Life Sketches Manuscript

Immaculate Children

I can now look back on my youthful experience, and see how near I came to making a fatal mistake. I had read many of the religious biographies of children who had possessed numberless virtues and lived faultless lives. I had conceived a great admiration for the paragons of perfection there represented. But far from encouraging me in my efforts to become a Christian, these books were as stumbling blocks to my feet; for I despaired of ever attaining to the perfection of the youthful characters in those stories, who lived the lives of saints, and were free from all the doubts and sins and weaknesses under which I staggered. Their faultless lives were followed by a premature but happy death, and the biographers tacitly intimated that they were too good and pure for earth, therefore God, in His divine pity, had removed them from its uncongenial atmosphere. LSMS 22.1

The similarity of these avowedly true histories seemed to point the fact to my youthful mind that they really presented a correct picture of a child's Christian life. I repeated to myself again and again, “If this is true, I can never be a Christian. I can never hope to be like those children.” This thought drove me almost to despair. But when I learned that I could come to Jesus just as I was, that the Saviour had come to ransom just such unworthy sinners as I was, then light broke upon my darkness, and I could claim the promises of God. LSMS 22.2

Later experiences have convinced me that these biographies of immaculate children mislead the youth. They extol the amiable qualities of their characters, and suppress their faults and failures. If they were represented as struggling with temptations, occasionally vanquished, yet triumphing over their trials in the end, if they were represented as subject to human frailties and beset by ordinary temptations, then children would see that they had experienced like trials with themselves, yet through the grace of God had conquered. Such examples would give them fresh courage to renew their efforts to serve the Lord, hoping to triumph as those before them had done. LSMS 23.1

But the sober realities and errors of the young Christian's life were vigorously kept out of sight, while the virtues were so exaggerated as to lift them far above the common level of ordinary children, who naturally despair of ever reaching such excellence, and therefore give up the effort, in many cases, and gradually sink into a state of indifference. LSMS 23.2