Just as the morning
foreshadows the day, so does the child reveal the future man it is going to be,
showing all those tendencies which subsequently become distinct. A man is but
an overgrown child, and generally retains in him some of the refreshing
features of childhood.
The child may not be the
spiritual being as Wordsworth has painted it, but it is fresh from God, and is
quite innocent. We can observe its mind very easily and analyses its character.
On doing so, we shall come across certain inherited dispositions. Good and bad,
which lie in it in a germicide condition like seeds which one day would sprout up
into flower and fruits? Byron calls the child “a rose with all its sweetest
leaves yet folded”. Pollock says that children are “living jewels, dropped
unstained from heaven.” But all the same they are the tomorrow of society and as
such have embedded in them the glory of manhood also, holding in their hands
the destiny of the nation.
A man’s destiny hinges on
his childhood. It is, therefore imperative on our part to see that the child is
able to retain some of his pristine innocence and purity when he grows up. The
conventions and the false creeds of the world should not be grafted on his minds, so that in later years he may
have come of the child’s heart left to respond to the earliest enchantment.’
The careers of many children have been blighted for want of proper care and
training. If we want to give the child something positive, let us plant in him
the seeds of those virtues which would bear only sweet fruit in life. For the
nothing is no necessary as a good home and a good company. We daily come across
examples of men who developed rightly under right influence and of men who went
astray because none cared to preserve in them the instincts of childhood.
Not that all the instincts
of a child are to be fostered. The child is the father of the man. He has in
him all those tendencies which would become prominent later on. So we should
curb down the vicious tendencies and encouraging the virtuous ones. Only we
should keep him free from the contamination of the social .conventions as long
as he is not able to form a mature judgement. Let us not teach him our so-called
wisdom what will make him lose his angelic lustre and become a slave to customs
and the world.
If there is anything that will endure.
The eye of God because if still is pure.
It is the spirit of a little child,
Fresh from his hand, and therefore, undefiled.
Nearer the gate of paradise than we,
Our children breathe its airs, its angels see;
And when they pray God hears their simple prayer,
Yea, even sheathed his sword, in judgement bare, Stoddard)