# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S354
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

354 On the Evangelical Conduct of a Christian-minded Parish Schoolteacher, Etc.

Now when, after Christ's ascension, the gospel was later proclaimed to
the Gentiles as well, and a part of them came to believe in Christ, the
Christian fathers or mothers certainly instructed their children at home
in the first letters of Christian doctrine, and raised them on the
reasonable, pure milk of the catechism. And just as they had formerly,
out of the impulse of natural love, told their children the fables of the
deeds of their so-called gods, so, after their conversion, it was the
outflow of their sanctified love that, once they themselves had heard
and learned, through their evangelists and catechists, the three great
works of the triune God, they in turn imparted these, in narrative and
doctrine, within the domestic circle, to their children and household
members.

It is thus evident, partly from the natural light of reason, partly from
God's Word, that the natural fathers, and, according to circumstances,
also the mothers, are the natural teachers of their children first of all in
God's Word; and that many of them, after the invention of the art of
printing, having acquired for themselves the reading of the printed Word
of God, taught the same to their children as well. History confirms this.
For, down to more recent times, in Norway, in what are now the Russian
Baltic provinces, in Finland, Esthonia, and Livonia, for example, the
Lutheran parents — and especially the mothers, at the spinning wheel —
have performed for their children this twofold service of love; and, to
my knowledge, there still exists in Iceland this lovely Christian custom,
that the natural parents are, in their own homes, father-teachers and
mother-teachers to their children in the reading and learning of the
Small Lutheran Catechism. And where, by the power of faith in Christ,
the parents were themselves enlightened Christians and had a living
knowledge of the divine Word, there, to the great profit and benefit of the
children, doctrine and discipline in such domestic instruction went hand
in hand in the most desirable and manifold way. Thus, for instance, a
godly mother, in teaching the Fourth Commandment, had manifold
occasion to demonstrate to her children, most vividly, their own manifold
transgression of it from their conduct at home, together with the horror
of original sin from which these actual sins flow; to disclose to them
repeatedly the holy wrath and punishing zeal of God against it; and, with
the wholesome sharpness of the divine Word, to press it upon their
conscience, so that they began to be terrified before God's wrath and
judgment, to bear contrition and sorrow over their sin, and to take
refuge in Christ.

Likewise, how sweet and lovely it must then have been, precisely from
the lips of the mother — whose hands were constantly engaged in bodily
kindnesses toward her children — for the depicting of Christ, according
to the gospel, as their Savior and Redeemer too, to flow into the hearts
of the children, and to strengthen the faith in Christ already received in
baptism, ever taking from his fullness grace for grace, forgiveness for
forgiveness.

In the meantime, however, schools too had arisen in which children
were taught, and this on the part of the church. In the Middle Ages it
was chiefly