"It is interesting to observe how the Creator, who has subjected the child at first to parental and family influences, has, even at that age, provided for it's growing freedom, by inspiring it with an overflowing animation, an inexpressible joy, an impatience of limits, a thirst for novelty, a delight in adventure, an ardent imagination, all suited to balance the authority of the old and gradually mingling with the trustful innocence of infancy that questioning, doubting spirit, on which intellectual progress chiefly depends.

  It is only by putting forth this inward and self-forming power that we emerge from childhood. He who continues to be passively moulded prolongs his infancy to the tomb. There is deep wisdom in the declaration of Jesus, that to be His disciple, we must "hate father and mother;" or, in other words, that we must surrender the prejudices of education to the new lights which God gives us; that the love if truth must triumph over the influences of even our parents and our best and earliest friends; that forsaking  the maxims of society, we must frame ourselves according to the standard of moral perfection set before us in the life, spirit, and teachings of Jesus Christ." William Ellery Channing.