CHAPTER IV.
CHARACTER OF EARLY INSTRUCTION.
1. Every one knows that whatever disposition the branches of an old tree possess, they must necessarily have been so formed from the first growth. The animal, unless it receive in its very first formation the foundations of all its members, no one expects that it would ever receive them, for who can amend that which was born lame, blind, defective, or deformed? Man, therefore, in the very first formation of body and soul, should be molded so as to be such as he ought to be throughout his whole life.[1]
2. For although God can bring an inveterately bad man to be profitable by completely transforming him, yet in the regular course of nature it scarcely ever happens otherwise than that as a thing has begun to be formed from its origin, so it becomes completed and so it remains. Whatever seed any one has sown in his youth, such fruits he reaps in old age, according to the saying, “The pursuits of youth are the delights of age.”
3. Let not parents, therefore, devolve the whole instruction of their children upon teachers of schools and ministers of the church. It is impossible to make a tree straight that
- ↑ Compare with the first book of Rousseau’s Émile (Boston, 1885). Plato also says in the Republic: “In every work the beginning is the most important part, especially in dealing with anything young and tender; for that is the time when any impression, which one may desire to communicate, is most readily stamped and taken.”
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