Children of light

“ And I have heard the children of this world speak with like superiority of the child of light whom they loved—allowing him wondrous good, but regarding him as a kind of God’s chicken: nothing is so mysterious to the children of this world as the ways of the children of light, though to themselves they seem simple enough. ”

“ Clair? was I to take it quite quietly, and give no sign even of annoyance? take no means of showing my displeasure, or of putting a stop to the naughtiness that called it forth? My mind put these questions impatiently, and still, as it did so, an answer came from somewhere, "Walk as children of light." I knew that children of light would reprove darkness only with light; and a struggle began. Other words came into my head then, which made the matter only clearer. "If any man smite thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other." "Love your enemies." ”

“ In the out-of-door scene, too, it is the glitter of the running water, or a meadow all white with daisies, which captivates the glance. Light, the symbol of life's joy, seems to be the first language in which the spirit of beauty speaks to a child. ”

“ People are born in one of three classes: children of light, children of twilight, children of night. And how can they help into which class they are born? But I do think the twilight children can by diligence, by, if you like, prayer and fasting, come out of the dusk into a greater brightness. Only they must come out by themselves. ”

“ Above all, away with this bugaboo nightmare of little children, who will have enough, God knows, to contend with, as they grow older, without prematurely draping with the blackness of darkness, the entrance to a portal through which they are certainly destined to pass, and which the light of faith in their maturer years may gild, as the shining gate to the Celestial City. ”

“ A little door inside me opens to those Voices.
My little door opens at the first shriek of the first child out of doors, and I hear not only the hundreds of vivid piercing Voices but more—their far-off echoes.
They are the Voices of children, children light-held in crude cold innocence. The eyes of the children are clear—their impulses and instincts rule their little lives. They are yet untouched by the tiredness and terror and shame and sorrow of being human beings. ”

“ A child can easily make a substantial thing out of the dark, as he can out of a shadow.
Yet in most, if not all, cases imagination is active here. The darkness itself offers points for the play of imagination. Owing to the activity of the retina, which goes on even when no light excites it, brighter spots are apt to stand out from the black background, to take form and to move; and all this supplies food to a child's fancy. ”

“ It is the history of three brown girls, children of the sunny East; born blind, but whose eyes have been opened so that they can see the beautiful, noble things in life. And now, that their eyes have grown accustomed to the light, now that they have learned to love the sun and everything that is in the brilliant world; they are about to have the blinders pressed back against their eyes, and to be plunged into the darkness from which they had come, and in which each and every one of their grandmothers back through the ages had lived. ”

“ Then they went riding on the clouds, and the light of their faces gave a brightness to the edge of the clouds, so that the people on the earth loved to stand watching them, never fancying what a troop of angel-children were frolicking on them. ”

“ It is with the advance of years that a materialistic temper settles upon us. But the children live in the light of the morning-land. The spirit-world has no mysteries for them; that parable and travesty of the spirit-world, the fairy-world, where all things are possible, is it not their favourite dwelling-place? And fairy tales are so dear to children because their spirits fret against the hard and narrow limitations of time and place and substance; they cannot breathe freely in a material world. ”

“ It is not too much, I think, to say that to many a child this dread of the black night has been the worst of his sufferings. At no time is he really so brave as when he lies still in a cold damp terror and trusts to the coming of the morning light.
I do not believe that fear of the dark is universal among young children. ”

“ Children of the light should be brave, children of the light should not be afraid of the light, children of the light should be cheerful, children of the light should be buoyant, [206] children of the light should be transparent, children of the light should be hopeful, children of the light should be pure, and children of the light should walk in this darkened world, bearing their radiance with them; and making things, else unseen, visible to many a dim eye. ”

“ How can you wake children in a more kindly way than by a gentle Voice that will not frighten them, but will merely remind them that the night is over and the light has come? You do not inform them that the nightmares that frightened them so badly are not real, because children believe in magic. ”

“ So many little children I have loved have gone home with tiny life-torches just filling some small domestic world with light, a light that could not go out, and which perhaps heaven needs to make it perfect heaven. ”

“ It is a light from the right or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows. And you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing and parting caress that infancy has given to his face. ”

“ Besides light and colour, children have a beauty of finish which is much beyond that of more finished years. This gratuitous addition, this completeness, is one of their unexpected advantages. Their beauty of finish is the peculiarity of their first childhood, and loses, as years are added, that little extra character and that surprise of perfection. A bloom disappears, for instance. In some little children the whole face, and especially all the space between the growth of the eyebrows and the growth of the hair, is covered with hardly perceptible down as soft as bloom. ”

“ There is structural adaptation in the brain tissue to the manner of thoughts we think––a place and a way for them to run in. Thus we see how the destiny of a life is shaped in the nursery, by the reverent naming of the Divine Name; by the light scoff at holy things; by the thought of duty the little child gets who is made to finish conscientiously his little task; by the hardness of heart that comes to the child who hears the faults or sorrows of others spoken of lightly. ”

