The trials and sorrows of children and young people have not always had the recognition they deserve from parents and teachers. It is even customary to speak of childhood as an age of utter freedom from anxiety and grief, and to look upon boys and girls generally as happier and lighter-hearted than they can hope to be in later life. No mistake could be greater than this. The darker side of life is seen first. The brighter side comes afterward.

“Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” The first sound of a child’s voice is a cry, and that cry is many times repeated before the child gives his first smile. How easily the best-behaved baby cries, every mother can testify. It is the soothing of a crying child, not the sharing in the joy of a laughing one, which taxes the skill and the patience of a faithful nurse. Only as the child is trained, disciplined, to overcome his inclination to cry, and to find happiness in his sphere, does he come to be a joyous and glad-hearted little one.

Every burden of life—and life’s burdens seem many—rests at its heaviest on a child’s nature. A child is refused more requests than are granted to him. He is subjected to disappointments daily, almost hourly. The baby cannot reach the moon, nor handle papa’s razor, nor pound the looking-glass, nor pull over the tea-pot, nor creep into the fire. The older child cannot eat everything he wants to, nor go out at all times, nor have papa and mamma ever at his side. Then there come school-tasks to shrink from, and the jealousies and unkindnesses of playmates and companions to grieve over. And as more is known of life and the world, and the inevitable struggles with temptation, and of the injustice and wrongs which must in so many instances be suffered, it becomes harder and harder for a young person to see only the brighter side of human existence, and to bear up bravely and cheerily under all that tends to sadden and oppress us. There are more clouds in the sky of life’s April than of life’s August.

As the young grow older they come to be less sensitive to little trials, and they control themselves better. They are not tempted to shed tears whenever they find their plans thwarted, or themselves unable to do or to have all they would like to, or their companions unlike what they had hoped for. They learn to philosophize over their troubles, to look at the compensations of life, and to recognize the fact that many things which they have longed after would not have been good for them if they had obtained them, and that, at all events, time will soften many of their trials. And so life’s troubles seem lighter, and life’s joys greater—if not more intense—to maturer minds than to the young. Even when men are far greater sufferers than ever children can be, they come to be calloused in a measure through the very continuance of their grief, and they bear as a little thing that which would have crushed them a few years before.

But how their former experiences and their earlier tumults of feeling are forgotten by men and women as they get farther and farther away from childhood! They fail to remember how deeply they grieved as little ones. They forget, in large measure, how heavy the burdens of life seemed in their earlier years. They are sure that many things which now trouble them had no power over them when they were younger. It seems to them, indeed, that the little trials of children cannot seem very large even to children. And so, as they watch the little ones in their brighter moments, they think that childhood is the age of freedom from sorrow and care; and they are even inclined to wish that they were young once more, that they might have no such hours of trial and grief as now they are called to so frequently.

Values are relative; so are losses; so are sorrows. One person puts a high estimate on what another deems quite worthless. One grieves over a loss for which another would feel no concern. That which a child values highly may be of no moment to the child’s father; but its loss might be as great a grief to the child as would the loss to the father of that which, in the father’s sight, is incalculably more important. The breaking of a valued toy may be as serious a disaster, from the child’s point of view, as the bankrupting of the father’s business would seem from the father’s standpoint. And the child’s temporary censure by his playmates for some slight misdoing of his, may cause to him as bitter a sorrow as would the condemnation by the public, cause to his father when the father’s course had brought him into permanent disgrace.

A little girl was startled by what she heard said at the family table concerning a neighbor’s loss of household silver through a visit of robbers. “Mamma,” she whispered, “do robbers take dolls?” Her dolls were that child’s treasure. If they were in danger, life had new terrors for her. “No, my dear,” said her mamma; “robbers don’t want dolls. Why should they take them?” “I didn’t know but they would want them for their little girls,” was the answer; as showing that, in the child’s estimation, dolls had a value for children in the homes of robbers as well as elsewhere. With the assurance that her dolls were safe, that little girl had less fear of midnight robberies. What, to her mind, was the loss of the family silver, or of clothing and jewels, if the dolls were to be left unharmed! A child’s estimate of values may be a false one; but the child’s sorrows over losses measured by those estimates are as real as any one’s sorrows.

It must, indeed, be a sore pressure of sorrow and trial on a child’s mind and heart, to bring him to commit suicide; yet the suicide of a child is by no means so rare an act as many would suppose. The annual official statistics of suicides in France show a considerable percentage of children among the unhappy victims. Hundreds of suicides are reported in England, year by year. In America the case is much the same. Month by month the public prints give the details of child suicides as a result of some sore trial or sorrow to the little ones.

“Forgive me for committing suicide,” wrote a bright and affectionate lad, in a note to his father just before committing the fatal act. “I am tired of life,” he added. And everything in connection with his suicide showed that that lad had planned the act with a cool head and an aching heart. In fact, most persons of adult years can recall out of the memories of their earlier life some experiences of disappointment, or of grief, or of a sense of injustice, which made life seem to them for the time being no longer worth living, and the thought of an end to their trial in death not wholly terrible. Very childish all this was, of course; but that is the point of its lesson to parents; childish griefs are very real and very trying—to children.

One plain teaching of these facts concerning the sorrows of children is, that the young need the comfort and joys of a Christian faith for the life that now is, quite as surely as the aged need a Christian hope for the life that is to come. The surest way of bringing even a child to see the brighter side of this life is by inducing him to put his trust in an omnipotent Saviour, who loves him, and who makes all things work together for good to him if only he trust himself to His care and walks faithfully in His service. The invitations and the promises of the Bible are just what children need, to give them happiness and hope for now and for hereafter.