“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body,” says Addison. “As, by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated; by the other, virtue (which is the health of the mind) is kept alive, cherished, and confirmed.” And Dr. Johnson adds, “The foundation of knowledge must be laid by reading.”

But there is reading, and reading; there is reading that debilitates and debases the mind; as there is reading that strengthens and invigorates it. There is reading that forms the basis of knowledge, and there is reading that lessens the reader’s desire for knowledge. A love of reading is an acquired taste, not an instinctive preference. The habit of reading is formed in childhood; and a[Pg 176] child’s taste in reading is formed in the right direction or in the wrong one while he is under the influence of his parents; and they are directly responsible for the shaping and cultivating of that taste.

A child ought to read books that are helpful to his growth in character and in knowledge; and a child ought to love to read these books. A child will love to read such books as his parents train, or permit, him to find pleasure in reading. It is the parent who settles this question—by action or by inaction. It is the child who reaps the consequences of his parents’ fidelity or lack in this sphere.

Of course, it is not to be understood that a child is to read, and to love to read, only those books which add to his stock of knowledge, or which immediately tend to the improvement of his morals; for there is as legitimate a place for amusement and for the lighter play of imagination in a child’s reading, as there is for recreation and laughter in the sphere of his physical train[Pg 177]ing. As one of the fathers of English poetry has told us,
“Books should to one of these four ends conduce,
  For wisdom, piety, delight, or use;”

and that reading which conduces merely to “delight” for the time being, has its essential part in the formation of a character that includes wisdom and piety and useful knowledge. But it is to be understood that no child should be left to read only those books to which his untutored tastes naturally incline him; nor should he be made to read other books simply as a dry task. His taste for instructive books as well as for amusing ones should be so cultivated by the judicious and persistent endeavors of his parents, that he will find enjoyment in the one class as truly as in the other.

“Nonsense songs” and the rhymes of “Mother Goose” are not to be undervalued, in their place, as a means of amusement and of attraction in the direction of a child’s earliest reading. Their mis[Pg 178]sion in this realm is as real as that of the toy rattle in the education of a child’s ear, or the dancing-jack in the training of his eye. But these helps to amusement are to be looked upon only as aids toward something better; not as in themselves sufficient to an end. So, also, it is with the better class of fairy tales. They meet a want in a child’s mind in the developing and exercising of his imagination; and he who has never read them will inevitably lack something of that incitement and enjoyment in the realm of fancy which they supply so liberally. But it is only a beginning of good work in the sphere of a child’s reading, when he has found that there is amusement there together with food for his imagination and fancy. And it is for the parent to see that the work thus begun does not stop at its beginning.

There is a place for fiction in the matter of a child’s reading. Good impressions can be made on a child’s mind, and his feelings can be swayed in the direction of the right, by means of a story that is fictitious without being false. And thus it is[Pg 179] that the average Sunday-school library book has its mission in the work of child-training. But fiction ought not to be the chief factor in any child’s reading, nor can influence and impressions take the place of instruction and information in the proper filling of his mind’s treasure-chambers. Even if a child were to read only the best religious “story-books” which the world’s literature proffers to him, this reading by itself would not tend to the development of his highest mental faculties, or to the fostering of his truest manhood. Unless he reads also that which adds to his stock of knowledge, and which gives him a fresh interest in the events and personages of the world’s history, a child cannot obey the Divine injunction to grow in knowledge as well as in grace, and he will be the loser by his lack.

That a child is inclined by nature to prefer an amusing or an exciting story-book to a book of straightforward fact, everybody knows. But that is no reason why a child should follow his own unguided tastes in the matter of reading, any more[Pg 180] than he should be permitted to indulge at all times his preference, in the realm of appetite, for sweet cakes instead of bread and butter, or for candies rather than meat and potatoes. “A child left to himself causeth shame to his mother,”—and dishonor to himself, in one sphere of action as in another; and unless a parent cultivates a taste for right reading of every sort on a child’s part, that child can never be at his best in the world, nor can his parents have such delight in his attainments as otherwise they might have.

A wise parent can train his children to an interest in any book in which they ought to be interested. He can cultivate in their minds such a taste for books of history, of biography, of travel, of popular science, and of other useful knowledge, that they will find in these books a higher and more satisfying pleasure than is found by their companions in the exciting or delusive narrations of fiction and fan............