Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/170

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ABOUT PEOPLE.

aims and wishes are for the children's benefit. Direct instruction should be derived from none other than parent or guardian, and should be given to children as they grow, not waiting till an engagement of marriage takes place, the instruction then being connected with an individual. The law of birth constitutes one of the child's earliest subjects of inquiry, and should be truthfully, though not fully, answered in its earliest years. Then the child knows in words the true law, but its full sense it does not comprehend till later; yet it does not start with a false term, and its progress from particular to general ideas is true, as its years increase its knowledge, which is thus planted deep in the mind, and ready for use when occasion demands. Parents who have had the bitter or sweet gift of experience should insist on early frankness. By such plain speaking, enforced by home example, and by such choice of language and such reverence of thought as shall make the child feel

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