86 MORAL CONDITION OF THE CHILD 



come to those human conditions where he may re- 

 ceive spiritual influences through channels of 

 spirit, and not through mere blood arteries. Dr. 

 Duvall, of Ohio Wesleyan University, allows the 

 statement that the child grows up in the matrix 

 of the home-life for the first nine years of his 

 life as he grew in the matrix of his mother's body 

 for the first nine months. The higher nature is 

 spiritual ; its period of gestation is the years when 

 parental influences enfold it; streams of habit 

 flow into it; bands of power are bound round it, 

 directing its growth and controlling the spiritual 

 nutriment that is built into its character. Let us 

 take a single example of the invincible power of 

 the parent, the law of Imitation. Imitation in a 

 child is not volitional. He can not help imitating. 

 His nature acts that way independently of choice. 

 Yet every action performed through imitation 

 drops some reflex back into his self -life. His self 

 is but the product of his past actions. "What we 

 do is a function of what we think; what we think 

 is a function of what we have done." (Baldwin.) 

 We thus can control the action of the child, and 

 hence the character of the child through the ac- 

 tions we live before him, and the authority we 

 have over him. Thus these years of childhood up 

 to adolescence are much more important for char- 

 acter than anything known that can come to him 

 in his pre-natal life. If this truth could be ade- 

 quately appreciated by parents, they would not, 

 as is now frequently done, allow the life of the 



