We have seen that the soul takes possession of the organs of sense gradually, by tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling, and touching that which is agreeable; and that the continuous exercise of the organs develops them up to a certain though indefinite limit to finer susceptibility of impression. We have seen that by exercising the limbs, the soul takes possession of them in particular and in general. Thus the nursery plays, improvised instinctively by all mothers, Froebel has enlarged, describing in his Mother's Book various duplicate movements of the limbs, especially of the hands, that, with the accompanying songs, have for their end, besides physical health, to make the mind discriminate various parts of the body and know their several forms and functions. This is the beginning of human education.

"Patty-cake" teaches a child that he has hands and fingers; "This little pig goes to market, this one stays at home," that he has toes. It is the child's own body that first furnishes the objects of his attention to be associated with words. From the beginning it is the instinct of the maternal nurse to talk to the child, which attracts him to observe the organs of speech; and this prompts the sympathetic use of his own organs. Speech is a function distinctively human, which, beginning in the nursery, is carried on carefully in the kindergarten, creating the sphere of the intellectual life; for words support the operation of thinking.

From all that I said of the modus operandi of the child's taking possession of his body in the nursery period, you see that childish action is involved in the mother's action. It is her wisdom, such as it may be, which must be the guide of the child's will, as it is brought gradually out of the blindness of ignorance; and it is she, not the child, who is responsible for the perfection of this part of the child's life.

And is not this, on the whole, the common sense of mankind? Does any sane person hold a baby, up to three years old, and often, indeed, much later, responsible for the state of its temper, or for the rightfulness of its action?

Nevertheless, the child is a moral person all this time, and it is of the last importance to his subsequent moral life whether or not his temper has been kept sweet, and his action according to law, or discordant. Discordant action must have a bad reactionary effect upon the temper, and interrupt or retard the growth of the several organs of sense and of motion. Hence the mother or nurse must not neglect to use her power wisely as well as gently to prevent these evils, by duplicate movements that are rhythmic, and calculated to bring about some end that the child's mind may easily grasp.

It is instinctive with every one, as soon as he begins to play with a child, whether it be reasonable or not, to talk to it about its being good or bad, although a little child cannot be good or bad, but only orderly or disorderly; and there is no little danger to his moral and spiritual future in anticipating by our words the workings of his conscience before it has the conditions for its development. One of these conditions is such a sense of individuality as enables the child to say "I," with which it presently combines such perception of relationship to others as will say, "I ought,"—a phrase that occurs in all languages, and means something very different from "I will." It is of the greatest importance to keep this distinction in mind, for an imposed or artificial conscience almost certainly forecloses the natural or inspired conscience,—a truth largely illustrated by the history both of families and of nations, from which we learn that periods of corruption and wild license invariably follow periods of extreme restraint and asceticism. And all conscientious action and moral judgment in children also presupposes thinking, which is a process that does not begin until after much repetition of impressions, being a reflective act, which associates impressions with specific things and actions (as the etymology of the word suggests). Mere reception of impressions is passive; but to compare impressions of difference or similarity (which individualizes things) is active. Therefore thinking and putting thoughts into words includes comparison and inference, and really produces the human understanding, which we do not bring into the world with us, as we do our heart and will. Before there is a possibility of conscience or any moral judgment properly so called, the child's affections (or feeling of relation with other persons) must be cultivated by the mother's genial care, directing mental activity towards fellow-beings, instead of leaving the heart to turn back and stagnate upon self. The more impressible a child is, the more important is the mother's or kindergartner's providential care of his affections during this irresponsible, pre-intellectual period of his life.

