| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 13 |
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We are all children of greater or lesser growth. Our lives are incomplete, undeveloped. But if we are living as we should there is real moral beauty in our imperfectness. It is a natural and necessary process in the unfolding of the perfect. A child’s work in school may be very faulty and yet be beautiful and full of encouragement and hope, because it shows faithful endeavor and worth improvement. A writing teacher praises his scholars as he inspects the page they have written. He tells them, or certain of them, that they have done excellently. You look at their work, however, and you find it very faulty indeed, the writing stiff and irregular, the letters rudely formed, and you cannot understand why the teacher should speak so approvingly of the scholars’ work. Yet he sees real beauty in it because, when compared with yesterday’s page, it shows marked improvement.
So it is in all learning. The child actually walked three steps alone today and the mother is delighted with her baby’s achievement. These were its first steps. A little girl sits at the piano and plays through the simplest exercise with only a few mistakes, and all the family are enthusiastic in their praise f the performance. As music it was most meagre and faulty. If the older sister, after ten years of music lessons and practice, were able to play no better than the child has done there would have been disappointment and no commendation. The imperfect playing was beautiful because, belonging in the early stages of the child’s learning; it gave evidence of faithful study and practice.
A mother found her boy trying to draw. Very rude were the attempts, but to her quick eye and eager heart the figures were beautiful. They had in them the prophecies of the child’s future and the mother stooped and kissed him in her gladness, praising his work. Compared with the artist’s masterpiece when the boy had reached his prime, these rough sketches had no loveliness whatever. But they were beautiful in their time as the boy’s first efforts.
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