But already in my lifetime I had had an opportunity for psychological observation, made under circumstances perhaps still more favorable for getting evidence of the importance of a very early recognition of the Heavenly Father's name in the formation in a healthy manner of the human understanding and the development of the reason, verifying the declaration which Froebel has made the corner-stone of his system; namely, that though a child is the extreme opposite of God, contrasting as effect to cause, as absolute want to infinite supply, all these terms are connected—conciliated—into unity, by Love and Thought, which must recognize each other, and whose loss of equal companionship is a

I have somewhere, very careful memoranda, made at the time, which I have unfortunately mislaid, but I will present from present recollection as well as I can the whole psychological observation, though I am aware that I shall leave out many little things said and done which were perhaps not unimportant links in the chain.

Before I begin, I will observe that I tell it to the class to show the difference between talking to and conversing with children, and to illustrate several truths.

First, There is an innate Idea, not as a thought but as a feeling, given to every child, of an all-embracing Love (named by Jesus, Father), one in substance with the deepest consciousness of self;

Second, That this Idea becomes a child's personal and individual perception only when he has a realizable name for it;

Third, That such a name is not an empty vocable, a mere movement of air, but a sign, to which the intuition of his heart gives vital meaning;

Fourth, That an adequate name for God is the axis of the intellect, and the revolution of thought around it gives perfect globular form and solidity to the mind, balancing the centripetal force of individual self-assertion with the centripetal force of a Divine Love, comprehending all Being. Before God was named to and by this child of whom I am about to speak, you will see that he was a dreary little chaos "without form and void." After he had learned to utter intelligently the name of a Heavenly Father he was what I am going to tell you.

But first I must tell you how I had this opportunity and privilege of being the first person to name God to this child when he was four and a half years old. He was the son of a most conscientious mother whose early orphan life had been saddened with religious terrors. Her earliest recollection, as she told me, having been the death-bed, and immediately after, the burial of her mother, whom she saw, when she was too young to comprehend death, shut up in a coffin and put into the ground; and she remembered how her agonizing cries at what seemed the frightful cruelty, were peremptorily hushed, with the declaration of the person taking care of her, that God who made the heavens and the earth willed it to be so and would punish her if she did not acquiesce. Little did the thoughtless and heartless person who thus dealt with the distressed little heart think, how disastrously she was emasculating the word God of good by associating it with such an image of ruthless power divorced from tenderness, as she unheedingly did. It was not till long years after that her imagination was cleared of the frightful falsehood; and when she came to have a child of her own, her governing thought was to keep him ignorant of the fact of death, and the name of God, until he should be old enough to understand them, as she said. She was a person of deep feeling, upright and benevolent, but her imagination, probably by reason of this life-long depression, was of feeble wing, and she was taciturn. In consequence, her child, though most tenderly cared for as to his body, was starved in mind and spirit. His face continued to be an infant's countenance, and he was strangely without that childish joyousness called animal spirits, and grew more and more peevish as he grew older; for he was sequestered to the society of his silent mother, who would not even be read to in his presence, lest, as she said, some chance word which he could not understand should excite some fear.

Suddenly a hemorrhage of the lungs brought this mother to death's door. She had been, for a few years before her marriage, my pupil in my own house, and she used to say she owed to me all the happy views she had of God and Heaven, as well as of human life and death, and I was sent for in this extremity as a mother to a child.

Since her marriage she had lived in a city distant from me, and I had seen her but little. Her child was so very timid I had made no acquaintance with him in transient interviews, and of me he had no impression but of one little story that I had told him six months before when I met him at the house of her husband's parents. This story I had half invented to explain a picture in the "Story without an end," that I was showing to him. (See Appendix.)

When I came to the mother's bedside, she told me it was best for her to die, because she was utterly baffled in all her efforts to bring up her child. She went on to describe her timid methods; she said she feared he was non compos, for he made no progress. Among many phenomena, she mentioned that when she gave him playthings, he immediately broke them to pieces, and when she tried to prevent this, by endeavoring to make him understand their uses and construction, he would look drearily into her face and say, rather than ask, "What for?" He seemed deficient in will, without impulse, for, though flowers seemed rather to please him, if she took him into the garden and told him he might gather them, he would stand still, and helplessly cry; and she had to command him to do everything, even to play, before he would attempt it. He acted like an automaton. Moreover, he had no sensibility, and expressed no affection.

