The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young (Paperback)

Excerpt: ...of what his father, who was a minister, was constantly meeting in his parish work, he says: "Matrimonial and family relations were often the subject of his admonitory and corrective conversation and remonstrances. The Pg 108 way in which my father spoke of this, made me consider the subject as one of the most pressing and difficult for man, and in my youth and innocence, I felt deep grief and pain that man alone among created things should pay the penalty of such a sexual difference that made it hard for him to do right. Just then my oldest brother, who lived away from home, came back for a time, and when I told him my delight in the purple threads of the hazel buds, he made me notice a similar sexual difference among flowers. "Now my mind was satisfied. I learned that what had troubled me was a widespread arrangement throughout nature to which even the quiet, beautiful growths of flowers were subject. Henceforth human and natural life, soul and flower existence, were inseparable in my eyes, and my hazel blossoms I see still, like angels that opened to me the great temple of nature. Henceforth it seemed as if I had the clue of Ariadne, which would lead me through all the wrong and devious ways of life; and a life of more than thirty years with nature, often, it is true, falling back and clouded for great intervals, has taught me to know this, especially the plant and tree world, as a mirror