this word, which should be consecrated on its lips, together
with the Name which it may not take in vain, and whose meaning should
soften and animate every emotion through which the inferior things and
the feeble creatures, set beneath it in its narrow world, are revealed
to its curiosity or companionship; this word, in modern child-story, is
too often restrained and darkened into the hieroglyph of an evil
mystery, troubling the sweet peace of youth with premature gleams of
uncomprehended passion, and flitting shadows of unrecognized sin.

These great faults in the spirit of recent child-fiction are connected
with a parallel folly of purpose. Parents who are too indolent and
self-indulgent to form their children's characters by wholesome
discipline, or in their own habits and principles of life are conscious
of setting before them no faultless example, vainly endeavor to
substitute the persuasive influence of moral precept, intruded in the
guise of amusement, for the strength of moral habit compelled by
righteous authority:--vainly think to inform the heart of infancy with
deliberative wisdom, while they abdicate the guardianship of its
unquestioning innocence; and warp into the agonies of an immature
philosophy of conscience the once fearless strength of its unsullied and
unhesitating virtue.

127. A child should not need to choose between right and wrong. It
should not be capable of wrong; it should not conceive of wrong.
Obedient, as bark to helm, not by sudden strain or effort, but in the
freedom of its bright course of constant life; true, with an
undistinguished, praiseless, unboastful truth, in a crystalline
household world of truth; gentle, through daily entreatings of
gentleness, and honorable trusts, and pretty prides of child-fellowship
in offices of good; strong, not in bitter and doubtful contest with
temptation, but in peace of heart, and armor of habitual right, from
which temptation falls like thawing hail; self-commanding, not in sick
restraint of mean appetites and covetous thoughts, but in vital joy of
unluxurious life, and contentment in narrow possession, wisely esteemed.

Children so trained have no need of moral fairy tales; but they will
find in the apparently vain and fitful courses of any tradition of old
time, honestly delivered to them, a teaching for which no other can be
substituted, and of which the power cannot be measured; animating for
them the material world with inextinguishable li