Just at this point of her dismal story her chamber door was opened by the nurse, with this great boy in her arms. He had his mother's beautiful large brow and deep eyes, but with no speculation in them, and his whole figure was lifeless and so languid that the arms that had been about the nurse's neck, slowly lost their curve when she put him down on his feet. But his look rested on me, who, with an inviting smile and gesture, held out my hand. Immediately the large eyes filled with intelligent light, and with a cry of joy he sprang towards me, climbed up into my lap, clasped his arms round my neck, nestled upon my bosom, and looking up with a joyful expression of confidence said, "Story—little boy—drop of water!" It was, as I have said, about half a year before, that I had lured him to me as he held off in timidity, by offering to show him the picture where the child, in the "Story without an end" is represented beside the brook, looking at a drop of water hanging from a leaf, "telling the little boy a story," as I said, to which he had answered "Story!" and I had gone on and invented a free paraphrase of the story given in the book, adapted to his infantile capacity, and when I had finished, he said, "Story again!" and I repeated it again and again, so imperative was his "story again!" and now he again said "Story," with a confiding pressure, as he leaned on me then, gazing at the picture on the book in my lap, giving me the conviction that he understood me. It was really, as I found subsequently, the only rational words that had ever been addressed to the child's imagination.

"This does not look like want of sensibility, or mens non compos," I said to the mother. "I never saw anything like it before," she said, all tears. The ensuing silence was immediately broken by the child's imperative repetition of the word "story!" I was too much affected by the mother's emotion to remember or invent any story, but it was an early, warm spring day and the windows were open. The house stood on a bluff of the Merrimac, within sight of the Rapids; and the sound of the rushing waters came in upon our silence. I said, cheerfully, "Do you hear the water running?" to which he responded with a joyful "yes! what does it run for?" "Oh, because it is glad," I replied, and again he responded with a joyful and satisfied "yes," and after a moment asked, "Where is it running to?" "Oh, into the ocean, where all the rest of the waters are!" and again an emphatic "yes" expressed his satisfaction. Perhaps he remembered that in the story I had told him of a drop of water it had ended with the drop falling off the leaf, and running away with its brothers and sisters, and falling into the ocean, out of which the sun had originally taken it. At any rate, he not only repeated his yes with the emphasis of satisfaction, but seemed to be thoughtful. I said, "Do you ever look out of the window and see the sun shine on the water, and all the little sparkles of light in the water?" "Yes," said he, joyfully, "what makes the sun shine on the water?" "Oh," said I, "it is because the sun loves the water." "Yes," said he, and began to embrace me in the most energetic manner.

It was too much for the poor mother, who absolutely wept aloud, whether with joy or sorrow she could not tell, as she afterwards said.

The sound of her weeping attracted his attention, and he sat up in my lap and turned his large eyes upon her as she lay in bed, and then upon me, with a look of concern and appeal. "See," said I, "poor mother. She is sick and sorry. She wants me to tell her a story, and won't you get down and go into the nursery and let me tell dear mother a story to make her feel better? Then I will come to you and tell you one."

With a cheerful "yes" he immediately got down and went into the nursery, but stopped at the door to say:—

"When you have told mother a story, won't you come right in and tell me one?"

I said to the mother, "You see, my dear friend, that the child has mind enough, heart enough, and a moral nature. He can understand and feel sympathy; feels the symbolism of nature; and can obey a self-denying motive. No fatal harm has been done after all by your delay, but he needs now to know he has a Heavenly Father, fully to manifest all the powers of a human being. You must allow me to give him that name for the Love he feels within and without."

"Not quite yet," said she, "not until you come to stay, because he would ask me questions that I should not know how to answer. Children ask such terrible questions. I am afraid as soon as you name the Invisible God, he will be frightened. Don't you know M. D. was afraid to stay in a room alone because of the omnipresence of God, which seemed to be an unimaginable horror to her?"

"I do not wonder," I replied. "Omnipresence of God! What was there in a child's experience to interpret this Latin abstraction? I think it would have been quite another thing, considering who her earthly father was, had she been told that our Heavenly Father was all about her though she could not see Him with her eyes, but could feel Him giving her love and joy. I cannot but wonder that anybody around her should have talked to her in such abstractions."

"I am so unready in expression," she persisted, "and can so poorly express my thoughts and feelings, I am sure I should only do mischief if I should try to answer his questions, and I am sure he will go on asking them, for his mind seemed to wake up at once as soon as you began to talk to him. How different was that 'yes' from the dreary 'what for?' with which he always received the very best explanations that I could make of the things he played with. That 'what for?' was not an enquiry of intelligence, but an expression of utter want of perception, with no interest to hear a reply. It is best for him that I should die; then I shall ask his father to give him to you to bring up. Nobody ought to have children but people of genius!"

