Child Versus Parent Part 5

Parents must be willing to forfeit all save honor in pressing upon youth the categorical and undeniable summons of the ideal. Parents must sometimes, ofttimes, be immovably firm, so firm as to be ready to lose the love of children rather than to sacrifice their self-respect.

Men and women are not worthy of the dignity and glory of parenthood who lack the courage to brave the frown of a child, the strength to front a child's displeasure. Remembering that parents usually love their children not wisely but too well and that children love their parents wisely but not too well, let the gentleness of parents be lifted up and hallowed by firmness and the firmness of children be hallowed and glorified by gentleness.

If anything the case is still harder for the uneducated or slightly educated parents of children, who have been enabled to tread the highway of education. It seems indecent on the part of these to treat parents in contemptuous fashion, sitting at table with them but never exchanging a word of converse. Even when children have virtually attained the heights of omniscience, it is well for them to remember that earth's greatest are not too proud to hold converse with the lowliest, and that one's education is measured not by the number of languages one speaks but by the fineness of spirit that shines through one's speech, however ungrammatical and one's acts however unveneered.

Comradeship is not to be bought by parents, neither can it be bribed by children. It must not mean the forfeiture of standards. The comradeship that it not suffered to hold the target ever higher is not comradeship but compromise. The comradeship that dare not press higher standards is not comradeship. The comradeship that fears to urge the enn.o.bling ideal is not comradeship but concession.

I have before me as I write a letter or a fragment of a letter written by a young sergeant of the French army to his parents ere he fared forth in early August, 1914, to Lorraine,--a youth of promise on the eve of fulfilment. These are his words, unread until after his death in the following month, which he gloriously met, fighting to the end against the overwhelming numbers to which he refused to surrender. "Be sustained by the contemplation of the beautiful which you cannot fail to love, and which brings you to the eternal principle to which our soul returns.... It is not they who pa.s.s for whom we must mourn. I desire but one thing, that I may have a death worthy of the life of my admirable and truly loved father." No conflict here but perfect concord, the concord of a perfect comradeship. The father a distinguished servant of his country in war and peace, the mother a seeker after G.o.d and the highest, had been as his comrades, going just a little before and teaching him how to live and toil and hope. He dared all and fell with peace in his heart and faith in his unconquered soul that all was well, that the comradeship of earth would merge at last in the comradeship eternal.

The Prophet was right: "And he shall turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers." For the Messiah is born when the hearts of parents and children are turned to each other in reverence and selflessness. For then it is that the home is brought nearer to the presence of G.o.d and that clashing and conflict end--when, in the word of a n.o.ble teacher of our generation, it is remembered that "the child is itself a gift, first to parents out of the infinite, then by them to the eternal."

Footnotes

[A] Toward Social Reform, p. 111.

[B] Parenthood and Race Culture, p. 193.

[C] Life of Alice Freeman Palmer, p. 68.

[D] Choice of Books, p. 8.

[E] Emerson, "The Oversoul."

[F] Atlantic Monthly, August, 1921, p. 221.

[G] Our Social Heritage, p. 60.

[H] _Idem_, p. 95.

[I] _Idem_, p. 224.

[J] P. 63.

[K] Getting Married, Preface, pp. 132-133.

[L] The Making of a Teacher, p. 34.

[M] Emerson in Concord (E. W. Emerson) p. 8.

[N] Emerson in Concord, p. 21.

[O] Tucker, Public-Mindedness, p. 133.

[P] Cheerful Yesterdays, p. 123.

[Q] Cheerful Yesterdays, p. 160.

[R] Public-Mindedness, p. 77.

[S] Higginson, Contemporaries, p. 2.

[T] Darmesteter, Life of Renan, p. 45.

[U] _Idem_, p. 103.

[V] History of Israel, Vol. II, p. 163.