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Untitled Article
neighbour . The true morality of the case is much more likely to be found in such arrangements as would accommodate all parties , ( which would be very practicable even for the poor , were it not for our national determination that every cottage should be a Castle Sulky with its independent apparatus of coercion and punishment , ) instead of making it a cardinal point of infantile morality
that the will of the child should be broken for crossing the will of the parent . ' I am the oldest and the strongest ; you like noise , I like quietness , and so I shall whip you till you cry softly , and then you will be good : ' the morality of this we take to be sheer humbug , and we like it yet worse when it goes on into religious cant , and defames the Deity by ascribing a similar process to his providence . The object of religion is to make the human will coincide -with the divine will , by enlightening the mind till it perceives that
the latter only consults the happiness of man . Such should be the object of infantile education . The mere subordination of will to will by forcible means tends to the utter destruction of worth of character . The will of the child is , hke that of the adult , infalg libly determined to the greatest apparent good . If mistaken in the estimate of good , and the error cannot be corrected by
enlightening the understanding , it may still yield to confidence in a superior mind . This is not bending , or breaking the will , it is a spontaneous change in the direction of the desire , wrought by affection . And
thus should the rational being who knows , ever guide by love the rational being who does not know . But to overbalance the greatest apparent good , though it be but to the mind of a child , by an arbitrary association therewith of evil , by privation , stripes , or tbreatenings , is a gross and brutal tyranny . The moral of its appeal to religion amounts to this , that vice would be very pleasant , if God had not arbitrarily tacked hell to its indulgence . A
Deity , so described , is only loved by the base selfishness which presumes on a peculiar favouritism . The parent who introduces such a religion into the analogous process of the education of his own children ^ is but in the position of the flogged negro slave , flogging his jackass . * He my nigger . ' The antithesis of this system , is not the giving children sweetmeats till they are sick , and allowing them to be always idle , which is not disusing the
rod , but only keeping it in pickle ; but it is the disposing them towards their real £ ood by the two simple powers of light and love , the one waxing strong where the other fades away . Shame is it to an adult , and especially to a mother , to her clearness of head and fondness of heart , to her judgment and her patience , if
she cannot make the child her spontaneous companion , in any path in which it is really for that child ' s good that she should lead it . If she cannot do this , she should abdicate her maternity , and finding a woman who can , she should delegate the task , ask no questions , commit no interferences , and pay the bills without
Untitled Article
A Victim . 169
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1833, page 169, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2610/page/25/
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