"No, no," said I; "it does not require genius to talk with children, but only simplicity of heart trusted in. I interested him and gained a response, not because of genius, for I have none, but because I believe in him, and in myself, whose happiness is in loving, and that God has created us to love and commune with one another and Him. You have said yourself that he seemed to love flowers, though he was afraid to gather them, and that he loved to hear the street musicians. Beauty and music touch his sensibility. By saying that the waters run because they are glad, and the sun shines on and makes things beautiful because he loves them, I put his own conscious life into the music of waters and the light of the sun. He recognized the meaning of gladness and love because he himself felt glad and loving, which made a pre-existent possibility of recognizing the love and joy of the Creator that shine in those natural objects, because they are God's own words of love addressed to His own image, who is capable of love and joy and knowledge of Him. If we talk to children in instinctive faith, they understand us. You have not done so because of your early misfortune that saddened your heart and took away your instinctive courage. Faith is the proper act of the heart (courage, you know, is a synonym of heartiness); the heart goes before the understanding in the process of life. Without heart one can do no justice to children in talking with them; with it, we awaken their minds and nurture their souls, and all our mistakes will be of small account beside the positive advantage of setting their minds in joyful motion 'amidst this mighty sum of things forever speaking.'"

"When you come to stay," was her rejoinder, "you can say to him what you please, for then you will be here to take care of his mind and answer his questions."

This was all I could gain at that moment, and I left her, to go to the child, who had several times opened the door and looked at me wistfully, with a silent appeal which was all the more proof of his quickened intelligence that he did not tease. His own desire to have a story had interpreted to him his mother's need.

I have very little power of inventing a story, and to his demand for one I responded by taking from the bookshelves Miss Edgeworth's first story of Frank, and began to read to him of Frank's making a noise on the table and the conversation between him and his mother that ensued. But this did not suit my little one's mood, which was a little exalted by his delight at seeing me, and having had his imagination touched by the beautiful language of nature that I had made intelligible to him. He pulled the book away, and asked me to tell him a story "out of your own self," as he said.

Thus urged, I began: "Once there was a little worm about as long as the nail of my thumb, and no larger round than a big darning-needle. This little worm lived in a little house that he had made for himself in the ground, just big enough to hold him, when he rolled himself up like a little ball with his head sticking out. There were no windows nor doors in his house, but one on top, which was his door to go in at, and his window to look out of. When he had made this house he was tired and crawled into it and curled himself up and went to sleep, and slept all night. In the morning the sun rose and spread his beams all over the world, and one of the bright sunbeams shone into the window of the little worm's house and touched his eyes and waked him, and he popped up his head and looked out and saw it was very pleasant in the garden, and he thought he would go out. He squirmed himself up out of his hole, and because he had no feet he crept along the garden path. The warm beams of the sun put their arms all round his cold, little body and made it warm as could be, and the sunbeam went into his little mites of eyes, and filled him all full of light, and the songs of the birds went into his little mites of ears and filled him all up with music, and the sweet smell of hundreds of flowers went up that little mite of a nose and filled him up with their perfumes. And so that little worm went creeping along as glad as he could be that he was alive.

"Now in the house that stood in that garden lived a little boy about four years old; and when the morning came, the sunbeams had gone into the window of his nursery and waked him, and he was washed and dressed and had his breakfast of bread and milk, and then his mama took him to the door that led down the steps of the piazza into the garden, and told him he might go down the path and have a good run to make himself warm. So down he ran. But now if that little boy should put his strong foot on that dear little worm, it would break him all to pieces—"

"Oh, he shall not, he must not!" cried the child in a spasm of distress. "Aunt Lizzie, don't let him break the dear little worm to pieces!"

"No indeed," said I, "that little boy would not not do such a cruel thing for the world! He saw the little worm creeping along, so glad to be alive, and he ran on the other side of the path; and the little worm nibbled a little blade of grass, and drank a little dew for his breakfast, and then he felt tired, and went creeping back, full of good food, to the little hole that was his home, and curled himself up like a little ball and went to sleep."

"Now tell me that story all over again!" said the child.

I did so more than once at his entreaty, and always when I came to the possible catastrophe of crushing the worm, the same terror seemed to seize him, and he would cry out:—

"Oh, he must not, he shall not!" and I always tranquillized him again, and gratified his sense of justice by my assurance of the little boy's consideration of the little worm's right to his life and happiness.

