Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Dr. Bob Christian Training # 1

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Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Dr. Bob – Vermont Youth Refresher # 1

Dick B.
© 2009 Dick B. All rights reserved

Articles in The Vermont Chronicle for June, 1896

[Introduction to the Vermont Youth Refresher series: After two years of research at the boyhood communities of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob in East Dorset, Rutland, Manchester, and St. Johnsbury, Vermont, we have just acquired The Vermont Chronicle: The Religious Family Paper of Vermont Vol. LXX1 No. 24, June 11, 1896, published by C.M. Stone & Company. In our title Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous: His Excellent Training in the Good Book as a Youngster in Vermont, we’ve covered the many training influences that impacted on A.A. and Dr. Bob—Bob’s parents, church, Sunday school, Christian Endeavor activities, prayer meetings, revivals and conversions, the YMCA, St. Johnsbury Academy, and the Fairbanks family. And this timely issue of The Vermont Chronicle for June, 1896 provides a great backdrop for the facts at this peak period of Dr. Bob’s training. In these excerpts, we’ll extract representative portions.]

“Children Belong to God

“Parents are the divinely appointed guardians and educators of their children. Children are entrusted to them by God to train up the way of righteousness, so that they may be upright, rendering to their Maker a hearty reverence and obedience, and to all men the things that are just and equal. To carry out this desire of God for every child that is born into the world should be the great aim and purpose of parents. From the birth of the child the supreme thought of every parent should be, ‘How can I make this child what God would have it become? How can I make sure that, in character and conduct, it will attain the excellence it is capable of and which God designed it to have?’ The parents who make this their prayer and aim may be sure of God’s sympathy and help. . . . A practical example of this method of regarding and training children appears in some remarks made once by Mrs. General Booth [wife of the Salvation Army founder]. . . . ‘The first principle on which parents are to act is to acknowledge God’s ownership in their children. . .’”

The Childhood Christian Training of A.A. Cofounder Dr. Bob

In our title Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous (http://www.dickb.com/drbobofaa.shtml), we quote Proverbs 22 “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” And the start of Dr. Bob’s training began at his boyhood home and birthplace in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Bob’s parents, Judge Walter P. Smith and Mrs. Susan Holbrook Smith, were deeply involved in training a youngster by bringing him to Christ and teaching him the Bible. The information is available in the records of their years of service at Bob’s Sunday school as teachers and Sunday school superintendents, and in the materials from the Sunday school that we have acquired and now placed in the Dr. Bob Core Library at North Congregational Church, St. Johnsbury, Vermont.
Gloria Deo