Children of this world

“ To bring the human race, family by family, child by child, out of the savage and inhuman desolation where He is not, into the light and warmth and comfort of the presence of God, is, no doubt, the chief thing we have to do in the world. ”

“ Very fond of books, and full of lively fancies, born of a strong imagination and a spiritual nature, these traits made his parents anxious to balance them with useful knowledge and healthful society, lest they should make him one of those pale precocious children who amaze and delight a family sometimes, and fade away like hot-house flowers, because the young soul blooms too soon, and has not a hearty body to root it firmly in the wholesome soil of this world. ”

“ This world has never taken the education of children seriously. Misled by selfish dreamings of personal life forever, we have neglected the true and practical immortality through the endless life of children's children. ”

“ I have wished to become a child again that I might find this book, that not only tells one of such a country, but is fuller than any other book that tells of heroic life, of the childhood that is in all folk-lore, dearer to me than all the books of the western world.
Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. ”

“ Let the children come unto Me!—Not kings and politicians, not journalists and generals, not the grown-up people, but children. And so to-day also, when we ask for a way out of the present world-misery, when we in profundis of darkness to-day ask for light, and in sorrow for to-morrow ask for advice and comfort, we must look to the children and Christ. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When fathers and mothers look upon the fair blossoming children that cling to them as the vine wraps its tendrils round the spreading bough, and when their great love fills them with ineffable longing to shield these tender souls from the blighting blasts of a cold and stormy world, and little by little to prepare them to stand alone and breast the gales of fortune, do they not instinctively put their trust in the power of education? ”

“ There are children, I know, who soon capitulate, who early accept the ruling of their elders that the world is a place of utter unlikelihoods, that uncertainty characteristic; they simply accept the fact that life reflects itself on the retina not in the dignity of uprightness, but rather stands consistently and perpetually on its head. ”

“ Parents desire their Children’s Happiness, (I say nothing of those Monsters who neither feel nor act the Parent’s Part) but how do they attempt to reach it? certainly in a Path the most remote from it. No sooner have Children a Place on the great Stage of the World, but their Will is irregularly cherished; before they know where [209] they are, or know to what End they have a Being, their tender Minds are impressed with Principles as opposite to Happiness as Light to Darkness. Who first awakens in them a Spirit of Resentment and fierce Revenge, even before they can speak? ”

“ Just so irrational, inconsequent, loving and heroic, and generally tiresome to the grown-up world were our own impulses that long ago, on which we look back with tenderness, but seldom with complacency. If we rise, after reading, The Story of a Child [See Appendix A] , a little more humble, a little more diffident, ready to believe more than we see, why, it will do us no harm, and should bless and help the children. ”

“ The object of the present writer is to treat of the child from a point of view hitherto entirely neglected, to exhibit what the world owes to childhood and the motherhood and the fatherhood which it occasions, to indicate the position of the child in the march of civilization among the various races of men, and to estimate the influence which the child-idea and its accompaniments have had upon sociology, mythology, religion, language; for the touch of the child is upon them all, and the debt of humanity to the little children has not yet been told. ”

“ Now, they are in our hands to mold as we will; then, they will be the masters, and much of the character of their sway will depend upon the guidance of the present. Viewed in this light, the manners and the morals of children, closely associated as they are, become of the greatest importance to the world. ”

“ Let this be the mother’s key to the whole of the education of each boy and each girl; not of her children; the divine Spirit does not work with nouns of multitude, but with each single child. Because He is infinite, the whole world is not too great a school for this indefatigable Teacher, and because He is infinite, He is able to give the whole of His infinite attention for the whole time to each one of His multitudinous pupils. ”

“ The First Function of the Parent is that of Disciple––But we live in a redeemed world, and one of the meanings which that unfathomable phrase bears is, that it is the duty of those who have the care of childhood to eradicate each vulgar and hateful trait, to plant and foster the fruits of that kingdom in the children who have been delivered from the kingdom of nature into the kingdom of grace; that is to say, all children born into this redeemed world. ”

“ But children heed no minor distinctions; to them, the inhabited world is composed of the two main divisions: children and upgrown people; the latter being in no way superior to the former—only hopelessly different. ”

“ If heredity means so much, if, as would seem at the first glance, the child comes into the world with his character ready-made, what remains for the parents to do but to enable him to work out his own salvation without let or hindrance of their making, upon the lines of his individuality? The strong naturalism, shall we call it, of our day, inclines us to take this view of the objects and limitations of education ”

“ But however good the children be, the parents owe it to society to make them better than they are, and to bless the world with people, not merely good-natured and well-disposed, but good of set purpose and endeavour. ”

“ You see this foundation, the starting point, the germ of intelligence embodied in this infant, calculated to grow and expand into manhood, then to the capacity of an angel, and so onward to eternal exaltation. But here is the foundation. Sent to school, the child learns to read, and continues to improve as long as it lives. ”

