energies. Equally destructive is a parent's want of reverence
for the sources of life which meet them in a new being. Fathers
and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted
nature of the child. Until they see that the word "child" is
only another expression for the conception of majesty; until
they feel that it is the future which in the form of a child
sleeps in their arms, and history which plays at their feet,
they will not understand that they have as little power or
right to prescribe laws for this new being as they possess the
power or might to lay down paths for the stars.

The mother should feel the same reverence for the unknown
worlds in the wide-open eyes of her child, that she has for the
worlds which like white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue
orb of heaven; the father should see in his child the king's
son whom he must serve humbly with his own best powers, and
then the child will come to his own; not to the right of asking
others to become the plaything of his caprices but to the right
of living his full strong personal child's life along with a
father and a mother who themselves live a personal life, a life
from whose sources and powers the child can take the elements
he needs for his own individual growth. Parents should never
expect their own highest ideals to become the ideals of their
child. The free-thinking sons of pious parents and the
Christian children of freethinkers have become almost
proverbial.

But parents can live nobly and in entire accordance to their
own ideals which is the same thing as making children
idealists. This can often lead to a quite different system of