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Our Duty to the Children: 58 total pages.

affec­tionate child comes into this critical, Contentious state, it may be hard for his friends, but it is harder still for himself; he is not to be blamed, but helped with the utmost kindness and patience to come through the Ishmaelite stage to a more lovely and wiser rationality. And how shall we help? By disputing and ridiculing the first efforts of a young man to reason for himself? To be sure his conclusions are very crude; he sees only the natural side of the question that he under- THE TRANSITION takes to solve; he thinks little of the opinion of any one in comparison with his own. But it may be an honest effort to use the faculty of reason. Shall we ridicule it? Do we treat so a child's first efforts to walk? Does a bird treat so the efforts of her young to fly? This comparison is a good one, for the wings of a bird are emblems of the power of thought. "He led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, flut­tereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them,

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