Article April 1, 1916 Issue

Hope of the Ages

AMY C. FARISS

Possibly the most impressionable thing in the world is a child's consciousness. In Science and Health (p. 237) our Leader says, "The more stubborn beliefs and theories of parents often choke the good seed in the minds of themselves and their offspring." With what care, therefore, should we older ones guard the child's unfolding.

Would it not be well at times to give a glance backward at our own budding ideas, and experience there try to understand more intimately something of how deeply a careless word may lodge in the tender soil? Like a seed dropped into some gentle spot of the springtime earth, it may lodge, perhaps to bear fruit after its kind; hidden away in a tiny breast, hardly a conscious thought, it may yet find root and gather strength, perhaps in time to have its part in the shaping of that life. "We are all sculptors," Mrs. Eddy reminds us, "working at various forms, moulding and chiseling thought" (Science and Health, p. 248). The child at play is no less "molding and chiseling thought." Indeed, it is right here in the unformed consciousness that mortal existence begins to assume development. Here, then, is where the hope of the ages should ever have rested, where today the greatest hope of future ages still rests.

We of this generation must needs dig deep beneath the rubbish heaps of false conclusions, biased opinions, sometimes beneath the chaos of despair, to find a trace of the tender soil so much needed for the planting of the seed of Truth. Undoubtedly the results of distorted impressions vary in their subtly mischievous course; but in one case at least the farthest stretch of memory goes back to the hour when little feet were diverted into the angular by-path of unhappiness, driven there by the force of a baneful impression. This stretch of memory recalls a lean, keen-faced child standing alone in a big orchard. Dark clouds hung low in the sky, the wind whipped long strands of hair about the tiny, anxious face. The child shuddered but stood her ground. Thunder pealed and rumbled and died. The clouds grew singularly black and lowering. The slight body straightened, and took on defiance. If ever the devil was to come and carry away all naughty children, it would surely be today. The blackest cloud of all was speeding him nearer; there was no hope of escape. Even the gentle mother had declared that the devil and unending punishment were all that lay before so bad a girl.

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