hearing, and partially of taste and smell, by the scarlet fever, which
left her but one avenue of knowledge of material things,--the sense of
touch. But through that the practical benevolence of Dr. Howe won a way
to her imprisoned spirit, and opened communication of thought with her
by means of words; and she even learned to read in the raised type for
the blind. The whole story is immensely interesting and important to any
teacher. She had been taught enough of the properties of matter to be
able to work on and with _things_, and moral science could be taught her
through her own and others' activity; but how was she to be taught about
God and spiritual things? Dr. Howe reserved to himself to speak to her
of God, forbidding all others to do so, and watched for his opportunity.
My sister Sophia went over to the asylum to model Laura's bust, and one
day asked her teacher (who was with her always) to translate into spoken
words the conversation that she saw was passing between them by means
of the hand language. Very soon occurred the following:--
_Laura._ I want to go to walk.
_Teacher._ You cannot go to-day, because it rains.
_Laura._ Who makes it rain?
Instead of making a direct reply, the teacher went on to explain how
moisture exhaled from the earth by the action of the sun, and was
collected in masses which were called clouds, and when the clouds were
so full as to be heavier than the air, it fell to the earth in drops of
rain.
Laura said, reverently, "God is very full."
The teacher was startled, and said, "Who told you about God?"
_Laura._ No one told me. The Doctor is going to tell me about him when I
know more words. But I think about God all times.
The teacher said to my sister, "This is very important," and went to
tell the Doctor, who was a good deal moved, but found himself at
somewhat of a loss. That evening he came to a little gathering at our
house to talk about it. He said that nearly a year before, if not
longer, Laura had come upon the word _God_ in her reading, and
immediately stopped and asked the meaning of the word. According to his
directions, she was then sent to him, and he was so anxious not to do
any harm, especially not to frighten her with the idea of Infinite Power
(which is the main element of our conception of God, even eighteen
hundred years after Christ's manifestation of Infinite _Love_), that he
was embarrassed, and said to her that she did not yet know other words
enough to explain the word _God_, but when she had learned more words,
he would tell her, and meanwhile he wished she would not ask any one
else. But now he was pondering what was the best way to proceed. I
suggested that perhaps Laura could teach him more than he could teach
her about God, and asked what was the sentence in which she had found
the word. But this he had never known. It was then suggested that
probably the word had explained itself, for no sentence could possibly
contain the word, not even in an exclamation, that would not suggest to
such a perfectly clear thinking mind as Laura had always shown, the fact
of supreme love or wisdom. The company present proved this by trying to
make sentences. I do not know what he finally concluded to do or say to
Laura. I think certainly that the true way would have been to have drawn
her out, and according to what she said or seemed to need, to have
shaped whatever teaching he had to give, taking great care not to negate
any of her positive assertions; for we could not doubt that God was
manifesting himself to the imagination of her heart, if not yet in the
forms of the human understanding.
If I had known how to use the hand language, I would have solicited the
privilege of going to learn what this hermit soul could have told me
before it was darkened by our traditional theology, which did not
originate in children,--
"On whom those truths do rest
That we are toiling all our lives to find,"
but in the minds of old sinners who had lost the original purity of soul
that "sees God." "I think about God all times!" How interesting it would
be to know exactly what she thought! That it was nothing terrific or
painful was evident from her habitual mood, which was even joyous. So
careful had the Doctor been to educate every bodily and mental activity,
that she had none of that discouragement, inelasticity, and indolence of
mind, which comes of want of success in childish effort. A genial,
educating assistance was always around her, but careful not to weaken
her by doing anything for her that she could learn to do for herself.
Obstacles, therefore, only stimulated her efforts, and so delightful was
her sense of overcoming them, that, for instance, she would laugh
exultingly when sewing if her thread became knotted, or if in anything
she was doing there was some little difficulty to be surmounted. Her
faith in herself seemed never to have been broken; but she rested on the
fulcrum of Infinite God, in whom she "lives and moves and has her
being."
The only thing we ought to do in the religious nurture of childhood is
to _preserve_ this faith which comes from the child's seeing God even
more clearly and certainly than it can see outward things. See to it
that you use language so as more clearly to define and not to blot out
the divine vision, as old Dr. Barnard's cocked hat and black silk gown
and seat in the clouds eclipsed the sweet face with which my Creator
seemed to own me as his child, as I told you in my last lecture.
Another mistake that was made in my religious education was during a
visit that I made to a great-aunt when I was five years old, and was
taught to say the Lord's prayer by the servant who put me to bed. I got
the idea that some unknown evil might happen to me in my sleep if I did
not do this, and was also told that God would be displeased with me if I
thought about anything else when I was saying it. But I was
involuntarily conscious of having my mind full of images, while the
words of the prayer were empty vocables. In order to prevent the
intruding thoughts, I would try to rush through the words quickly, going
back to the beginning over and over again. But this artificial duty was
not associated with the instruction of my mother, who was in general
very happy in what she said to me about God, dwelling on his goodness,
referring to it everything delightful, making Sunday a day of quiet but
constant enjoyment, letting us paint, and cut paper, with other little
amusements, devoting herself to making us happy, while the rest of the
week she was busy; for she kept a large school, and Sunday was, as she
often said, her only and blessed day of rest. Long after, at a time of
religious controversy and so-called revival, I was immensely aided by
hearing my mother say to a young aunt of mine who affirmed that St.
Paul, in saying that we must pray without ceasing was fanatically
unreasonable: "Yes, if praying meant saying over prayers; but spiritual
prayers mean a devotional attitude of mind towards God which we can have
whatever we are doing."
