It is
just as easy to teach children to speak correctly, and to call all things
by their proper names, as to abuse their vernacular tongue. Such
mutilations are impediments to the growth of the intellect. The child must
afterwards be taught to undo what it was taught to do and say in the
nursery. But as this subject will be fully considered in the chapter on
Home Education, we shall refrain from further comment here.
The nursery is moral and spiritual. The first moral and religious training
of the child belongs to the nursery, and is the work of the mother. Upon
her personal exhibition of truth, justice, virtue, &c., depends the same
moral elements in the character of her child. In the nursery we receive our
first lessons in virtue or in vice, in honesty or dishonesty, in truth or
in falsehood, in purity or in corruption. The full-grown man is the matured
child morally as well as physically and intellectually. The same may be
said of the spiritual formation and growth of the child. Spiritual culture
belongs eminently to the nursery. There the pious parent should begin the
work of her child's salvation.
From what we have now seen of the nursery, we may infer its very common
abuse by Christian parents in various ways. They abuse it either by
forsaking its duties, or giving it over to nurses. The whole subject warns
parents against giving over their children to dissolute nurses.
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