“Right, Mrs. Meredith! But don’t think for a moment that physiology lends itself to the cult of muscle. Here is a youth whose biceps are his better part: like most of us, he gets what he aims at—some local renown as an athlete. But what does he pay for the whistle? His violent ‘sports’ do not materially increase the measure of blood which sustains him: if the muscles get more than their share, their gain implies loss elsewhere, to the brain, commonly, and, indeed, to all the vital organs. By-and-by, the sports of youth over, your brawny, broad-chested young fellow collapses; is the victim of ennui, and liver, lungs, or stomach send in their requisition for arrears of nourishment fraudulently made away with.”
“But, surely, Mr. Meredith, you do not think lightly of physical development? Why, I thought it one of the first duties of parents to send their offspring into the world as ‘fine animals.’”
“So it is; but here, as elsewhere, there is a ‘science of the proportion of things,’ and the young people who go in violently and without moderation for muscular feats are a delusion and a snare: in the end they do not prove ‘fine animals;’ they have little ‘staying’ power.”
“But a child is more than an animal; we want to know how mind and moral feelings are to be developed?”
“Even then, Mrs. Tremlow, we should find much help in the study of physiology—mental physiology, if you like to call it so. The border-line where flesh and spirit meet seems to me the new field, an Eldorado, I do believe, opened to parents and to all of us concerned with the culture of character. I mean, the habits a child grows up with appear to leave some sort of register in his material brain, and thus to become part of himself in even a physical sense. Thus it rests with parents to ease the way of their child by giving him the habits of the good life in thought, feeling, and action, and even in spiritual things. We cannot make a child ‘good,’ but, in this way; we can lay paths for the good life and the moral life in the very substance of his brain. We cannot make him hear the voice of God; but, again, we can make paths where the Lord God may walk in the cool of the evening. We cannot make the child clever; but we can see that his brain is nourished with pure blood, his mind with fruitful ideas.”
“I suppose all this would be encouraging if one were up to it. But I feel as if a great map of an unknown country were spread before me, where the few points one wants to make for are unmarked. How, for instance, to make a child obedient, kind, and true?”
“Your question, Mrs. Tremlow, suggests further ground we must cover: a few set rules will be of little service; we must know how much there is in ‘human nature,’ and how to play upon it as a musician on the keys of his instrument. We must add to our physiology, psychology, and, to psychology, moral science. Complex, yet most simple, manifold, yet one, human nature is not to be ticked off in a lecture or two as a subject we have exhausted; but there is no conceivable study which yields such splendid increase for our pains.”
“And the spiritual life of the child? Does either of these ‘ologies’ embrace the higher life, or is it not susceptible of culture?”
“Ah, there we have new conditions—the impact of the Divine upon the human, which generates life, ‘without which there is no living.’ The life is there, imparted and sustained from above; but we have something to do here also. Spirit, like body, thrives upon daily bread and daily labour, and it is our part to set before the child those ‘new thoughts of God, new hopes of Heaven,’ which should be his spiritual diet; and to practise him in the spiritual labours of prayer, praise, and endeavour. How?—is another question for our Society to work out.”