(Deut. 30: 15): “See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil,”—for thy choice. Here, as everywhere, God concedes to man the privilege of exercising his will-power in the direction of life and good, or of death and evil. The strictest Calvinist and the broadest Arminian are at one in their opinion so far. Whatever emphasis is laid, in their philosophy, on God’s influencing or enabling the human will to its final choice, neither of them disputes the fact that man is actually permitted to use that will in the direction of his choice. “It is God that worketh in man to will and to work for His good pleasure.” It is not that God worketh above man to crush out man’s faculty of willing whether to act for or against His good pleasure. In other words, God has fore-ordained that every man shall have the freedom of his will—and take the consequences.
It is true that God holds out before man, as an inducement to him in his choosing, the inevitable results of his choice. If he chooses good, life comes with it. If he chooses evil, death is its accompaniment. The rewards and the punishments are declared in advance; but after all, and in spite of all, the choice is man’s own. And every soul shall have eternally the destiny of its own choosing. The representative of God clothed with power, as he stood before the people of Israel, did not say, “You shall choose God’s service now; and if you deliberately refuse to do so, God will break your will so that you do do it;” but he said, “If it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve” (Josh. 24: 15).
As God, our wise and loving Father in heaven, deals with us his children, so we, as earthly fathers, should deal with our children. We should guard sacredly their privilege of personal choice; and while using every proper means to induce them to choose aright, we should never, never, never force their choice, even into the direction of our intelligent preference for them. The final responsibility of a choice and of its consequences rests with the child, and not with the parent.
A child’s will ought to be strong for right-doing. If it be not so at the start, it is the parent’s duty to guide, or train, it accordingly. But to break, or crush, a child’s will, is inconsistent with the educating and training of that will. A conflict between a parent and a child, where the only question is, Whose will shall yield to the other? is, after all, neither more nor less than a conflict of brute force.
Whether, in any instance, the will of the parent be set on having his child commit some repulsive crime against which the child’s moral nature recoils, or whether the will of the parent be set on the child’s reciting a Bible text or saying a prayer, the mere conflict of wills as a conflict of wills is a conflict of brute force; and in such a conflict neither party ought to succeed—for success in any such case is always a failure. If the parent really wills that the child shall do right, the parent’s endeavor should be to have the child will in the same direction. Merely to force one will into subjection to the other is, however, an injury both to the one who forces and to the one who submits.
A hypothetical illustration may make this matter clearer. A father says to his strong-willed child: “Johnny, shut that door.” Johnny says, “I won’t.” The father says, “You shall.” Johnny rejoins, “I won’t.” An issue is here made between two wills—the father’s and the son’s. Many a parent would suppose that in such a case the child’s will ought to be broken, subjugated, forced, if need be, under the pressure of the father’s will; and the more conscientious the parent, the firmer is likely to be his conviction of duty accordingly.
It is at such a point as this that the evil of breaking a child’s will, instead of training it, finds its foothold in many a Christian home. The father is determined not to yield his will to his child’s will. The child is determined not to yield his will to his father’s will. It is the old conflict between “an irresistible force and an immovable body.” In such a case, brute force may compel the child to do that which he chooses not to do, just as the rack and thumb-screws of the Inquisition could compel the tortured one to deny a belief which he chooses to adhere to; but in the one case, as in the other, the victim of the torturing pressure is permanently harmed, while the cause of truth and right has been in no sense the gainer by the triumph. Oh, what if God should treat his children in that way!
What, then, it may be asked, should be done with such a child in an issue like this? It certainly would have been better, it would have been far better, for the parent not to make a direct issue by following the child’s first refusal with the unqualified declaration, “You shall.” But with the issue once made, however unfortunately, then what? Let the parent turn to the child in loving gentleness—not then in severity, and never, never, never in anger—and tell him tenderly of a better way than that which he is pursuing, urging him to a wiser, nobler choice. In most cases the very absence of any show of angry conflict on the father’s part will prompt the child to choose to do that which he said he would not do. But if worst comes to worst (for we are here taking the extremest supposable issue, which ought indeed rarely, if ever, to occur), let the parent say to the child: “Johnny, I shall have to give you your choice in this matter. You can either shut that door or take a whipping.” Then a new choice is before the boy, and his will is free and unbroken for its meeting.
Be it understood, the father has no right to say, “I will whip you until you shut that door;” for that would be to deprive the boy of a choice, to deprive the boy of his will-power in the direction of his action: and that no parent is ever justified in doing. If the boy chooses to be whipped rather than to obey, the father must accept the result so far, and begin again for the next time; although, of course, there must be no undue severity in a child’s punishment; even the civil law forbids that. The father as a father is not entitled to have his will stand in the place of his child’s will; even though he is privileged to strive to bring the child to will in the same direction that the father’s will trends.
All the way along through his training-life, a child ought to know what are to be the legitimate consequences of his chosen action, in every case, and then be privileged to choose accordingly. There is a place for punishment in a child’s training, but punishment is a penalty attached to a choice; it is not brute force applied to compel action against choice. No child ought ever to be punished, unless he understood, when he chose to do the wrong in question, that he was thereby incurring the penalty of that punishment.
In most cases it is better, as has been said, for a parent to avoid a direct issue with a child, than to seek, or even than to recognize and meet, an issue. And in the endeavor to train a child’s will, there is often a gain in giving the child an alternative consequence of obedience or disobedience. That is God’s way of holding out rewards and punishments. For example, a wise young mother was just giving her little boy a bit of candy which was peculiarly prized by him, when, in speaking to a lady visitor he called her by the familiar term used by older members of the family in addressing her. The mother reminded him of the manner in which he should speak to the lady. He refused to conform to this. “Then I cannot let you have this candy,” said the mother. “All right,” was the wilful reply. “I’d rather go without the candy than call her what you tell me to.” The mother turned quietly away, taking the candy with her. An hour later that child came to his mother, saying, “Mamma, perhaps you can give me that candy now; for I will always call that lady just what you tell me to.” A few added words from the mother at that juncture settled that point for all time. Thenceforward the child did as he had thus been led to will to do. His will had not been broken, but it had been newly directed by judicious training.
But, it may be asked, if a child be told by his mother to leave the room, at a time when it is peculiarly important that he should not remain there, and he says that he will not go, what shall be done with him? Shall he be permitted to have his own way, against his own true welfare? If the chief point be to get him out of the room, and there is no time just then for his training, the child can be carried out by main strength. But that neither breaks nor trains the child’s will. It is not a triumph of will,
