This thought of the Saviour of the world implies another conception which we sometimes leave out of sight in dealing with children. Young faces are not always sunny and lovely; even the brightest children in the happiest circumstances have their clouded hours. We rightly put the cloud down to some little disorder, or to the weather, but these are the secondary causes which reveal a deep-seated discontent. Children have a sense of sin acute in proportion to their sensitiveness. We are in danger of trusting too much to a rose-water treatment; we do not take children seriously enough; brought face to face with a child, we find he is a very real person, but in our educational theories we take him as “something between a wax doll and an angel.” He sins; he is guilty of greediness, falsehood, malice, cruelty, a hundred faults that would be hateful in a grown-up person; we say he will know better by-and-by. He will never know better; he is keenly aware of his own odiousness. How many of us would say about our childhood, if we told the whole truth, “Oh, I was an odious little thing!” and that, not because we recollect our faults, but because we recollect our childish estimate of ourselves. Many a bright and merry child is odious in his own eyes; and the “peace, peace, where there is no peace,” of fond parents and friends is little comfort. It is well that we “ask for the old paths, where is the good way;” it is not well that, in the name of the old paths, we lead our children into blind alleys, nor that we let them follow the new into bewildering mazes. CHAPTER VI _PARENTS AS INSPIRERS_ PART IV “One of the little boys gazing upon the terrible desolation of the scene, so unlike in its savage and inhuman aspects anything he had ever seen at home, nestled close to his mother, and asked with bated breath, ‘Mither, is there a God here?’”--JOHN BURROUGHS. The last chapter introduced the thought of parents in their highest function--as revealers of God to their children. To bring the human race, family by family, child by child, out of the savage and inhuman desolation where He is not, into the light and warmth and comfort of the presence of God, is, no doubt, the chief thing we have to do in the world. And this individual work with each child, being the most momentous work in the world, is put into the hands of the wisest, most loving, disciplined, and divinely instructed of human beings. Be ye perfect _as your Father_ is perfect, is the perfection of parenthood, perhaps to be attained only in its fulness through parenthood. There are mistaken parents, ignorant parents, a few indifferent parents, even, as one in a thousand, callous parents; but the good that is done upon the earth is done, under God, by parents, whether directly or indirectly.