explicit the denominational faith the earlier may religious motives affect the will.
This is the way of our hopes, to the closer consideration of which we intend to
return in the future, though it must be expected that the happiest consensus will
be long quarantined from most schools. Meanwhile a second way, however
unpromising, is still open. Noble types of character may rest on only the native
instincts of the soul or even on broadly interpreted utilitarian considerations. But
if morality without religion were only a bloodless corpse or a plank in a
shipwreck, there is now need enough for teachers to study its form, drift, and
uses by itself alone. This, at least, is our purpose in considering the will, and this
only.
The will, purpose, and even mood of small children when alone, are fickle,
fluctuating, contradictory. Our very presence imposes one general law on them,
viz., that of keeping our good will and avoiding our displeasure. As the plant
grows towards the light, so they unfold in the direction of our wishes, felt as by
divination. They respect all you smile at, even buffoonery; look up in their play
to call your notice, to study the lines of your sympathy, as if their chief vocation
was to learn your desires. Their early lies are often saying what they think will
please us, knowing no higher touchstones of truth. If we are careful to be wisely
and without excess happy and affectionate when they are good, and saddened
and slightly cooled in manifestations of love if they do wrong, the power of
association in the normal, eupeptic child will early choose right as surely as
pleasure increases vitality. If our love is deep, obedience is an instinct if not a
religion. The child learns that while it can not excite our fear, resentment or
admiration, etc., it can act on our love, and this should be the first sense of its
own efficiency. Thus, too, it first learns that the way of passion and impulse is
not the only rule of life, and that something is gained by resisting them. It
imitates our acts long before it can understand our words. As if it felt its
insignificance, and dreaded to be arrested in some lower phase of its
development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost a passion. As the vine
must twine or grovel, so the child comes unconsciously to worship idols, and
imitates bad patterns and examples in the absence of worthy ones. He obeys as
with a deep sense of being our chattel, and, at bottom, admires those who coerce
him, if the means be wisely chosen. The authority must, of course, be
ascendancy over heart and mind. The more absolute such authority the more the
will is saved from caprice and feels the power of steadiness. Such authority
excites the unique, unfathomable sense of reverence, which measures the
capacity for will-culture, and is the strongest and soundest of all moral motives.