# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1900_S9
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1900. 9

waits for its young and teaches what is due them. . . . And what use is it that we should otherwise have and do everything, and be like so many saints, if we neglect that, for the sake of which we live above all, namely to care for the young folk? I hold also that among outward sins the world before God is burdened by none so heavily and deserves so terrible a punishment as by this one, which we commit against the children, that we do not bring them up." (Loc. cit., p. 465.)

Very beautifully and truly writes Comenius, the pious advocate of thorough school instruction who lived in the seventeenth century, though not orthodox in every point: "Holy Scripture teaches us above all that no other means under heaven for mending human corruption is more effective than a right education of the young. So Solomon goes through all the wanderings of human faults, and after he has complained about them, that the perversities are not mended, nor the defects able to be counted, he turns at last to the young men with the urgent admonition that they remember their Creator, fear him and keep his commandments, for that is the whole duty of all men, Eccl. 12:1, 13. And in another place he says: Train up a boy in the way he is accustomed to, and he will not depart from it until he is old, Prov. 22:6. Hence David: Come, children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD, Ps. 34:12. But the heavenly David himself also, the true Solomon, the eternal Son of God, sent from heaven to make us new, has pointed out to us the same way, as it were with outstretched finger, in the words: Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them; for of such is the kingdom of God, Mark 10:14. And to the rest of us he said: Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven, Matt. 18:3." (Great Didactic [Große Unterrichtslehre], translated by Dr. C. Th. Lion, 4th ed., p. 16.)

This duty of parents toward their children is at the same time a glorious right, which no one may take from them or curtail. In our time the state in many quarters claims the education of children as a task belonging to it. Even if it does not seek to enforce this supposed right in the same manner as happened centuries ago in Sparta, where boys in their seventh year were taken away from their parents and brought up in state schools at state expense according to Spartan principles, it still comes to the same thing when the principle is set up and defended by many today that children are the property of the state, and that therefore the schooling and education of the children is first of all the state's responsibility. But this is a thoroughly perverted principle. The state thereby oversteps its bounds. — And when a congregation a Christian congregational school [sentence continues on the next page]