Raising Children for Christ: Child-Rearing Manuals, Sunday Schools, and Leisure Time

Abstract

In 1874 Andrew Murray jun. described a prolonged journey into the interior of the Cape Colony to the pupils of the Huguenot Seminary. The institution’s headmistress, Abbie Ferguson, wrote about his talk to her sister, placing particular emphasis on Murray’s references to the ‘thousands and thousands of children who had no one properly to care for them’ in rural South Africa.1 Murray’s argument was less that these children lacked parents and guardians to take care of their material needs, and more that they were without adequate spiritual guidance. ‘Proper’ care, in his definition, implied an interest in children’s spiritual growth, as well as their physical, emotional, and intellectual development. His purpose was to encourage his audience to train both as teachers and as missionaries and, to some extent, his point was that the DRC needed to direct a kind of missionary work towards the Cape’s rural white, as well as black, population. The DRC initiated its missionary activities formally at a synod in 1857, at least 50 years after concerted missionary work had begun in South Africa. Until the arrival of the Scottish ministers during the 1820s, the leadership of the DRC had been suspicious of missions and missionaries, partly because of its general antipathy towards evangelicalism.2 But as an evangelical church, the DRC felt a particular urgency to make up for lost time.3