Mill should be well on in his Greek at five; that Arnold at three should know all the Kings and Queens of England by their portraits; or that a musical baby should have an extensive repertoire of the musical classics. We were once emphasising the fact that every child could learn to speak two languages at once with equal facility, when a gentleman in the audience stated that he had a son who was a missionary in Bagdad, married to a German lady, and their little son of three expressed all he had to say with equal fluency in three languages--German, English, and Arabic, using each in speaking to those persons whose language it was. “Nana, which does God love best, little girls or little boys?” said a meditative little girl of four. “Oh, little girls, to be sure,” said Nana, with a good-natured wish to please. “Then if God loves little girls best, why was not God Himself a little girl?” Which of us who have reached the later stages of evolution would have hit upon a more conclusive argument? If the same little girl asked on another occasion, watching the blackbirds at the cherries: “Nana, if the bees make honey, do the birds make jam?” it was by no means an inane question, and only proves that we older persons are dull and inappreciative of such mysteries of nature as that bees should make honey. This is how we find children--with intelligence more acute, logic more keen, observing powers more alert, moral sensibilities more quick, love and faith and hope more abounding; in fact, in all points like as we are, only much more so, but absolutely ignorant of the world and its belongings, of us and our ways, and, above all, of how to control and direct and manifest the infinite possibilities with which they are born. Our conception of a child rules our relations towards him. _Pour s’amuser_ is the rule of child-life proper for the “oyster” theory, and most of our children’s books and many of our theories of child-education are based upon this rule. “Oh! he’s so happy,” we say, and are content, believing that if he is happy he will be good; and it is so to a great extent; but in the older days the theory was, if you are good you will be happy; and this is a principle which strikes the keynote of endeavour, and holds good, not only through the childish “stage of evolution,” but for the whole of life, here and hereafter. The child who has learned to “endeavour himself” (as the Prayer Book has it) has learned to live. If our conception of _Whence?_ as regards the child, as of-- “A Being, breathing thoughtful breath, A traveller betwixt life and death,”--