Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Read Chapter 22
Basil the Great
AD 379
Thus, here also it calls him a new child who was reborn through the washing of regeneration and educated and made childlike, who is made fit for the kingdom of heaven through this process in the same way. The book of Proverbs, therefore, provides training which imparts perception and understanding to the recently born child who is hungry for rational and genuine milk: a perception of present realities but an understanding of future realities. For the child is educated in human matters and given a perception of reality so that he would neither be enslaved to shameful desires nor long for the empty glory of this world. Beyond this, Proverbs confers an understanding of the coming age and encourages faith in the promises by its words.
It is well known that the Lord grants a great many in their old age to be changed and relieved of the vices that they had in their youth. It is also well known, on the other hand, that some abandon in their old age the virtues with which they were seen to be marked in their youth. But because people much more commonly follow the habits with which they were imbued as children for the rest of their lives, it became a proverbial saying that a man will not change in his old age whatever he began to do as a youth, even though it does not always happen that way. The proverb is formulated like this, therefore, to persuade its readers to be zealous for virtue in youth, lest they be unable as adults to learn the practices which they had despised to acquire at a tender age, for “the odor of that with which a new vessel is imbued will endure for a long time.”
It is a proverb, is added by St. Jerome, to make the sentence more striking.
It. He is like a tender plant, (Calmet) or wax, or a new vessel. Quo semel est imbuta recens servabit odorem Testa diu. (Horace, ep. i. ad Lol.)
"Shall wool regain its whiteness after it has been dyed purple? "(St. Jerome, ad Lætam.)
Hebrew, "initiate a young "Proportion your lessons to his capacity, and make him relish them.