Of course, I told his mother of the effect of this story, and the evidence it gave of the child's sound moral nature and innate sense of justice. And I begged her to let me lose no time in referring to the presence of the Heavenly Father, that the intuition of his heart might become the possession of his mind. I said I did not believe that he would ask any question. He would suppose that I alone knew, for, as I observed to her, he had never for the whole six months referred to the little boy with the drop of water, and yet had vividly remembered the whole story, as his greeting me had shown, and I had the proof of it, for I had just told it to him again at his request. I told her if I proved to be mistaken, and he should ask her any question she could not answer to her own satisfaction, she could say she would write to me and ask me, and I felt sure he would wait. But I told her I believed what I was thinking of saying to him would keep his thoughts busy while I was gone (for I was going only for a week to prepare for a stay with her for an indefinite time). At last I gained her consent, and the child was put into my bed, that I might have the conversation the first thing in the morning.

When I awoke, I found him awake, close by me, and his great eyes seemed to devour me.

"How long you did sleep!" said he; "I have been seeing you sleep."

Said I, "What do you see with?"

"My eyes," he replied, and to the questions, What do you hear, smell, taste, touch with? he made the appropriate answers.

"But what do you love with?" I asked.

He jumped up upon his knees and crossed his arms on his breast, paused a moment wonderingly, and then exclaimed, "With my arms!" and throwing his arms round my neck, hugged me. I was taken a little aback, but in a moment said:—

"Have you a great deal of love?"

"Oh, a great deal, a great deal!" he exclaimed.

"Where is it? where do you keep it?" said I.

He started up again on his knees, again crossed his arms upon his breast, and said, "Where do I?"

Placing my hand on his heart, I said, "Is it not in there?"

His whole expression was affirmative, he looked delighted, but did not speak.

"Are you good?" said I.

"Sometimes," he said.

"What are you when you are not good?"

"I cry."

He had evidently been told it was naughty to cry.

I said, "Why are you not good all the time?"

"Why ain't I?" said he, after a moment's pause.

"Oh," said I, "I think you have not goodness enough to be good with all the time."

He looked assent, delighted and earnest. I answered his unuttered feeling with the question,—

"Should you like to have goodness enough to be good with all the time?"

"How can I?"

"Oh," said I, "you have a good friend who has a whole sky full of goodness. He gave you all the goodness and love you have in there (I touched his breast), and will give you more and more if you want him to, always and always, enough to be good with all the time."

He looked perfectly blest, did not speak, but laid himself down close by me, took my arm and put it over him, and said, as he nestled up to me,—

"Talk to me some more."

I went on: "Your good friend gives you all your joy to be glad with, and all your love and goodness. They always go together. And now listen to me: the next time you are going to cry (I used his own practical expression instead of saying the next time you are naughty), stop and think. I have a good friend who has a whole sky full of goodness and he will give me goodness enough to be good with all the time, and I guess you will not cry." He responded only with huggings and kissings and exclamations of "I love you a whole sky full," and as I did not want to overdo or say anything to mar the impression I had made, I took advantage of a noise I heard, to change the subject, and said:—

"What is that noise?"

He jumped out of bed, went to the window, and said:—

"It is the carpenters making a house," and after a pause, asked, "Who made all the other houses?"

"Carpenters," said I; "don't you see they make houses out of boards?"

"Who made the boards?"

"The boards are made out of trees. People cut down the trees, and then they saw them up into great logs, and then they split up the logs and smooth them out into pieces we call boards."

"Who made the trees?" said he.

I understood very well where the tyrannizing unity of his personality was leading his understanding, but did not wish, just then, to risk giving outward form or connection to his thought of the Divine Cause, so I said:—

"The trees grow out of the ground; don't you see old trees and young trees and little baby trees growing out of the ground?"

For this information he did not give me that hearty "yes" with which he had received my communication of spiritual facts, but came back to bed again. I persisted, however, in talking playful nonsense for half an hour, until his nurse came to take him up to dress him. As soon as she appeared at the door, he started up on his knees again, crossed his arms over his breast, and in a loud, joyful voice cried out:—

"Mrs. Doyle! I have a good friend up in the sky who has a whole sky full of goodness, and he will give me as much goodness as I want to be good with all the time," emphasizing the last three words.

The nurse, a good-hearted Roman Catholic, who, like all the servants, had been forbidden to talk to the child about God or any kindred subject, looked at me startled, yet gratified, and said:—

"What will his mother say?"

