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COMING EVENTS CAST THEIR SHADOW BEFOREOR

THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN

Introduction: Life is a gradual process of unfolding. The seed is developed into a plant the bud blooms into a flower, and the child grows to be a man. It is a profound truth, not a mere analogy. The sum total of energy which is spread over the allotted course of man’s life on the earth, is concentrated in the child. Development is but another name for the slow liberation of this compact energy. The buoyancy of childhood and the lethargy of old age but different phases of this energy; when it is tight and concentrated, we have the vigour of infancy, when it is loose and relaxed, we have the languor of old age. There will be no cause for wonder in a little child’s being the storehouse of life’s energy, which can destroy the world.

Relation of priority and posterity between childhood and manhood: In the first place, there is the same relation between childhood and manhood as there is between priority and posterity, the cause and the effect. An individual before he comes to the state of manhood must necessarily pass through the state of childhood. As the childhood of an individual precedes his manhood, as the latter develops out of the former, the former may be called the father, or parent, or cause of the latter.

Childhood as a Miniature of Manhood: Moreover, childhood is immature manhood, and manhood a fully developed state of childhood. The powers that are latent in the child are made manifest in the man; the faculties that but dimly seen in the former are fully seen in the latter. One is the index of the other. All qualities, mental, moral and physical which go to make up the future man are present in germ in the child. There is no power or faculty in man that is not already present in the child, the difference between them lies only in the degree of manifestation. Great men show signs of their future greatness even in their child hood. As in their manhood they stand head and shoulders above the ordinary run of mankind, so in their childhood, too, they are distinguished from companions of their age by a marked superiority over them in some respects or others. In fact when they come into the world, they bring with them the seeds of their greatness. The seeds are not shown here; they are planted in them by the invisible hand of God. He sends every man and woman to do the parts. He allots:

“All the world’s a stageAnd all the men and women merely players’They have their exists, their entrances”

Shakespeare When Good distributes different parts to His children. He also gives them the capacity necessary

for the successful performance of those parts; those parts may be of a poet, of a statesman, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a robber, or a thief. So, what kind of man a child will be, can be known from the tastes and tendencies which he begins to exhibit from his very childhood. As he grows up his tastes and capacities develop and every circumstances, which surrounds him, favours the growth of these tastes and capacities. When he enters the world, those sates and capacities help him to act the part assigned to him by unseen powers.

There is a story which illustrates well there point in hand. A king had a son born to him just at the moment when the son of a washer man was born. A fairy played a trick. She took away the washer man’s son, and put him in the place of the king’s son; and she carried the king’s son into the washer man’s house. The children began to grow up; but they displayed different tendencies. The washer man’s

MODEL ENGLISH ESSAYS FOR FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION, PROVINCIAL PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS BY PROF. IQBAL A. BHATTI M.A. BHATTI PUBLISHERS

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son though in a place, loved to wash clothes, while the king’s son, though in the house of a washer man was fond of nothing so much as of books and other thing that become the son of a king to learn. These different tendencies of the boys showed what they would be when they grew up into manhood. The king’s son sat on the throne and the washer man’s at his father’s trade.

Illustrations from History: A part from the above story which is mythical in character, numerous examples can be cited from history to prove that the character of the child’s mind, his tastes and tendencies, his likes and dislikes give a foretaste of the kind of man he is going to be in future. Ruskin has said, “Tell me that you like and I shall tell you what you are”. This statement is as truer of grown up men as of children. Stories are told of great men—poet, statesmen, sculptors, philosophers, scientists and soldiers—who gave indications of their future greatness, in their infancy. Pope said of himself, “I lisped in numbers,, for the numbers came” and his earliest attempts at poetry were made when he had hardly left his nursery. Hardy’s pessimism originated in the childhood. As a child he loved to watch the maggots “the little helpless creatures who passed their time in mad carousal” in a mud-puddle hear his father’s house in Dorset shire. Often he asked himself what was the meaning of all this. As he grew older, he turned his attention to the larger but equally helpless human maggots who wallowed and multiples and died in the mud-puddle of the earth. Blake, the poet of mystical visions, saw as a child of four “God put his forehead on the window”. Macaulay, even while a child of three could quote the Bible and use high sounding words. Once when a cup of hot tea had been split on his leg by a careless servant, he was asked by his hostess, how he felt. He replied in all seriousness, “Thank you, madam the agony has now abated”. The great Buddha even when he was a child could be seen sitting apart from his playmates and meditating upon something. He was moved with the spectacle of suffering scattered here, there and everywhere on this earth, which later on urged him to abandon this world of storm and struggle and devote himself to a life of clam contemplation. Sir Isac Newton had in his childhood the tendency of enquiring into everything that he saw to find out its cause and to have an idea of its details. When quite a young boy, he constructed, a toy windmill which worked in every respect like a real wind-mill. This spirit of enquiry and creative imagination led him to become afterwards one of the greatest scientists of the world that he was.

MODEL ENGLISH ESSAYS FOR FEDERAL PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION, PROVINCIAL PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS BY PROF. IQBAL A. BHATTI M.A. BHATTI PUBLISHERS