The Child that Really Counts

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 15, 1906

The Child that Really Counts

THEY had been through college together—three of them. Even all through college days they were wise in domestic affairs. Especially were they full of lore concerning the proper upbringing of a child. Models of beauty, of strength, and of goodness would be the dear little children that one day should call them by the sacred name of mother.

Three years after they had left school, two of them, still unmarried, went to visit the other one, who was married, and the happy mother of a child—a real, living child nearly two years old.

It was with something awestricken in their faces, something noble and stirring in their souls, that they drew near to their friend, to her child, who was, spiritually, to a certain extent, their child also; for had not their counsel, their convictions, gone to shape the character that it must have?

When ten days had elapsed of the two weeks’ visit they were to make, they could contain themselves no longer. They must speak; they did—the two visitors between themselves.

The child was ugly! It was ill-natured! It was spoiled! They resolved to say nothing to the mother, their traitor college chum; they would heap no reproaches upon her; they would only depart. But their “over-soul” spoke in spite of them. It spoke in their faces, in their repressed manner, in their air of melancholy and discontent. Finally the poor mother blurted out in the face of their disapproval and despair, “O girls, please don’t take it so hard! This isn’t the child I was going to have; but it’s the one I’ve got.”

There in the cruel light of day is disclosed a child on which everything in the world depends, and how much are we doing for him—the child we’ve got? The child we were going to have, the child we ought to have, the child we would like to have—these unreal children of imagination, ambition, desire,—have become a modern fetish. For their preservation and development we pursue many sciences, we keep in motion many movements which cause us to study, write, preach, and run about the world.

But the child we’ve got—what of him? Are we keeping close to him? Do we know his mind? Is his heart beating in our heart? Or by any fearful chance have we left him alone?

She was an old-fashioned mother listening to the outpouring of the heart of a “new mother,” troubled and worried about the many things embraced in the

child problem of the day. She said: “Do not let much learning make you foolish and mad. There is just one thing fixed and indispensable in bringing up a child. Make him feel that he is loved.”

Is not that a consoling thought to the mother disappointed in the child she was going to have? There still remains to her hope, the happiness, the fruitful labor, of loving the child she has.—Harper’s Bazar.