Here are some excerpts from FW Boreham's "The Father of the Man."
In one of the most inspired moments Wordsworth declared that the child is the father of the man. The laureate's epigram has its practical implications.
If maturity can imbibe all that infancy can impart, the golden age of which the seers of the ages have dreamed may not be as remote as we sometimes fancy. The fresh and sparkling-eyed youngster has much that he can teach his prosaic and blase senior.
Sir John Kirk, the eminent naturalist, once declared that, if he had his way, a little child should be always available in the heart of London, perhaps somewhere in the precincts of Westminster Abby or St. Paul's Cathedral, and no man should be allowed to contest a seat in Parliament, or become a candidate for any public office, until he had spent at least a day with the child and had passed an examination in his novel methods of thought, feeling, and expression.
The glory of childhood lies in the fact that it sees things whole; its world has no hemisphere and no frontiers. The realm of Romance and the realm of Reality merge naturally and blend easily. This, of course, is in keeping with the eternal fitness of things; for the division of the globe into hemispheres and sections is as arbitrary and artificial as anything on the planet.
To a child there is no such thing as Fact and no such thing as Fancy. Jack the Giant Killer is, to him--as I remember once writing--as real as Julius Caesar; he is as sure of the Fairy Godmother as of Queen Victoria; the Enchanted Castle falls into the same category as the Buckingham Palace. Chesterton has an essay, running into forty pages, in which he lashes the stupidity of unimaginative adults for their failure to appreciate the charms of Fairyland.
Chesterton extols the genius of childhood in recognizing the inherent beauty of a story, whether its plots happens to be laid in Fairyland or in Bethnal Green. Let grown-up people sneer as they will, Fairyland remains, Chesterton maintains, the sunny country of common sense. More than anything else, it prepares the mind for that subtle element of mystery that lurks everywhere in life and for the inexorable chain of causes and consequences that, day by day, confronts us at every turn.
St. Chrysostom thought that the preeminent charm of childhood lay in its scorn of those social distinctions that later in life enslave us. A child will make no bones about turning his back on an uninteresting duke to chat with an interesting gardener. Some time back, a small boy, charged with the task of presenting a bouquet to the Queen, horrified the assembled dignitaries by rummaging around Her Majesty's feet. He was, he afterward explained, looking for the mouse that, on her visit to London to look at the Queen, the cat saw under the chair. To a child, monarchs and mice are of equal interest.
"If," says Chrysostom, "you show him a queen with a crown, he will not prefer her to his mother, albeit clothed in rags, but will cling to his mother in her poor attire rather than the queen in all her bravery."
A child exhibits an innate sensitiveness to mysticism. His insight is astounding. Tell a child the story of Bethlehem, the vigil of the shepherds, the quest of the Magi, the song of the angels and the babe in the manger. He drinks it all in. An adult, similarly situated, opens a discussion on what he is pleased to call the doctrine of the Incarnation. Tell a child the story of the Cross; he accepts it avidly, finding no difficulty anywhere. Relate to an adult the same impressive facts and he will ask learnedly for a theory of the Atonement.
The archives of inspiration contain few gems more affecting than the record of the way in which the Savior of Men took a little child and set him in the midst of the disciples, not that the child might aim at becoming like Peter and James and John, but that Peter and James and John might covet the sweetness and simplicity of the little child.
