shment
for his sins. His will was broken; he was made weak where he might
have been strong; and he did evil because he had learned no power of
self-restraint: yet his people loved him, and they had done all these
things because they wished to purge him wholly from all uncleanness.

The parents of the other child were warned of the lamentable results
of this gloomy training, and they said one to another: "Our darling
shall be free as air; his duties shall be made to seem like pleasures,
or, better still, he shall have no duty but his pleasure. He shall
do only what he wills, that his will may grow strong, and he can but
choose the right, for he knows no evil. We will hold up before him no
bugbear of future punishment, for doubtless there is no such thing;
and if there be, it will not be meted out to such a child. He will
love and obey his parents because they have devoted themselves to his
happiness, and because they have never imposed distasteful obligations
upon him, and when he grows to manhood he will be a model of wisdom
and of goodness."

But, lo! the child of this training was as great a failure as the
child of austerity and gloom. He was capricious, lawless, willful,
disobedient, passionate; he thought of no one's pleasure save his own;
he cared for his parents only in so far as they could be of use to
him; and like a wild beast of the jungle he preyed upon the life
around him, and cared not whom he destroyed if his appetites were
satisfied.

"In every field of opinion and action, men are found swinging from
one extreme to the other of life's manifold arcs of vibration." This
perpetual movement may be the essential condition of existence, for
death is cessation of motion; or it may be a never-ending effort of
the mind to reach an ideal which discloses itself so seldom as to make
its permanent abiding-place a matter of uncertainty. Doubtless there
is somewhere a middle to the arc, and in the lapse of ages the needle
may at last find the "pole-point of central truth" and be at rest; but
as yet, in every department of labor and thought, it is vibrating, and
after tarrying a while at one extreme it swings unsatisfied back to
the other.

Nowhere are these extremes more noticeable than in the government of
children. Centuries ago, in the patriarchal period, the father of the
family seems also to have exercised the functions of a criminal judge;
but the uniting of the two sets of duties in one person does not
appe