_Du Moulin_, in his excellent little volume upon _Peace and Content_,
says, “Of children expect no good, but the satisfaction to have
done them good, and to see them do well for themselves. For in this
relation, the nature of beneficence is to _descend_, seldom to
_remount_.”
So Bishop Taylor, in his _Life of Christ_, when speaking of mothers who
do not nurse their own children, says, “And if love _descends_ more
strongly than it _ascends_, and commonly falls from the parents upon
the children in cataracts, and returns back again up to the parents but
in small dews,--if the child’s affection keeps the same proportions
towards such unkind mothers, it will be as little as atoms in the sun,
and never expresses itself but when the mother needs it not,--that is,
in the sunshine of a clear fortune.”
So Fuller says, in his chapter on Moderation, the silken string that
runs through the pearl chain of all the virtues, “yea as love, doth
_descend_, and men doat most on their grand-children.”
The same sentiment, with the reason in which the truth originates, has
been noticed by our poets.