I think the most frightfully selfish beings I have ever known were endowed with great natural sensibility, which was left to concentrate upon self, because the claims made by the sensibility of others were not early enough presented to the imagination of their hearts. By the growth of personal affections, the individual intensifies the feeling of individuality, which first comes to him by his having taken such possession of his body as enabled him to run alone; and this growth, whether intentionally directed towards that combination of his soul and body, which he begins to call himself or "I," or directed toward others, to whom he clings at first as part of himself (their embrace of him being necessary to his comfort), is cherished by the duplicate action of the mother. She moulds his heart in her heart, as she has moulded his bodily activity by her care and cheering sympathy, when helping out the power of his limbs in walking and manipulation. She half creates the child's generous and devout affections, if she is herself faithful to their proper objects, starting him on the way of a brotherly humanity and a filial adoration of the common Father, long before the understanding has completely discerned the objects of these human and divine affections, which must be blended in order to continue vital and pure. But the moral and religious is the most delicate region of the child's life, the holy of holies, into which "fools incontinently rush, though angels fear to tread." She can only be the mother of the soul as well as of the body of her child, on condition of being herself rich in love of others and in piety to God.

Froebel suggests this in the introductory poems of Die Mutter Spiele und Kose Lieder. The first five of these are the mother's communings with herself upon the emotions that arise in her heart, as she nurses her baby in her arms, and realizes that to her and her husband has been sent a living witness of the "very present God," who is the author of their being, and has united them by a love that makes that being a blessing to themselves, which they are bound to extend beyond themselves. The rhymed introduction of the several little child-songs that follow are suggestions to her of the meaning of her instincts, and of the bearing on the development of the child's heart and mind of the little gymnastics described. And just as she could not be the educator of her child into his individual body if she were a paralytic herself, so, if she be not affectionate and generous herself, she cannot educate him into the social body of which he is a living member; nor unless she loves God herself, can she inspire him to recognize the Parental Spirit of whom we are (as heathen poet and Christian apostle alike aver) the veritable children. "We are the offspring of God," said St. Paul, quoting from the Greek poet Aratus in the Sermon on Mars' Hill, which is a model of all reformatory instruction, whether religious or secular. I think all true instruction, proceeding from the known to the unknown, is both secular and religious, on the principle that to those who have the seed, can be given the increase.

In the first of these mother-songs of Froebel, the mother finds that the baby she holds in her arms, though another than herself, is in a certain sense one with herself; thus is unveiled (revealed) to her the Divine Fountain of Being, the Person of Persons, from whom she and her little one have severally come; and her feelings of wonder and gratitude awaken the sense of responsibility to make her child grow conscious as she is of the common Father,—and thankful as she is for life in such close relation with herself,—who is the first form in which God reveals Himself to the child; for when he first looks away from his body so far as to perceive that his mother is another than himself, she fills the whole sphere of his perception!

Rousseau affirms that every child, if left to its own natural growth, would think its mother was its creator. And William Godwin in his Enquirer (or some volume of his writings) has quite an eloquent paper, setting forth that the natural religion of a child is to worship its earthly parents. I have made some observations and had a personal experience which makes me doubt this, though I do not doubt that the characteristics of parents nearly always determine the character of the child's religion. But the question of who is his own creator does not naturally come up to a child, even when he begins to ask who made the things about him. His own consciousness is of "being increate," and when brought to know that his body grows old and must die, the fear that this causes is because he imaginatively associates his undying self, which is a "presence not to be put by" with the perishing body. What the soul, by virtue of its inherent immortality, fears and hates, is loneliness, absolute isolation! And when we think of the body, which we identify with ourselves from the moment that we have taken it up and walked by its instrumentality, as put away alone in the ground, the undying person that the soul is, shudders, and can only be comforted by learning to conceive itself wholly detached from the decay, and housed within the bosom of Him who is the Alpha and Omega of our life; of Him whom we have learnt to know with the spirit and understanding also, by the process of living in human relations. For we know ourselves as individuals first by means of the body, and we know ourselves as a component part of the social whole of humanity by means of genial intercourse with our kindred, it being revealed to us that we are substantially social, as well as distinctly individual, by our instinctive horror of separation from them. Later in life only, there are pleasures of solitude for those few who by imaginative act make nature populous with personifications, and consequently the refracting atmosphere of the Divine Personality. The baby that finds itself alone cries for and is comforted by the embrace which restores the sense of union with its mother. Seldom is a baby in such a wretched state of feeling that a tender embrace and kiss will not completely comfort it.

