That in true forms of beauty may unfold
The Maker’s highest thought.
—Transcript.
“I regretted that you had no child, because I thought your heart would not receive that education for heaven which the care of children alone can give. You are surprised perhaps, for you are thinking only of educating your child; but let me tell you that we parents are as much indebted to our children as they to us.”—Anna E. Porter.
“Who is sufficient for these things?”
In a recent magazine article, on the training of horses, I found the following: “The thoroughly competent trainer considers the colt’s individuality and breeding, for upon these depend the measures to be taken to develop the animal into a race-horse. Every good or bad quality in a race-horse is inherited from sire or dam; courage, endurance, extreme speed, action, ability to carry weight, soundness or unsoundness, good or bad temper, all these are matters of inheritance, and must be carefully looked for by the trainer as he develops his horses. The trainer is constantly devising schemes to counteract the faults and to make the best use of the good points of his horses.
“The making of a thoroughbred race-horse cannot be called an exact science. It develops, however, an amount of patience, courage and self-denial that is rarely engendered in callings better understood and more highly esteemed by the general public. The trainer’s life is a hard one and vicarious in the extreme.”
It strikes me that in this we, as parents and teachers, have a grand suggestion in the right training of children. With us a vicarious life would count for the coming generations of the human family.
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” has been invested with a new meaning to me these past few years. It not only means train him up in the correct moral way, reverencing things sacred, respecting father and mother, being a pleasing child, a good son, a law-abiding citizen, a blessing to home and society; but it means as well, train him up in the way he was intended to go, from the endowment of birth, heredity and education. In other words do not warp, from his birth, a mechanic by trying to make a minister of him. Do not try to crowd a farmer into a lawyer’s mold. Do not attempt to train into a carpenter one who is a born artist. Do not force your boys and girls through a literary college, if a bent in some particular direction inclines them toward a technical education. In short, “Train up a child in the way he should go,” as well as in the way he should go.
The mother of the Wesleys was once asked when she should begin to train the little three months’ old baby she held in her arms. “Begin?” she replied, “why I began three months ago.” Her answer was admirable, but she did not place the time sufficiently far back by many months. When our daughters are rightly trained, they will all the way along, from the time that marriage enters their minds, be consciously educating themselves for motherhood, and thus be in a large measure training their little ones even before they are promised.