I replied, "His mother will be very glad; she only wanted to wait till she thought he could understand. But I have told him enough for the present; don't talk to him about it; but if he says anything to you, come and tell me."

"Yes," said she, "and I thank God you have come to teach the poor child something."

I then said to her aside, "His mother is very anxious lest he be frightened; for she was frightened about God and death when she was a little child, and has suffered from it all her life long. She has been a double orphan ever since she can remember."

I said this to her for several reasons: one was my extreme desire to see what the one simple truth would do for the child, and this was the reason I gave good friend for God's name. Of course, the mother craved to know exactly what had passed on this important occasion, and was immensely relieved and gratified at what I told her, and wanted it all to be written down; and thus it happened that I made memoranda of this and subsequent conversations, and even of those held in her presence, for they continued to be no less interesting than they began.

Observe these points in the child's speech to the nurse: he interpolated the words up in the sky. I had given no place to the good friend, though I had said he had a whole sky full of goodness and love; and the sky being the glorious symbol of unboundedness, elevation, purity, and power to the human imagination, in all nations and times, as is proved by the earliest idolaters who worshipped the heavens, and the host of stars, and verifying the more spiritual conceptions of the Hebrew Psalmist, and of Job, who did not confound (nor did this child) the sign with the Living God who created it to signify His Being. Another thing: Observe it was not even as the giver of love and joy, but as the giver of goodness that the Person of Persons had seized the imagination of the child so powerfully. It was wonderful to see that very day, the effect upon his understanding of this conversation. The night before, when I told him the story of the little worm, I found his vocabulary so small that I could give my imagination a very narrow scope. But in the course of the day (in which, for the first time in his life) he talked incessantly, asking innumerable questions about his good friend, he seemed to have no difficulty in talking. I am very sorry I have not my written memoranda, because I should like to tell you everything in order; but I remember he wanted to know how his good friend "looked." I replied by asking him, "How does love look?" He laughed, and said, "Love does not look, but feels." "Well," said I, "so your good friend does not look, but feels. Don't you feel him now, putting love and goodness into you?" He laughed assent, and said, "Where is he?"

"Wherever love and goodness are," said I; "in you, in me, and in mother, in everybody who loves." I was encouraged to believe he would comprehend this language, unimaginable and inconceivable as such truth is to the mere understanding, for I had in my remembrance a conversation I once overheard between two children, one five and the other not three years old, at which I had not ceased to wonder since I heard it. I was sitting drawing with their mother in a recess of a room that hid us from the children's sight, when our attention was diverted by hearing the younger one say:—

"Can God see me now, when I am all wrapped up in this shawl?"

The elder one replied very earnestly, "O yes! God can see everybody, everywhere."

"But I don't see how He can see me when I am all wrapped up in this shawl. It is dark," persisted the little three-year-old. There was a pause, when Eliza, in a very anxious voice, said:—

"Amelia, can you see mama in your eye?" (She meant imagination.)

Amelia replied after a moment, "Yes, I can see mama in my eye, just how she looks."

"Well," said Eliza, "I suppose that is the way God sees everything, because He knows everything."

I cannot conceive a more perfect proof that the soul of a child is a "sparkle of God," and its mind the intuition of the eternal reason—its image, than was given by this original illustration of the truth of truths made by a child of five years old. The mother made an exclamation of wonder, and said:—

"I am sure I never could have given so profound an answer as that," and I continue to think it the most wonderful thing I ever heard of so young a child's saying, and had I not heard it myself, I doubt if I could have believed it was said. But it has given me courage to think that children might have very early a definite conception of the invisible God without materializing it.

The omnipresence and invisibility of God were mysteries that attracted my little pupil's mind and taxed it, but did not distress nor perplex it. Of the reality of God's being, the intimacy of his own relations with Him, he never seemed to have a doubt; his delight in the thought of Him was boundless. At the end of the first day he said a thing which struck his parents with astonishment. The evening of the day on which I arrived, his father had made tea for me in the parlor, and as the child did not want to leave me a moment, he was set up at the table in his high-chair opposite me, to eat his bread and milk with us. While the father talked of one thing and another, the child's eye and mine occasionally met, and he would immediately make some gesture of lovingness and an inarticulate sound, ee ee ee! At last his father checked him with the words "Don't make those silly noises, Foster!" I interposed, and playfully said:—

"Now please don't come between me and Foster. I understand his silly noises and just what he means to say to me. How can you expect he will talk any sense when you have never given him any help to think?" The father laughed at my "transcendentalism," as he called it. But the second night, when we were all again in the same relative position, the demeanor of the child was wholly changed; he sat silently eating as if wrapped in thought. By and by he said in a very decided tone, "Some things live, and some things only keep."

