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(October 1888)
Publications:
- The Path, vol. III, no. 7, October 1888, pp. 222-224
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DATA
Title for references: Keightley J - A Plea for the Children
Short description:
Signed "August Waldersee, F. T. S." On children's natural closeness to the Unseen, and a call for Theosophical Sunday Schools to teach them Karma and Reincarnation rather than leave them to sectarian error.
222
A Plea for the Children.
A few years ago, the interest of the "average man" in occultism was nil. Now, to quote Molière the witty, "we have changed all that." Many an honest man is an unconscious theosophist, and we have innumerable new versions of "Le Philosophe sans le savoir." Little by little the stealthy tide has stolen in, until the public in general takes its daily rations of occultism in novels, essays, and experiences, and has even adopted its expressive phraseology. In a word, the average man is coming abreast of the theosophical student. This sign is favorable. It marks the moment when a fresh impulse from higher spheres may be expected, and which will impel the advance-members of our era further still. These advance-members, in the present respect of which we write, are the theosophists.
One step, of greater present importance than any other, now remains to be taken and promptly taken. Opportunity is a fruit which will not keep.
223 It is a vital truth that real knowledge, if unused, injures the mind that keeps it locked-up and barren. Knowledge is not a dead thing like the fruit of the loom and the easel. Knowledge is a seed, a living germ; it should be sown, it should be active, should fructify. He who stores up spiritual truths as mere intellectual acquisitions soon has a mental and moral plethora, and ends by turning from his normal food. The mind has its indigestions as well as the stomach, and of a more deadly order, for all things have more power as we proceed inwards. In the natural procedure of life, we learn one thing at a time, and it is learned by living it. A truth may first be intellectually perceived (so far as our consciousness of its entrance goes), but if it is not then lived out, it remains as a point of stagnation in the mind and more or less impedes the circulation of Thought. It is thus that our mental limitations accrue by degrees. To live a truth, we naturally begin by conforming our daily actions to it. Its overflow is first felt by those nearest to us; they are blessed or banned by our use or misuse of it. Equally, if we withhold it, they are deprived of a benefit to which they have a moral right. Although they may be unconscious of the loss, we have injured them in direct proportion to the value of the truth withheld.
The theosophist is, as a rule, ready and willing to impart this gracious knowledge which has radiated into his life from hidden spheres and touched it with a glory which escapes the mould of words. But how many theosophists realize that the persons nearest to us, our rightful heirs, are the children? Do they say that these mutinous heads clustering and tossing about us are too full of toys and the glee of a perpetual springtime to find room for larger learning? No observer of children, no nursery eavesdropper, will maintain it. In their butterfly flight they pause, poised just out of reach, let fall some reflection or question full of mysticism, and are gone, swifter than the winged answer. They are sturdy witnesses to the reality of the unseen. They sense it, they ruminate upon it; they turn some theory of their own over and over as the young calf chews its first cud. They find it and use it in their games. They project their knowledge tentatively upon their older friends, in whose conversations they do not find it figured. They are full of naive wonder at this omission, but, once lightly dealt with, once mocked, they shut fast those rosy lips and dream on in silence. They are nearer than we to the Unseen from which we have all come: to us a speculation, to them it is a memory, and they resent its profanation instinctively.
Instances of astral and spiritual experiences on the part of children may easily be multiplied, but in the Tea Table of this magazine they have been sufficiently outlined.
The pressing question then for theosophists is this: Shall we leave the224 children to these vague foreshadowings of truth, until the pressure of material life has dimmed the prophecy of pure youth and eradicated the finer impulse? Or, where the psychic nature is strong, shall we leave them balanced between dread of these sights unseen by others about them, and the keener dread of their own sanity and health? Shall we leave them tossing there, or shall we put a rudder in their hands? The budding form, the starry gaze, the blossom-tinted cheek are so dear; are the hearts, the minds less precious to us? Do we say that these truths are too grand for them? They are not truths if they are not of a pristine simplicity. The limpid purity of the child reflects the True better than our troubled soul can do, and "heaven is near us in our infancy." Springtime is seed time the world over. While the parents are reaching out for Truth, shall the children go on imbibing error? Let us give them the bread of life, not the stone of materiality: let us give them the teachings of universal Justice, of Love. Let us show them how all things move by Law; the rebound of good and evil; the magnificent reaches of Life from world to world, from form to form. When we trace out Karma and Reincarnation to them, first in natural and afterward in ethical symbol, we shall endear the universe to them as they find it welded in links of harmony and love. This joy we owe them, and it is owed higher still; it is a debt to the Supreme.
There should be Sunday Schools for the children of theosophists who believe and practice what they profess. Each Branch could start one. In progressive Boston the idea has already taken root. We seem to be irresolute for want of a practical method. Catechisms could be compounded from those of Colonel Olcott. Interesting dialogues and tales might be written by those versed in the labyrinths of these young minds: we all hold a clue to them; this clue is Love. Let us pay our debt to the children.
August Waldersee, F. T. S.
Footnotes