CMP Review 2025-12-07

“It may surprise parents who have not given much attention to the subject to discover also a code of education in the Gospels, expressly laid down by Christ.”

Few sentences have impacted me more in my decades of study of Charlotte Mason’s words. For here we have a “captain idea”: that we see our children the way Christ sees them.

“The most fatal way of despising the child falls under the third educational law of the Gospels; it is to overlook and make light of his natural relationship with Almighty God. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me,’ says the Saviour, as if that were the natural thing for the children to do, the thing they do when they are not hindered by their elders.”

In these timeless and heart-rending words, Mason points us to Matthew 19. She vividly urges us to set no hindrances in the path of our daughters and sons.

Sadly, in her six volumes of published poetry on the Gospels of Christ, she did not reach Matthew 19. We never knew what poetic meditation she would have on this wonderful passage.

Until handwritten pages were found in a file. On one of which was Mason’s poem on the third educational law of the Gospels: Hinder not. The poem was discovered so that it could be read. See or hear it here.

@artmiddlekauff

🖼️: Christ Blessing the Children by Nicolaes Maes