Infancy
Infancy, the morning of life! How beautiful it is! How filled with great responsibilities! An immortal soul commences its existence. A life, beginning in time, but capable of growing brighter when time is ended and eternity begun, commences to note the passing hours.
We welcome the infant with joy, and congratulate the parents, and we do well; but to an angel, who can clearly understand the infinite value of the life just commenced, the heights of happiness to which it may ascend, the depths of misery to which it may be brought, it must seem a moment so deeply freighted with solemn meaning as to dispel all expressions of joy, save only of a subdued and chastened kind.
Infancy has its hours of anxiety and trials for the parents, but it has also its hours of compensating joys. When sickness is in the midst, and it seems as if the cradle song would be exchanged for a dirge, what utter wretchedness of heart is the parent's portion! A mother watching the palpitating frame of her child as life ebbs slowly away evokes the sympathy of the sternest. A child dying dies but once, but the mother dies a hundred times. A mother mourning by the grave of her first-born, and strewing flowers over a coffined form instead of kisses on a warm brow, is one of the deepest spectacles of human woe. These are the dark shades, the night scenes of the parents' experience; but it has its richer, deeper, and more inspiring history, its seasons of comfort and delight, when the little child, insensibly, perhaps, draws the parents into a higher and a better life. What a sense of delicious responsibility fills the parents' hearts as they realize that in their hands and under their influence is to be molded a character, that they are the ones to carefully watch the unfolding of a human life, the development of a human soul.
How earnestly should they seek to set a watch over their lips, to guard well their thoughts and actions, to surround the child with such an air of refined, intelligent, loving kindness that its young life shall as naturally grow into a youth of beauty and a noble manhood or true womanhood as that the bud on the rose-bush expands to the gorgeous flower that excites universal admiration. Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier's, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentation when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child—the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation—soften all hearts to pity and to mirthful and clamorous compassion.
The parent's duty commences at the birth of the child. There is importance even in the handling of infancy. If it is unchristian it will beget unchristian states and feelings. If it is gentle, even patient and loving, it prepares a mood and temper like its own. Then how careful to banish the cross word, the impatient gesture! Let kind and loving tones only fall on its ears, and only gentle hands assist it in its little wants. There is scarcely room to doubt that all most crabbed, resentful, passionate characters—all most even, lovely, firm, and true ones—are prepared in a great degree by the handling of the nursery. The biography of many persons, faithfully written, would ascribe to the training of early years the molding not only of youthful character, but the more matured forms of mental and moral development of after years. The influence thus exerted in the early days of infancy is often the almost hopeless "casting of bread upon the waters"—often not found in any of its favorable developments until after "many days." The cares of the world and the evil example of others often choke the word of a good mother, and destroy its vitality; but not unfrequently it will be found, like seed long buried in the earth, to spring up to remembrance in active life, and the counsels imparted to the "infant of days" be found to influence and control the whole destiny of the man of mature years and gray hairs.
As it is a law of our being that all, even the most feeble and insignificant, exert a reciprocal influence on all around them, then an infant exerts a great modifying influence on the elder men and women around it. It recalls them from the contemplation of the stern realities of life to its innocent phases, from disdainful, self-reliant pride to trustful confidence. Hearts that but for the smile of innocence on the prattling lips of infancy had grown callous beat once more in sympathy with the distressed around them. The feeble clasp of well-nigh helpless hands is sometimes powerful enough to turn strong men from the road to ruin. An infant in his cradle is king, and wields his power over all who come near him.