“ We all know that the first thing a child does with its eyes, even when it is only five or six weeks old, is to turn them towards the most brilliant object within its reach. Instinctively and without being aware of it, the child's eye seems to seek the light. The whole of nature, from the lowest plant to the baby in the cradle, appears more or less endowed with this instinct of turning towards the light.
From the time that children begin to distinguish objects, their eyes are liable to be affected by two causes of error. ”

“ The child who observes the sun for a year and notes down for himself, or dictates, the times of his rising and setting for the greater part of the year, and the points of his rising and setting, will have secured a basis for a good deal of definite knowledge. Such observation should take in the reflection of the sun's light, the evening light reflected by east windows, the morning light by west windows, the varying length and intensity of shadows, the cause of shadows, to be learned by the shadow cast by a figure between the blind and a candle. ”

“ The Light One gave his mother's body to the earth, the Great Mother from which springs all life. He made great mountains, and covered them with forests from which beautiful rivers ran. The Dark One threw down the mountains, gnarled the forests, and bent the rivers which his brother had made. ”

“ It does not show itself in the early months. A baby of three or four months if accustomed to a light may no doubt be upset at being deprived of it; but this is some way from a dread of the dark. This presupposes a certain development of the mind, and more particularly what we call imagination. It is said by Dr. Stanley Hall to attain its greatest strength about the age of five to seven, when images of things are known to be vivid.
So far as we can understand it the fear of the dark is rarely of the darkness as such. ”

“ Children should be taught at an early age not to let the light, either natural or artificial, shine in their eyes. The strongest light should come from the left. Light from above is the best. One should not read too long at any one time without looking up at some distant object in order to rest the muscles of the eyes. ”

“ At last, they arrived at the room of smooth, unflecked Black Light, which men call Darkness because their eyes are not yet able to make it out. And here the Children fell asleep without delay on two soft beds of clouds. [Pg 125]
CHAPTER VII THE GRAVEYARD
When the Children were not going on an expedition, they played about in the Realms of Light; and this was a great treat for them, for the gardens and the country around the temple were as wonderful as the halls and galleries of silver and gold. ”

“ Solar Light.--But this is only one of the reasons why, for health's sake alone, it is of the first importance to give children long days in the open country. They want light, solar light, as well as air. ”

“ He may shut his eyes and say, 'There is no sun,' but none the less is he warmed and fed and comforted by the light he denies. This is the faith in which we would bring up our children, this strong, passionate sense of the dear nearness of our God ”

“ The children of the sun, the children of their sun—oh, how beautiful they were! Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find some remote, faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! ”

“ Field after field, and forest after forest, tiny villages and lonely huts flitted past them; the air grew no cooler, but the earth grew darker, and the sky lighter. The horses dashed onward with their silent load; the deep stillness of the summer night enwrapped them; over the black tree tops hung the tender crescent of the moon, and now and then a flash of light lit up the firmament, as if from a distant thunder cloud; a dreamy, quiet mood stole over our friend, the subdued happiness of a half dormant soul ”

“ A shadow rose out of the deep beyond the worlds and spread itself over heaven and earth, for the light of the universe had gone out.
The gods could not speak for horror. They stood like statues for a moment, and then a hopeless wail burst from their lips. Tears fell like rain from eyes that had never wept before, for Balder, the joy of Asgard, had gone to Niflheim and left them desolate. But Odin was saddest of all, because he knew the future, and he knew that peace and light had fled from Asgard forever, and that the last day and the long night were hurrying on. ”

“ How much the fear of the dark is due to inability to see and so to know is shown by the familiar fact that children and adults who can enter a strange gloomy-looking room and keep brave as long as things are before their eyes are wont to feel a creepy sense of "something" behind them when they turn their backs to retire and can no longer see. It is shown too in the common practice of children and their elders to look into the cupboard, under the bed, and so forth, before putting out the light ”

“ But, just as certainly, young people [5] do have religious experiences, and these often are more vivid and glowing than those of the elders. That is it—children can glow. They can light up. This capacity to glow is at the very heart of what we are talking about. ”

“ And now, before bidding you good-bye, did you ever think of the spiritual meaning of the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night, as connected with our knowledge and our ignorance, our light and darkness, our gladness and our sorrow? The everyday use of this divine alternation to the wandering children of Israel, is plain enough. Darkness is best seen against light, and light against darkness ”

“ Above these dusky star-eyed children,—
Crinkly-haired, with sweet-sad baby voices,
Pleading low for light and love and living—
And I crooned:
"Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair ”

“ Inasmuch as light makes thus early an impression on the delicate organ of vision, how necessary it behooves us to guard the infant from too bright lights or too much exposure in our bright climate. Mothers—not only the young mother with her first child, but also those who have had several children—are too apt to try to quiet a restless child by placing it near a bright flame ”

“ As mine were to thee;
The free life of thy living,
Be the gift of it free;
Not as servant to lord, nor as master to slave, shalt thou give thee
to me.
O children of banishment,
Souls overcast,
Were the lights ye see vanish meant
Alway to last,
Ye would know not the sun overshining the shadows and stars overpast.
I that saw where ye trod
The dim paths of the night
Set the shadow call'd God
In your skies to give light;
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in
sight. ”