What a proof it is that God is Love, that the very embrace that symbolizes to the baby's heart the sense of human companionship, gives its mind that impression of objective nature which is the first momentum of the human understanding! The gentle pressure of one sensitive body upon another produces counter-pressure, a resistance that is positively pleasurable, whereby the impenetrability of matter becomes a delightful instead of a frightful revelation to the mind of the Immutable Reality of the loving Creator, as the complement of our own changeful individuality! It is the first syllable of that word (or speech of God) made intelligible by the various qualities and forms of matter, the Truth which He is forever addressing to man. How gracious it is, that He should so inextricably mingle the first impression of matter with that perception of the otherness of person that makes Love possible! Thus love and the sense of individuality are correlative creations and twin births. Later, the sense of individuality becomes a positive self-love (which in its healthy degree is innocent), and the perception of otherness of person, with whom it is delightful to be in free union, becomes the basis of the self-forgetting generosity of mankind. These opposite principles are at first mere and perhaps equal sources of satisfaction, having no moral character whatever. Afterwards, they become respectively hard selfishness or a weak and base servility, or they may rise into a majestic self-respect, and that sublimest love which is to make the human race, as a whole, the image of God, not only king over material nature, but one with the perfect Son of Man, also Son of God, who, with a humility and dignity equally venerable, is able to say, "I and my Father are One!"

But you will say that I am getting quite beyond the nursery.

In the earlier years, the growth of the religious life is merely germinal. And as it is involved within the mothers at the beginning, it must be cherished sympathetically by her removing all occasion for self-care and self-defence, and thus prevent the sense of individuality from degenerating through fear into inordinate self-will and self-love. The child should be treated with unvarying tenderness and consideration, without having his senses pampered into morbid excess by over-indulgence, but above all things, never wounding nor frightening his heart, nor repressing the simple and healthy expression of his feelings and thoughts. For enforced repression tends to produce ugly temper, baseness, or subtlety, according to the child's temperament, which is also in imperfect social harmony, if not absolutely quarrelsome. It must be her work, therefore, not only to complete the child's organic education, but to take him, as it were, into her own affectionate spirit by using the methods which Froebel has suggested to the mother for the discipline of her infants. (I use this word discipline in its true sense of teaching; not in the sense of punishment. That the word discipline should ever have come to mean punishment is a severe commentary on the ideas and modes of education that have hitherto prevailed in Christendom.)

The kindergartner, as well as the mother, must be thoroughly grounded in the faith that God has done His part in the original endowment of children; and that He is truly present with her, helping her to remedy the effects of the mother's shortcomings. She will certainly succeed in her work if she studies His laws with an earnest purpose to carry them out, first in the government of herself, and then in leading the children to self-government. Wordsworth in his Ode to Duty, sings:—

Little children certainly, of all persons, are oftenest found in this condition when

And that "other strength," which must come by reflection on and study of the unfolding nature of the child in the felt presence of the Inspirer of Duty, will certainly be needed by the kindergartner who will receive children not always from the hands of natural and faithful mothers, but of uncultured servant-maids. (It is but justice to the latter to say that there are occasionally found among the Irish nurses those who could teach many mothers. The Irish nature is not altogether bad material for the production of good motherly nurses; but it must not be left wild; it needs a great deal of discipline; and I hope the time may come when schools for the education of children's nurses, such as Froebel established in Hamburg, which still exist, may be founded in all our cities.) Though I think the education of mothers is still more important and the first thing to aim at, as it would render nursery maids comparatively unnecessary. It is so short a period of a mother's life when she has young children, and the book of nature which these few years open to her is so rich, that, for her own being's sake as well as for the children's, it seems to me a terrible loss for her to delegate her maternal cares to others during the nursery period. On the other hand, when the age for the kindergarten comes, the mother needs to be relieved of the increasing care; and children, in their turn, need other influences than can be had in a family, especially in families where parents have work to do outside of their homes. It is, indeed, "a consummation devoutly to be wished," that the time may come when labor may be so organized that no mothers may be obliged to leave their children's souls uncared for in order to get the wherewithal to sustain their bodies.

