[What Is and What Might Be by Edmond Holmes]@TWC D-Link book
What Is and What Might Be

CHAPTER II
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For what is most cruel in cruelty is its tendency to demoralise its victims, especially those who are of tender years--to harden them, to brutalise them, to make them stubborn and secretive, to make them shifty and deceitful, to throw them back upon themselves, to shut them up within themselves, to quench the joy of their hearts, to numb their sympathies, to cramp their expansive energies, to narrow and darken their whole outlook on life.

All this the cruelty of his seniors would do to the child, even if he had not been taught to believe in his own inborn wickedness.

But that belief, with which he has been indoctrinated from his earliest days, necessarily weakens his power of resisting evil, and so predisposes him to fall a victim to the malignant germs that cruelty sows in his heart.

We tell the child that he is a criminal, and treat him as such, and then expect him to be perfect; and when our misguided education has begun to deprave him, we shake our heads over his congenital depravity, and thank God that we believe in "original sin."[5] In the next place, if Man is to be faithful to his model, he must bring up the child in an atmosphere of vexatious interference and unnatural restraint.

That Man himself has been brought up in such an atmosphere in both his schools--the Legal and the Ecclesiastical--I need not take pains to prove.


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