Nature (that is, the material universe, as I have said before) is God's expression of mathematical and all correlative laws, the apprehension of which builds up the intellect of the individual who, through his sense perceptions, on which he reflects and generalizes, gains knowledge of his surroundings, beginning with that part of nature which is within his own skin.

It was the grand intuition of Oken which has been splendidly illustrated by Dr. J. Garth Wilkinson in his Human Body in its Connections with Man, that the human body is the metropolis of material nature, in which may be found in vital order all the elements of the material universe which are, outside of the human body, in a more or less chaotic state. This development of the individual intellect needs more or less aid from the human environment, simultaneously with that nurture of the heart which means man's conscious relation to man. But though morality, which is the performance of man's duty to man, is not religion, which is man's consciousness of relation to God, it leads to it inversely, because it shows the heart its need of a Father of us all, in order to be happy. All three processes, the intellectual, the moral, and the religious, must go on together, to make a perfect education, for in proportion as integral education is wanting in those about the child, his intellect will be starved, confused, or darkened with error; and immorality and irreligion will more or less transpire in the individual.

Froebel perfectly realized the deficiency of this integral education to be the cause of all the evil that is the present experience of mankind, in spite of Church and State and the optimism which in form of hope "springs eternal in the human breast" (for the pessimist is the exception, not the rule among men, the great mass of whom are pursuing some ideal aim, even though it be a low one, their moral sentiment having been perverted and their religion having become a superstitious idolatry either of material forms or of logical formulas).

The system of education which Froebel discovered, or invented, in consequence of realizing this, is what we are endeavoring to learn and apply, that we may bring out of the moral chaos around us the lost equipoise of the threefold nature in our children, by ourselves plunging into infant life in imagination and realizing its innocent heart and unfallen spiritual state, watching it in its own attempts to understand and use its material surroundings and its human environment, to the end of guiding it by our own experience and matured knowledge, from the errors and misfortunes it inevitably falls into if left to its own ignorant experimenting unrevised.

The playthings and means of occupation Froebel invented are to develop the intellect, and are a perfect miniature of nature, and to use them in playing with the child is an art and a science that the kindergartner must add to her moral affections and religion, which are also her indispensable qualifications.

I wish to say this very emphatically, all the more because this part of your education (the art and science that develop the intellect) is not my part of your training course, but the moral and religious nurture; and therefore I must leave the exhaustive analysis of the gifts in their relation to the unfolding intellect as well as of the "schools of work" (as the series of embroideries, foldings, drawings, weavings, pea-work, etc., are called, and which require your study the whole year) to your accomplished trainers to do justice to.

But before I turn to my specific department, I would say that this intellectual part of the training, which it was the special genius of Froebel to discover, is of equal importance; for it is the duty of man to worship God with the mind, as well as with the heart and might, though that is a part of the great commandment, which seems to have been systematically overlooked by many of the churches, if not virtually denied.

To worship God with the mind means to develop the intellect; as to worship Him with the heart keeps pure the moral sentiments and quickens moral action; and to worship Him with the might lifts the will, quickened by the heart and enlightened by the mind into oneness with the Holy Spirit, more and more forever. And here let me recall to you what I said of Froebel's authority in my second lecture, and beware of deviating from the path he has pointed out (he was nearly fifty years in inventing his technique); and be very careful about adding to his Gifts or Schools of Work, though I would not have you mechanical followers. There will be legitimate outgrowths of his method. He himself, in one of his Pedagogies, published after his death by Wichard Lange, has suggested a "school of drawing" upon the curve, which Miss Marwedel has developed, leading the child naturally through vegetable formation; and Mr. Edward A. Spring, the sculptor, has also suggested and partly carried some children through animal forms, from the worm to the "human face divine"; and we hope both these "schools" may be published and used. In the musical line, also, in which Froebel was personally rather deficient, Mr. Daniel Bachellor, now of Philadelphia, has suggested a series of exercises by means of the correspondence of tones and colors, that makes the children as creative in the discovery of melodies, as they are of the harmonies of color in their weaving and painting.

There is unquestionably danger that the kindergartner may degenerate into mechanical imitation and rote-work in this part of her guidance of the children, nevertheless in some of the charity kindergartens I have seen there was danger of doing injustice to the technique.

On this last day of communion with you on the Froebel education, I would like to speak with some comprehensiveness and particularity on the subject of religious nurture. Mark me, I say religious nurture, not religious teaching. The religion that integrates human education is not to be taught. It is the primeval consciousness of filial relation to God, who alone can reveal Himself; for human language has no adequate expression of God, founded as it is on the material universe, which is the finite opposite of Creative Being. Every individual child is a momentum of God's creativeness which the human Providence of education must take as its datum. Only childhood symbolizes God as "the sum of all being," realizing itself in joy incommensurable. Ruskin has happily said the joy of childhood is out of all proportion to the occasions that call forth its expression, and in order to make God the central conscious truth of the child's intellect, we must give the name father or mother to God, which is intelligible to the heart, and which will identify its filial aspiration with the parental bounty, as another, yet the same.

