My little boy was playing in the garden, decking himself with the strange and beautiful flowers which luxuriated in the spot. I remember that he had tall white lilies and scarlet passion flowers, or something like them, held above one shoulder, and floating like a banner in the bright, white air. He was absorbed in his sport, and had the sweet intentness of expression between the eyes that his mother used to wear. When the vesper anthems sounded out, the child stopped, and turned his nobly moulded head toward the unseen singers. A puzzled and afterward a saddened look clouded his countenance; he listened for a moment, and then walked slowly to me, trailing the white and scarlet flowers in the grass behind him as he came.
"Father, teach me how to sing! The other children do. I'm the only little boy I know that can't sing that nice song. Teach me it!" he demanded.
"Alas, my son!" I answered, "how can I teach you that which I myself know not?"
"I thought boys' fathers knew everything," objected the child, bending his brows severely on me.
A certain constraint, a something not unlike distrust, a subtle barrier which one could not define, but which one felt the more uncomfortably for this very reason, after this incident, seemed to arise in the child's consciousness between himself and me. As docile, as dutiful, as beautiful as ever, as loving and as lovable, yet the little fellow would at times withdraw from me and stand off; as if he looked on at me, and criticised me, and kept his criticism to himself. Verily the child was growing. He had become a separate soul. In a world of souls, what was mine—miserable, ignorant, half-developed, wholly unfit—what was mine to do with his? How was I to foster him?
When I came face to face with the problem of Boy's general education, this question pressed upon me bitterly. Looking abroad upon the people and their principles of life, the more I studied them, the more did I stand perplexed before them. I was in the centre of a vast Theocracy. Plainly, our community was but one of who knew how many?—governed by an unseen Being, upon laws of which I knew nothing. The service of this invisible Monarch vied only with the universal affection for Him. So far as I could understand the spiritual life at all, it seemed to be the highest possible development and expression of love. What these people did that was noble, pure, and fine, they did, not because they must, but because they would. They believed because they chose. They were devout because they wished to be. They were unselfish and true, and what below we should have called "unworldly," because it was the most natural thing in the world. They seemed so happy, they had such content in life, that I could have envied them from my soul.
How, now, was I to compass this national kind of happiness for my son? Misery I could bear; I was sick and sore with it, but I was used to it. My child must never suffer. Passed beyond the old system of suffering, why should he? Joy was his birthright in this blessed place.
How was I, being at discord from it, to bring my child into harmony with it? I was at odds, to start on, with the whole system of education. The letters, art, science, industry, of the country were of a sort that I knew not. They were consecrated to ends with which I was unfamiliar. They were pursued in a spirit incomprehensible to me. They were dedicated to the interests of a Being, Himself a stranger to me. Proficiency, superiority, were rated on a scale quite out of my experience. To be distinguished was to possess high spiritual traits. Deep at the root of every public custom, of every private deed, there hid the seed of one universal emotion,—the love of a living soul for the Being who had created it.
I, who knew not of this feeling, I, who was as a savage among this intelligence, who was no more than an object of charity at the hands of this community,—what had I to offer to my son?
A father's personal position? Loving influence? Power to push the little fellow to the front? A chance to endow him with every social opportunity, every educational privilege, such as it is a father's pride to enrich his child wherewith?