Part 11
In order to sympathize with another, you must be able to put yourself in his place, mentally and emotionally; to occupy, for the time being, his point of view, and to see that which he sees, and as he sees it, as he looks out thence. It is not that your way of looking at it is his way from the start, but it is that his way of looking at it must be your way while you are taking your start in an effort to show your sympathy with him. In many relations of life, sympathy would be impossible between two parties, because of the differences of taste and temperament and habits of thought; but in the case of parent and child, the parent ought to be able to learn the child’s ways of thinking and modes of feeling, so as to come into the possibility of sympathy with the child at all times.
How the child ought to feel is one thing. How the child does feel is quite another thing. The parent may know the former better than the child does; but the latter the child knows better than the parent. Until a parent has learned just how the child looks at any matter, the parent is incapable of so coming alongside of the child in his estimate of that matter as to win his confidence and to work with him toward a more correct view of it. To stand off apart from the child, and tell him how he ought to think and feel, may be a means of disheartening him, as he finds himself so far from the correct standard. But to stand with the child and point him to the course he ought to pursue, is more likely to inspire him to honest efforts in that direction, until he comes to think and to feel as his parents would have him.
A parent misses an opportunity of gaining added power over his child, when he fails to show sympathy with that child in the child’s enjoyments and ordinary occupations. If, indeed, the parent would be always ready to evidence an interest in his child’s plays and companionships and studies, the parent would grow into the very life of his child in all these spheres; and there would be hardly less delight to the child in talking those things over with his parent afterward, than in going through with them originally. But if the parent seems to have no share with the child in any one or all of these lines of childhood experience, the child is necessarily shut away so far from his parent, and compelled to live his life there as if he were parentless.
Still more does a parent lose of opportunity for good to his child, if he fails to have sympathy with his child in that child’s weaknesses and follies and misdoings. It is in every child’s nature to long for sympathy at the point where he needs it most; and when he has done wrong, or has indulged evil thoughts, or is feeling the force of temptation, he is glad to turn to some one stronger and better than himself, and make confession of his faults and failures. If, as he comes to his parents at such a time, he is met with manifest sympathy, he is drawn to his parents with new confidence and new trust. But if he is met unsympathetically, and is simply told how wrong he is, or how strange it seems that he should be so far astray, he is turned back upon himself to meet his bitterest life-struggle all by himself; and a new barrier is reared between him and his parents, that no parental love can remove, and that no parental watchfulness or care can make a blessing to either child or parent.
It is a great thing for a parent to have such sympathy with his child that his child can tell him freely of his worst thoughts or his greatest failures without any fear of seeming to shock that parent, and so to chill the child’s confidence. It is a great thing for a parent to have such sympathetic thoughts of his child when that child has unintentionally broken some fragile keepsake peculiarly dear to the parent, as to be more moved by regret for the child’s sorrow over the mishap than for the loss of the precious relic. There is no such power over children as comes from such sympathy with children.
There is truth in the suggestion of Herbert Spencer, that too often “mothers and fathers are mostly considered by their offspring as friend-enemies;” and that it is much better for parents to _show_ to their children that they are “their best friends,” than to content themselves with _saying so_. It ought to be so, that children would feel that they could find no such appreciative sympathy from any other person, in their enjoyments or in their sorrows and trials, as they are sure of from their parents. This is so in some cases; and wherever it is so, the parents have such power over and with their children as would otherwise be impossible. On the other hand, there are parents who love their children without stint, and who would die to promote their welfare, who actually have no sympathy with their children, and who, because of this lack of sympathy, are without the freest confidences of their children, and are unable to sway them as they fain would.
The power of sympathy is not wholly a natural one. It is largely dependent upon cultivation. An unsympathetic parent may persistently train himself to a habit of sympathy with an unsympathetic child, by recognizing his duty of learning how the child thinks and feels, and by perceiving the gain of getting alongside of that child in loving tenderness in order to bring him to a better way of thinking and feeling. But if a parent and child are not in sympathy, the best and most unselfish love that that parent can give to that child will be fruitless for such results in child-training as would be possible if that love were directed by sympathy.
XXVI.
