When Bruno was a little fellow, his mother and father were killed in the Messina earthquake.

Because he was one of so many left-behind babies, he was quite neglected, and he grew up to four years as a weed grows. Sometimes one madre of the tenement mothered him, sometimes not. At times he was fed, at other times he starved. Because of the great fear that came to him with the blinding smoke and the twisting red river of molten lava and the death cry of his girl mother that day of the earthquake, Bruno’s mind seemed a bit dulled. He was often confused by the commands of people who tried to take care of him and so could not obey. Then they would strike him. And he heard very vile language spoken and he saw very evil things done during his babyhood in the tenement.

When Bruno wandered across the threshold of the Via Giusti Children’s House in Rome, he seemed like a little alien among the other happy little ones who were so carefully watched over, so gently led. For days he sat in silence, his great, frightened blue eyes watching to help him dodge the blow that he expected but never felt; his lips ready to imitate the vile speech that he had known before, but which he never heard here. His timid fingers fumbled with the big pink and blue letters that the other children used in making long sentences on the floor; they tried to button, to lace, to match colors, but not very effectually. It was as if the great fear of his babyhood had shadowed his whole mental life and left him powerless.

One morning Bruno’s dulled blue eyes glimpsed an unusual stir among the children. A new little one had come and, full of disorderly impulses, had snatched at the varicolored carpet of carefully arranged color spools Piccola had placed on her table, scattering them to the floor. Red, green, orange, yellow, Piccola’s painstaking work of an hour lay in a great, colored, mixed-up heap. Piccola’s eyes, still pools that reflected all the hazel tints of fall woods, grew blurred with tears. She dropped her curly head in her arms and sobbed, big, gulping sobs that wouldn’t stop, that strangled her. Bruno, watching her, found his muscles. He ran to her, putting one kind little arm around her waist, and with the other drew her head down to the shoulder of his little ragged blue blouse and smoothed her hair, talking sweet, liquid nonsense all the time that made Piccola’s sobs grow less and less, and comforted her. When she smiled and drew away to watch the group of children who had hurried to pick up her colors for her, Bruno slipped back to his corner and the old, dull look settled back in his face.

“The little man has the conscience sense. He shall have a chance to use it,” thought the Montessori directress who had been watching the scene.

And because she wanted his soul to grow strong, even if his timid fingers couldn’t, she often stopped by Bruno’s chair to hold his hand, kindly, for a minute in hers, or just bent over him, smiling straight down into his face.

“No one will hurt this little man of ours. He loves us and we love him,” she assured Bruno over and over, until one day her patience reaped the prize of Bruno’s answering smile and she felt his two hungry little arms clasping her.

She strengthened his beginning friendship with Piccola, the color-loving, reckless, daring little maid, whom all the children loved to love and loved to fight. When Piccola brought an unusual treat in her luncheon basket, a leaf-wrapped packet of dried grapes or two luscious figs instead of one, the directress suggested that she share with Bruno, who had no one to tuck a surprise in his basket. As the two child faces drew close above the feast and the little hands fluttered together over this friendly breaking of bread, Bruno’s eyes sparkled. He was reading his first lines in the primer of love; he was finding his sight. And in return Bruno helped Piccola to rake leaves in the garden, he unrolled and carefully spread upon the floor the rug upon which Piccola wished to curl herself and sort letters; he hastened to add his strength to hers when the drawer that held the letters stuck; he fought Piccola’s street battles for her.

Soon Bruno’s loving busy-ness so increased that he found things to do almost every second of his happy days in the Children’s House. No longer the little cowering, cringing, inactive child of a few weeks past, he was an alert little man whom I instantly watched, because his activity was so unusual. When the line of children, two by two and clasping hands, in their pretty custom of welcoming visitors to the Via Giusti Children’s House, tumbled in each morning, Bruno always headed the line. He held by the hand the smallest, newest, or the most timid child, dragging it in his eagerness to teach it to shake hands and say good-day. He would “hold up” the line because he had so much to say in his welcome to the strangers who had come to spend the morning with the little ones.

“See our Signorina; is she not kind?

“This is our room; do you like it?

“There is Margherita; she writes!

“This is Piccola, who reads!”

In breathless sentences, Bruno’s heart interest worded itself. Then, as the others settled themselves for the day’s work, Bruno began his day of service. He was the Loving One, the Helping One, the Comforting One of the Via Giusti Children’s House. Was any child left without a glass of water at the luncheon hour, Bruno fetched it. Did the little girl waitress for the day forget to fill a soup plate from her tureen, Bruno reminded her. If the three-year-old started home with his cloak unbuttoned, Bruno, feeling in his tender little heart the chill wind of the Roman hills, buttoned the cloak for the baby. If a toddler tumbled down, Bruno picked it up and examined it for bumps, and started it safely on its way again. He fetched and carried, watched for chances to help, to champion the weak, to wipe away anybody’s tears with the hem of his apron.

The seat he most often chose was under a cast of the Madonna. Sometimes he sat quiet for long spaces, looking at it. “Bruno calls the Madonna his madre,” whispered Piccola one day.

“Who is that big, homely child?” asked a visitor, pointing to Bruno putting fresh water in a bowl of roses that stood under the cast. “Isn’t he older than the other children?”

“Older—yes, in spirit,” answered the far-seeing directress. “He is our little Christ-child.”

So he is our little Christ-child. Wherever there is a child in a home, Dr. Montessori tells us, there Christ is. She discovers for us a new sense, the “conscience sense,” only waiting for an opportunity to exercise itself and, in the exercising, unfold and bloom and ripen into the fruits of the spirit. If being an orphan and hungry and beaten and knowing vile things couldn’t hurt the soul of Bruno, think of the possibility of Christ in your baby.

