Martha Laurens Ramsay's Religious Education on Her Children

As a Christian mother, Martha provided religious education to her children at home. Before they were born, they were the subjects of her prayers. At a time when private baptisms were common, she devoted them all to God in baptism, publicly in church, because “she rejoiced in every proper opportunity of declaring to the world her firm belief of the Christian religion, and her respect for all its institutions.” As soon as they were capable of receiving religious instruction, she liberally imparted it; and early taught them their miserable and corrupted state by nature; that they were born into a world of sin and misery; surrounded with temptations, and without a possibility of salvation, but by the grace of God, and a participation in the benefits procured for sinners, by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

When her children could read, she taught them to read religious texts. According to Ramsay, “she early taught them to read their Bibles. That this might be done pleasantly she connected with it Mrs. Trimmer's prints of scripture history; that it might be done with understanding, she made them read, in connexion with their Bibles, Watts's short view of the whole scripture history, and, as they advanced to a proper age, Newton on the Prophecies, and such books as connect sacred with profane history, and the Old with the New Testament; so that the Bible, though written in periods widely remote from each other, might appear to them a uniform, harmonious system of divine truth.” Of this blessed book she enjoined upon them daily to read a portion, and to prize it as the standard of faith and practice; as a communication from heaven on eternal concerns; as the word of God pointing out the only way to salvation; as a letter of love sent from their heavenly Father to direct their wandering feet to the paths of truth and happiness. In her family, “she was the head of the family, and in health, she daily read to her domestic circle, a portion of the holy scriptures, and prayed with them;” Moreover, she also instructed her children to read Burkitt's Help and Guide to Christian Families. In performing this duty, she placed her children around her, and read alternately with them verses in the Bible, and Watts's Psalms and Hymns, or sentences in other religious books, so as to teach them at the same time, by her example, the art of reading with emphasis and propriety. The exercise was occasionally varied by reading in the same manner the New Testament in Greek, with her sons, and in French with her daughters.