The baby is a new human soul, learning Life. He should have about him from the first, Truth and Order, with a sequence of impressions which great minds have labored to prepare. He should have his mother's love, his father's care, his brother's and sister's society; his home's seclusion; and he should also have from his earliest days, a place to share with many other children, and the love and care and service of such guides and teachers as are most fit to help the growing of the world.
We have gone far indeed in those things we learn after we leave home. In our trades and professions, our arts and sciences, in the broad avenues of the world's life, we have made great progress—albeit hampered always to some extent by our nursery-mindedness.
But in our own personal relations we are stagnant, hide-bound, inert. Our littleness, our morbidness, our self-consciousness, our narrowness, our short-sightedness, our oppressive, insistent, omnipresent personality—all these still crush us down. Bumptious with a good child's complacency, grieving with a bad child's remorse, indifferent and rebellious as ill-trained children are, we live unawakened among social laws. We enjoy when we can; we suffer much—and needlessly; but we seem incapable of taking hold of our large world-questions and settling them.
It is only an apparent limitation. We are quite capable were we but taught so. What hinders us is Nursery-Mindedness.
A VILLAGE OF FOOLS
There was a certain village, a little village on a little stream; and the inhabitants thereof were Fools.
By profession they were tillers of the soil; and they kept beasts, beasts of burden, and beasts to furnish meat. They lived upon the products of their tillage, and upon the beasts, and upon fish from the stream.
The Wise said, "This is a good village. There is land to furnish food, and beasts in plenty, and a good stream flowing steadily from the tree-clothed hills. These people should prosper well."
They did not know that the people of the village were Fools; Utter Fools. Observe now their Foolishness! They cut down the trees of the hills to make their fires withal; many and great fires, without stint or hindrance; and presently there was no more any forest upon the hills to cover them. Then the moist breath of the cloud-building forest was dried away; and the thick wet sponge about the roots of the forest was dried away; and the snow slid down the hills as it slides down steep roof gables; and the rain ran down the narrow valleys as it runs down gutter pipes; and the village was swept by floods in flood time, and lay parched and thirsty in the dry season. And the people of the village called the flood an Act of God, and they called the drought an Act of God; for they were Fools.
Their fields they tilled continuously, for they needs must eat; gathering from the good ground year after year, and generation after generation, till the ground became sour and stale, and was bad ground and bore no fruit.