letter published posthumously in Old School Baptist Quarterly vol. 1 no. 2 (Apr. 1906)
AUTHOR: | Thompson, Gregg M. |
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In reference to Sunday Schools, I wish it was with the Baptists now as sixty years ago. Then there was a Sunday School in every family. Parents then did not allow their children to visit on Sunday, but took them to meeting; and at home trained them to read the scriptures, and would talk to them of God and a future state. And for ten or fifteen years after I became a Baptist, I never heard of a child trained by Baptist parents and receiving a hope in Christ and going to some other denomination.
As preachers, we should teach parents their duty to their children, and children their duty to parents. But the training or educating of children, is a parent’s duty and belongs to none others. The church is nowhere made the guardian of our children, neither has she any right or power from Christ to meddle with their education, or to assume the duties which belong to parents. I hold that the church is the only body Christ has ever organized or authorized to administer the laws of His kingdom, and that she has no legislative power; that every church is an independent body and subject to no power but Christ, and that all humanly devised societies belong to the world. |
