Children of wrath

“ It is wrath upon this people, the wrath of God, that will kindle this devouring consuming fire. 2. By the particular terror it would be to women with child, and poor mothers that are nurses. Woe to them, not only because they are most subject to frights, and least able to shift for their own safety, but because it will be a very great torment to them to think of having borne and nursed children for the murderers. 3. By the general confusion that should be all the nation over. There shall be great distress in the land, for men will not know what course to take, nor how to help themselves. ”

“ This little tale interprets with fine insight the demonology of barrenness and obstruction. The boy’s wrath against the unconscious cause of his troubles is the rage often observed in children who retaliate upon the table or chair on which they have been bruised, and it repeats embryologically the rage of the world’s boyhood inspired by ascription of personal motives to inanimate obstructions. Possibly such wrath might have added something to the force with which man entered upon his combat with nature ”

“ And round the giant dwarf the baleful brood
Came with low howls of terror, wrath, and pain,
As children round their father. They depart,
But strife remains; Fear and the Human Heart;
[Pg 369]
For Fear was on the bold! Then spoke aloud24
The horrent Image: "Child of hateful Day,
What madness snares thee to the glooms that shroud
The realms abandon'd to my secret sway?
Why on mine air first breathes the human breath?
Hath thy far world no fairer path to Death?" ”

“ Nay, we may be so carried away, intoxicated, by a fierce lust of power that we do some terrible irrevocable deed of cruelty to a tender child-body or soul, and wake up to never-ending remorse. We meant no harm; we meant to teach obedience, and, good God! we have killed a child. ”

“ For these enemies, who grappled in the fierce death-struggle, were children of the same mother, and yet forgot it in the midst of their senseless fury and thirst for vengeance, when, in truth, they had nothing to avenge. ”

“ After this wild first burst of anguish had partly passed, another mood seized the girl. She leaped to her feet, and with eyes aflame with hate, and teeth set, exclaimed:
"Oh! oh! if there is a God how I hate him—no man, no devil could be as cruel as He is! Why has He made all this misery? Why has He created us at all? He has arranged things so that in order to save mankind from still worse suffering we have to kill innocent children. Oh, mother! we had better all die at once and leave the world to wild beasts." ”

“ Because they loved their own their anger burned the fiercer; and for love of their pitiful scrawny babies that flower-like child in the doorway was hated with all the vehemence of their untamed natures. Their every breath cried out for vengeance, and with the brute instinct they sought to hurt the man through his child, because they had been hurt by the wrong done to their children. ”

“ The companion picture of the Nativity, of the Holy Child lying in Mary's arms, of the wondering shepherds, of the Magi from a far country,--the shadow of all this idyllic beauty is the massacre of the Innocents, the wailing of Rachel for her children. It is, as it were, the opening of a new stage in the world-old conflict where the powers of evil appear to have the advantage and can show the bodies of murdered infants as the trophies of their victory.
But are we to think of the death of a child as a disaster? ”

“ So when boys quarrel and fight, or steal, or do any other thing that is wrong, it is not so much the influences by which they are surrounded, the temptation from without, but the wickedness and the evil and the sinfulness which there is in the human heart, eating its way out through their heart into their lives, and deforming their lives, which otherwise would be upright, honorable and manly and Christ-like. ”

“ Would wring the heart of the devils spinning ropes of sand in hell,
But not the insolent Revellers in their old lascivious ease—
Children hollow-eyed, starving, consumed alive with disease;
Boys and men tortured to fiends and branded with shuddering fire;
Girls and women shrieking caught, and whored, and trampled to death in the mire;
Babyhood, youth, and manhood and womanhood that might have been,
Kneaded, a bloody pulp, to feed the gold-grinding murderous Machine! ”

“ Woe to them in their death hour, whether it come swiftly with blood and violence, or after long and lingering pain! Woe, in the dark house, in the rottenness of the grave, when the children's children shall revile the ashes of the fathers! Woe, woe, woe, at the judgment, when all the persecuted and all the slain in this bloody land, and the father, the mother, and the child, shall await them in a day that they cannot escape! ”

“ A wicked child of godly parents is one of the most miserable wretches in the world. With what horror do I look on such a person! How near is such a wretch to hell! When father or mother were eminent for godliness, and daily instructed them in the matters of their salvation, and prayed with them, and warned them, and prayed for them, and after all this the children shall prove covetous or drunkards, or whoremongers, or profane, and enemies to the servants of God, and deride or neglect the way of their religious parents, it would make one tremble to look such wretches in the face. ”

“ As soon as each boy has disappeared within the precincts, a dull chopping sound is heard, a fearful cry rings out, and a sword or spear, dripping with blood, is thrust through the roof of the shed. This is a token that the boy’s head has been cut off, and that the devil has carried him away to the other world, there to regenerate and transform him. So at sight of the bloody sword the mothers weep and wail, crying that the devil has murdered their children. ”

“ Out of sixty children, not ten walked without torture, and many of them would cry with rage as they limped along, each step being a painful effort; but with the invincible physical pluck and moral cowardice of childhood, would hide their tears, for fear of ridicule from their companions. ”

“ Alone in the moon-lit solitude,
And she was silent and he was grave.
"And fears not my daughter the evil spirit?
The strongest warriors and bravest fear it.
The burning spears are an evil omen;
They threaten the wrath of a wicked woman,
Or a treacherous foe; but my warriors brave,
When danger nears, or the foe appears,
Are a cloud of arrows—a grove of spears."
"My Father," she said, and her words were low,
"Why should I fear? for I soon will go
To the broad, blue lodge in the Spirit-land,
Where my fond-eyed mother went long ago,
And my dear twin-sisters walk hand in hand. ”

