fied as he passes through the separate phases of childhood. He passes swiftly and can never turn back to let us atone to him for neglect.

There was a little boy who liked to play with grasshoppers rather than read in books. He had many other queer little ways. He loved certain little trousers that had been made out of an old pair of his brother's and sewed together wrong so that one leg seemed to be going and one leg coming. They were also much the worse for having slid down many banisters, but the little boy preferred those trousers to all others and better ones. This little boy had meddling fingers too that gave other people trouble. Whenever he saw a plate of cookies with raisins in them he always wanted to dig out the raisins, which left little holes in the middle. He had very decided aversions, and one of them was going away from home and staying in other peoples houses for any length of time. One day when his mother was visiting with him and in very deep conversation, the little boy lay down upon the floor and kicked it very hard while he yelled with equal vigor, "I don't like this darned old house,-I want to go home." He hated water also, after the manner of all small boys when it has to be applied externally.

It is confidentially asserted now that this same

small boy has long since ceased to catch grasshoppers, but that he catches ideas with great avidity. There are now no meddling fingers in that home (the two lonely inmates wish there were), but the son of the house has perfect table manners. He is a connoiseur in the matter of clothes, also, and there are those who affirm that the little worn out, much loved trousers of other days contributed to the good taste of his present apparel. He felt so comfortable and presentable in them, -thus was cultivated the desire to continue to be comfortable and presentable. Though a man's standards and a little boy's differ, the underlying principle in dress is the same. He has long since made his bow to conventionality, also,—this little boy who kicked and screamed in the strange house-and he only says polite and agreeable things even though he is himself uncomfortably awaiting the convenience of other people. While he has made such large concessions to cleanliness as to amount to fastidiousness itself yet he is actually the same person who used to declare frantically that "ears don't matter, Mamma." Nor would they have mattered in the way he meant, when it came to the respect of his little clan, the only place where public opinion mattered to him. As for chivalry, it is said to have found its finest flower in this former tormentor of small girls,

-for once when he was asked, in desperation, why he tormented his little neighbor so unrelentingly, he replied with great satisfaction, "Cause I just love the screamings of Ruth!"

It is self evident that all children outgrow childish ways.

"What is there new in these reflections?" says the reader. "When I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things."

The apostle was trying to make it plain that with childish ideas and childish actions, primitive and childish feelings should also be put aside. It would be so, indeed, if we ourselves did not harbor these feelings toward the child and so make abortive the plan of his moral growth. The grub was never allowed to spread its wings but was fastened to the wall with a pin stuck through it. In the soul of the average man and woman, we find childish passions in a state of fatal arrest, having been jabbed through and transfixed by the treatment of older people.

Listen, Mothers. We older mothers had with us a little being of whom Jesus said, "His angel doth always behold the face of my Father who is in Heaven." We had him with us by the fireside, we had him in our arms, we led him by

the hand in fields and lanes as we both went down the road of life together. Are the wrongs we have done him forgiven and forgotten? Yes,— but our greatest punishment lies in the fact that we hear him repeating those mistakes and calling them right.

We heard a harsh cold man boast of his bringing up in the following language: "There was no modern foolishness about my mother; when she said, let things alone, I let things alone and when she said do a thing, I did it." And his whole manner and personality expressed more emphatically than words the means by which this discipline had been brought about. Creditors, employees, business associates, all trembled before the arbitrary will and mercilous disposition of the man.

It is not necessary to be a tyrant or to make a tyrant in order to teach obedience, but this man was "held up" at the stage in his development when he knew no better than to respect brute force and he had never gotten beyond it. He was still on the same plane with the little boy who had to be told that God could "skin the world" in order that the power of the Almighty be vindicated to him. Alas for those who grow up to believe that the power of righteousness is in armies and arbitrary force. The whole world

has been halted in its progress because the child has been made to stumble at the brute stage.

A mother was meant to be the love of God made visible and tangible. She it is who may demonstrate if she will the truth of that saying, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." Really all we are contending for, is that Christianity be taken literally in our treatment of children, however impractical it may still be held to be for adults.

A man was seen to beat with pitiless fury a pair of struggling horses who were unable to draw a heavy load he had put behind them. An old gray haired woman came out of the farmhouse and begged him to stop. It was pathetic to see her, so powerless before the anger of her son; and it was not less pitiful to see him having a brain storm that would not have been serious in a little child. Little children are delicate nervous mechanisms ill adjusted to their environments as yet. That a molecular tension breaks, that energy, losing its way in the little brain where paths are but dimly marked out at best, bursts out in hysterics, is not serious in the child. That he kicks and screams and strikes at whoever comes to undress him when he has been allowed to get too tired at night is not serious in its portent for the future, unless he is spanked at this