spiritual parents.

This is tragic but just, for if there is a field on which man
must sow a hundred-fold in order to harvest tenfold it is the
souls of children.

When I began at five years of age to make a rag doll, that by
its weight and size really gave the illusion of reality and
bestowed much joy on its young mother, I began to think about
the education of my future children. Then as now my educational
ideal was that the children should be happy, that they should
not fear. Fear is the misfortune of childhood, and the
sufferings of the child come from the half-realised opposition
between his unlimited possibilities of happiness and the way in
which these possibilities are actually handled. It may be said
that life, at every stage, is cruel in its treatment of our
possibilities of happiness. But the difference between the
sufferings of the adult from existence, and the sufferings of
the child caused by adults, is tremendous. The child is
unwilling to resign himself to the sufferings imposed upon him
by adults and the more impatient the child is against
unnecessary suffering, the better; for so much the more
certainly will he some day be driven to find means to transform
for himself and for others the hard necessities of life.

A poet, Rydberg, in our country who had the deepest intuition
into child's nature, and therefore had the deepest reverence
for it, wrote as follows: "Where we behold children we suspect
there are princes, but as to the kings, where are they?" Not
only life's tragic elements diminish and dam up its vital