we would not have had, if others of the race to which we belong had not existed before us? As one part of the testament there is original sin, say some. What exactly is meant by that familiar theological phrase? That every child shares in the guilt, the moral blame, of Adam’s transgression? If that be original sin, common sense as well as common justice should most vehemently protest against such a monstrous and God-dishonouring doctrine. Is it not a metaphysical contradiction to affirm that guilt as well as evil can be transmitted? Personal identity, surely, cannot be confused, without confusion all over life. Adam was Adam. I am not Adam. I have enough to answer for of my own, without taking in addition the blame-worthiness of one who lived thousands of years ago. It is more than time that the heartless heresy of original sin, as meaning guilt contracted by Adam in which every helpless babe shares, were exploded. Our reason is certainly not to be the measure of things. There are mysteries in Divine doctrine before which I am dumb, humbled, awed. But it is one thing to accept in faith which is above reason. It is another to impose what contradicts reason and the moral sense. The truly conservation and earnest theologian who is anxious that God’s truth should be maintained finds that a most important part of his duty is the displacement of that in the creed which was not put there by the hand of God, and which acts only as a stumbling block to thoughtful and candid minds.
(1j.) If by original sin is meant a liability to go wrong, which every human being has inherited from the past, we have both Scripture and observation to support that doctrine. There is such a thing as solidarity. There is a sense in which it is true that we are bound up in the great progenitor who fell. We suffer by our connection with a race that is lapsed and estranged from what is good. No member of a family can offend flagrantly against the laws of God and man without bringing suffering upon all who bear his name, as well as upon himself. There is shame not only for the forger but also for his brothers and sisters. The drunkard’s children have not as children the drunkard’s guilt, but they cannot escape all the consequences, physical and moral, of his evil doings. So taking a wider view of the situation, the child, as part of that humanity that is stricken and morally vitiated, is a sharer in the evil, though not in the blame-worthiness, that has come down from the distant past. Every parent has the witness of his own eyes and ears to that part of the testimony of Scripture.
(1k.) Perhaps you object to disabilities, inherited disorders, inborn propensities, temptations arising from the perverted bias of fallen human nature, as an unjust imposition upon the child. But existing conditions make it impossible in the nature of things that a child of a human race could be differently situated. That which is in the stream of humanity cannot but be coloured by its fount and channel. Heredity must be accepted as an ultimate and unavoidable fact in the system of which we form a part. If you should persist in trying to take a step further, and stoutly object to any creature being put into such conditions, you raise the question of the origin of evil, and no man who has the wisdom of modesty will follow you as you knock your head against that rock.
(1l.) But this has to be said for our encouragement, and in vindication of the justice and goodness of God, that if any member of the human family comes into the world feeling that his lot is a bane, he can at once find the antidote in the Lord Jesus Christ. If he is aggrieved by what his connection with the first Adam brings, he can obtain redress, and more than retrieve himself by a voluntary connection with the second Adam. The grace of God is the panacea of the moral world. It is an inexhaustible fund of recuperative power. It more than meets all the complaints, all the losses and grievances of man’s natural condition. It corrects every anomaly, heals every wound, suits every case, if taken in faith that brings hope. The origin of evil, therefore, is not the practical question of life, but rather the advent of Christ. Why does Nature excluded me from its paradise? is not what I have to ask. The question for me is, Why should I by unbelief exclude myself from the paradise of Christ?
(2.) The opportunities and duties of the child. The great opportunity of the child can be compressed into one word - -EDUCATION.
(2a.) Life from the beginning to end is an education, but childhood is much more favourable for that than any of the subsequent stages. We learn more in the first few years of life than we do in all the others, though fourscore should be reached. The nature is then open, plastic, retentive. Consolidation comes afterwards. We become more and more like the iron, and are in danger of being rigid in our habits of thought and action. In youth we are clay in the hands of the potter.
(2b.) Education! What is that? It is what is in us, emerging as the result of well applied effort on our part. There is much God-given faculty that is latent in us like ore in the mine, and it is to us as if it did not exist till it is educed. The difference between an uneducated and an educated person is like that between the pocket-knife, the blades of which are not opened, and the same knife with the blades unshut, open to view, and ready for use. The steel is in the closed knife, but what is the use of it? We have to convert what we are into power, and education does it. Let us not pass out of the world without giving proof of what we are and have. Every Milton who is allowed to remain mute and inglorious is a loser, and entails loss upon the world. Each of us, too, is as responsible for the one, as another is for the five talents.
(2c.) True education is dynamic, not putting in information merely, as you do into a cistern, but presenting the facts of science and history so as to bring out hidden resource and capability. Scholastic and technical education is not to be neglected, but there is a great deal to life’s training which lies outside the classroom and outside the boards of books. Some make a fetish of printed matter, and forget that the original sources of thought are nature, experience, and the Word of God. Others again, robust men too, such as a considerable proportion in the world’s greatest inventors, going straight to the facts of life, have made their mark, though as “self-made” men they have flaws and limitation which a more liberal education in early days might have prevented. We need all the educators that Providence places without our reach.