“ All young People are, what they are, in proportion to the Opportunities they have had of acquiring Knowledge, or the Use they have made of them; so shut them out from Opportunities, and they can never improve; because they are deprived of the Means: thus it often happens in Families; the Boys are in the World, and gain a Knowledge of good Behaviour; the Girls are coop’d up, and Mamma wonders at their Ignorance! ”

“ And we thought we were wise and strong in thus leaving for ever the land of childish dreams, but as we re-become little children in the wondrous world of wisdom, we shall return again to the inspiring dreams of childhood and find that they are, after all, realities. ”

“ Only at home can children be trained in the chivalrous temper of 'proud submission and dignified obedience'; and if the parents do not inspire and foster deference, reverence, and loyalty, how shall these crowning graces of character thrive in a hard and emulous world? ”

“ Children all the world over laugh and weep, quarrel and make up, play hard, and eat heartily, love and try their mammas, pet and tease their little brothers and sisters,—are a sweet care and a dear perplexity, and are God's little folk, all of them. ”

“ As a matter of fact, we do not realise children, we under-estimate them; in the divine words, we 'despise' them, with the best intentions in the world, because we confound the maturity of their frames, and their absolute ignorance as to the relations of things, with spiritual impotence: whereas the fact probably is, that never is intellectual power so keen, the moral sense so strong, spiritual perception so piercing, as in those days of childhood which we regard with a supercilious, if kindly, smile. ”

“ Children, ay, forsooth,
They bring their own love with them when they come,
But if they come not there is peace and rest;
The pretty lambs! and yet she cries for more:
Why the world's full of them, and so is heaven—
They are not rare. ”

“ As they follow intently the progress of the story, the young listeners are constantly called upon to place themselves in the situations in which they have never been, to imagine trials, dangers, difficulties, such as they have never experienced, to reproduce in themselves, for instance, such feelings as that of being alone in the wide world, of being separated from father's and mother's love, of being hungry and without bread, exposed to enemies without protection, etc. ”

“ Children live, in a great measure, from the earliest age in an ideal world—their pains and their pleasures, their joys and their fears being, to a vast extent, the concomitants of phantasms and illusions having often the slightest bond of connection with the realities around them. ”

“ I know it for certain, though most people seem to have forgotten it, that children are living beings—more living than grown-up people, who have built their shells of habit around them. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for their mental health and development that they should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love. ”

“ Children the world over epitomize in their habits and thoughts the infancy of the human race. Their morals and modesty, as well as their games, are those of paleolithic man, and they are as remorselessly cruel. ”

“ This, of the sensations, is only one example of the altruistic or egoistic direction which the various operations of a child’s complex nature may receive. His affections, again, are capable of receiving a subjective or objective direction, according to the suggestions which reach him from without. Every child comes into the world richly endowed with a well of love, a fountain of justice; but whether the stream of love shall flow to the right or the left, whether it shall be egoistic or altruistic, depends on the child’s earliest training. ”

“ What can the child have, if she spends her life here? No education, no pleasure,—nothing. Nice little place, no doubt, for those that are used to it, but—Lord! a child that has the whole world before her, to pick and choose! ”

“ If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has that possession. ”

“ They must be let alone, left to themselves a great deal, to take in what they can of the beauty of earth and heavens; for of the evils of modern education few are worse than this--that the perpetual cackle of his elders leaves the poor child not a moment of time, nor an inch of space, wherein to wonder--and grow. At the same time, here is the mother's opportunity to train the seeing eye, the hearing ear, and to drop seeds of truth into the open soul of the child, which shall germinate, blossom, and bear fruit, without further help or knowledge of hers. ”

“ I think she might have given many a pointer to folks that bring up children, and I realized that no matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world, and “Except ye become as little children” is the law by which he is governed. ”

“ No matter what we are, or what we sing, Time finds a withered leaf in every laurel.
The World Some are the brothers of all humankind, And own them, whatsoever their estate; And some, for sorrow and self-scorn, are blind With enmity for man's unguarded fate. For some there is a music all day long Like flutes in Paradise, they are so glad; And there is hell's eternal under-song Of curses and the cries of men gone mad. ”

“ through the survival of their children, happy parents are able to think calmly, and with a very practical affection, of a world in which they are to have no direct share; ”

“ 'I think this power of living in our children is one of the sweetest things in the world; ”

“ With all of the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world! ”

“ What the next generation will be depends upon the physical, mental, and moral training of the children of to-day. These children are the to-morrow of society. Are they to be puny and dyspeptic, fretting and worrying through life as through a task? ”

“ We endeavour that all our teaching and treatment of children shall be on the lines of nature, their nature and ours, for we do not recognise what is called 'Child-nature.' We believe that children are human beings at their best and sweetest, but also at their weakest and least wise. ”

“ But perhaps their chief attraction is due to their representing the child as living in brotherly fellowship with nature and all creatures. Trees, flowers, animals wild and tame, even the stars, are represented as the comrades of children. ”