But what I want you to observe is, that language being limited in meaning by its origin in material nature, you should talk about God as little as possible, after having given Him the name that will excite the child's worshipful aspiration, and limit yourselves carefully to regulating moral manifestations, leading children to act kindly, generously, truthfully, in your own assured faith that God is present to inspire the truth, generosity, and loving will that is practically prayed for with good resolution. (Good resolutions are the special prayers of faith, as children should be taught expressly.)

Kindergartners cannot carry out this course quite irrespective of the theory of human nature declared in their creeds. But the heart is generally larger than the creed, as was once strikingly evidenced to me by Louisa Frankenberg, a dear, devout old German kindergartner, who had learned the art of kindergartning from Froebel himself, in the very beginning of his own experimenting; but she was such a bigot to the Lutheran Church that she could not theoretically admit as a Christian any one who did not swear by its dogma of total depravity. Yet I remember hearing her exclaim, "Oh, Froebel's method is so beautiful! because the affectionate plays and innocent occupations take the children entirely away from the depravity of their hearts." She said this with a gush of love and faith that showed how much the unbounded human heart is beyond being totally eclipsed by shadows cast by the limited human intellect. It is neither feeling or thinking, but righteous doing, that gives us victory.[11]

The child in the first era of his life has no individual consciousness of separation from God, and for a certain time it is obvious to all observers that this august unconsciousness even prevents the immediate development of an intellectual conception of him. The child in its infancy (infant, you remember, means not speaking) does not see nature as object, but feels it also to be himself, and hence he has no language, for language is the expression of his intellect. Hence the infant's sublime unconsciousness of danger and absolute fearlessness, and its impulse to spring upward out of its mother's arms, the laws of gravity notwithstanding! It stands, as Wordsworth has sung,—

Now the true religious nurture is to keep the child in the mood of ineffable joy in which he was created, while he is evolving his sense of individuality and free agency by experimenting freely, but more or less painfully, so that he shall not lose sight of the central Sun, to which everything he is slowly learning through his senses and his reflection is related; and this must be begun by giving a name to the central Sun that shall express the character of his inmost consciousness of joy and love, which is his vision of God, and needs to be recognized as God in the understanding.

In the Old Testament we see that it is the name of the Lord which is set forth as the only means of escaping that idolatry which is destructive of progressive spiritual religion. The name of the Lord, or Ruler, with the Hebrews was Jehovah, a word made up of the three tenses of the substantive verb to be, "was, is, and shall be," and which Philo, the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher, translates The Eternal. It was understood by the worshippers to be the ineffable Creative Reality, so that when they came to the word in their sacred ritual they did not speak it, but reverently bowed their heads in a moment's silence, or paraphrased it, The Lord God.

But Jesus, the bright, consummate flower of the Hebrew race, used the name Father (my and our Father), which you may observe was original with him. That word expressed the whole of his theology. He made no disquisitions on God's being, but simply recognized the vital relation of mankind to its Creator by this word, which any child who has come to see that he and his mother are two can understand and will love.

Froebel has proved by his nursery method that the child shall get this idea and name of God from his mother; and at all events when children come to the kindergarten they will generally already have heard some name for God, adequate or inadequate. Now all you have to do—but that is a great deal, indeed the greatest thing—is not to cloud the child's intuitive knowledge of God by your inadequate words as was done in the case of M. D., who was afraid of the omnipresence of God, as I mentioned in my narrative of F. H., and in the case of his unfortunate mother at her mother's funeral. In the case of little F. the mistake was not to have given any name before his sense perceptions had made "a prison house for the growing boy." But you have seen how the shades were dispelled by my taking it for granted with him that a Heavenly Father existed, which he joyfully accepted at once, for I knew that

The naming of God in the kindergarten should be in music, which is the natural language of spirituality (or aspiration), lifting the soul above the cold level of the intellect that cognizes the correlations of the natural universe. Froebel finds support of his faith in the efficacy of song, that puts devout expression into the works of nature, in the historical fact that the civilizing literature of all nations begins in religious hymns. The different characteristics and the different destinies of nations are seen in germ in the national songs, which are in large degree and sometimes exclusively addressed to the Powers above. The Li-king of the Chinese, the Rig Veda of the old Aryans, the Puranas of the Hindus, the Garthas of the Iranians, the recently discovered early poetry of the Egyptians, and even the magical formulas of the Babylonians, all express with more or less exaltation of spirit the primeval intuition of Supreme Being, and use the particulars of material nature as words of God pointing to that unity of all life that is the music of the spheres. Is it not heard in the voice of the healthy infant, which is the most exquisite music on earth, and later seen in the pictures made by the imagination before language that is coined by the human understanding has introduced prosaic, that is, analytic definitions, and drawn the human individual away from feeding its heart on the fruits of the Tree of Life (which are music and poetry) to the fruits of the tree of knowledge, which are evil as well as good. The kindergarten exercises should begin and end with spiritual songs and hymns; indeed, they should come in any time at the call of the children, who, it will be found, will oftener call for hymns of praise than for any other songs.

