Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect the house was much on a par with the country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.
Every child should get into his consciousness by experience, not by theory, the idea that he is expected to do his share in the improvement of his environment. The worst conception he can get is that “whatever is is right”; that things can not be improved. Every child should be encouraged to make suggestions for the improvement of his own environment and conditions in the schoolroom, in the yard, in the details of class management, or in anything else that he thinks he can improve.
The closing sentence of Our School should ring always in the minds of teachers, especially the last clause: “And will do far better yet.”
Dickens had implicit faith in even weak humanity, and taught the hopeful truth, that every man and every child may be improved, if the men and women most directly associated with them are wise and loving. Harriet Carker said to Mr. Morfin:
“Oh, sir, after what I have seen, let me conjure you, if you are in any place of power, and are ever wronged, never for any wrong inflict punishment that can not be recalled; while there is a God above us to work changes in the hearts he made.”
The Goblin of the Bell said to Toby Veck in The Chimes:
“Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind; abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good, grasping in their fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them still when bruised and dying in the gulf below, does wrong to Heaven and man, to time and to eternity.”
The influence of Nature on the awakening mind of the child was outlined in A Child’s Dream of a Star.
These children used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.
Nature is the great centre of interest to the child, and it may be the child’s first true revealer of God, if adulthood does not impiously come between the child and God by trying to give him a word God for his intellect too soon to take the place of the true God of his imagination.