Eonchs of ruby. A Gift of Love :: :: University of Virginia Library

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THE GOSPEL OF LOVE.

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy.”—

Wordsworth.

“He that will humble himself to go to a child for instruction, will come away a wiser and a better man. Better to be driven out from among men, than to be disliked of children.”—

Charles H. Dana.

I.

You beat the child into distress,
That you may force him to confess
His faults—then, penitent, caress
His penitential bitterness.

II.

You force from out his heart the tears
That have been sleeping there for years,
By waking not his love but fears—
He only thus reformed appears.

III.

For your own heart's offended sake,
Him to your arms again you take—
Keeping his former love awake;
Else, like his own, your heart would break!

IV.

But had you not caressed the child,
Thereby becoming reconciled

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To him, now he is so exiled—
You had not tamed, but made more wild.

V.

It was your kindness was the cure,
And not the pain he did endure;
Else why the after-overture
His former friendship to secure?

VI.

To punish one that does not need
The punishment, is to exceed
His guilt, did he deserve to bleed,
By doing far the greater deed.

VII.

No evil underneath the sun
Is greater than this very one;
What tenderness at first had done,
Makes after-overture just none.

VIII.

Why should you first withdraw your love
To punish him? then, after, prove,
By kindness, what it did behoove
You first to do his heart to move?

IX.

Your after-kindness only shows
That what you tried to do by blows,
(Which your own heart, now melted, knows,)
From acts of kindness only flows.

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X.

Thus what you try by force to bend
You only break—this is its end;
By forcing Nature to contend,
You only mar what you would mend.

XI.

What Nature says is right, is so:
This every man on earth should know,
That, feeling for another's wo,
Is what we all were born to do.

XII.

To make the Man, build up the child—
Still keeping pure the undefiled;
To tame is not to make more wild:
This must be done by acts most mild.

XIII.

That doth the father's heart defile
Which makes him to his child hostile;
The vigor born of such black bile,
Is evidence itself of guile.

XIV.

Healing the blow, that caused him pain,
By after-kindness, proves it vain;
For that which will not him restrain,
Helps him to do the deed again.

XV.

The child's soul must be first imbued
With principles of perfect good,
Before it can be thus renewed
To walk the path of rectitude

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XVI.

The madness we can not endure,
We send to Hospitals to cure—
Purging the heart to make it pure,
From future ills to keep secure.

XVII.

A fostering kindness is the way
To purge such darkness all away
From that poor soul now led astray—
Letting in Truth's eternal Day.

XVIII.

This law unto the soul was given
When God first sent it down from Heaven—
By force no heart is bent—but riven:
Man may be led—but never driven.

XIX.

That which belongs alone to God,
He has upon no man bestowed;
Death-punishment, therefore, for good,
Should be erased from penal code.