Heavenly children.
It seems to me that lovely and loving childhood, with its truthfulness, its frank sincerity, its pure, simple love, is so sweet and holy an estate that it would be a beautiful thing in heaven to have a band of heavenly children, guileless, gay, and forever joyous—tender spring blossoms of the Kingdom of Light. Was it of such whom He had left in his heavenly home our Savior was thinking, when He took little children up in his arms, and blessed them, and said, “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven?”
Poetry and prose.
The first child in a family is its poem,—it is a sort of nativity play, and we bend before the young stranger with gifts, “gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” But the tenth child in a poor family is prose, and gets simply what is due to comfort. There are no superfluities, no fripperies, no idealities, about the tenth cradle.
A child’s crosses.
My individual pursuits, my own little stock of interests, were of course of no account. I was required to be in a perfectly free, disengaged state of mind, and ready to drop everything at a moment’s warning from any of my half-dozen seniors. “Here, Hal, run down cellar and get me a dozen apples,” my brother would say, just as I had half-built a block-house. “Harry, run upstairs and get the book I left on the bed”—“Harry, run out to the barn and get the rake I left there”—“Here, Harry, carry this up garret”—“Harry, run out to the tool-shop and get that”—were sounds constantly occurring—breaking up my private, cherished little enterprise of building cob-houses, making mill-dams and bridges, or loading carriages, or driving horses. Where is the mature Christian who could bear with patience the interruptions and crosses in his daily schemes that beset a boy?
Repression.