With a look of astonishment his father exclaimed, "What an extraordinary generalization!" "The consequence," said I, "of being talked to as if he were a rational being one day!"

The next day I went to Boston for a day or two, to make arrangements for returning to stay an indefinite time, which was such a disappointment to the poor little thing that he screamed in the most passionate manner, so that his mother could no longer doubt his sensibility or will. He was so angry with the stage-coachman who took me away, that his father had great difficulty in persuading him that he was not a bad man, but, on the contrary, a kind one, whom Aunt Lizzie had asked to come to take her to the railroad. At last he somewhat reluctantly agreed that he might be a good man.

"But I shall never like him," he said, and left his father, to go and caress his mother, who was weeping, as he divined, with the same regret as his own, and he was apparently comforted by her saying, that she, too, was sorry Aunt Lizzie had to go away for a little while, but she had promised to come back in a day or two and stay all summer.

It turned out as I had surmised, that he had asked no questions while I was gone, and had said very little except to wonder that I stayed so long, though I was gone only two days.

When I came back I had immediate evidence that he had been thinking while I was gone, and to some purpose. You remember that on that first morning of our conversation, he had asked me who made the trees, and I had said, "The trees grow out of the ground," which did not seem to give him the satisfaction that my reference of his emotions, sensibilities, and thoughts, to an invisible personality had given him. Now, as soon as the embraces of welcome and expressions of joy had subsided a little, he burst into the subject which had so possessed his mind, and with a sort of triumphant air, as if he was sure of a satisfactory response, he asked:—

"What did our good friend want the trees to grow out cf the ground for?"

I said, "Do you think the trees are pretty? Do you like to look at them?"

"Yes, I think they are beautiful."

"Well," said I, "I guess that was one reason; you know he loves us all, and so he likes to please us. Do you like to please those you love?"

"Yes!" and a passionate embrace and kiss was the expressive reply.

I then went on to call his attention to the fruits that grow on some of the trees, and which serve us with delicious food, and the uses of wood to build houses with, etc. This conversation naturally introduced other kindred subjects of inquiry as to why our good friend had arranged things so and so. The tyrannizing instinct of his own mind, of which he had become conscious through the exercise of it, that my naming of the Spirit Father had so happily started, had made objective to him the Unity of all life, and he was sure that the good friend was at the bottom of everything outward as well as inward, even trifles; for I one day heard him say, as he was lying on the floor at play, "Heavenly Father, I wish you would not let my leg feel so cold." This was later on, in the winter time, however.

I cannot sufficiently regret that I have lost my original memoranda. They were transcribed from notes that his mother made, who was watching every word said, with the most intense interest. She always had pencil and paper at her side, because the danger of hemorrhage caused her to avoid speaking. She wrote down with care the very words, as if they were, as indeed they were, a divine Revelation. Whatever he accepted or expressed with joy, she felt was true, knowing as well as she did the past emptiness of his understanding, and the dreariness of his feeling as an individual. But I can perhaps remember enough to show you the method I took, which was truly the very method of conversation that Froebel proposes we should have with children, prompted by the Wisdom of love, which so profoundly respects its object that it gives it opportunity to be itself by not obtruding. The reason that we do not get the lesson that childhood can give us is that we thrust our finite minds between the child and the Divine, instead of limiting ourselves to putting the child into the point of view to see for itself what of course though essentially one, is perhaps of different aspect to each. I made it a point to be very quiet, and to exhibit no surprise at his questions or mistakes, but to lead him by my questions to the answers, and the corrections of mistakes which must needs arise from one-sidedness. The entire respect with which I listened to what he said gave him complete possession of and confidence in his own mind. One laugh at any incongruity he uttered (as Dr. Seguin would tell you) would have shut him up perhaps forever. How often children's thinking is thus nipped in the bud!