_INFLUENCE OF THE HOME ATMOSPHERE._
In the world of nature, life is dependent on the atmosphere. Whatever else is secured, the atmosphere is essential to life’s existence. It is, in fact, the atmosphere that gives the possibility of all the varied forms of vegetable and animal life in the earth and the sea and the air. So, again, the atmosphere brings death to every living thing, if elements that are hostile to life prevail in its composition. When the question of the date of man’s first appearance on our planet is under discussion, a chief factor in the unsolved problem is the nature of the atmosphere of the earth at any given period of antiquity. Without a life-sustaining atmosphere, life were an impossibility. Similarly, the question of the probability of other planets being inhabited, pivots on this consideration. Life and death are in the atmosphere.
It is not alone the component elements of the atmosphere that bring life or death to all within its scope; but the temperature and the measure of movement of the atmosphere go far to decide the degree of life that shall be attained or preserved within the scope of its influence. Unless there is a due measure of oxygen in the air, the atmosphere is death-giving. Without sufficient warmth to the air, its oxygen is of no avail for the sustaining of life. And even though the oxygen and the warmth be present, the force of the swift-moving air may carry death on its vigorous wings. No gardener would depreciate the importance of a right atmosphere for his most highly prized plants; nor would any wise physician undervalue the sanitary importance of the atmospheric surroundings of his patients. As it is in the natural world, so it is in the moral sphere: life and death are in the atmosphere.
A vital question in connection with every home is, Is the atmosphere of this home suited to the life and growth, to the developing of the vigor and beauty, of a child’s best nature? That question cannot always be answered in the affirmative; and where it cannot be, it is of little use to talk of the minor training agencies which are operative in behalf of the children in that home.
The atmosphere of a home is the spirit of that home, as evidenced in the conduct and bearing of the parents, and of all whom the parents influence. The atmosphere itself—there, as in all the natural world—is not seen, but is felt. Its effects are clearly observable; but as a cause it is inferred rather than disclosed. Indeed, the better the atmosphere in a home, the more quietly pervasive its influence. Only as the home atmosphere is inimical to the best interests of those who feel its power, does that atmosphere make itself manifest as an atmosphere, rather than give proof of its existence in results that cannot otherwise be accounted for.
You enter one home, and, mingling with the family there, you feel the balmy air of love and sympathy. Parents and children seem to live for one another, and to be in complete accord in all their enjoyments and occupations; and all is restful in the peace that abides there. You are sure that everything in the moral and social atmosphere of that home tends to the fostering and growth of whatever is best in the child-nature. It is obvious that it is easier for a child to be good, and to do well, in such a home as that, than in many another home.
You enter another home, and the chill of the household air strikes you unpleasantly, at the first greeting given to you by any member of the family. There is a side of the child-nature that you know needs more warmth than that for its developing. Again it is the burning heat of an excited and ever-driving household life that you are confident is withering the more delicate and sensitive tendrils of the young hearts being trained there. Yet again, it is the explosive storm-bursts of passion which tear through the air, that make a home a place of peril to the young for the time being, however it may seem in the lulls between tempests. In the one case as in the others, it is the home atmosphere that settles the question of the final tendency of the home training.
In view of the importance of the home atmosphere, parents ought to recognize their responsibility for the atmosphere of the home they make and control. It is not enough for parents to have a lofty ideal for their children, and to instruct and train those children in the direction of that ideal. They must see to it that the atmosphere of their home is such as to foster and develop in their children those traits of character which their loftiest ideal embodies. That atmosphere must be full of the pure oxygen of love to God and love to man. It must be neither too hot in its intensity of social activities, nor too cold in its expressions of family affection, but balmy and refreshing in its uniform temperature of household living and being. It must be gentle and peaceful in its manner and movement of sympathetic intercourse. All this it may be. All this it ought to be.
Every home has its atmosphere, good or bad, health-promoting or disease-breeding. And parents are, in every case, directly responsible for the nature of the atmosphere in their home; whether they have acted in recognition of this fact, or have gone on without a thought of it. In order to secure a right home atmosphere for their children, parents must themselves be right. They must guard against poisoning the air of the home with unloving words or thoughts; against chilling it with unsympathetic manners, or overheating it with exciting ways; against disturbing its peaceful flow with restlessness, with fault-findings, or with bursts of temper.
Parents must, as it were, keep their eyes on the barometer and the thermometer of the social life of the home, and see to it that its temperature is safely moderated, and that it is guarded against the effect of sudden storms. Only as such care is taken by wise parents, can the atmosphere in their home be what the needs of their children require it to be.
XXVII.
