The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1901-10-05
RELIGIOUS TRAINING IN YOUTH.

In one of the essays read at the
Mothers and Teachers meeting yes
terdayl 1t was said that too much re-
hgiousf training in early childhood is
not productive of good results in after
life. OF course too much of anything
is logically more than Is good to have,
but assuming the thought to be that
young children may be alienated from
the practice of religion by having it
made an irksome and continuous task,
we want to give it our full faith. When
one gets at the truth in the old saw
about the worldliness of minister's sons
and deaeons daughters-truth which
takes note of all the exceptions that
prove the rule-he comes to the point
made in the essay. The late Robert ].
Ingersoll always said that it was the
everlasting religious drill in the home
of his father, a clergyman, which reused
his hostility to the body of doctrine and
set him thinking on critical lines. There
is, to be sure, another view of this
phenomenon. THE Spectator" he of
The Outlook, suggests, in his essay on
Heredity, that the qualities most de-
veloped by the parents are used up or
30 weakened by use that they cannot be
transmitted and that the youngsters
only inherit the qualities which the
parents have neglected or repressed.
Thus the offspring of very religious per-
sons derives no religious instincts; and
instead succeeds to the worldly inclina-
tions which the father and mother. in
their lifelong efforts to be good have
avoided, held in check or concealed.
But all this raises a psychological query
that need not be pursued into the mists;
the question is whether, irrespective of
parentage and heredity, 1t may not be
possible to so disgust a child with
church and Sunday School and religious
admonition and discipline at home as TO
make him non-religious person in aft
er life.
A vision rises out of the distant past.
Ten boys in village of nine hundred
people and six churches, boys of New
England ancestry and uncommonly re-
ligious parents, were early "dedicat-
ed to God" On Sundays they were
washed as clean as hot water and cas-
tile; soap could make them. dressed in
their decorous best and taken to church.
For each one there had been a meager
prayers beforehand; at the church there
was an interminable sermon, not line
of which the poor lad understood and
some droning music that added to his
uneasiness. After church he was
solemnly escorted home, his tight shoes
creaking under his furtive footsteps and
given piece of something cold for
lunch. Soon he went back to Sunday
school which lasted an hour and a half
and which involved, among other items
of unhappiness, the deposit of valued
penny in a wooden box for the sup
port of the missions in the Sandwich
Islands" The afternoon seemed ever
lasting but an evening praise service
with sermon attachment was to come
and it was nearly nine O'Clock before
the luckless lad found himself in bed.
Was it any wonder that, after few
years, the ringing of church bells be
came an intolerable clamor to him from
which he escaped in the direction of the
woods and streams?
But religion was not alone for sun
day. In that village it was Tor every
day. It darkened all the gIadness of the
week; it kept the lad from the circus