The circumstances in this instance were favorable to real conversation. In addition to my love of psychological observation in general, and my love and interest in this child in particular, was that which I felt in the mother, whose own childhood had been so shadowed by her human environment that it had not taught her what only childhood can teach with its uneclipsed vision of the Father's face, of which Christ speaks and warns the adult not to offend (or, as the revised version translates it, cause to stumble). On her account, as well as on my own and the child's, I was careful not to put my thoughts into his head, but merely lead him to the standpoint from which he could see the truth for himself. It is because these conditions made for once an opportunity for a genuine conversation between intuitive childhood and such maturity of experience as I had attained, realizing Froebel's ideal of the conversation of the kindergarten, that I am desirous to give it to you as a hint of how you should proceed—though, of course, you would probably never have so exceptional an opportunity; because the children that come to you will generally have minds already misty with half-defined ideas of God, received from the vague, half-defined minds of the imperfectly educated adults, conveyed to the children either in that careless or dogmatic manner in which they are usually talked to, not with.

Another advantage I had with this child was, that besides the arrested development arising from his mother's timid plan with him, he inherited from both parents, and perhaps from remoter ancestry, an individuality of mind that was not at all imaginative; which did not, however, exclude him from spiritual truth, for that is not the work of imagination, but is discerned by the spiritual sense, being as objective as what is discerned by the five senses (a transcendental objective, not a material one). The respectful interest with which I treated him gave him a happy confidence in his own thought, which was my opportunity for observing the natural order of mental development. In short, the conversation we had was a genuine one as between equals, unless, indeed, he was the superior in giving to me the divine laws of the spiritual order. He often surprised me by his next question, and was so disarmed of all fear by my consideration and tenderness, that he revealed that which is always the individual's secret, and I gained as much as he did by the conversations, and certainly I gained certainty in what was previously only conjecture on my part. I was sometimes obliged to say I did not know, and remember his asking me with surprise, "Don't you know everything?" "Oh, no!" said I. "Only our good friend knows everything and gives us our thoughts all the time. Doesn't he give new thoughts to you every day?"

"Yes, he gives me a great many new thoughts all the time," he replied with animation. On another occasion, when I had become perfectly exhausted in answering his questions, I said to him:—

"I am very tired, but I will answer that question, provided you will not ask me another before dinner."

As he walked away he said, "Oh, I wish I had asked another question instead of that!"

"Well," said I, "what? Perhaps I will answer that one."

Turning back, he said eagerly, "Will our good friend answer all my questions when I go into the sky?"

I said, "Yes, every one; for he knows everything, and can never be tired."

The expression of complete satisfaction with which he went away from me was most expressive.

You will observe his expression of "when I go into the sky," and consider it together with the words that he interpolated saying, "I have a good friend up in the sky," in repeating to Mrs. Doyle that first morning when I had told him that his good friend who gave him thoughts, and joy, and goodness, and love, had a sky full of goodness. The sky is the natural symbol of the unbounded and infinite and the essentially spiritual, and the conception of God into which I had led him, and which I named his good friend, pervaded all space.

The subsequent questions of how God looked, and upon His whereabouts, and the conversation on this, by identifying Him with the Love that he felt within himself, had revealed to him Immortality before he had defined mortality.

The God he felt within him in his conscious Love and without him in all manifestations of beauty and power, gave him assurance that he would be sometime wherever God was. I have lost the connection and place in the narrative of another conversation I had with him on the omnipresence of God. He often had said his thoughts were in his head, and his feelings were in his bosom. One day he was sitting in my lap close to a table, with his feet bare, and I put my hand under the table and pinched his toe. He said:—

"What are you pinching my toe for?"

I said, "How do you know I pinched your toe? you cannot see what I am doing under the table."

"I think you pinched my toe, because I felt it."

"I thought all your thoughts were in your head, and all your feelings in your bosom, not in your toes."

"My feelings are all over my body," said he; "and when you pinched my toe, the feeling ran right into my head and turned into a thought."

"So you see," said I, "that you live all over your body and in any part of it, just as your Heavenly Father lives all over the world and in everything at once."

"Yes," said he, "I did not know how that was before."

The date of this conversation was some weeks, perhaps months, from the beginning of our intercourse, as I know from the use of the word Heavenly Father, which came after a time to take the place of good friend, and it was preceded by some other conversations. He was always overflowing with expressions of love to me. When I gave him anything, he would embrace me, and I would ask, "Which do you love best, me or the thing given?" (an apple perhaps, or whatever it might be). He would always say, "You, you." Once he said, "I love you more than all the apples in the world." Once when he was kissing my hand, I said, "Which do you love best, me or my hand?"

"I love both," he said.

I persisted, and said, "Supposing my hand was cut off, would you love me as well?"

"I should love you a great deal more," said he, energetically; "for it would hurt you so to have your poor hand cut off. Would it not hurt you dreadfully?"

