Yet do not be afraid of my re-reading it to you from the mystic,
nonsensical, and Papistical side. I am going to read it to you--if
after many and many a year of thought, I am able--as Giotto meant it;
Giotto being, as far as we know, then the man of strongest brain and
hand in Florence; the best friend of the best religious poet of the
world; and widely differing, as his friend did also, in his views of
the world, from either Mr. Spurgeon, or Pius IX.

The first duty of a child is to obey its father and mother; as the
first duty of a citizen to obey the laws of his state. And this duty is
so strict that I believe the only limits to it are those fixed by Isaac
and Iphigenia. On the other hand, the father and mother have also a
fixed duty to the child--not to provoke it to wrath. I have never heard
this text explained to fathers and mothers from the pulpit, which is
curious. For it appears to me that God will expect the parents to
understand their duty to their children, better even than children can
be expected to know their duty to their parents.

But farther. A _child's_ duty is to obey its parents. It is never
said anywhere in the Bible, and never was yet said in any good or wise
book, that a man's, or woman's, is. _When,_ precisely, a child
becomes a man or a woman, it can no more be said, than when it should
first stand on its legs. But a time assuredly comes when it should. In
great states, children are always trying to remain children, and the
parents wanting to make men and women of them. In vile states, the
children are always wanting to be men and women, and the parents to
keep them children. It may be--and happy the house in which it is so
--that the father's at least equal intellect, and older experience, may
remain to the end of his life a law to his children, not of force, but