George MacDonald Quotes About Children
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But God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that he takes them from them, and tries the other way: for lack of them and its misery, they will perhaps seek the true!
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All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children.
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The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.
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I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.
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He (God) can be revealed only to the child; perfectly, to the pure child only. All the discipline of the world is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them.
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Never tell a child 'you have a soul.' Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.
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We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them.
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The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children.
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For when is the child the ideal child in our eyes and to our hearts? Is it not when with gentle hand he takes his father by the beard, and turns that father's face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss? when even the lovely selfishness of love-seeking has vanished, and the heart is absorbed in loving?
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Do you think you love your children better than He who made them? Is not your love what it is because He put it into your heart first? Have you not often been cross with them? Sometimes unjust to them? Whence came the returning love that rose from unknown depths in your being, and swept away the anger and the injustice? You did not create that love. Probably you were not good enough to send for it by prayer. But it came. God sent it. He makes you love your children.
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The truly wise talk little about religion and are not given to taking sides on doctrinal issues. When they hear people advocating or opposing the claims of this or that party in the church, they turn away with a smile such as men yield to the talk of children. They have no time, they would say, for that kind of thing. They have enough to do in trying to faithfully practice what is beyond dispute.
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A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.
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I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.
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[God desires] not that He may say to them, "Look how mighty I am, and go down upon your knees and worship," for power alone was never yet worthy of prayer; but that He may say thus: "Look, my children, you will never be strong but with my strength. I have no other to give you. And that you can get only by trusting in me. I can not give it you any other way. There is no other way."
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