This sentence seemed to pour light into a shady place.
"Don't you _say prayers_, mama?" I said to her when aunt was gone.
"Not when I am alone," she said; "for God sees my thoughts and feelings,
and knows that I love him, and always want his help."
My mother had nothing of the martinet about her. She took it for granted
that upon the whole we wanted to do what was right. She was not apt to
give the worst, but the best interpretation to doubtful phenomena. She
believed that to treat a child with generous confidence invoked
generosity and truthfulness, and what was better than all the rest, she
did not _talk down_ to her children, but rather drew them up to her own
mental and moral level; and interlarded stories from Spenser's _Faerie
Queen_ and the Scriptures with stories of the kind and noble deeds of
real people around us. (See Appendix.)
Her religion was moral inspiration to herself and consolation for all
calamity, and always very naturally expressed. She more than corrected
her first mistake and inadequate talk with me about my Creator, by
telling me the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, when I was yet so very
young that my fancy clothed her words with grotesque images, but on the
whole did better justice to the _spirit_ of the emigration and the
ultimate results it has worked out for the world than the exact facts
that transpired in history. What I gained from my self-created mythology
was that my ancestors knew themselves to be God's children, whom neither
tyrannizing king nor priest had any right to prevent from going to him
in prayer first hand, and that in order to do his will as their
consciences understood it, they left home and country and all the
comforts of civilization, and trusted themselves in a frail vessel to be
driven over a stormy ocean by the winds, at imminent peril from the
waves below, which would have swallowed them up, had not God, who loved
them, approved what they were doing, guided the ship (by a power
stronger than the wind, for it was his love) through the narrow opening
of Plymouth Harbor to the rock where I still seem to see them streaming
along, a procession of fair women in white robes as _sisters_ (for so I
had interpreted the word _ancestors_, who strangely enough were all
named _Ann_). I still seem to see these holy women kneel down in the
snow under the trees of the forest, and thank God for their safety from
the perils of the sea; and then go to work in the sense of his very
present help, and gather sticks to make a fire, and build shelters from
the weather with the branches of the trees. Among these rude buildings
my mother took pains to tell me that they built a schoolhouse where all
the children were to be taught to read the Bible.
There is nothing for which I thank my mother and my God more than for
this grand impression of all-inspiring love to God, and of
all-conquering duty to posterity, thus made on my childish imagination,
and its association with the idea of personal freedom and independent
action. It never could have been made except by one who herself had
faith in God, and believed that he had made all men free to come to him,
and also that the mother was his first appointed mouthpiece. The
fanciful images which were the effect of the shortcomings of my
ignorance did not hide the vital truths which I was as open to accept
then as now; namely, that God is my Father, the Father of all souls,
from whom no one has a right to shut off another.
That first schoolhouse, which I fancied that I saw the "Ann Sisters"
building, taught me as no mere words ever could have done, that it was
the most acceptable service to God to educate all his children to know
him and his works. That first idea of human duty I have never outgrown,
but still believe universal education is the true culture of the
American people, the reasonable service they owe to him who called them
out of the Old World to be a nation of individuals. There was nothing
fatal, therefore, in that first false notion of God (which I received
for a time), though it was for a time more of an evil to me than it
would have been to a child less subjective, or of more lively perception
of things without. Liveliness of perception brings so many things before
the mind, and so stimulates its volatility, that it undoubtedly prevents
the stereotyping of many a single impression and fancy that does
injustice to spiritual truths; and false impressions, unless strongly
associated with terror or some other morbid sensibility, do not take
hold of a child so strongly as the images that are consistent with the
eternal laws of mental evolution, such, for instance, as that human face
divine with which I had instantaneously clothed my intuition of God, and
which, notwithstanding its temporary eclipse, has haunted me all my
life.
It is very encouraging to the educator to know that the innocent soul of
childhood has so much more affinity with truth than with falsehood,
because the best and most careful educator cannot sequestrate children
entirely from false impressions. But what finds no echo in the spirit
passes off, unless the mind is shocked into passivity by fear or pain.
When the soul is active, it has a certain superiority to passive
impressions, and makes use of them as materials for imaginative
production. It is, therefore, desirable to keep children employed in
gentle activity which has successful results, and happy in the midst of
attractive natural surroundings, by which God is working with us in the
same purpose of educating the child, allowing us to be his partners, as
it were, in this work, because it educates us. It is not uncommon to
hear persons say that they would like to begin life all over again with
the knowledge they have gained from their life-experience. This we can
all do if we will in imagination really _live with our children_, as
Froebel says, whose motto explains what Christ meant when he bids us to
be converted and become little children.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] _Idea_ is a word I always use in the sense of _insight_, as Plato
uses it, rather than in the sense of _notion_, as Locke uses it.
[10] See note A in Appendix, and the Record of a School.
LECTURE VI.
A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION.
PART FIRST.
I SAID in my last lecture that had I possessed the power to talk in
Laura Bridgeman's hand, I should have begged Dr. Howe to let me have
some conversation with her after she said that she "thought about God
all times"; not that I felt that I could teach her, but that I might
learn what God had taught her concerning Himself. It was a wonderful
chance for a most important psychological observation of the innocent
mind of childhood, and would have afforded, doubtless, a luminous
illustration of the truth that the human soul is also a divine
personality justifying the method initiated by Froebel of conversing
with the children in the Socratic manner.
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
"Grief, past all balsam and relief,"
as Mr. Emerson has sung.
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."