The hymns of the kindergarten repertory should be entirely free from all that is didactic and denominationally doctrinal. Their object is not to teach any science, whether intellectual, moral, or theological; but to express childish joy in existence, or quicken the original childish faith, which in all ages and nations has expressed itself in music and the dance. Nor should the singing of hymns in kindergarten be ever perfunctory or a thing of course. A good kindergartner begins the day with bringing all the children into company for preliminary conversation, and asking each in turn what is in his mind; or the class as a whole may be asked some general question, perhaps about the weather, which always has something beneficial that can be brought to the attention; then they could be asked, "Could you have made this weather? Who made it? and would you not like to thank the Heavenly Father for it?" Something similar to this should precede all the hymns to rouse their sense of free activity, and prevent routine, and then they will sing with the heart and understanding also. I remember going one day into a kindergarten with Mr. Alcott when such a preliminary conversation was going on, which was followed by this song of the weather, the children making the illustrative gesticulations with their arms. They began with the weather of the day, and continued with several varieties, for it is not often the whole song is sung at one time. The intense delight of the children when themselves personifying the weather, poured itself out in the chorus, which they had first learned to sing with a will,—

Mr. Alcott, with his eyes full of tears, turned to me, and said, "This must have an immense influence upon character." In religious conversation children have the advantage of us in their as yet uneclipsed original vision of God, and we have an advantage of them in knowledge of outside things and the adaptation of means to ends. By this knowledge of ours we can generally guide them to accomplish their purposes when they are such as will really give them pleasure and do no harm to any one else. They get our knowledge by confidingly doing as we direct, and a confidence in the method which brings about the results they have instinctively foreseen. We save their minds from getting lost or bewildered in the chaos of particulars by winning their attention to the orderly connections of things, and leading them to realize how they connect little things in order to make larger things, and how opposites are connected in the world around about them. To recognize their own little plans and open their eyes to God's methods and plans; and because they cause new effects, they realize that all effects have causes, and in the last analysis realize one personal cause. They must believe in themselves as a preliminary to believing in God. Let them with things create order; and you will have influence with them in proportion to their feeling that you respect their free will, and divine in a genial way what they want; and this you can do if you inform yourself of what is universal in human desire, keeping your eyes open to what modifications their individuality suggests; and it is your cognizance of these individualities which makes your part of the enjoyment. If there are no two leaves alike, much more are there no two human individuals precisely alike, and human intercourse is made refreshing by these various individualities playing over the surface of the universal race-consciousness. If you respect the individuality of a child, and let it have fair play, you gain its confidence. Nothing is so delightful as to feel oneself understood. It is much more delightful than to be admired. But to give a child's individuality fair play in a company of children, you must open children's eyes to one another's individualities, and you will find that if you suggest their respecting each other's rights in the plays, there is something within them that will justify you. The consciousness of individuality is the correlated opposite to the conscience of universality. Justice is an intuition. The opposite poles of a human being are self-assertion or personal consciousness on the one side, and generosity or race consciousness on the other.

We have seen that the maternal instinct, which the kindergartner is to make her own by cultivating it, cherishes the indispensable innocent self-assertion (which is only changed into selfishness by lack of that social cherishing which keeps generosity wide awake to balance self-assertion). We must sympathize with the play instincts of the child, so that it may get knowledge of its body in its parts and its powers of locomotion, manipulation and speech, giving self-respect to the consciousness of power, while the simultaneous knowledge of limitation is prevented from becoming fear by experience of the motherly providence, which is the first comprehensible form of that love which in due time calls forth ideal worship of the Infinite God, if God has been adequately named in natural sympathetic conversation with an earnest self-persuasion but without sanctimonious affectation. Unless you have unaffected spontaneity of faith yourselves, you should not dare to talk about God to the child.

The religious nurture which Froebel proposes therefore consists simply in so living with children as to preserve their primeval joy by tenderly and reverently respecting it, as that human instinct prompts which is in the highest power in the mother. Sympathetic tenderness is the first of all means for moral culture. The child's faith in God must be cherished into self-reliance. There is a self-distrust that is really a distrust of God, and no harm we can do a child is so great as to lead it to doubt its own spontaneity. The common religious teacher—even a conscientious mother—sometimes does this, and so far from nurturing the child's conscious union with God, starts a morbid self-consciousness, the opposite of religious peace. In order not to make this mistake, let the mother and kindergartner read and ponder Froebel's Mother Love and Cossetting Songs.[12]

If you ask me what aid the moral culture derives from the religious nurture, I reply, the name Heavenly Father, given to the inmost consciousness, keeps the heart happy and the will self-respecting, by preventing those indefinite fears, incident to a sense of helplessness, which engenders selfishness. Hope and Faith are correlatives, and conscious or necessary means of goodness (which is enacted thereby), not agonies of will in the absence of this support. In the majority of cases moral discouragement is the secret of children's naughtiness; and, as Dr. Channing used to say, "there is nothing fatal to child or man but discouragement," which often exists close beside manifestations of pride and self-will.

