“I wish I hadn’t! But supposing you at some few times in your life have gone into the sanctuary in such frames of mind, did you never have them changed by what you’ve heard? Did you never have the very common experience of learning that it is at these very moments of weakness, indecision, blankness, childishness, or whatever you may please to call it, the mind becomes peculiarly retentive of whatever of real value happens to strike it?”
Mrs. Burton reflected, and by silence signified her assent, but she was not fully satisfied with the explanation, for she asked,
“Do you think, then, that all the ways of children are just as they should be?—that they never ask questions from any but heaven-ordained motives?—that they are utterly devoid of petty guile?”
“They’re human, I believe,” said Mr. Lawrence, “and full of human weaknesses, but any other human beings—present company excepted, of course—should know by experience how little malice there is in the most annoying of people. Certainly children do copy the faults of their elders, and—oh, woe is me! inherit the failings of their ancestors, but it is astonishing how few they seem to have when the observer will forget himself and honestly devote himself to their good. I confess it does need the wisdom of Solomon to discover when they are honest and when they’re inclined to be tricky.”
“And can you inform us where the wisdom of Solomon is to be procured for the purpose?” asked Mrs. Burton.
“From the source at which Solomon obtained it, I suppose,” Tom replied; “from an honest, unselfish mind. But it is so much easier to trust to selfishness and its twin demon suspicion, that nothing but a pitying Providence saves most children from reform schools and penitentiaries.”
“But the superiority of adults—their right to demand implicit, unquestioning obedience——”
“Is the most vicious, debasing tyranny that the world is cursed by, “Tom exclaimed with startling emphasis.” It gave the old Romans power of life and death over their children. It cast some of the vilest blots upon the pages of Holy Writ. Nowadays it is worse, for then it worked its principal mischief upon the body, but nowadays ‘I say unto you fear not them that kill the body, but’—excuse a free rendering—fear them who cast both soul and body into hell. You’re orthodox, I believe.”
Mrs. Burton shuddered, but her belief in the rights of adults, which she had inherited from a line of ancestors reaching back to Adam or protoplasm, was more powerful than her horror, and the latter was quickly overcome by the former.
“Then adults have no rights that children are bound to respect?” she asked.