_THE POWER OF A MOTHER’S LOVE._
In estimating the agencies which combine for child-shaping through child-training, the power of a mother’s love cannot be overestimated. There is no human love like a mother’s love. There is no human tenderness like a mother’s tenderness. And there is no such time for a mother’s impressive display of her love and tenderness toward her child as in the child’s earliest years of his life. That time neglected, and no future can make good the loss to either mother or child. That time improved, and all the years that follow it shall give added proof of its improvement.
Even when a man seems to be dead to every other influence for good, the recollection of a mother’s prayers and a mother’s tears often has a hold upon him which he neither can nor would break away from. And a mother is so much to a man when he is a man, just because she was all in all to him when he was a child.
Although God calls himself our Father, he compares his love with the love of a mother, when he would disclose to us the depth of its tenderness, and its matchless fidelity. “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you,” he says, as if in invitation to the sinner to come like a grieved and tired child, and lay down his weary head on his mother’s shoulder, where he is sure of rest and sympathy, and of words of comfort and cheer. “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?” asks God, as if to turn attention to that which is truest and firmest of anything we can know of human affection and fidelity. And then to show that he is a yet surer support than even mothers prove to their loved children, he adds, “Yea, they may forget, yet will not I forget thee.”
David, the man after God’s own heart, could find no words which could express his abiding confidence in God, like those wherein he declares, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” Nor could he find any figure of the profoundest depth of human sorrow more forcible than that in which he says of himself, “I bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother.” When David’s greater Son was hanging on the cross in agony, with the weight of a lost world upon him, he could forget all his personal suffering, and could turn, as it were, for a moment, from the work of eternal redemption, to recognize the tenderness and fidelity of his agonized mother at his feet, and to commend her with his dying breath to the faithful ministry of the disciple whom he loved.
The Bible abounds with pictures of loving mothers and of a mother’s love,—Hagar, weeping in the desert over her famishing boy; Rachel mourning for her children, refusing to be comforted because they were not; Jochebed playing the servant to secure the privilege of nursing her babe for the daughter of Pharaoh; Hannah joying before God over her treasure of a longed-for son; the true mother in the presence of Solomon, ready to lose her child that it might be saved; Rizpah, watching on the hill-top the hanging bodies of her murdered sons, month after month, from the beginning of harvest until the autumn rains, suffering “neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night;” the wife of Jeroboam, longing to be at the bedside of her dying son, and torn at heart with the thought that as soon as she should reach him there he must die; the widow of Zarephath, and the Shunammite woman, securing the intercession of the prophet for the restoration to life of their dead darlings; the mother of James and John pleading with Jesus for favors to her sons; the Syro-Phœnician woman venturing everything, and refusing to be put aside, that she might win a blessing from Him who alone was able to restore to health and freedom her grievously vexed daughter; the mother of Timothy, teaching her son lessons by which the world is still profiting; and so on through a long list of those who were representative mothers, chosen of God for a place in the sacred record, and whose like are about us still on every side.
And the Bible injunctions concerning mothers are as positive as the examples of their loving ministry are numerous. “Honor thy father and thy mother” is a commandment which has pre-eminence in the reward attached to it. “Forsake not the law of thy mother,” said Solomon; “and despise not thy mother when she is old.” It is indeed a “foolish man,” as well as an unnatural one, who “despiseth his mother,” or who fails to give her gratitude and love so long as she is spared to him. In all ages and everywhere, the true children of a true mother “rise up and call her blessed;” for they realize, sooner or later, that God gives no richer blessing to man than is found in a mother’s love. Even in the days when a queen-wife was a slave, a queen-mother was looked up to with reverence, not because she had been a queen, but because she was still the king’s mother. “A mother dead!” wrote gruff and tender-hearted Carlyle. “It is an epoch for us all; and to each one of us it comes with a pungency as if peculiar, a look as of originality and singularity.” And it was of the mother whose death called out this ejaculation, of whom, while she was still living, Carlyle had written, “I thought, if I had all the mothers I ever saw to choose from, I would have chosen my own.”
A mother can never be replaced. She will be missed and mourned when she has passed away, however she may be undervalued by the “foolish son” to whom she still gives the wealth of her unappreciated affection. Indeed, the true man never, while his mother is alive, outgrows a certain sense of dependence on a loving mother’s sympathy and care. His hair may be whitened with age; he may have children, and even grandchildren, looking up to him in respect and affection; but while his mother lives she is his mother, and he is her boy. And when she dies he for the first time realizes the desolateness of a motherless son. There is then no one on earth to whom he can look up with the never-doubting confidence and the never-lacking restfulness of a tired child to a loving mother. There is a shelter taken away from above his head, and he seems to stand unprotected, as never before, from the smiting sun and the driving storms of life’s pilgrimage. He can no more be called “My dear son” in those tones which no music of earth can equal. To him always:
“A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.”
