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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chris land who wrote (38758)	5/31/1999 6:57:00 PM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 108807

I have no need of apology. The masses of misled people do. Our women and children are bound to break away from this system of fettered thought. If I could stand where stood the cock when all the world could here him crow, my cry would be to the wives and mothers on behalf of the children. The women are bound to rescue the children, and to head their Exodus from the bondage of orthodoxy, even if the men are too unmanly--too cowardly to help them. No doubt, one real crux is, What are we going to teach the children? And here there isso much to be done and lived by the parents in presence of the children, and so little to be said! The life we live with them every day is the teaching that tells; and not the precepts uttered weekly that are continually belied by our own daily practices. Give the children a knowledge of natural law, especially in that domain of physical nature which has hitherto been tabooed. If we break a natural law we suffer pain in consequence, no matter whether we knew the law or not. This result is not an accident, because it always happens, and is obviously intended to happen. Punishments are not to be avoided by ignorance of effects; they can only be warded off by a knowledge of causes. Therefore nothing but knowledge can help them. Teach the children to become the soldiers of duty instead of the slaves of selfish desire. Show them how the sins against self reappear in the lives of others. Teach them to think of those others as the means of getting out of self. Teach them how the laws of nature work by heredity. How often has the apparently pious, God-fearing parent produced a child that seemed to the outside world the very opposite of himself, as if the devil had dropped an egg in the good man's nest. And yet this Satan of a son was but the nature of the saintly father turned inside out--only an exposure of that which had been hidden for a time beneath the cloak of hypocrisy; because in the end nature is honest, and will out with it. Children have ears like the very spies of nature herself; eyes that penetrate all subterfuge and pretence; and a sense of justice that, if allowed fair-play, would straightway wreck the orthodox gospel. Guide the curiosity of the little ones while it is yet innocent, and give them all necessary knowledge fresh and sweet from the lips of the mother and father, Mr. Ruskin notwithstanding. Let the children be well grounded in the doctrine of development, without which we cannot begin to think coherently. Give them the best material, the soundest method; let the spirit-world have a chance as a living influence on them, and then let them do the rest. Never forget that the faculty for seeing is worth all that is to be seen. It is good to set before the youngsters the loftiest and noblest ideals--not those that are mythical and non-natural, but those that have been lived in human reality. The best ideal of all has to be portrayed by the parents in the realities of life at home. The teaching that goes deepest will be indirect, and the truth will tell most on them when it is overheard. When you are not watching, and the children are--that is when the lessons are learned for life.