This is, perhaps, how the educational formula should run: Education is a life; that life is sustained on ideas; ideas are of spiritual origin; but, “God has made us so,” that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another. The duty of parents is to sustain a child’s inner life with ideas as they sustain his body with food. The child is an eclectic; he may choose this or that; therefore, in the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand, for thou knowest not which shall prosper, whether this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good. The child has affinities with evil as well as with good; therefore, hedge him about from any chance lodgment of evil suggestion. The initial idea begets subsequent ideas; therefore, take care that children get right primary ideas on the great relations and duties of life. Every study, every line of thought, has its “guiding idea;” therefore the study of a child makes for living education, as it is quickened by the guiding idea “which stands at the head.” In a word, our much boasted “infallible reason”--is it not the involuntary thought which follows the initial idea upon necessary logical lines? Given, the starting idea, and the conclusion may be predicated almost to a certainty. We get into the _way_ of thinking such and such manner of thoughts, and of coming to such and such conclusions, ever further and further removed from the starting-point, but on the same lines. There is structural adaptation in the brain tissue to the manner of thoughts we think--a plan and a way for them to run in. Thus we see how the destiny of a life is shaped in the nursery, by the reverent naming of the Divine Name; by the light scoff at holy things; by the thought of duty the little child gets who is made to finish conscientiously his little task; by the hardness of heart that comes to the child who hears the faults or sorrows of others spoken of lightly. FOOTNOTES: [1] “We beg pardon for the use of this _insolens verbum_, but it is one of which our language stands in great need.”--S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] Isaiah xxviii. [3] _Method_--S. T. COLERIDGE. CHAPTER V _PARENTS AS INSPIRERS_ PART III It is probable that parents as a class feel more than ever before the responsibility of their prophetic office. It is as revealers of God to their children that parents touch their highest limitations; perhaps it is only as they succeed in this part of their work that they fulfil the Divine intention in giving them children to bring up--in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.