Above
all things, it is a line of marching children that takes me quite out of
myself. I was a visitor not long ago at one of the public schools, and I
sat in state on the principal's platform. When the bell rang for
dismissal, and the sliding doors were pushed apart so as to form one
huge assembly room, and the children began to file out to the sound of
the piano, the splendour and the pathos of it overpowered me. I did not
know which I wanted to be then, the principal in his magnificent chair
of office, or one of those two thousand children keeping step in their
march towards freedom.
Pathos? Why pathos in a little army of children marching out in fire
drill, or the same children marching in for their morning's Bible
reading and singing? I find it difficult to say why. Perhaps it is
consciousness of that law which has raised man from the brute, and which
I see embodied when we take a thousand children and range them in order
and induce them to keep step. Perhaps the pathos is in the recognition
of our isolated weakness and our need to make painful progress by
getting close together and moving forward in close formation.
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