CHAPTER IX.
MORAL TRAINING.
1. What those external virtues are, in which youth ought to be exercised in their early years, I have enumerated already in the fourth chapter. Now I will explain how it behooves to be prudently and properly accomplished. In case it should be asked how any age so tender[1] can be accustomed to these serious things, my reply is, even as a young and tender tree can be bent so as to grow this way or that much more easily than a full-grown tree, so youth can be exercised in the first years of their lives, more readily than afterwards, to good of every kind, provided legitimate means be used; and these are: (1) a perpetual example of virtuous conduct; (2) properly timed and prudent instruction and exercise; (3) duly regulated discipline.
2. It is necessary that children should have presented before them a perpetual good example,[2] since God has implanted in them a certain imitative principle, namely, a desire to imitate what they see others do. So much so, that
- ↑ Pestalozzi says in this connection “The child at his mother’s breast is weaker and more dependent than any creature on earth, and yet he already feels the first moral impressions of love and gratitude. Morality is nothing but a result of the development of the first sentiments of love and gratitude felt by the child.”
- ↑ “The end,” says Seneca, “is attained sooner by example than by precept,” and Plutarch observes: “That contemplation which is disassociated from practice is of no utility.”
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