Chapter XVI
Vocation
Beware of bringing up your children in indolence. Strive to render them competent to earn a decent living. Send them to school, but not too long; it is not necessary to make every boy a first-class bookkeeper and every girl a school-teacher. In most cases it is preferable that your children learn a trade.
Train them to render themselves useful, wherever they may be. For this purpose give them some occupation at home, as soon as they are able to be of service to you. Do not, however, make them work as slaves. Though you may have it in your power to bestow such ample means on your daughters that they may not be required to earn their living by their own labor, you should, nevertheless, not only accustom them to lend a helping hand in the daily housework, but also have them learn how to sew, cook, wash, iron, etc.; for whatever may be their future station in society, it behooves them at least perfectly to understand such work.
Do not imbue your children with the prevalent spirit of vanity and ostentation, by bestowing on them too fine clothing, costly jewelry, or rich presents. Beware of educating them above their natural spheres in life, and of providing them with all the luxuries and accomplishments that are accessible only to the more wealthy. Endeavor, as far as circumstances permit, to bestow a higher and appropriate education on those of your children who may display a remarkable talent for some of the liberal arts, or manifest a vocation for some one of the professions.
As soon as your children have finished their schooling put them to work at once. It is often dangerous to let them taste even for a single day the baneful sweets and allurements of idleness. Until they have attained their majority, oblige them strictly to bring all their earnings to their mother, who may give them a small weekly allowance as pocket-money. Nothing more surely ruins a boy than to let him do what he likes with his earnings. When your children have attained their majority require them to contribute a monthly sum as their share of the family expenditures. Do all in your power to train them to habits of economy and sobriety.
Whilst your children are growing up, carefully and closely study their natural dispositions and inclinations, that you may discover their vocation and help them to follow it. Bear in mind that their salvation depends on their embracing that state of life to which God calls them. You have no right to prescribe what state of life your children should embrace: that belongs to God alone. “Every one,” says St. Paul, “hath his proper gift from God: one after this manner, another after that. As the Lord hath distributed to every one, as the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk” (1 Cor. vii. 7, 17). Pray much that God may enlighten you and your children as to their vocation. Teach them often to repeat: “Make known to me, O Lord, the way in which I should walk” (Ps. cxlii. 8).
If you discover in one of your boys the signs of a vocation to the priesthood, consider it as the greatest honor God can bestow on your family, and humbly thank Him for it, for the priestly dignity is the highest in the gift of God. According to St. Ambrose, the priest is a second Christ, because he continues Christ’s ministry and the work of man’s redemption.
If any of your sons and daughters are called to the religious state thank God for the honor He confers on your family in choosing one of its members as His own loved spouse. Beware of obstinately opposing or of endangering the ecclesiastical or religious vocation of your children, for you would thereby greatly offend God, and expose yourselves to fearful punishments for thwarting His designs. Parents who succeed in preventing their children from consecrating themselves to God’s service are usually, sooner or later, ill-treated or disgraced by those very children, or meet with some terrible divine punishment, or have the grief and sorrow to see those children overtaken by some horrible fate. You should therefore not only not seek to hinder your children from responding to the divine call, but you ought rather to do all in your power to help them to be faithful to it. Such a conduct on your part will secure for you and yours the choicest of heaven’s blessings.
The greater part of mankind, however, are called to the state of matrimony. Unfortunately, comparatively few parents understand the full extent of their duty towards those of their children who are called to this most responsible state; and among those who understand it there are some who have not courage to perform it. Certain parents, and especially certain mothers, do not want their children to get married, for fear of being deprived of their help; some, out of prejudice or from some selfish motive, would even rather see their sons plunge into vice than consent to their contracting an honorable marriage. Many others, on the other hand, through culpable negligence and indifference, allow their children to be wholly guided by their own fancy and folly in all that regards matrimony. Others, again, are bent on marrying off their children, and especially their daughters, by all means and at the earliest opportunity. To catch husbands for their marriageable daughters they take them to balls, theatres, parties, and other more or less dangerous amusements, and even to some church more fashionable than their own parish church, using every imaginable trick and device to insure success to their plans. It does not seldom happen, however, that such mothers, whilst they are secretly congratulating themselves on their ingenuity and cunning, are, together with their unhappy daughters, made the subject of popular merriment, and become the laughing-stock of society. The aforesaid parents are not infrequently the cause of their children’s unhappy and even disgraceful marriages!
