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Updated: June 28, 2025
"I boarded near them one summer when you were a baby, Frances, and I shall never forget the way they were treating some children visiting there! ... Oh, no, I don't mean they abused them or beat them ... but such lack of sympathy, such perfect indifference to the sacred sensitiveness of child-life, such a starving of the child-heart ... No, I shall never forget it!
Broken fragments of our choice literary products have been served up, but the best literary works as wholes have never been given to the children in the schools. The Greek youth were better served with the Iliad and Odyssey, and some of our grandfathers with the tales of the Old Testament. We now go still further back in the child-life and make use of fairy tales in the first grade.
Toilin' till late bedtime, gettin' up before half rested, and takin' up agin the hard toil till the little feeble child-life is born into the world. How is it with the mother and the child? For answer, I refer you to countless newspaper files, under the headin' of "mysterious dispensations of Providence," and to old solitary churchyards, and to the insane statisticks of the country.
Miss Cooper has drawn some pretty pen-pictures of her father's child-life. She writes: "From the first bow and arrow, kite and ball, to later feats in fishing, riding, shooting, and skating, all were connected with his highland home." He was "healthy and active; a brave, blithe-hearted, impetuous, most generous and upright boy."
The beginning had been . . . yes, the first conscious beginning had been the going away of little Mark, out of his babyhood into his own child-life. He had gone out and left an empty place behind him, which till then had been filled with the insistent ever-present need for care for the physical weakness of babyhood. And she had known that never again would Mark fill that place.
More obvious tokens of child-life were the swings nailed to the lintels of a few doors, in which, despite the cold, toothless babes swayed like monkeys on a branch. But the Square, with its broad area of quadrangular pavement, was an ideal playing-ground for children, since other animals came not within its precincts, except an inquisitive dog or a local cat.
If the church makes no such provision, if it has no place for children, in the name of our wider spiritual family relationships we must demand it. Let the voice of the family be heard insisting on suitable buildings and specially designed worship for child-life suitable forms of service and activity.
Never before in the course of her narrow, sheltered child-life had she, even in imagination, been brought face to face with the manifold wants and woes of her poorer brothers and sisters, or understood the service to which the Son of Man summons all his faithful followers: "Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?"
More often than of anything else, he used to talk to me of the fatuous blindness of a civilization that centred its economic activities in places where child-life was perpetually repressed and imperiled. The last time I saw him he was flaming indignation at the ghastly record of children killed and maimed by trucks and automobiles.
No one who lacks either the ability or desire to put herself into sympathetic touch with child-life should ever be assigned to work in the juvenile department, and the assistant who avowedly dislikes children, or who "has no patience with them," will work disastrous results if allowed to serve these little ones with an unwilling spirit she should be relegated to some department of the library to which the sunshine of childhood can never penetrate, and kept there.
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