g being and then open all
doors to him, leaving him in the broad world to follow his own paths,
and ask for nothing, neither thanks, nor praise, nor remembrance. But to
most mothers may be applied the bitter exclamation of a son in the book
just mentioned, "even a mother must know how she tortures another; if
she has not this capacity by nature, why in the world should I recognise
her as my mother at all."

Certain mothers spend the whole day in keeping their children's nervous
system in a state of irritation. They make work hard and play joyless,
whenever they take a part in it. At the present time, too, the school
gets control of the child, the home loses all the means by which
formerly it moulded the child's soul life and ennobled family life.
The school, not father and mother, teaches children to play, the school
gives them manual training, the school teaches them to sing, to look at
pictures, to read aloud, to wander about out of doors; schools, clubs,
sport and other pleasures accustom youth in the cities more and more
to outside life, and a daily recreation that kills the true feeling for
holiday. Young people, often, have no other impression of home than that
it is a place where they meet society which bores them.

Parents surrender their children to schools in those years in which they
should influence their minds. When the school gives them back they
do not know how to make a fresh start with the children, for they
themselves have ceased to be young.

But getting old is no necessity; it is only a bad habit. It is very
interesting to observe a face that is getting old. What time makes out
of a face shows better than anything else what the man has made out
of time. Most men in the early period of middle age are neither
intellectually fat nor lean, they are hardened or dried up. Naturally
young people look upon them with unsympathetic eyes, for they feel that
there is such a thing as eternal youth, which a soul can win as a prize
for its whole work of inner development. But they look in vain for this
second eternal youth in their elders, filled with worldly nothingnesses
and things of temporary importance.

With a sigh they exclude the "old people" from their future plans and
they go out in the world in order to choose their spiritual parents.

This is tragic but just, for if there is a field on which man must sow a
hundred-fold in order to harvest tenfold it is the souls of children.

When I began at five