The deepest reason why a child should be taken care of in its earliest infancy by its mother rather than by a person comparatively uninterested in its personality, is this, that only a mother can respect a child's personality sufficiently. All others regard the child for its manifested qualities; but with the mother, it is the child itself that she loves, quite irrespective of any qualities that he manifests. Phenomenally, a little child is a complex of self-assertion and generosity (or a desire for union with its kind); a desire or a feeling of finiteness in strange contrast with that instinct to "have dominion" which gives vitality to self-assertion. We call this primal desire for union his heart, and this primal self-assertion his will. The will expresses itself in efforts to change its environments, putting what is at rest in motion, knocking down, tearing up, because it does not yet know how to put in order, or to change things artistically. The child acts without external motive,—doing things merely because it can. Even after a child is old enough to think and talk, and has done some act for which you see no reason or motive, when you ask him why he did it, he not unfrequently will say, "because." I remember when I was a child of six or seven, that I would give this answer with a perfect sense of satisfaction that it was an answer; and when it would sometimes be said, "because is no reason," or "because is an old woman's reason," I recollect my feeling of surprise. I seemed to myself to have given the most substantial reason. The word meant to me a great deal. And I now think I was truly philosophical in this, for I affirmed the primal truth, that a self-determining person in spontaneous action, if only of some instinct, is a first cause[4]—an absolute cause—to the extent of consciousness. It was an intuition.

Now to retain the sense of this causal personality is at the root of all stability of character, all nobleness of manifestation. But self-assertion in an ignorant child is more apt than otherwise to be disorderly, discordant, and perhaps destructive; it therefore provokes resistance in the unthinking, but challenges the thoughtful to give guidance. It is of life-and-death importance to the child whether this force shall meet mere hard resistance, which shall utterly crush it or increase it by reaction, or whether it shall meet with a genial sympathetic guidance to which it will voluntarily and gladly surrender itself. A mother loves this little ignorant force of self-will and wants it to have free course. She cannot help desiring to have her child have its own way. She does not want it to be opposed by others. She will, as far as possible, further or humor it, as we say. And when she finds it necessary to control it, she will try to do it by awakening the child's affectionateness, and so captivating its fancy as to make it feel it is doing as it likes, though it be something different from what it was impelled to do at first; in short, she inspires him to will the better thing, and so educates the blind instinct of self-assertion into a harmonizing and beneficent power, and preserves the child's dignity and nobleness instead of crushing its personality. We hear of "breaking the child's will." A child's will should never be broken, but opened up into harmony with God's will through a lower harmony with the will of its loving and loved mother or kindergartner. But a mother will be more sure than any one else to bring about this result, because she acts from an impulse of the heart deeper than all thought, while the kindergartner by thought must cultivate in herself the impulse.

There are those who deprecate motherly indulgence as if it were the greatest evil. Doubtless it will become a great evil if it be not properly subordinated to the wisdom which appreciates the divinity of order, or if it is alternated with capricious severities; in short, if the indulgence proceeds from indolence or self-love instead of love of the child. The indulgence that really comes from the last is a recognition (unconscious, it may be) of the divine possibilities of the child,—a spark of the divine creativeness! Of the two evils, extreme indulgence is not so deadly a mistake as extreme severity. Indulged children return from afar. The prodigal of the Gospel story may have been over-indulged, perhaps, in being allowed to take his portion of goods, and go off by himself, out of the reach of his father's counsel and authority, and left to his own uneducated self-will. But the sinner, when he came to himself (observe that expression), recognized the self-forgetting, fatherly love in that very indulgence; and it was the immeasurableness of that love that revived his self-respect and hope, and saved him; for the hope was not disappointed. Love giveth, "upbraiding not."

The one fatal thing is to wound the child's heart. It is better to give up the point of controlling its will to righteousness for the moment, than to do that; and a parent is the least likely of all persons to wound his child's heart.

When nothing can be done without wounding, the parent who trusts his own heart will leave the rebel to the consequences which God holds in his gracious hands for the final salvation of every one of his children.

Besides, to choose to give up one's own will is the only complete and salutary giving up, enabling the soul to mount up spiritually like the eagle and renew its strength. There are families in which the act of disobedience is absolutely unknown, in earlier or in later life; where there is no necessity for uttered commands, because expressed wishes are enough. The most perfect, if not the only real, obedience I have ever seen, has been that of strong men to an unexacting, tender mother.

