So in the matter of education.  There are genuine principles which underlie the development of every child that lives—­even the feeble-minded, deaf, and blind.  Read Helen Keller’s wonderful life, if you want to see the proof of it.  Just as surely as a child has two legs and has to learn to walk on them by a series of prolonged experiments, just so surely he has (a) a sense of justice, (b) an instinct for freedom, (c) a love of play.  Every kind of child has all these instincts, as much as he has love for food and drink; and to educate him consists in developing these instincts into (a) the habit of dealing justly by others, (b) the right use of freedom, (c) love of work.  The particular methods may differ.  The principles do not and CANNOT DIFFER.

She who would succeed in child training must hold to these truths with all her might and main—­making them, in fact, her religion, for they are the doctrines of the Christian religion as applied to motherhood.  To hold them lightly, or even experimentally, will not do.  One most walk in faith.  And that the faith may not be blind, but may be based on experience and understanding, let me suggest this means of proof:  Instead of asking yourself how the laws laid down in these little books would fit this or that particular child, your own or another’s, ask how they would have fitted you, if they had been applied to you by your own mother.  Take the chapter on faults, pick out the one which was yours, in childhood—­oh, of course, you’ve got over it now!—­think of some bitter trouble into which that fault hurried you, and conceive that, instead of the punishment you did receive, you had been treated as the lesson suggests—­what, do you think, would have been the result?  And so with the other chapters—­even with that much-mooted question of companionship.  Test the truth of them all by their imaginary application to the child you know best.  When you can, find the principles that your own mother did employ in your education, and examine the result of what she did.  Some of the principles will suddenly become luminous to you, I am sure; and some things that happened in the past receive an explanation.

Such a self-examination, to be of any value, must be rigidly honest.  There is too much at stake here for you to permit any remnants of bitter feeling to influence your judgment—­and you will surely be surprised to find how many bitter resentments will show that they yet have life.  The past is dead, as far as your power to change it is concerned; but it lives, as a thing that you can use.  Here is your own child, to be helped or hindered by what you may have endured.  It will all have been worth while, if by means of it you can save him from some bruises and falls.  Every bitterness will be sweetened if you can look through it and find the truth which shall serve this dearer little self who looks to you for guidance.