Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 May 1891 — The Child. [ARTICLE]

The Child.

The child is near the savage in hi 3 love for myths and lairy stories. What is the myth ? The shell, the beautiful shell that has brought truth to us adown the ages. Without the myth we should have very little of the past. The savage looked down to the earth and the earth said: “What am I?” and the poor savage with his untutored mind replied, “Thou are God,” and worshiped it. And he looked up to the sun, and the sun said: “W’hat ami?” and the savage bowed reverently and said: “Thouart God.” The child has this spirit of inquiry; the stars are the naij holes in the floor of heaven; the doll is a fetich to the child. A stick or a bundle of rags is loved by the child as it loves its life. That is a fetieji. Would you rob the child of its fetich ? Would you tell it “That is not true, little girl. That doll is only a bundle of rags V” Thank God, no philosophy has ever entered a mother’s heart so terrible as that. You remember the few bits of broken plates and a shingle or two where you received company, fed them, talked to them, dismissed and sent them home. Your mind peopled the whole air with fairy forms. “That was not true,” says the Puritan. It was true. It was truth coming to that child in the way God intended truth to come. What is this fancy which comes in the myth and the story told by the cradle ? That growth of fancy is the growth of spiritual life. Confine the child to the stern world of fact and he becomes a very stern fact. He must live in the world beyond; he must have faith in the spiritual life. The child is a born naturalist. There is not a child alive who does not love nature. It is a good plan for us to go back to our early childhood and see what we loved. Every child is a horn lover of music. What is the cause ? The organized human bemg is made up of rhythm. The light comes to us in cadenced rhythm; sound comes to us in cadenced rhythm; thunder comes to us in rhythm, and we march the world in cadenced rhythm. Even the rattling along the street has its rhythm and the child responds to rhythm .because it was born and created in it.— F. W. Parker, in Texas Journal of Education.