“ That they have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands, and with their Idols have they committed adultery, and have also caused their sons, whom they bare unto me, to pass for them through the fire, to devour them.—They have both effected church-state unions. They have blood guilt, for wars, and for causing the spiritual [pg 479] death of multitudes. They have given their hearts to idol doctrines. They have caused God's children to endure fiery troubles, and have scorched, scarred and burned their religious lives with the eternal torment theory. ”

“ Many thousands are in hell, through the means of their own parents: such cruel monsters will they be to the souls of any others, that are first so to their own. If the devil can get the parents to be cursers, swearers, gamesters, drunkards, worldlings, proud, deriders or railers at a holy life, what a snare is here for the poor children! ”

“ Women and little children tortured to death, men blown away from guns, inhuman crimes, inhuman vengeance, hell gaping its mouth to devour, and heaven, the dear heaven, of which, in the days of her childhood, she had dreamed, passing away as visions pass in the lurid light of a world in flames. ”

“ Children, before they were born, were doomed to the same unrelenting life of savage hate and bloodshed; and boys of tender years were brought by the mothers that bare them, before the bloody corpse of their father, and made to swear, with baby lips, undying vengeance and murderous retribution, so soon as their hands should be strong enough to grasp a gun, and their skill sufficient to point it home to the heart of the foe.
Thus the hand of every man was against his neighbour ”

“ Yet none regarded his entreaties, but by all manner of ways strove to destroy themselves; not only men and women, but even boys and little children, with a hideous outcry, leaped, some into the fire, others from the walls, others fell upon their parents' swords, baring their throats and desiring to be struck. ”

“ Children cry to their mothers for bread, and faint with hunger at every street corner; the ghastly rumour goes forth that a mother has boiled her baby; elders sit on the ground in silence; young maidens hang their heads despairing; princes tremble in their helplessness; the enemy break through the walls, carry havoc into the city, insolently trample the sacred courts of the temple; even the priest and the prophet do not escape in the indiscriminate carnage; wounded people are seen, with blood upon their garments, wandering aimlessly like blind men ”

“ Have you ever thought of the French children born in houses of death in the shadow of defeat, fed with ideas of discouragement, trained to strike for a bloody, fatal, and perhaps futile revenge: for even as babies, the first thing they learned was that there was no justice, there was no justice in the world: might prevailed against right! For a child to open its eyes upon such things is for its soul to be degraded or uplifted for ever. ”

“ But when the child is first introduced to cruelty as a thing in the real world, care must be taken to choose incidents in which he will identify himself with the victim, not with the torturer. Something savage in him will exult in a story in which he identifies himself with the tyrant; a story of this kind tends to produce an imperialist. But the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac, or of the she-bears killing the children whom Elisha cursed, naturally rouses the child’s sympathy for another child. ”

“ He shouted, beating his hands together. "What right," he cried furiously, "have men and women to marry and bequeath disease and madness to their children? What right have they to propagate the rottenness of their minds and bodies? It's worse than murder. It's the cruelest, the most wicked, of all crimes. What are the feelings of a child to such parents? ”

“ That is exactly what happened to the children of the Middle Ages. They moved in a world of devils and spooks and only a few occasional angels. Sometimes, their fear of the future filled their souls with humility and piety, but often it influenced them the other way and made them cruel and sentimental. They would first of all murder all the women and children of a captured city and then they would devoutly march to a holy spot and with their hands gory with the blood of innocent victims, they would pray that a merciful heaven forgive them their sins. ”

“ One thing he knows, “that even infancy is subject to sin.” From the womb we are touched with evil. “Myselfe have seene and observed some little child, who could not speake; and yet he was all in an envious kind of wrath, looking pale with a bitter countenance upon his foster-brother.” In an envious kind of wrath! Is it not the motive of half our politics, and too much of our criticism? Such is man’s inborn nature, not to be cured by laws or reforms, not to be washed out of his veins, though “blood be shed like rain, and tears like a mist.” ”

“ No small voice ever whispered to her that the elder children, fretful, vicious, unhealthy, malicious, reflections of her own state of mind when bearing them, were children of a greater sin—against themselves, against society, against the human race. ”

“ To rule in a spirit of exasperating severity tends only to dishearten.—“Lest they be discouraged” (ver. 21) . If the child sees that all his endeavours to please are in vain, and that he is repulsed with sternness and cruel severity, he loses heart, and becomes sullen or morose, or is stung into a state of desperate revenge. To be perpetually fault-finding, and to gratify your angry passions in brutal, savage chastisement, will crush the spirit of any youth, and perhaps transform him into a monster more terrible than yourself. Children are to be led, not driven ”

“ She thought of the thousands unto whom the light of day comes only as a dreaded tyrant, at whose approach the weary, worn out frame must bid adieu to its needed repose; of the multitude of children treading the paths of sin and vice, through want of a mother's tender care to guide them ”

“ The thought of such scenes made them curse their own existence, and shudder at the idea of bearing children. Then they would conjure the warriors by every thing that was dear to them, to take pity on the sufferings of their wives and helpless infants, to turn their faces once more towards their homes, families, and friends, to forgive the wrongs suffered from each other, to lay aside their deadly weapons, and smoke together the pipe of amity and peace. ”

“ "There is one thing sadder than to see one's children die; it is to see them leading an evil life." ”

“ They spared children as little as persons of more advanced age, and without the slightest regard for their years; they loaded them with blows with the flat of their swords, or with the butt-end of their musquetoons; such was their violence that in many instances many were crippled for life. ”

“ Nor is it only in profane expressions that we see the influence of evil. Some children I have known, in the same neighbourhood, who even beat their parents. There was a poor widow, very near the school, who was frequently to be seen with her face dreadfully bruised by blows from her own son. ”