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.