Biography is rich with illustrations of this truth, although the man whose mother is still spared to him need not go beyond his own experience to recognize its force. Here, for example, is testy old Dr. Johnson, bearish and boorish in many things. When he is fifty years old, and his mother is ninety, he writes to her in tenderness: “You have been the best mother, and, I believe, the best woman, in the world. I thank you for your indulgence to me, and beg forgiveness of all that I have done ill, and of all that I have omitted to do well.” How many men there are whom the world little thinks of as child-like, who could make these words their own, and set their hands to them with Johnson’s closing assurance, “I am, dear, dear mother, your dutiful son.” And the lion-hearted Luther, who seems better suited to thunder defiance at spiritual oppressors than to speak words of trustful affection to a kind-hearted woman, turns from his religious warfare to write to his aged and dying mother: “I am deeply sorrowful that I cannot be with you in the flesh, as I fain would be.” “All your children pray for you.”
St. Augustine has been called the most important convert to the truth from St. Paul to Luther. Near the close of his eventful life, St. Augustine said: “It is to my mother that I owe everything. If I am thy child, O my God! it is because thou gavest me such a mother. If I prefer the truth to all things, it is the fruit of my mother’s teachings. If I did not long ago perish in sin and misery, it is because of the long and faithful years which she pleaded for me.” And of his mother’s remembered devotedness to him, he said at the time of her death: “O my God! what comparison is there between the honor that I paid to her, and her slavery for me?”
John Quincy Adams’s mother lived to be seventy-four; but he had not outgrown his sense of personal dependence upon her, when she was taken away. “My mother was an angel upon earth,” he wrote. “She was the real personification of female virtue, of piety, of charity, of ever-active and never-intermitting benevolence. O God! could she have been spared yet a little longer!” “I have enjoyed but for short seasons, and at long, distant intervals, the happiness of her society, yet she has been to me more than a mother. She has been a spirit from above watching over me for good, and contributing, by my mere consciousness of her existence, to the comfort of my life. That consciousness has gone, and without her the world feels to me like a solitude.” When President Nott, of Union College, was more than ninety years old, and had been for half a century a college president, as strength and sense failed him in his dying hours, the memory of his mother’s love was fresh and potent, and he could be hushed to needed sleep by patting him gently on the shoulder, and singing to him the familiar lullabies of long ago, after the fashion of that mother, who he fancied was still at hand to care for him.
Lord Macaulay has been called a cold-hearted man, but he was never unmindful of the unique preciousness of a mother’s love. He it was who said: “In after life you may have friends, fond, dear, kind friends, but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which a mother bestows. Often do I sigh, in my struggles with the hard, uncaring world, for the sweet deep security I felt when, of an evening, nestling in her bosom, I listened to some quiet tale, suitable to my age, read in her untiring voice. Never can I forget her sweet glances cast upon me when I appeared asleep; never, her kiss of peace at night. Years have passed since we laid her beside my father in the old churchyard, yet still her voice whispers from the grave and her eye watches over me as I visit spots long since hallowed to the memory of my mother.”
Napoleon Bonaparte, with all his self-reliance and personal independence of character, never ceased to look up to his mother with a reverent affection, and he was accustomed to say that he owed all that he was, and all that he had, to her character and loving ministry. “Ah, what a woman! where shall we look for her equal?” he said of her. “She watched over us with a solicitude unexampled. Every low sentiment, every ungenerous affection, was discouraged and discarded. She suffered nothing but that which was grand and elevated to take root in our youthful understandings.... Losses, privations, fatigue, had no effect on her. She endured all, braved all. She had the energy of a man combined with the gentleness and delicacy of a woman.”
When all else seemed lost to him, as he lay a lonely prisoner on the shores of St. Helena, Napoleon was sure of one thing. “My mother loves me,” he said; and the thought of his mother’s love was a comfort to him then. He who had felt able to rule a world unaided, was not above a sense of grateful dependence on a love like that. “My opinion is,” he said, “that the future good or bad conduct of a child depends entirely upon its mother.”