# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 06 22_S172
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172

matorium, God the Lord alone knows, who trieth the hearts and reins. May He grant in grace that you all, together with your reverend pastors, receive open eyes of understanding from Him who openeth the eyes of the spirit and of the body. May it soon come to pass! That is my sincere wish. Then you also will reject the article that went out against me under your name, and will marvel how greatly knowledge and conscience had been darkened and lulled to sleep in you. The grace of God be with you.

Your sincerely loving, and for you praying, L. F. E. Krause,

evang. luth. pastor.

Macomb County, (Michigan), the 19th of May, 1852.

(Submitted.)

Letters to the Lutheran Parents of This Country on Christian Child-Training.

No. 2.

Grace and peace in Christ!

You have, my dear ones, I hope, clearly seen from the first letter that and how you, as Christian parents, are thought worthy of so high a grace and honor by God; for you have certainly all plainly recognized that in your training of your children you are helpers and fellow-workers of God upon your children, who are not merely your flesh and blood, but essentially and properly created by the Father, redeemed by the Son, and regenerated and sanctified by the Holy Ghost, and thus a threefold possession of the triune God.

But your children are not this only, but at the same time also the hope of the Church and of the civil commonwealth; and as these two must of necessity ever more decay and fall into ruin the more unchristian neglect and misrearing spreads, so will they flourish joyfully in the same measure in which truly Christian education extends, which of course presupposes that by God's grace ever more adults are converted to the LORD.

Therefore it behooves you now, if you will indeed be Christian parents, to apply all earnestness and diligence, in the fear of God, to this end, that from early on, according to God's Word and will, you faithfully tend and train this His possession, in order that one day, under the Lord's grace and blessing, your children may also be your joy and crown, and you with them may attain eternal life.

Let me now begin to give you brotherly counsel as to how it stands with truly Christian child-training.

But for the sake of completeness I will begin from the beginning, and state my view how one should wisely and in a Christian way care for the little ones before they clearly understand the words of their parents and the training can properly begin, that is, before the end of the first year of their age. — Here the labor of love of the Christian parents is limited chiefly to prayer and intercession, to nursing, and to habituation.

As to the first point, it begins indeed even earlier than when the little child has beheld the light of this world; for indeed, since it already lives before God in the mother's womb, it is already an object of the believing intercession of the parents, as well as of the whole Church, that the LORD may further bless and preserve it in this "lowest part of the earth," where His love has planted this divine little seed-grain and inwardly nourishes it, until by His gracious and mighty help it breaks through the mother's womb as a healthy fruit of the body and rejoices the heart and eyes of the parents.

But after it has been born bodily, and thereafter spiritually through holy Baptism, it behooves you now, dear parents, that henceforth you continually lift up for the little child your prayer and intercession to the LORD, who, as HE drew it out of the mother's womb and regenerated it through the washing of water by the Word, now also henceforth will be its gracious and almighty Father, Preserver, and Ruler.

Here it behooves you now daily to commend it to the LORD, that HE may preserve it in His sweet and saving baptismal grace, and not impute to it the manifold stirrings of original sin in all manner of self-will and wickedness, but rather impute to it the merit and intercession of the dear LORD Jesus Christ, and that He may also graciously keep it bodily, by the protection of His holy angels, from all mishap and heartache.

These are doubtless the chief points of paternal and maternal intercession in the course of the first year, with which, of course, at the prompting of the Holy Ghost, according to circumstances, many a little sigh will mingle, the content of which, however, will be better known to the Holy Ghost praying within you, and to the faithful God and Father to whom it ascends, than to yourselves. With such praying and interceding, however, there must of course also be joined the constant spiritual offering up of your little child, that you have it only as though you had it not, and commend its life or death daily into the will of the LORD.

As to the second point in the course of the first year, namely the nursing of the little child, it is indeed necessary that, although it relates only to the body, you yet always hold fast the truth that the body needs fitting care and nursing not only for the sake of the soul, in order hereafter to be its capable servant and fellow-worker, but also for this reason, that it too is a creature of God, redeemed by the Son and inhabited by the Holy Ghost as His temple.

Therefore it becomes you in such nursing neither to cling to the little child in carnal self-love in such a way that you, as your flesh and blood, bodily pamper and coddle it, nor yet, in well-meant but unwise legalism, to harden it bodily too early, although this latter aberration occurs much more seldom than the former; for on the average one finds it much more frequent that the little ones have more food and warmer clothing and covering, especially in the cradle, than were well, whereas the washing and bathing of the whole body, which strengthens the skin and nerves, is not applied as often as is desirable.

In regard, finally, to the habituation of the child, this begins in fact, as regards the bodily, in a certain measure already within its first year of life; and it is not so altogether a matter of indifference, as some think, for the following years, in which the soul is to be wholesomely trained and habituated by suitable discipline, whether and how the little child, before it understands the training and habituating word, has been habituated already before the end of the first year. Particularly what is meant by this is in what manner mothers conduct themselves in the nourishing of the children; for it happens sometimes, alas, even with well-disposed and otherwise sensible mothers, that shortly before and after weaning they give the children too often, too much, and not seldom also highly indigestible foods, as, for example, fat pastry, fat meat, heavy vegetables, and the like. Thereby, however, not only are the stomach and its power of digestion weakened, the natural healthy nourishment and the wholesome strengthening of the little child hindered, and the germ of later evil diseases laid; — but there is also at the same time planted in the little child an evil habit, a morbid craving for much and unwholesome food, and thereby indirectly the power of the evil lusts in general, which it has inherited from Adam through its parents, likewise that of self-will, is mightily strengthened. — Conversely, on the other hand, if the child in that time receives at a fixed hour a fixed measure of easily digestible and suitable articles of food, as, for example, milk, white bread, porridge, and the like, then not only is its bodily well-being and thriving not hindered, but even now the wholesome habituation to temperance is planted, as it were germ-like, in the child.

The proper training and habituation of the child, however, in the more definite sense, begins indeed only after the end of the first year of life, when its reason gradually awakens, that is, when it begins to perceive and to understand the words of command and prohibition, together with the accompanying gestures, which the parents and especially the mothers speak to them. Here it behooves the educators again, before all things, daily to lift up their prayer to the Lord, and first for themselves, that they, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, may obtain enlightenment and wisdom to train the little child concerned according to God's will and Word, and that the LORD may also bless such training upon the child; and in these last peti-