Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/68

 life. No opinion can be of more pernicious influence than this; and those parents must be accounted to have done much for their children, of both sexes, who, not by words, but in fact, have proved such a doctrine to be false.

There are however many degrees of affection, whether conjugal or parental; and, it may be said, that, where other requisites are not wanting, the success of a system of domestic culture will bear proportion to the intensity of these feelings.

There is a parental affection, rational and steady, which may be quite sufficient to secure a consistent regard to the welfare of a family; and powerful enough to sustain the labours and self-denials involved in conducting an educational course. But there is an affection going very far beyond any such passive, measured love. There is a love of offspring that knows no restrictive reasons; that extends to any length of personal suffering or toil; a feeling of absolute self-renunciation, whenever the interests of children involve a compromise of the comfort or tastes of the parent. There is a love of children in which self-love is drowned; a love, which when combined with intelligence and firmness, sees through, and casts aside, every pretext of personal gratification, and steadily pursues the highest and most remote welfare of its object, with the determination at once of an animal instinct, and of a well-considered, rational purpose. There is a species of love, not liable to be worn by time, or slackened, as from year to year, children become less and less dependant upon parental care:—it is a feeling which possesses the energy of the most vehement passions, along with the calmness and appliancy of the gentlest affections; a feeling purged, as completely as any human sentiment can be, of the grossness of earth; and which seems to have been conferred upon human nature as a sample of emotion proper to a higher sphere.

This kind of parental love, balanced by vigorous good