EMMY LOU'S ROAD TO GRACE
EMMY LOU'S
ROAD TO GRACE
BY
AUTHOR OF EMMY LOU, Etc.
How many are his foes!
How many ways there are to sin
No living mortal knows.
—The Pilgrim's Progress
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
THAT HOSTAGE GIVEN TO THE FUTURE
THE AMERICAN CHILD
PREFACE
Some years ago a collection of short stories underthe title, "Emmy Lou: Her Book And Heart," wasoffered to the American public as a plea for and adefense of the child as affected by the then prevailingstupidity of the public schools.
The present series of stories is written to showthat the same conditions which in the school make forconfusion in the child's mind, exist in the home,in the Sunday school and in all its earlier points ofcontact with life; the child who presents itself atsix or even at five, to the school and teacher, beingalready well on the way in the school of life, andits habits of mind established.
It is the contention of these new stories thatthe child comes single-minded to the experience oflife. That it brings to this experience a fundamental,if limited, conception of ethics, justice, consistencyand obligation. That it is the possessor ofan innate conscience that teaches it to differentiate[viii]between right and wrong, and that the failure tofind an agreement between ethics and experience confrontsthe child long before its entrance at school.
Not only do its conceptions fail to square withlife as it finds it, but the practices and habits ofthe persons it looks up to fail to square with whatthese elders claim for life. Further, the child meetswith an innate stupidity on the part of its el