Children grow, mentally, through the right exercise of the senses. To see and to be able to distinguish between beautiful colors and beautiful forms; to discriminate between sounds that are discordant and sounds that are harmonious; to know rough things and smooth things, round things and square things, velvet things and linen things, by touching them with the finger tips, this we know is a starting point on the road of the three R’s of everyday education. Dr. Montessori guides us a lap farther in the new education. She sees, born with every child, eyes of the spirit and slender, groping fingers of the soul that look and reach for the good. To help a child to use his spirit eyes and his soul fingers means to give him a chance to exercise his conscience. It is a new sort of sense-training that means his finding the three R’s of the life of the spirit: faith, hope, and charity.

How shall we help a child to exercise and train his conscience sense?

Dr. Montessori tells us that if we but watch a little child’s free, spontaneous use of his soul fingers, his daily loves and hopes and faith, these will shine for us as a Bethlehem star-path leading us to the manger-throne of a King-in-the-making. As we are turning a child’s tendency to handle into mind-training, we will turn his manifestations of inner sensibility into morality.

It is quite ineffectual to say to a child:

“You must love your neighbor.”

Of course he will try to do the thing that we ask of him because he is a very kind little person, ready to put up with the inconsistencies of his elders and willing to try to obey; but it will be a makeshift sort of love, not free and a flowering of the child’s own heart, but built upon what we tell him about love. This makes of children little puppets.

Dr. Montessori says: “Watch how children love and what they love.”

You know how your child loves—with the thoughtless abandon of pure passion. That he interferes with your important occupation, crumples your immaculateness, has a soiled face and sticky fingers when he kisses you, do not enter into his thoughts. That anything should interfere with his caresses would wound his heart. If you were disfigured or maimed, he would still vision you as the beautiful mother whom baby eyes see only with the eyes of adoration.

Is this a love that we can teach?

You know what your child loves. There was the ugly yellow puppy with muddy feet that stained your new rug; don’t you remember how the Little Chap sobbed so long, and then woke up in the night crying, the day you sent away the yellow puppy? He loved, too, the dirty rag doll that you burned and the broken toy that you threw away, and that little street gamin of a newsboy who stands at the corner in all kinds of weather. He doesn’t love ceremony and money and the opinions of other people as we do. The Little Chap goes out into the highways and byways for his stuff of love. And he doesn’t care if the thing he loves is ugly, or old, or halt, or lame, because he sees, with his soul eyes, behind the veil of appearances to the real of it.

Your child is born with faith and hope, too. If you tell him that the moon is made of green cheese and that a stork dropped him down the chimney, he believes you, and when he grows up and catches you in the lies, he has one less peg in his moral inner room to pin his faith in the divine to. If you tell him that you will take him to the circus, and then let your bridge party interfere with that promise, the Little Chap is going to be less hopeful that God will keep His promises, for you stand for the divine in the Little Chap’s beginnings of spirituality.

Dr. Montessori says that we often crush the child’s conscience sense by not giving him an opportunity to exercise it as he is led to, instinctively. We must let our children, in their baby days, love as they wish and what they wish. We must be quite careful to give them true conceptions of the strange world in which they find themselves, and we must make only good promises to children and use much vigilance in keeping those promises.

Dr. Montessori sets another guidepost for us in the star-path by which our children will travel across the desert of unbelief to the manger where God, incarnate, lies. She tells us that, as the Ten Commandments were a very simple set of laws for the Israelites, and John, in his preaching of simplicity, paved the way for Christ, so the first religious teaching of the little child should have this same quality of directness.

The child’s first religious training will consist in a discrimination between good and evil.

“It was good of you to share your sweets with sister. When you ate your chocolate, alone, yesterday, I was sorry, because it was selfish.”

“It was thoughtful of you to fetch grandfather’s cane for him. Some little boys would not have been so kind.”

“You must not scream and kick when you are angry. It is wrong!”

We might say in contrast; we do, ordinarily, say:

“You must share because I wish you to.”

“You must be kind because the world likes gentlemen.”

“You mustn’t scream and kick, because you give me a headache and mar my furniture.”

Such commands are quite ineffectual, because they call the child’s attention to us and not to his own acts. But patiently and effectually to see that the Little Chap knows the difference between good and evil and practices good instead of evil—this gives him a chance to train and strengthen his conscience sense and forms the beginnings of his moral life.

“But how shall I give my child an idea of God?” thousands of thinking parents object.

It isn’t necessary to give the idea of God to your child. Dr. Montessori tells us that every child has it.

We think that we must do so much teaching in order to educate the little child’s mind, or his soul. In fact we need to do less teaching than watching, less pruning than watering. After observing our little ones’ spontaneous manifestations of love and giving these a chance to increase, and meeting them with encouragement after conscientiously pointing out to them the good and the evil of life and insisting that they choose the good and reject the evil—we discover a miracle. God comes to the little ones.

Bruno, starved in his mind and starved in his heart, and never having heard of things of the spirit except in terms of the vilest blasphemy, found God as naturally as he would find the first gold blossom of the broom braving winter’s frosts on the Appian Way.

Our own Helen Keller, deaf and dumb and blind, knew God before anything that her teacher could tell her about Him had pierced the dark wall of her sleeping senses.

Dr. Montessori asks us to prepare the way for this miracle in our homes. She says that she would like to suggest to mothers a new beatitude, “Blessed are those who feel;” and we add,

For they find God.