When I kept school, in my earlier life, I became the confidante of many cases of wrong-doing and conscious wrong feeling. Sometimes the confidentialness was altogether spontaneous on the part of the children, and in other cases I took the initiative, drawing out the confidence, by intervening on occasion to console and help, especially when I saw that the sensibility had been wounded, or there was moral puzzle. And my experience and observation in this line justified the faith in which I began to keep school; viz., that children are all but perfectly good, in all cases, and are never so grateful for anything else, when they find themselves naughty, as for spiritual and moral help, given as God gives, "upbraiding not."

When they are not grateful for moral help, it is the fault or mistake of the grown-up counsellor. Even in the worst cases I always took it for granted that nevertheless they loved goodness better than the naughty self which for the hour had got the victory over the better self. Spiritual being, whether finite or infinite, is only to be discerned by aspiring faith. Yet I do not think it right or wise to suggest to little children that their wrong-doings, which are more weaknesses than presumptions, are sins against God. Children can comprehend their relations to each other, and the violation of each other's rights to happiness, and can be easily led to sympathize with the pain or inconvenience of those they make suffer, which touches their sense of justice and generosity; they can appreciate wrong and its consequences to their equals and to themselves in the present life. But God is too great to be injured by them; and to bring God to their imagination as personally angry with them, overwhelms thought, and annihilates all sense of responsibility, with all self-respect. Children can comprehend perfectly that wrong-doing, in particular cases, is an injury to themselves, as well as a harm to their neighbor; also that they forfeit, for the time being, their privilege of being, as it were, in partnership with God in making others happy, as well as being companions with Him in making things grow; and an occasional hint of this, when they are very happy and successful, is well. But to suggest that they are forfeiting this privilege of divine companionship and partnership, is quite painful enough, be this forfeiture ever so partial. Old sinners are to be disciplined, perhaps, by that love of God which speaks in the thunder, the earthquake, and fire, breaking through the crust of selfish habit to awaken attention to the still, small voice of conscience, in which alone the Lord is in person. But the naughty child, at his worst, needs only to think of God as sorry for him, and "waiting to be gracious," like the father of the prodigal son.

I can illustrate this by anecdotes of a child to whose moral life I was obliged to call in the aid of the religious sentiment, and even of the specific Christian revelation of pardon for all past wrong repented. It was the case of a very sensitive child of nine years of age, whose mother was gifted with the finest imagination and moral instincts, but was married to a cold, Dombey-like husband, whom she unfortunately thought superior to herself, whom she idealized, and endeavored to make her children satisfactory to his worldly ideal. The result in their characters was more or less disastrous to each, ending with the suicide of one. This child's conscience of the duty of satisfying both parents I soon found to be abnormal; and her sense of her father's contempt for her intellect, and her mother's painstaking that she should satisfy him, so worked on her sensibility that it suspended her reasoning powers; and no matter what it was she failed in, whether in missing an answer to a question in arithmetic, or in failure of good temper when tormented, she fell into despair. I endeavored to show her that a mistake in any school exercise was no crime, but only made an occasion for her learning more thoroughly the thing in hand, and to show her that, unless she had fortitude to bear failures, and courage and hope to overcome them, I could not help her out of them; and I never rebuked any naughty manifestation of a moral character of any one in her presence, but she would burst into tears, and tell me how much naughtier she was. One Monday morning I asked my children, as I was wont to do, if there was anything interesting that they had heard at church or Sunday-school the day before, when, almost with a shriek, she cried out, "Oh, don't ask me that." I said gently, "Come with me into my chamber," which she did, crying all the while. "Mr. Greenwood preached about the prayers, and he said we should not look about the church, or think of anything else, while the service was being read; and I always do, and I can't help it, because I am so bad." I took her into my arms, and said, "It is a sure proof that you are not bad, that you are so distressed at the thought of doing wrong. Bad people do not care, and so they grow worse and worse; but your conscience seems to forget the Heavenly Father, who did not give it to you to discourage you, but to help you to see what way you must not go, and to remind you that He is close by to help your good resolution, which is the prayer of your will."

"But I read in a hymn that God sets down everything we do wrong in a book; and at the judgment day He will read it all out to the assembled universe. I told a lie once."

"Did you?" said I, tenderly. "Tell me all about how you came to." "I cannot," said she, "because then I should have to tell something bad about somebody else, which I must not." "How long ago was it?" "It was when we were living at ——." I saw by this that it was several years before.

She had a little brother, of whom she was very fond. I took hold of a locket that she wore about her neck, that contained the hair of the lady for whom she was named, and the memory of whose great virtues had been impressed on her imagination, and said:—

"What if Edward should take this locket and break it, and take out the hair and throw it in the fire?" With a great deal of energy she said:—

"He never would do such a naughty thing."

