Childhood

You do not know the secret that, in their ignorance, children conceal. You do not know what they are, nor what they were, nor what they will become. And yet you love them and cherish them as if they were a part of yourselves, in such wise that a mother’s love for her children is reputed the greatest love that one being can have for another being. Whence comes this sweet affection, this tender benevolence that even strangers feel for a child? Do you know it? No. It is this that I wish to explain to you. Children are beings whom God sends into new existences; and, so that they may not complain of His great severity, He gives them every appearance of innocence; even in a child of bad nature its defects are covered by the unconsciousness of its acts. This innocence is not a real superiority over what they were before; no, it is the image of what they ought to be; and, if they are not so, the blame will fall upon them alone.

But it was not for them alone that God gave them this aspect; it was also and above all for their parents, whose love is necessary to their weakness; and this love would be singularly weakened at the sight of an intolerant and impertinent character, whereas, supposing their children good and gentle, they give them all their affection and surround them with the most delicate attentions. But when children no longer need this protection, this assistance which was lavished upon them during fifteen or twenty years, their real and individual character reappears in all its nakedness: it remains good, if it was fundamentally good, but it always shimmers with hues that were hidden in early childhood. You see that the ways of God are always the best and that, when one has a pure heart, the explanation is easy to conceive.

Indeed, imagine that the spirit of the children who are born among you may come from a world where it acquired completely different habits. How would you have this new being find itself in your midst, who comes with passions completely different from those you possess, with inclinations and tastes entirely opposed to yours? How would you have them incorporate themselves into your ranks in a manner other than that which God willed, that is, through the sieve of childhood? There come to be confounded all the thoughts, all the characters, all the truths of beings engendered by that multitude of spheres where creatures develop. You yourselves, on dying, find yourselves in a kind of childhood, in the midst of new brothers. And, in a new existence outside the Earth, you are ignorant of the habits, the customs, and the relations of that world so new to you; you will manage with difficulty a language that you are not accustomed to speak, a language more vivid than your present thought. Childhood has yet another utility. Spirits do not enter into corporeal life except to perfect themselves, to better themselves. The weakness of tender age renders them flexible, accessible to the counsels of experience and of those who must make them progress. It is then that we can reform their character and repress their bad propensities. Such is the duty that God has confided to parents, a sacred mission for which they shall have to answer.

Thus, not only is childhood useful, necessary, and indispensable, but, furthermore, it is the natural consequence of the laws that God has established and that govern the Universe.

[Without name.]

Observation. – We call the attention of our readers to this remarkable dissertation, whose elevated philosophical scope is easily comprehensible. What is more beautiful, more grandiose than that solidarity which exists among all worlds? What more apt to give us an idea of the goodness and the majesty of God? Humanity grows by such thoughts, whereas it is debased if we reduce it to the petty proportions of our ephemeral life and of our imperceptible world among the other worlds.

[The communication above complements the answer to question no. 385 of The Spirits’ Book.]