, to have maintained a creative, selective, active attitude
toward all persons and toward all books that have been brought within
range of their lives.

II

The Top of the Bureau Principle

The experience of being robbed of a story we are about to read, by the
good friend who cannot help telling how it comes out, is an occasional
experience in the lives of older people, but it sums up the main
sensation of life in the career of a child. The whole existence of a boy
may be said to be a daily--almost hourly--struggle to escape from being
told things.

It has been found that the best way to emphasise a fact in the mind of a
bright boy is to discover some way of not saying anything about it. And
this is not because human nature is obstinate, but because facts have
been intended from the beginning of the world to speak for themselves,
and to speak better than anyone can speak for them. When a fact speaks,
God speaks. Considering the way that most persons who are talking about
the truth see fit to rush in and interrupt Him, the wonder is not that
children grow less and less interested in truth as they grow older, but
that they are interested in truth at all--even lies about the truth.

The real trouble with most men and women as parents is, that they have
had to begin life with parents of their own. When the child's first
memory of God is a father or mother interrupting Him, he is apt to be
under the impression, when he grows up, that God can only be introduced
to his own children by never being allowed to get a word in. If we as
much as see a Fact coming toward a child--most of us--we either run out
where the child is, and bring him into the house and cry over him, or we
rush to his side and look anxious and stand in front of the Fact, and
talk to him about it.

And yet it is doubtful if there has ever been a boy as yet worth
mentioning, who did not wish we would stand a little more one side--let
him have it out with things. He is very weary--if he really amounts to
anything--of having everything about him prepared for him. There has
never been a live boy who would not throw a store-plaything away in two
or three hours for a comparatively imperfect plaything he had made
himself. He is equally indifferent to a store Fact, and a boy who does
not see through a store-God, or a store-book, or a store-education
sooner than ninety-nine parents out of a hundred and sooner than most
synods, is not worth bringing up.

No ju