Chapter IV
Religious Training at Home
Your principal duty as parents is, as we have said, to bring up your children in the holy love and fear of God. All your other duties are only secondary and subordinate to this one, and must never be allowed to interfere with it. You should, then, teach your children to love and fear God, and not to love and fear the world.
Charity is the greatest of the virtues: it is the life of the others. Had we faith great enough to move mountains, says St. Paul; were we able to speak all the languages of angels and of men, and were we even to master all sciences, and be at the same time wanting in charity, in divine love,—all this would profit us nothing! The love of God is the sum of all our duties, for, says St. Augustine, “love God, and do what you will.”
You should show to your children that no one is more deserving of our love than God, the infinitely good, wise, bountiful, great, and perfect Being, who, without any merit on our part, has loved us from all eternity; who for our sake did not spare His own beloved Son, who loved us so exceedingly as to die for us the most cruel and disgraceful of deaths; who so lovingly bestows numberless favors on us every moment of our life; who so mercifully forgives us our sins; who so generously deigns to make us His children, destining us forever to share His own unspeakable happiness and glory.
You should teach your children, from their tenderest years, all the claims which God has to their love, as well as their most sacred obligation of loving Him with their whole heart and soul, with all their mind and all their strength, and this not in words only, but sincerely and in deed. Since love is the union of wills, you should fully convince them that the true love of God consists in having but one will with Him, in doing all that He commands, and in seeking to please Him in all things.
Nothing tends more to ennoble and exalt rational beings, and incite them to the performance of noble and heroic deeds than divine love. Tell your children how divine love imparted to millions of martyrs the strength to endure the most excruciating torments and undergo the most painful death; that it is the love of God which has enabled, and still daily enables, poor weak mortals to leave parents, home, friends, country, worldly goods, and bright prospects, and renounce the pleasures of sense, in order to lead a life of poverty, chastity, obedience, self-denial, and self-sacrifice in the service of the poor, the ignorant, the sick, the wretched, and the outcasts of society, and daily perform those heroic deeds from which even the most bitter enemies of the Catholic Church cannot withhold the tribute of their admiration.
Those who have learned to love God above all things not only seek to please Him in all their actions, but they dread to displease Him above every other evil. This is the fear of God. Your children should be most intimately persuaded that sin, being an offence against God, is the only real evil, and that therefore it behooves them to hate, dread, and shun it more than the loss of beauty, of health, of worldly goods, of liberty, of reputation, and even of life itself. You should indelibly impress it on their minds that they ought to avoid sin at any cost, and should be willing to lose all, to suffer all, to sacrifice all, rather than ever wilfully offend God by a single sin, even if that sin could procure the salvation of the world!
You should make it plain to your children that they can have no excuse for committing sin—not their feelings or their inclinations, not worldly interest, not worldly custom or fashion, not human opinions, not even the avoiding of the greatest temporal misfortunes, for sin is the greatest of all evils: it is indeed the only real evil.
You should not fail frequently to remind your children that God is everywhere present, that He witnesses and notes down not only their most secret actions, but even their most hidden thoughts and desires, and that He will, after their death, call them to a most rigorous account of all the thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions of their life. This will inspire them with a wholesome fear of the divine justice; but if you have endeavored to instil divine love into their hearts, that fear will not be a servile fear, that dreads only punishment, but it will be a childlike fear—the fear a dutiful and affectionate child has of displeasing and offending the best of parents.