"He might do it without being naughty; he would not know that you never could get any more of Miss ——'s hair; and he would do it from innocent curiosity—and what if he should do it, what would you do?"

"Why, I should tell him he was a very naughty boy, meddling with other people's things, and that he had done something that he could never make up, for there was no more of that hair."

"Well," said I, "and I suppose you would say that, very likely crying, and if he seeing that he had given you such pain, should begin to cry, and should cry all the rest of the day, and cry himself to sleep, and when he waked in the morning should begin to cry again, and should cry all day for weeks—what would you do?"

"Why, I should tell him I was sorry to lose my locket, but I could bear it, and he must forget about it, for he did not know what a mischief he was doing, and I should take him out to walk, and amuse him, and do everything to make him forget it."

"Why should you do all this?"

"Because I love him," she said.

"Do you believe you love him better than God loves you?"

With a look of surprise, she said, "Does God love us the same way we love?"

"There is but one kind of love," I said, "and I really think He would like to have you forget that lie you told so long ago, without thinking how wrong it was, because you were thinking of something else, just as Edward was only thinking he wanted to see what was under the glass of the locket."

She looked at me wistfully.

"Did you ever read about Jesus Christ in the New Testament?" said I.

"Yes, and I hate to."

"Why?"

"Because you know everybody says we must be like Him, and He never did anything wrong, and I cannot be like Him, for I do wrong of all kinds—beside that lie, and you know how cross I am."

"O," said I, "I do not wonder you feel discouraged if you think that you must be as good as Jesus Christ right away, to begin with; but Jesus Christ came into the world to say a word that is the most important word in the New Testament, and if He had not said it, He would have done us more harm than good with His perfect example, discouraging us entirely."

"What was that word?" she asked, with the most eager interest.

"Pardon," said I, "for all past wrong-doing that you are sorry for."

"Oh, Miss Peabody, I never thought of the meaning of that word before."

"Yes, darling," said I, "and that is the reason of all your trouble. Now think of it always; and thank God that He sent Jesus to say it. That lie of yours God has pardoned long ago, just as you would have pardoned little Edward. We all do wrong things when we are children, and learn by doing them not to do them again. Now from to-day begin all your life over again. When you miss in your lessons, instead of crying, just let it go, and ask me to help you try again. So in making other mistakes, and when you feel cross, which comes in your case because you are so easily discouraged,—for that makes you have dyspepsia,—just forget it as soon as possible and go and do something pleasant, and think that God loves you, and only lets you do wrong to show you that you need to be getting wisdom all the time, and you will grow stronger continually, and the older you grow, the better you will understand."

I never knew a moral crisis in any child's life so marked as this was. She had a very hard path in life to walk and suffered much, but she never again lost the hope by which we live, and at length, full of years, joined "the Choir Invisible," from which commanding standpoint she doubtless sees the end from the beginning, and how God's redeeming Providence completes His creation of a free agent. What I insist upon is, that a child should never be left to doubt, but should always be helped to feel sure that God is loving him better than he loves himself; is sorry far more than angry with him when he has done wrong, and therefore it is that He will not let him succeed in doing wrong, but has so arranged things that the wrong always gets checked; that God is especially good precisely because He "makes the ways of the transgressor hard." Never let the Infinite Power appear to the naughty child's imagination as punishing, but only as encouraging, inspiring, helping! It is recorded as characteristic of the highest manifestation of God and Educator of man, who appeared to His most spiritual disciple as the "Eternal Word made flesh," that He did not "quench the smoking flax or bruise the broken reed," but distilled upon humanity—especially in its flowering stage—the gentle dews of blessing,—taking little children in His arms to bless them.

You may ask, But what if a child proves in some instances incorrigible to the method of love? What shall we do then? I think it will be sufficient to ask any Christian, What did Jesus do when the Jews proved insensible and incorrigible to his long-suffering, brotherly love, making it the occasion of their own capital crime? Did he abandon the method of love when they nailed him to the cross, or even doubt it? Let us dwell on this a little. Was it not the special trial of Jesus Christ's human life, the last temptation through which he was constrained by his apparent failure of accomplishing the work of redeeming Israel, by leading them of their own selves to judge and do what is right to cry out, My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me? For instead of their coming to him to get the waters of life he offered, they had made it the very act of their religion to murder him as a blasphemer. I ask, Did he, even then, exchange his method of forbearing love for cursing? Did he not, even then, hold fast to the principle of brotherliness by commending his spirit (which was his work) into the hands of the Father, with the words: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do"; showing that he felt that this ignorance was infinitely more pitiable than his own apparently forgotten bodily agonies? And, in this great humane act of forbearance, and divine act of faith did he not reveal in its fulness the loving character of God, whom he had always called Father, and with whom he proved himself one by this very token, which converted the Jewish thief and the Roman centurion on the spot; and which, step by step, is slowly but surely (by inspiring his disciples with the same spirit and method of dealing with their fellow-beings) converting the world? The moment of despair of an immediate spiritual good we are trying to do, is often the moment of our doing a higher and greater good.

