As a man just released from the rack stands bruised and broken,—bleeding at every pore, and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to heaven, and says, “God be praised! I suffer no more!” because to that past sharp agony the respite comes like peace—like sleep,—so we stand, after some great wrench in our best affections, where they have been torn up by the root; when the conflict is over, and the tension of the heart-strings is relaxed, then comes a sort of rest,—but of what kind?
129.
To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to think rationally, to will resolutely, and to work earnestly,—may this be mine.
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
(FROM A LETTER.)
We are all interested in this great question of popular education; but I see others much more sanguine than I am. They hope for some immediate good result from all that is thought, written, spoken on the subject day after day. I see such results as possible, probable, but far, far off. All this talk is of systems and methods, institutions, school houses, schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school books; the ways and the means by which we are to instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that which lies in most cases beyond our reach—the spirit sent from God. What do we know of the mystery of child-nature, child-life? What, indeed, do we know of any life? All life we acknowledge to be an awful mystery, but child-life we treat as if it were no mystery whatever—just so much material placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain form according to our will or our prejudices,—fitted to certain purposes according to our notions of expediency. Till we know how to reverence childhood we shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake with regard to childhood that theologians commit with regard to our present earthly existence; thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory to some condition of being which is to follow—as if it were something separate from us and to be left behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as in the sight of God this life is also something for its own sake, so in the estimation of Christ, childhood was something for its own sake,—something holy and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it not merely as the germ of something to grow out of it, but as perfect and lovely in itself as the flower which precedes the fruit. We misunderstand childhood, and we misuse it; we delight in it, and we pamper it; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it sinfully; at the best we trifle with it as a plaything which we can pull to pieces and put together at pleasure—ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we are!
And if we are perpetually making the grossest mistakes in the physical and practical management of childhood, how much more in regard to what is spiritual! What do we know of that which lies in the minds of children? we know only what we put there. The world of instincts, perceptions, experiences, pleasures, and pains, lying there without self-consciousness,—sometimes helplessly mute, sometimes so imperfectly expressed, that we quite mistake the manifestation—what do we know of all this? How shall we come at the understanding of it? The child lives, and does not contemplate its own life. It can give no account of that inward, busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and feelings which it is of so much importance that we should know. To lead children by questionings to think about their own identity, or observe their own feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken self-consciousness before you awaken conscience is the beginning of incalculable mischief. Introspection is always, as a habit, unhealthy: introspection in childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a knowledge of life such as it is when it first gushes from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot reascend the stream. We all, however we may remember the external scenes lived through in our infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that part of our nature which remains indissolubly connected with the inward life of that time. We so forget it, that we know not how to deal with the child-nature when it comes under our power. We seldom reason about children from natural laws, or psychological data. Unconsciously we confound our matured experience with our memory: we attribute to children what is not possible, exact from them what is impossible;—ignore many things which the child has neither words to express, nor the will nor the power to manifest. The quickness with which children perceive, the keenness with which they suffer, the tenacity with which they remember, I have never seen fully appreciated. What misery we cause to children, what mischief we do them by bringing our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices and senile experiences, to bear on their young life, and cramp and overshadow it—it is fearful!