“Parents who never
showed their love, complain of want of natural affection in their children;
children who never showed their duty, complain of want of natural feeling in
their parents; law-makers who find both so miserable that their affections have
never had enough of life's sun to develop them, are loud in their moralisings
over parents and children too, and cry that the very ties of nature are
disregarded.”
Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby on a universal truth. It
is seems to me, not much has changed: the state turns to state bodies in
education, health and justice to deal with familial issues, and they moralise
according to the prevailing winds of the time.
“Natural affections and instincts, my dear
sir, are the most beautiful of the Almighty's works, but like other beautiful
works of His, they must be reared and fostered, or it is as natural that they
should be wholly obscured, and that new feelings should usurp their place, as
it is that the sweetest productions of the earth, left untended, should be choked
with weeds and briers”.
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