This is a subject on which I feel very strongly, for it seems to me that the greatest social disorders that exist in the nations among which the "order that reigns in Warsaw"[5] is foremost, is the consequence of unreasoning obedience to wills not infinitely wise and good. The worth and duty of obedience is precisely in ratio with the validity of the command; and a command is valid only so far as it is inspired by a disinterested and proper respect for the being who is commanded. Children should only obey their parents, in the Lord; and parents should never "provoke their children to wrath."

I may be told that the important element of self-assertion (which gives strength to character) may be weakened by being always disarmed, and killed by the mother's sympathy; and that to provoke it into conscious strength, direct antagonism is necessary. But the best antagonism is that quiet, inevitable one, that comes from the inexorableness of material nature which the child must needs feel, the more disorderly he is, but which he sees is insensate and impersonal; whose antagonism, therefore, does not grieve his heart, and disappoint his hope as human oppression does, making him sad or bitter, but stimulates his mind to conquer and subdue it, or develops a dignified patience. The appointed domain for kingly man is not the brotherhood, but material nature; and gradually he is to learn that nature's inexorable laws are the expression of a Supreme Personality as benignant as it is august, who takes up His human child into Himself, not without his concurring will; for mankind mounts on the nature which he gradually subdues into a stepping-stone, by knowledge, and the use of it. The mother must remember that though the first, she is not the only instrumentality by which the Divine Providence works. The time comes when she is compelled to deliver her cherished darling up to other influences; when the child bursts out of the nursery, not only self-asserting and affectionate, but putting forth energies, and seeking satisfaction of sensibilities that cannot be met within that narrow precinct.

The kindergarten must, then, succeed by complementing the nursery; and the child begin to take his place in the company of his equals, to learn his place in their companionship, and still later to learn wider social relations and their involved duties. No nursery, therefore, not even a perfect one, can supersede the necessity of a kindergarten, where children shall come into cognizance of the moral laws which are to restrain and guide their self-assertion, and quicken and enlarge their social affections, leading them to self-denials for the sake of opportunities for themselves of useful and creative art, beneficence, and heroism.

The time for transition from the nursery to the kindergarten is definitely indicated by two facts. Firstly, Divine Providence has so arranged general family events that every mother must give up having the child live, as it were, entirely within her life, because she has other children to nurse, or other social duties to do. And, secondly, every child's growth in bodily strength and conscious individuality makes him too strong a force of will for so narrow a scope of relation as is afforded by one family. While hitherto, to be outside of the single family influence was an evil, it would now be an evil to confine the child entirely to it, narrowing his heart and mind, and deforming his character. He needs to be brought into relation with equals who have other personal characteristics, other relations with nature and the human race than his own family. The instinct of the growing child, at this period, to get out of doors to play with other children, is unmistakable. To check it vexes or depresses him. In getting possession, first of his body, and then of his personal and social consciousness, he has become an object to himself, and feels himself a power among other powers affecting each other. But he is still more or less consciously a prisoner (if not a slave) of nature, by reason of his ignorance of the laws of the universe,—that body outside of his own body,—which he is destined, in alliance with others, to take possession of, by action upon and within it, giving him knowledge of it, and enabling him to make it into instrumentality for the expression and embodiment of great ideas and a noble will.

All government worthy of the name begins in self-government, a free subordination of the individual in order to form the social whole. Subordination is something higher than subjection. We subject mere animals; intelligent moral agents must be subordinated. It is still the mother's part rather to inspire; the kindergartner's part is to subordinate, not to check childish, spontaneous talk, though, of course, it must be regulated so far as not to let the children interrupt each other impolitely, and to keep it to some main subject. Some kindergartners begin the session by asking each in turn what is interesting to him. Mrs. Kraus-Boelte generally receives each one as he or she comes in. They go to her for the morning kiss, and have something to say, in which she expresses due sympathy, and later recurs to and connects with what others say, and thus produces general conversation. Mrs. Van Kirk is very happy in her introductory conversations.