As Jesus resigned his own finite will, as the son of David, which was fixed on bringing the Jewish nation to fulfil its national mission of "blessing all the families of the earth," which he understood to be the motive inspiration of Abraham's emigration from Babylonian civilization into the wilderness; and as he accepted the will of his Father, which seemed to be that the privilege to do this patriotic duty was not granted to him as he had grown up thinking, the will was lifted, and he found himself doing more—becoming the Saviour, not of the nation of the Jews merely, but of all men, and so sat down on the right hand of God. For he proved himself to the heart of all humanity, God's Son, loving, not for the sake of men's reciprocation and appreciation of himself, but for the sake of the salvation of humanity. Therefore Christ's method is the one for every man and woman on all planes of activity, however humble. I have heard more than one mother say, that when they had tried every method they knew of to influence their child to give up some wrong object on which the irrefragable free will was bent, and all tender and violent measures had failed, the irrepressible tears of their despairing love had most unexpectedly melted the hardness of self-will at once, and effected the cure. Love, when it is understood, is irresistible. Our sacred oracles teach us that the origin of evil is in a doubt of God's love. In Eden it was a suspicion that He had some selfish ends in forbidding even one thing in a world of free gifts.

The conquest of evil, on the other hand, they represent, was in Jesus Christ's trusting God's love, in a lost world, amidst the physical agonies of his cross, and the moral anguish of a disappointment of the grandest aim that ever one born of woman had set to himself for his life-work. In faithfully trying to do the lesser good just at hand, he developed the power to save all men from their sins; not merely his own people.

To the training class of kindergartners I would say, your special work is rather to prevent, than to conquer sin, in the objects of your care; therefore you should, in your own imagination, associate yourself with God creating, first leading children to realize that all He has made is very good and must be kept so, which is giving the religious nurture.

That great word of Froebel, man is a creative being, has said in the world of education, whether religious, moral, or intellectual, "Let there be light," and is never to be forgotten in its uttermost meaning.

In this truth you will find an infinite resource of hope and successful energy. You may think that you apprehend and accept the scope of this pregnant word, because you do not reject it as a proposition; but partial knowledge is often deluding, and not doubting is far from efficient conviction, which a comprehensive and penetrating understanding of a principle gives. Let me illustrate this illusion of thinking we comprehend when we do not, by some of Froebel's gifts.

Think of the four last gifts of Froebel in their wholeness of form, as cubes. When these cubes are uncovered and you recognize them as eight, or twenty-seven, or thirty-six wooden, solid, six-sided, eight-cornered, twelve-edged units, and see the relations of their properties in nature, it may seem to you as if you exhaustively knew the cube; but you do not if you have omitted to notice one property inherent in it, more important because pregnant with more consequences than any other property,—I mean its divisibility by means of which its possible transformations are innumerable, every transformation presenting the symmetry of the original in a new variety of beauty, so that if you will give to a child one of these divisible cubes and suggest to him the clue of the law of connecting contrasts, which is the law of all production, he will never tire (except physically) of making the new combinations, and seeking through each and all, that sense of a whole which was the first impression. It is by reason of its divisibility, that the cube can be transformed infinitely. Now you may conceive the nature of man as a whole, and observe a great many of his attributes, and yet not see the greatest,—his creativeness, whose consequences are infinite.

Educational science has, in fact, generally omitted to do this in the past, and treated a child according to the attributes it recognized; but, because before Froebel's day man had not been recognized by the reflective mind as a creative being, it had not been realized that he can be transformed, or transform himself as well as his surroundings, infinitely, ever producing something new, and hence that there may be, in the lapse of ages, as much variety in human production as there is in God's workings in the Universe.

It is, in short, because education has not hitherto conceived of man as creative, that there has been so much dead uniformity and lifeless repetition on the plane of humanity; and that a general characteristic of educational systems hitherto has been a mechanical running of the human being into certain fixed moulds, not only irrespective of individual tendencies, but antagonistic to the universal creative impulse, which is the profoundest characteristic of man, and which, not being understood, has, in a great measure, proved only a source of disorder, and given a bad name with people of genius to educational art (although it is the highest of all the high arts), its material, if you will forgive the verbal ambiguity, being living spirit.

Richard Wagner has said that "were it not for education, all men would be geniuses, for they are endowed at birth with the passionate pursuit of the new, needing only liberty and opportunity for self-direction."

Liberty and opportunity! There could not be a better description of Froebel's principle and method of education.

To give liberty and opportunity to the creative principle of the child is just the work you have to do; but observe, this is not to leave him to the caprices of an uneducated will. There is neither liberty nor opportunity in that!

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," moral as well as political; and before the child is old enough to appreciate this, and be vigilant for himself, the educator must do so for him, genially, but firmly intervening to secure to his mind that pause before action on the moral, the artistic, and intellectual plane, that the Friends recognize to be necessary before acting on the spiritual plane.

