in it. Tasks, under which the grown-up man recoils and reels,
the child will assume with light heart, and execute without fatigue.
Committing to memory, which is repulsive drudgery to the man, is the
easiest of all tasks to the child. More than this. The things fixed in
the memory of childhood are seldom forgotten. Things learned later in
life, not only are learned with greater difficulty, but more rapidly
disappear. I recall instantly and without effort, texts of Scripture,
hymns, catechisms, rules of grammar and arithmetic, and scraps of poetry
and of classic authors, with which I became familiar when a boy. But it
is a labor of Hercules for me to repeat by memory anything acquired
since attaining the age of manhood. The Creator seems to have arranged
an order in the natural development of the faculties for this very
purpose, that in childhood and youth we may be chiefly occupied with the
accumulation of materials in our intellectual storehouse. Now to reverse
this process, to occupy the immature mind of childhood chiefly with the
cultivation of faculties which are of later growth, and actually to put
shackles and restraints upon the memory, nicknaming and ridiculing all
memoriter exercises as parrot performances, is to ignore one of the
primary facts of human nature. It is to be wiser than God.

Another faculty that shoots up into full growth in the very morning and
spring-time of life, is Faith. I speak here, of course, not of religious
belief, but of that faculty of the human mind which leads a child to
believe instinctively whatever is told him. That we all do thus believe
until by slow and painful experience we learn to do otherwise, needs no
demonstration. Everybody's experience attests the fact. It is equally
plain that the existence and maturity of this faculty in early childhood
is a most wise and beneficent provision of nature. How slow and tedious
would be the first steps in knowledge, were the child born, as some
teachers seem trying to make him, a sceptic, that is, with a mind which
refuses to receive anything as true, except what it has first proved by
experience and reason! On the contrary, how much is the acquisition of
knowledge expedited, during these years of helplessness and dependency,
by this spontaneous, instinctive faith of childhood. The same infinite
wisdom and love, which in the order of nature provide for the helpless
infant a father and mother to care for it, provide also in the
constituti