"I suppose it would, but by and by it would get well and what I want to know is, whether you would love me as well without my hand as with it?"

He still declared he should love me more. I then said, "So you see my hand is not me. It is only one of the things the Heavenly Father gave me to make things with, and He gave me my feet to walk with, and eyes to see with; but my eyes and ears and tongue are not me; and if I should lose them all, still I would be all of myself, and you could love me?"

"Yes," said he; "but I don't want you to lose any of those things, for I love them all together."

My object in these conversations was to see if he would separate in thought the finite material body from the conscious soul or himself, as I preferred to say, for to speak of one's self as a soul makes what is essentially subjective as objective as we desire to make the body, the use of which is to reveal to others the feelings and thoughts of the individual that otherwise the finite apprehension could not seize. I was endeavoring to prepare him to minister to his mother, when I could persuade her to let him know the fact of death, by appreciating and defining that crisis of life as a step onward into the deep consciousness of immortality, which I believed would lift her out of the abyss into which her own consciousness seemed to fall at the utterance of the word, in spite of all the intellectual views of immortality which she had for many years cultivated, but which somehow did not meet her exigency, when she felt herself on the brink of the separation of body and mind. No intellectual process can give what the faith of childhood has in its own immortality of which those who had the care of her infancy had robbed her.

It was delightful to see how she enjoyed the child who had long been a burden to her. She wanted him in her presence all the time with his playthings, and to hear all our conversation, and that I should tell her what we said in the little time that he could not be with her. She declared that she never had known what the enjoyment of life was till she had it in her sympathy with him. All the pleasures of intellect, and also of personal affections of the happiest kind, were pale beside the joy of this child—in his communion with God, who was in all his thoughts, and had taken him from his dreariness and growing peevishness, into that joy of childhood which Ruskin speaks of as so entirely out of proportion to the occasions of its expression, and which still had no painful excitement in it, but was simply a spontaneous outflow, not only quickening his thoughts but informing his affections with generosity and gratitude. The self that lost all sense of boundary, in its joy in the unbounded, spread out to embrace all about it. He said one thing to me which will, I think, explain to you what I mean. Of course, I was the first person on whom the flood of his heart poured itself out, though he did not stop with me, but also expressed his love to all with whom he came into near or remote relation. When saying to me how much he loved me, what a skyful of love he had for me, I said, "Yes, darling, I know you love me as much as you can," he replied scornfully, "I love you a great deal more than I can!" Was not that a wonderful expression of the immortal essence of his love,—of Love Divine?

Without its being suggested to him to thank others for kindnesses, he did so without a single exception. He would be taken to drive in the carriage with his mother, and standing at the window, would shout with delight at the things he saw on the way, and when he got home would often run back to the gate to say, "Thank you, horsey!" and all his habits of timidity were forgotten when the street musicians came by, and he was allowed to take out pennies to them. Callers at the house, from whom he used to shrink when they would have spoken to him, were in wonder at his hospitable welcome and fearless but intelligent interpositions in the conversation, which they thought indicated precocity instead of backwardness. The length, breadth, and depth of all the words Christ let fall in the last part of his life, of which I had had some insight before, became doubly intelligible to me. I saw into the beauty and meaning of mankind's being created in successive generations, and I was thus prepared to enter into and appreciate Froebel's ideas and methods, with which I did not become acquainted till a quarter of a century later.

I want you to observe that in what I did there was simply the spontaneous wisdom of love—love, not fondness, not desire of reciprocation, but self-forgetting and reverent of its object. Only this gives the creative method, or is the essence of creativeness, whether human or divine.

You remember, in the memoir of Froebel with which I began this course of lectures, it was said that he posed his elder brother with his questionings of God's wisdom in the arrangement of the social sphere. Unable to answer him, the instinct of his love led him to divert the child's attention into a department of nature where apparent discords were seen to be harmonized for the production of beauty and use, that the poor little perplexed and bewildered child might enjoy himself legitimately. He gave him the clue to the labyrinth and the strength to conquer the Minotaur. He had no idea of educating, but only of comforting. Thus, unconscious of any theory of education, he solved the problem practically, first for the child Froebel himself, later for mankind to whom the man Froebel has revealed it with such ample illustrations as to make an era in human history that, as we hope, shall retrieve the past. Childhood understood, leading in the promised millennium of peace on earth and good will among men, will make mankind forget the Babel confusion of its first experimenting, and enter into the mutual understanding of the Pentecostal miracle.