The ways of caprice are multitudinous,—the way of life is one for each individual, and is pointed out to the pausing attentive mind by the Father, who speaks to us, within, forever; but whose voice can only be heard when listened to by intention; even on the intellectual plane, we do not let the will go storming on, without the guidance of law, which is the voice of the very present Creator heard in the silence of reflection on perceived facts and truths.

There is a right and a wrong way of doing everything,—always. The right way will always produce a thing of use or of beauty, whose reaction on the mind of the producer cultivates his mind, or grows the human understanding; but this right way is only to be discovered in that pause between impulse and action which is the characteristic discrimination of man from all other animals, and must be secured for the child by the care of his educators—even when he is only playing, or the play will tire instead of exhilarate.

Hence it is not enough, though it is indispensable, to guide children's activity while it is still irreflective to spontaneously make forms of beauty and use with its playthings and materials of occupation; but after they have made something, you are to make them stop and look back (not every time, but often), and go over in thought, and put into words, what they have done, and lead them to observe all the properties and relations of the thing that are obvious to the childish sense; and when you have thus secured an impression of the means by which order is attained, you have given an experimental knowledge of there being a spiritual order; that is, a world of individual laws and a law-giver independent of human will and meant to lift it into the divine. Those of you who are Friends will agree with me that human beings can manifest no spiritual beauty or moral power, except so far as they listen to the Shepherd of souls in the holy pause of the hours of worship, a voice always suggesting loving activity. And cannot you see, that no artistic production, no intellectual work, is possible without listening, in the pause of reflection for the word of the law of beauty or use, that the Creator of the intellect gives? and which makes art and science the worship of God with the mind?

The most important, the crowning work of the kindergartner, is to secure to the child this moment of reflection in the midst of his play and work on all planes of life; and you do so by sympathetically playing with him and gently guiding his unthinking, impulsive activity, and asking him what he has done and is going to do, and not letting him do anything till he seeks to do the symmetrical or, at least, the useful thing. It is not every movement that will produce the satisfactory result. It is thus that the child learns that there is a greater mind than his own, or even than his teacher's mind, present with him guiding the intellect, for artistic principles flow into the mind from an Eternal source, no less than do moral and spiritual principles. In short, the true method of the intellect is the perpetual gift of a very present God, as much as the true method of the heart and soul.

Man, then, in the last analysis, is a creative being; and the Froebel education has for its final object, to give him the dominion over everything in the earth; put all the cosmic forces into his hands,—as well as to bring him into the communion of love with his fellows; thus lifting his whole nature to the height of sitting down with our Elder brother on the throne, with the Universal Father.

You should keep this great idea before you, and it will enable you to use the technique that you have been learning, with a certain freedom as well as fidelity, guiding these playful exercises in such an order as you may find agreeable and salutary for them; and to check caprice, you must insist that, in these appointed times, they do the appointed things, or do nothing, for they will generally conclude to do the thing in hand, rather than do nothing while all their companions are doing their work; and when they are doing nothing, they will have time for reflection, and to hear the inward voice of law, with the opportunity voluntarily to accept it. Thus does God give to all his children "to have life in themselves," and to bring out their whole likeness to Himself, which proves that they are not his bond slaves,—like the lower animals,—but sons. If there are not in the universe two leaves that are alike, still less are there two souls that are alike. But leaves and souls, after all, are alike in more than they are different. You can provide action for all the instincts that children have in common, and create a common consciousness to a certain extent, which is the common sense; but what is peculiar to each, and makes the independent individual, is his own secret, and you can only help that to flower and fruitage by giving him the conditions of free, independent action, opening the inward eye and sharpening the inward ear for communication with Him who alone can adequately guide the will to the satisfaction of all the sensibilities of the heart, and the powers of intellect, and all the creative energies: but the religious and moral principles I shall endeavor to define are general, not peculiar to, but inclusive of, the kindergarten plan of education. To have these principles clear and disengaged from the accidental associations of the various denominations of the church, all of which (and also with many of those outside of any visible church) unite in that faith in God, and that disinterested love of humanity, which was historically enacted on earth by Jesus Christ, and into which every child born on the earth should be brought before he is old enough to appreciate those intellectual distinctions which make different creeds; because then the kindergartner will be able to meet children on the high plane of life where their angels (does not that mean their spiritual instincts or ideals?) behold the face of the Father, and only then will the kindergartner practically enter into Froebel's method of living with the children, and communing with their innocence.

I see a great deal of this practical application in the kindergartens kept by the well-trained kindergartners; and especially when they are mothers, who unquestionably make the best kindergartners (other things being equal), because it is easier for mothers to divine the consciousness of their children. In the opening hour of the kindergarten, when the kindergartner interchanges the songs and hymns which the children choose, or at least agree to, with real free conversation, in which each child has a chance to tell what is uppermost in his little mind, the very most important work of the kindergartner is done. It has been my privilege to listen to much of this in the kindergartens kept severally by the mothers, who make the children feel that they are interested in whatever they say, however apparently trivial is the subject, and who answer genially, connecting it with something else, and so organizing the reflective powers of the children, that everything they think is seen to be a part of the process of moral, religious, and even intellectual growth.

