The time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child’s laugh, and the divine Friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as he took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.
Dickens had profound faith in children whose true development had not been arrested.
Doctor Strong had a simple faith in him that might have touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the wall.... He appealed in everything to the honour and good faith of the boys, and relied on their possession of those qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy.
Reliance begets reliance. Faith increases the qualities that merit faith.
David said the doctor’s reliance on the boys “worked wonders.” No wonder it worked wonders. We can help a boy to grow no higher than our faith in him can reach.
CHAPTER XI.
BAD TRAINING.
In addition to the bad training found in so many of his best-known schools, to show the evils of coercion in all forms, of the child depravity ideal, of the loss of a free, real, rich childhood, of the dwarfing of individuality, of the deadening of the imagination, and other similar evils, Dickens’s books, from Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood, contain many illustrations of utterly wrong methods of training children.