Parenting & Family Quote by Daniel H. Hill

A soldier’s plea to “Train our children to love God” is less a lullaby than a marching order. Hill isn’t talking about private spirituality as much as social formation: belief as discipline, reverence as rehearsal for duty. The verb “train” matters. It carries the muscle memory of drills, command structure, and repetition until obedience feels natural. Love, in this framing, isn’t a spontaneous emotion; it’s a cultivated allegiance.

Placed in Daniel H. Hill’s 19th-century world, the line sits inside a culture where Protestant Christianity functioned as civic technology. For many Americans, especially in the South, God-language underwrote hierarchies and offered moral cover for a society built on coercion. A career soldier and Confederate general, Hill lived through a period when national identity, regional loyalty, and religious certainty were tightly braided. Teaching children to “love God” could read as an attempt to stabilize a shaken world: war, emancipation, Reconstruction, and the slow collapse of an older order. When institutions feel threatened, the family becomes the fallback state.

The subtext is about control disguised as tenderness. “Love God” sounds soft, but “train” admits the anxiety underneath: left alone, the next generation might not choose the right loyalties. It’s also a wager on durability. Armies disband and governments fall; a child’s conscience, once shaped, can outlast battlefield defeats. In that sense, Hill’s sentence is a strategy for the long war: not over territory, but over memory, morality, and who gets to define the good.