Hence their
existence is very precarious; in a moment they may sink like the frosted
flower in its lovely blush. This may be said of the soul as well as of the
body and mind. What an argument, therefore, we have here for parental
diligence and promptness in duty to the eternal as well as to the temporal
well-being of the child.
The infant is the first prophecy of the man. It is the germ of manhood. It
is the man in a state of involution. It is the undeveloped man. Infancy is
the twilight of life,--the first morning of an endless being, the age of
germ and of mere sense. As the first dawn of spring is the season of the
undeveloped harvest, so childhood is manhood in possibility. The infant is
the vernal bud of life; it is a being of promise and of hope,--the prophecy
of the future man. Hence the age of education. The mother, in the nursery,
is ever evolving into the strength of maturity those powers of her child
which will be wielded for happiness or for misery. Her babe is an "embryo
angel, or an infant fiend." We behold in that fragile form, the bud of the
strong man,--the possibility of one who may in a few years arouse with his
thrilling eloquence a slumbering nation, or with the torch and sword of
revolution, overturn empires and dethrone kings, or with his feet upon the
walls of Zion, and the words of life upon his lips, overthrow the
strongholds of Satan, and bring the rebel sinner in penitence to the feet
of Jesus.
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