That the Christian education of children in the Christian home, which is so much extolled, especially in Protestantism, is based upon a lie, a sheer lie
Of course in "Christendom" people generally are living in such a way that parents do not concern themselves at all about being Christians except in name, have really no religion. The education of the children consists in a formal training, in learning a few things, but one does not undertake to convey any religious and still less any Christian view of life, to talk to the child about God, still less to speak of Him in accordance with the concepts and ideas which are peculiar to Christianity.
It is different in the families which like to assume an air of importance for being earnest Christians, and who know how to talk a great deal about the significance of the education of children in Christianity, from earliest childhood, as they put it.
The truth, however, is that this (the pride of Protestantism!), this Christian education of children in the Christian home is, Christianly speaking, based upon a lie, a sheer lie.
And this can very easily be proved.
In the first place. The parents cannot talk Christianly and truly about how the child's coming into existence is to be Christianly understood. The parents are egoistic enough — and that under the name of Christianity! — to bring up the child in the view that it was an extraordinary act of beneficence on the part of the parents that the child exists, that this master-stroke of the parents whereby the child came into existence was peculiarly well pleasing to God. That is to say, under the name of the Christian education of children they turn Christianity topsyturvy and transform its view of life into exactly the opposite of what it is. Christianly it is anything but the greatest benefaction to bestow life upon the child (that is paganism) ; Christianly it is anything but well pleasing to God, an act whereby one makes oneself thankworthy in his eyes, that one engages in begetting children (such a conception of God is paganism, even a lower form of paganism, or it is the sort of Judaism Christianity precisely would do away with); Christianly it is egoism in the highest degree that because a man and a woman cannot control their lust another being must therefore sigh, perhaps for seventy years, in this prisonhouse and vale of tears, and perhaps be lost eternally.
In the second place. That the world into which the parents introduce the child is a sinful, ungodly, wicked world, that lamentation, anguish, wretchedness, awaits everyone that is born, even if he is among the number of those that. are saved, and if he is not of this number, eternal perdition awaits him— this the parents cannot say to the child. For one thing, the child cannot understand it, the child is in immediate rapport with nature, too happy to be able to understand such things. And secondly, the parents for their own sake cannot well say this to the child. Every child in its naivete is more or less ingenious. Suppose now that this child in its naivete were to say to its parents, "But if this is such a bad world, and if this is what awaits me, then indeed it is not well that I have come into this world." Bravo, my little friend, thou hast hit the mark! This is an exceedingly awkward situation for the parents! No, Christianity is not the place for bungling.
In the third place. The parents cannot give the child the true Christian conception of God, and they are egoistically interested in not doing it. That before God this world is a lost world, where he who is born is by being born lost, that what God wills (out of love) is that a man shall die from the world, and that if God is so gracious as to turn His love toward him, that what God then does (out of love) is to torment him with every anguish calculated to take his life; for this is what God wills (yet out of love), He would have the life out of everyone that is born, have him transformed into a deceased man, one who lives as though dead. This, even if it were said to him, the child cannot grasp, and the parents, for egoistic reasons, take good care not to say it. What then do they do? Under the name of the Christian education of children they jabber foolishly out of the stock of paganism along the lines above suggested: "It is an extraordinary beneficence that thou didst come into existence, this is a fine world into which thou hast come, and God is a fine man, only hold fast to Him, He will to be sure not fulfill all thy wishes, but He's a help all the same." Sheer lies.
And what then is the consequence of this much extolled Christian education of children? The consequence is, either that the child babbles foolishly the same twaddle throughout his life, as a man, a father, a grandparent, or that there may come an instant in this life when the child will be tried in the most dreadful pain by the query whether God is a mean man who lets a poor child imagine that He (God) is something quite different from what He really is, or whether his parents are liars!
And when this pain has been overcome, when the child understands that everything is all right so far as God is concerned, that He had no share in what it occurred to me to tell about Him, and that at all events his parents were well-meaning in human love towards him, he nevertheless will need perhaps a long, long time, the most painful cure, to get all that out of him which under the name of the Christian education of children has been poured into him.
Behold, this is the consequence of the much extolled Christian education of children, based upon a lie, a sheer lie. But the priests extol it. Well, that you can understand. One man is enough to give a whole town cholera, and 1000 perjurers are more than enough to infect a whole society, so that the life they live under the name of Christianity is, Christianly, a sheer lie.