Or, Mary is a butterfly of a child, never constant for five minutes to anything she has in hand. “That child is just like me!” says her mother; “but time will steady her.” Fanny, again, sings herself to sleep with the Sicilian Vesper Hymn (her nurse’s lullaby) before she is able to speak. “It’s strange how an ear for music runs in our family!” is the comment, but no particular pains are taken to develop the talent. Another child asks odd questions, is inclined to make little jokes about sacred things, to call his father “Tom,” and, generally, to show a want of reverence. His parents are earnest-minded people--think with pain of the loose opinions of Uncle Harry, and decide on a policy of repression. “Do as you’re bid, and make no remarks,” becomes the child’s rule of life, until he finds outlets little suspected at home. In another case, common thought is much more on a level with the science of the day; there is a tendency to lung-trouble: the doctors undertake to deal with the tendency so long as the _habit_ of delicacy is not set up. The necessary precautions are taken, and there is no reason why the child should not die at a good old age. Once more;--there are parents who are aware of the advance science has made in education, but doubt the lawfulness of looking to science for aid in the making of character. They see hereditary defects in their children, but set them down as of “the natural fault and corruption of the nature of every man which naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam.” This, they believe, it is not their part to remedy; that is, unless the boy’s fault be of a disturbing kind--a violent temper, for example--when the mother thinks no harm to whip the offending Adam out of him. But so surely as we believe the laws of the spiritual life to have been revealed to us, so, not less, surely, though without the same sanctity, have been revealed the laws by which body, mind, and moral nature flourish or decay. These it behoves us to make ourselves acquainted with; and the Christian parent who is shy of science, and prefers to bring up his children by the light of Nature when that of authoritative revelation fails, does so to his children’s irreparable loss. If the race is advancing, it is along the lines of character, for each new generation inherits and adds to the best that has gone before it. We should have to-day the very flower and fruit that has been a-preparing through long lines of progenitors. Children have always been lovely, so far back as that day when a little child in the streets of Jerusalem was picked up and set in the midst to show of what sort are the princes in the Kingdom to come:-- “In the Kingdom are the children-- You may read it in their eyes; All the freedom of the Kingdom In their careless humour lies.”