"Enough! I will not play the Seer; I will no longer strive to ope The mystic volume, where appear The herald Hope, forerunning Fear, And Fear, the pursuivant of Hope. Thy destiny remains untold." In the next chapter we shall point out how useful children are in educating their parents. CHAPTER XVII. THE EDUCATION OF PARENTS. "O dearest, dearest boy! my heart For better lore would seldom yearn, Could I but teach the hundredth part Of what from thee I learn."--_Wordsworth._ "How admirable is the arrangement through which human beings are led by their strongest affections to subject themselves to a discipline they would else elude."--_Herbert Spencer._ "My friend," said an old Quaker, to a lady who contemplated adopting a child, "I know not how far thou wilt succeed in educating her, but I am quite certain she will educate you." How encouraging and strengthening it should be for parents to reflect that, in training up their children in the way they should go, they are at the same time training up themselves in the way _they_ should go; that along with the education of their children their own higher education cannot but be carried on. In "Silas Marner," George Eliot has shown how by means of a little child a human soul may be redeemed from cold, petrifying isolation; how all its feelings may be freshened, rejuvenated, and made to flutter with new hope and activity. Very simple is the pathos of this matchless work of art. Nothing but the story of a faithless love and a false friend and the loss of trust in all things human or divine. Nothing but the story of a lone, bewildered weaver, shut out from his kind, concentrating every baulked passion into one--the all-engrossing passion for gold. And then the sudden disappearance of the hoard from its accustomed hiding-place, and in its stead the startling apparition of a golden-haired little child found one snowy winter's night sleeping on the floor in front of the glimmering hearth. And the gradual reawakening of love in the heart of the solitary man, a love "drawing his hope and joy continually onward beyond the money," and once more bringing him into sympathetic relations with his fellow men. "In old days," says the story, "there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward, and the hand may be a little child's."