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The Sabbath of Freedom
135

and moral teaching as has passed over the teaching of physical deportment. A mother or governess now has to be content with forbidding certain attitudes as unsuited to the drawing-room or class-room; she cannot go through the solemn farce of forcing on the child her prejudices about certain attitudes being in the abstract "unladylike," when she knows that the child will presently be made to assume those attitudes by order of the Gymnast. So a clergyman would, if Logic were properly taught, be obliged to content himself with inducing in Church an attitude of reverence and devotion; he could not, with a grave countenance, attempt to inculcate his own opinions or prejudices as essential truths.

The command that children should honour their own parents by no means implies that they are not, once a week at least, to be put into an attitude of sympathy with the ideas of other people. This teaching of true Logic in no way tends to interfere with the submission due, in matters of fact, to parents or other lawful authorities. On the contrary, it makes submission seem less harsh. Disobedience in a child is usually the result either of unsatisfied craving for that reversal of physical posture which is the life of the muscles, or of unsatisfied longing for that antithesis of mental position whick constitutes the life of the brain. When we attribute naughtiness in a child to the natural depravity of his own heart, we often might more truly attribute it to the unnatural depravity of some adult, who has made him ill by trying to prevent his reversing either the physical or mental attitude in which she placed him.