In playing with the gifts, the teacher dictates certain movements and arrangements, for the purpose of the children's getting into the habit of listening and quickly catching the directions given; and the children should be encouraged to follow her words in what they do, rather than to imitate each other. In their spontaneous work they often make a new symmetrical form, which is really beautiful; and then it is well to call on the child to direct his companions how to make it; for children delight in the dignity of directing, and learn to be very precise in the use of all the words expressing relation of all kinds,—prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs,—precisely as well as nouns and verbs. Language does not merely transfer the outward inward, but soon begins to transfer the inward outward. Love, and other sentiments of the soul, good and bad, are named, as well as sensible objects. Even the instinctive search after proximate causes leads children to infer the substantiality of wind and the other invisible forms of matter; and the spiritual senses inherent in the "Me," which is the most essential of all substances, verifies the ideal world to children, as truly as the bodily senses verify the material world, and even more so; for children live in God before they exist out of God. The Italian philosopher Gioberti says that the soul is a spiritual activity; that is, it sees God as the first act of its life. God says, "Be thou" and the soul—before it is put into the sleep of nature (the deep sleep that came upon Adam)—looks back and says, "Thou art." We have the memory of this primeval vision, and act in our sense of holiness (wholeness?), right, justice, pure love from the uncalculating delight of loving, the ideals of beauty, and the sense of accountability to God and man, which forever haunt us, sometimes giving us pain, as remorse, whose sting is in the comparison of our outward manifested self with our inward sense of "being increate" (as Milton expresses it). It is this supernatural pre-intellectual soul which distinguishes man from the animal creation, and is symbolized by his form, which looks upward to the symbol of infinity made by the sky, with which the human being instinctively communes, and towards which the child wants to fly,—and delights in and loves the birds, beyond all other forms of animal life, because they can fly. Gioberti goes on, in his psychology, to say that when the soul, which has recognized its Divine Source as the first act of its life, is put to sleep in nature, it is gradually waked up by the individual forms of nature, which are so many syllables of the Divine Word that are echoed in human words, which describe matter and its evolutions; then the understanding begins, and (which is the point I want you to observe especially at this moment) the words of even a very young child soon bring to its understanding spiritual realities. And it is the office of education to see that the relations of things,—the laws of order among things,—the adjustment of external cause and effect, be accurately worded; and especially that the spiritual consciousness gets a happy symbolization; that is, that the best words are used to do justice to the Ideas of God and the sentiments of the heart of man.

A materialistic educator (or no less a mere dogmatist in religion, who does not see that the logical formulas and abstract terms of scientific theology cannot possibly wake up the primeval vision) may do an all but infinite mischief to the character and heart, by the words he uses in talking to children; and the theologian a greater mischief than the materialist, because the forms and evolutions of matter are, as I have said, syllables of the Word that was in the beginning with God and, in a certain sense, God, while the abstractions of the human mind are the refuse of finite spirit, infinitely superficial, mere limitations of thought which become stumbling-blocks to the mind when not used as stepping-stones to new outlooks, or rather, inlooks. Never should children be talked to in the language of theological science, but wholly in imaginative symbolization, and the symbols should be chosen with great care, and we should be on our guard against rousing the faculty of abstraction which is a sleeping danger in the nature, whose premature development is injurious in strict proportion to ignorance and sensitiveness. The symbols of the spiritual should be human because human consciousness involves substance outside the physical, and, therefore, did the Word which had not been comprehended in its creation of "everything which it had made," though "without it nothing was made," take flesh and dwell among us, in order that we might apprehend the glory of God and perfection of man with our whole nature. That it would do so, was the insight of the Hebrew genius, whenever by worthy soul-action the law-giver, king, and whoever entered into "the liberty of prophesying" was raised to the height of his nature. Now a child is "on its being's height," "mighty prophet," "seer blest,"

I hope you follow me in my thought, for I think I am looking into the child, which is the thing that ought to be done if one undertakes to teach it. That the child really knows God before God is even named to him is not a speculative theory with me but a fact of my experience. It is one of my earliest remembrances, that I was sitting in the lap of a young lady, whose name and countenance I have forgotten, who was caressing me, and calling me sweet, beautiful, darling, etc., when all at once she seized me into a closer embrace and exclaimed, rather than asked, Who made you?