(2d.) Certainly there is education for the child everywhere: in the nursery, in the playground, in the busy street, by the sea-shore, in the green fields, in the wood and garden, wherever the face of nature looks upon us. Children shut out from rural scenes, and ignorant of trees and flowers, birds, and beasts, are sadly neglected in their education, however much their parents spend upon it. Children should be able to tell one tree from another, and discover the properties of the teeming variety of objects that solicit our interest. The city-bred child is not in Paradise. How mournfully the poet sings:- -
“I was reared; In the great city –pent ‘mid cloisters dim; And saw nought lovely; But the sky and stars.”
Aberdeen children cannot make such a complaint. You do not dwell in an illimitable expanse of streets and chimneys—a wilderness of brick and stone. The ideal residence for the purposes of education, broad and liberal, is the place that is large enough to have the advantages of a city, and small enough to have almost all the advantages of the country.
(2e.) The higher education of life demands experimental religion, not, as Matthew Arnold would put it, as an element in culture, but as an inspiring and directing force which permeates the whole. How ill educated is he who has not learned to use his affections aright. The heart and conscience should receive out best attention, and on them should be placed the crown of culture. When God and our parents receive their due, the going out of homage and trust to objects worthy of them, brings about the highest self-improvement. To fall in love with the peerless moral beauty, the sublime self-sacrifice, the tender compassion of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, is itself an education. But the spiritual world shut out is a world within us shut up, as empty and desolate as the disused room of the deserted house.
(3.) The duties of the child are summed up in one word--OBEDIENCE.
(3a.) Every child should ponder this sentence: “And He went down and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them.”
(3b.) It is part of the divinely ordained condition of things that children should be obedient. “Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Parents, therefore, in so far as they are not unjust nor unreasonable, are to children as God. God tests us through creatures who are set over us as His delegates and representatives. In so far as magistrates and parents have Divine law back up their wishes, their commands are as the edicts of heaven. Disrespect to parents is disrespect to God. No one can retain the favour of heaven who has justly lost the approbation of father or mother. Obedience to parents is therefore a fair practical test of goodness in children. A child may not sin by swearing or stealing, as his training and associations lift him above such temptations. But unfilial conduct may be to him as great an iniquity before God as theft or profanity in those whose social environment is different.
(3c.) Obedience, not slavish but loving, is the germ of all the virtues and graces that adorn human life. It is a bad beginning to be careless whether you give pleasure or pain to those whose fostering care has done so much for you. He is not likely to become a gentleman who gives his mother a heavy heart when he might be her joy and strength.
(3d.) After the battle of Waterloo, when Prussian and British armies were in Paris, Wellington ordered a certain bridge, which some wanted to destroy, to be preserved. One British soldier was stationed on it for its protection. Only one soldier! Yes, but he represented British power, and had the British army behind him.
(3e.) So the poor, frail widowed mother, in that little home, has Omnipotence behind her. All the powers and resources of the universe are on her side as she endeavours to keep her son on the path of duty. She is not alone, though her powerful allies are not visible to the eye of sense. No throne is more firmly established than her seat of authority, no golden scepter possesses more dignity than is assigned to her position, no royal proclamation made amidst pomp and splendor has more weight than her word, though she should have only an attic to live in, and does not know where to-morrow’s bread is to be found. The son, therefore, who, taking advantage of superior physical strength, is brutal enough to disregard the will of her whom God has set over him, will yet have to reckon with a force more patent to his base and callous soul.
(3f.) The time will come when every act of unkindness or word of discourtesy will recoil upon the heads of ungrateful and irreverent sons and daughters. Bring not down the grey hairs of parents with sorrow to the grave. Cherish parents while you have them. Hear this pleading, tearful, heart-smiting appeal from one:--
“O friends, I pray to-night; Keep not your kisses for my dead cold brow; The way is lonely, let me feel them now; Think gently on me, for I am travel-worn.
When dreamless rest is mine; I shall not need; The tenderness for which I long to-night.”
(3g.) “Oh think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust-clouds and idle discords of the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and beautiful when it is too late.”
(4.) THE CHILD - POEMS
(4a.) “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
(4b.) “You never know where a good beginning may be happening. Every arrival of a new soul in the world is a mystery and a shut casket of possibilities.”
(4c.) “The child’s character presents far more distinctly the ground and plan of the mature man than the youth’s, since the proportions of the whole are often completely disguised by the temporary caprice of newly experienced passions and newly gained freedom. –Lewes.
(4d.) “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”
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