one occasion entered a common school, looked upon the pupils therein assembled, and began his address to them in these words: “Hail, reverend pastors, doctors, licentiates, superintendents! Hail, most noble, most prudent, most learned lords, consuls, praetors, judges, prefects, chancellors, secretaries, magistrates, professors, etc.” When some of the bystanders received these words with a smile, he replied: “I am not jesting; my speech is serious; for I look on these little boys, not as they are now, but with a view to the purpose in the Divine mind, on account of which they are delivered to us for instruction. For assuredly some such will come forth from among the number, although there may be an intermixture of chaff among them as there is among wheat.” Such was the animated address of this most prudent man. But why should not we with equal confidence declare, in respect of all children of Christian parents, those glorious things which have been mentioned above? since Christ, the promulgator of the eternal secrets of God, has pronounced that “of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”[1]
9. But if we consider only their present state, it will at once be obvious why children are of inestimable value in the sight of God, and ought to be so to their parents; in the first place, they are valuable to God, because, being innocent, with the sole exception of original sin,[2] they are not yet the defaced image of God, by having polluted themselves with actual guilt, and are “unable to discern between
- ↑ Fröbel says: “Let the child always appear to us as a living pledge of the presence, of the goodness, and of the love of God.”
- ↑ Strong as was his faith in childhood, he was too deeply grounded in religious dogmas to overcome the doctrine of original sin. Rousseau, who represents the other extreme, says: “Let us assume as an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always right; that there is no original perversity in the human heart.”
(Gutersloh, 1890). The same is translated almost entire in Barnard’s American Journal of Education, Vol. IV.