I remember my pleased surprise at the question, that I feel very sure had never been addressed to my consciousness before. At once a Face arose to my imagination,—only a Face and head,—close to me, and looking upon me with the most benignant smile, in which the kindness rather predominated over the intelligence; but it looked at me as if meaning, "Yes, I made you, as you know very well." I was so thoroughly satisfied, that I replied to the question decisively, "A man."

The lady said to another who sat near us, "Only think! this great girl does not know who made her!"

I remember I was no less sure of my knowledge, notwithstanding she said this. Though it was the first time I had thought God and given the name "man" to the thought, it seemed not new to me. I had felt God before.

I was a rather large girl, more than four years old, as I know from the fact that we were living in a certain house, to which we went on my fourth birthday. My next recollection is of going into a room of this house, where my mother was sitting, working at an embroidery frame that hung against the wall. I went up to her and said, "Mamma, Eliza asked me who made me, and I told her a man, and she said he didn't!" I stated this reply as a grievance and outrage.

Since I came to the age of reflection, I have always regretted the conversation that followed. It was not judicious, and seems to me a little out of character for my mother, who was of strong religious sentiment and quick imagination, and all other conversation on religious subjects that I remember of hers was very good. She was rather thrown off her guard by my unexpected theology and lost her presence of mind. I was her oldest child, and she had waited to see some enquiry raised before speaking on the subject. I had seemed more stupid than I was, for I belong by nature rather to the reflective than perceptive class, and so had very little language. At this distance of time I cannot, of course, remember the details of the conversation, but I came out of it with another image of God in my mind, conveying not half so much of the truth as did that kind Face, close up to mine, and seeming to be so wholly occupied with His creature. The new image was of an old man, sitting away up on the clouds, dressed in a black silk gown and cocked hat, the costume of our old Puritan minister. He was looking down upon the earth, and spying round among the children to see who was doing wrong, in order to punish offenders by touching them with a long rod he held in his hand, thus exposing them to everybody's censure. Of course my mother said no such thing to me, but what she did say, by subtle associations with the words she used, gave me this image, which I need not say rather checked than promoted my spiritual advancement.

This experience has been of value to me as a teacher since, for it has effectually saved me from being didactic and dogmatic in my religious teaching of children. The Socratic method is the true way of bringing into the definite conscious thought God's revelation of Himself to the soul. That image of authority and power to punish did not, I think, help, but rather puzzled my moral sense of which I was already conscious. For I remember that I used to muse very much in my childhood upon the mental phenomenon of feeling myself to be two persons. I was clearly conscious of an inward conversation on all occasions of a question of right and wrong, when a higher and lower law distinctly uttered themselves. The lower self often prevailed by the argument that the thing to be done was transient, I would do it only this once, and never again; and often I thus sinned against the very present God, which I think I might not have done so presumptuously, had I associated the thought of this strange other me with that kind face of Love Divine. When later in life I did learn that the remonstrating voice was unquestionably God, because He is the Love that I saw in my childish vision, the war between self-love and conscience ceased. But this was not till a great body of death had been accumulated, which I have never shuffled off except in moments of hope.

But to take up the thread of my discourse again. I would very earnestly say that the Socratic or conversational method is the only way of bringing into a child's definite consciousness God's revelation of Himself to souls. But this requires a mutual understanding of words, and if we are careful, we may produce this in the kindergarten.

Froebel intimates that a general impression of there being an invisible Friend and Protector may be given by the baby's seeing the mother in the attitude of devotion, and he would have recognition of God called forth by her naming the unseen Father at moments when the child's heart is overflowing with joy and love, or seeking to know where some beautiful thing comes from. The child feels already at such times the presence of the Infinite Cause, the Infinite Source of joy and goodness, and the name of Heavenly Father given to this presence will not be an empty vocable. Using with the name of Father the word "our," with which the Lord's Prayer begins, suggests that He is the Father of all alike, and all human beings will thus be united together with Him in the child's imagination.[6]

This idea of one personal but comprehensive Being, the centre of the social organization, is a quickening of the immortal personality, which has a date in time no less certainly than the quickening of the body, and is our sense of identity.[7]