I. The Christian home is an instrument of incalculable power for drawing forth and presenting in their full form and force all those ministering qualities and energies by which, in all ages, society is blessed and saved. But it has a further, deeper, and larger power. It can touch the life of society at the very spring, and renew it. "Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not," says Christ: "for of such is the kingdom of God." Had the Church understood the words of the Master, and in that mind undertaken the training of these little ones, we should not now be sighing and crying for the signs of the kingdom of heaven among men.
II. The root of the mischief the fundamental cause of the failure of the Church to make the Gospel the power which God intended it to be in the spiritual education of mankind is to be found in a radical misconception of the function of the Church. It has sought to rule in His name; it was set to witness to His truth. God has been systematically presented to the mind of Christendom, and of course to the youth of Christendom, and its homes, as the Ruler, the Lawgiver, the Judge, rather than as the Father; and the Church has been more prompt to wield authority than to minister and save. It is not too much to say that the chief trust of Christendom has been in law, as a power superior to love, in rebuking and destroying that sin from which man must be saved or perish. Never forget that the first, the fundamental principle of a Christian education is the surrounding the young spirit, in the very cradle of its higher life, with the witness that it is born into the Father's home, and that it has a right, in all its struggles, its sufferings, and its sins, to claim the Father's pity, to cry for the Father's help, and to rest on the Father's will and power to save.
III. A second great principle of Christian culture, which the Church has failed to grasp and to wield as a power, is this: Christ bids us remember that men have to be trained here for the universe and eternity, and that the training must begin in the home, if it is to bear any blessed and lasting fruit. "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth," said the Master. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God." How much of our education of our children has respect exclusively to the question, What kind of training will most largely and swiftly pay? And our thought concerns not what it will pay the man as an immortal being, with eternity before him to work out the great plan of his existence.
J. Baldwin Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 392.
References: Matthew 18:6. T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 48; F. Wagstaff, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xix., p. 409.