In a Oriental climate, abstinence from food may give the mind the preeminence over the body, and so leave the mind better fitted for religious duties.  In our country, literal fasting would have just the contrary effect:  it would give the body the mastery over the soul; it would make a man so physically uncomfortable that he could not attend with profit to his religious duties at all.  I am aware, Anglican reader, of the defects of my countrymen; but commend me to the average Scotchman for sound practical sense.  But to return.  These Fast-days are by many people observed as rigorously as the Scotch Sunday.  On the forenoon of such a day, my friend’s little child, three years old, came to him in much distress.  She said, as one who had a fearful sin to confess, “I have been playing with my toys this morning”; and then began to cry as if her little heart would break.  I know some stupid parents who would have strongly encouraged this needless sensitiveness; and who would thus have made their child unhappy at the time, and prepared the way for an indignant bursting of these artificial trammels when the child had grown up to maturity.  But my friend was not of that stamp.  He comforted the little thing, and told her, that, though it might be as well not to play with her toys on a Fast-day, what she had done was nothing to cry about.  I think, my reader, that, even if you were a Scotch minister, you would appear with considerable confidence before your Judge, if you had never done worse than failed to observe a Scotch Fast-day with the Covenanting austerity.

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But when one looks back and looks round, and tries to reckon up the sorrows of childhood arising from parental folly, one feels that the task is endless.  There are parents who will not suffer their children to go to the little feasts which children occasionally have, either on that wicked principle that all enjoyment is sinful, or because the children have recently committed some small offence, which is to be thus punished.  There are parents who take pleasure in informing strangers, in their children’s presence, about their children’s faults, to the extreme bitterness of the children’s hearts.  There are parents who will not allow their children to be taught dancing, regarding dancing as sinful.  The result is, that the children are awkward and unlike other children; and when they are suffered to spend an evening among a number of companions who have all learned dancing, they suffer a keen mortification which older people ought to be able to understand.  Then you will find parents, possessing ample means, who will not dress their children like others, but send them out in very shabby garments.  Few things cause a more painful sense of humiliation to a child.  It is a sad sight to see a little fellow hiding round the corner when some one passes who is likely to recognize him, afraid to go through the decent streets, and creeping out of sight by back-ways.  We have all seen that.  We have all sympathized heartily with the reduced widow who has it not in her power to dress her boy better; and we have all felt lively indignation at the parents who had the power to attire their children becomingly, but whose heartless parsimony made the little things go about under a constant sense of painful degradation.