except to break their wills in the beginning."

"But you have just said that it is not to your will as will that he is to
yield, but to your superior knowledge and experience. That surely is not
'breaking his will.' It is of all things furthest removed from it. It is
educating his will. It is teaching him how to will."

This sounds dangerous; but the logic is not easily turned aside, and there
is little left for the advocate of will-breaking but to fall back on some
texts in the Bible, which have been so often misquoted in this connection
that one can hardly hear them with patience. To "Children, obey your
parents," was added "in the Lord," and "because it is right," not "because
they are your parents." "Spare the rod" has been quite gratuitously
assumed to mean "spare blows." "Rod" means here, as elsewhere, simply
punishment. We are not told to "train up a child" to have no will but our
own, but "in the way in which he should go," and to the end that "when he
is old" he should not "depart from it,"--i.e., that his will should be so
educated that he will choose to walk in the right way still. Suppose a
child's will to be actually "broken;" suppose him to be so trained that he
has no will but to obey his parents. What is to become of this helpless
machine, which has no central spring of independent action? Can we stand
by, each minute of each hour of each day, and say to the automata, Go
here, or Go there? Can we be sure of living as long as they live? Can we
wind them up like seventy-year clocks, and leave them?

But this is idle. It is not, thank God, in the power of any man or any
woman to "break" a child's "will." They may kill the child's body, in
trying, like that still unhung clergyman in Western New York, who whipped
his three-year-old son to death for refusing to repeat a prayer to his
step-mother.

Bodies are frail things; there are more child-martyrs than will be known
until the bodies terrestrial are done with.

But, by one escape or another, the will, the soul, goes free. Sooner or
later, every human being comes to know and prove in his own estate that
freedom of will is the only freedom for which there are no chains
possible, and that in Nature's whole reign of law nothing is so largely
provided for as liberty. Sooner or later, all this must come. But, if it
comes later, it comes through clouds of antagonism, and after days of
fight, and is hard-bought.

It should come sooner, like the kingdom of God,