The possibility of doing this will prove to any one who has any heart and imagination that it is no mere poetic phrase, but a profound spiritual truth, that "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," that children do "come from God who is their home, trailing clouds of glory," and for a time

Of course all the opening conversation need not be on the moral and religious planes, but some of it should lead into explanations of nature and of the common life of this work-day world, improving dexterity and common sense; but one can hardly talk with children about anything, in a genuine way, that does not bring out of them some religious or moral expression. I think it is in connection with these conversations to which the children furnish by their spontaneous confidences the vital points, round which the thoughts of the whole little company shall revolve, that the teacher can connect her own story-telling.

For such genuine conversation the necessary prerequisite on the part of the teacher is a real faith in children's being the breath of God in their Essence.

Then she will not have any will-work of her own, but listen to hear what the child is attending to, be it nothing but a bit of string, which, of course, must have a certain length that can be measured, and with which other things may be measured, and which is made of material that has passed perhaps through the hands of many manufacturers, and which in its elements at least was a growth of nature, all whose works bear witness to the being of God; for God's throne may be reached from the ground of childish play as certainly and readily as from many a pulpit and cathedral, if not more so.

A child whose affection for his companions and for the personages of a story told by the kindergartner, and who sees the connection of some little playful or other experience that he tells as his story for the morning, is engaged in a service of God, more vitally bearing on his growth in grace than any mere repetition of prayers. A play bringing out little kindnesses, sweet courtesies, gentle self-adjustments to his companions, the asking and giving of forgiveness for little discourtesies or grave wrong-doings, brings the child nearer God than any spoken words of worship can, the joy attending such innocent sweetness being the proof of the vital union of his soul with a very present God.

So the work of the good Samaritan, though he was doubtless thinking only of the individual he was comforting, and not at all of God, was recognized by Christ as a real act of worship; for it was the fulfilment of the second commandment like unto the first.

The time will come, I confidently believe, when all religionists of whatever denomination will recognize that the favorite doctrines and formalities which distinguish them from each other are a mere superficial crust of that true spiritual life which is to be lived when the grown-up shall all become as little children, who feel that,

In speaking of the ceremonies of the Temple worship, which Moses made symbolical of all the virtues of life, moral and religious, but which in Paul's day had fallen into such a mere ritual that this great Apostle said that the Holy Ghost was not bodily exercise, but a hopeful, faithful charity of thought, feeling, and deed; and this is what children can be guided into from the beginning, provided the kindergartner knows how to converse and play with them instead of talking to them and coercing them ever so kindly into acting out her will. The play of childhood is the most genuine and intense life that is lived, body, heart, and will conspiring entirely; and it is by respecting the child's will and heart that you really help instead of hindering this unification of his threefold nature, which corresponds to the Trinity of the Supreme Being and prevents that from becoming a bewildering tritheism in his conception.

A child cannot be just unless he is loving, nor attain the freedom of moral dignity unless he asserts himself; and there is no way to nurture this self-respect except to express respect to him, by being as courteous to him as you are to any adult, always asking him to explain himself and his own motives, when he seems to be in the wrong, before you condemn him.

I think I have gained some of the deepest insights I have ever had into Divine Truth, by discovering what was the motive thought of some child, who did what seemed inexplicable, till he told me, or I had divined, his secret reason.

It is not mothers alone who can charm out of children their secret, as those know who have seen some maiden kindergartners talk with their pupils in the opening exercises; but those who are not mothers will always do well to observe carefully those who are. On the other hand, mothers have to guard themselves against exaggerating their own children's natures comparatively. I have known some of the best mothers in the world do that, so as to be practically of bad influence over children not their own.

Mothers who would be and can be the best kindergartners should therefore none the less study Froebel's science carefully and humbly.

All children are alike in having the threefold nature. I wish I had time to tell of a hundred kindergarten experiences that have come under my observation, in which the respectful, genial kindergartner has assisted in some moral development, whose occasion was very trivial to the superficial observer.

Herein lies the importance of prefacing the school with the kindergarten, that in it all the virtues and Christian graces can be unconsciously practised on the plane of play, which is the moral gymnasium of mankind.

This is the meaning of Solomon's wise saying, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." But the nature, which is the image of the Divine Nature, cannot be mechanically, but must be morally and spiritually, trained; that is, addressed and treated as free agency.

The salutation of the Brahmin to his youthful son, no less than to his equal in age, is "to the divinity which is in you I do homage." This is one of the gleams of light from the lost Paradise in which man was created, and to which we hope the kindergarten is to more than restore the race, when it shall have become the universally applied principle of culture for human beings. (See Appendix, Note F.)