development arising from his mother's timid plan with him, he inherited
from both parents, and perhaps from remoter ancestry, an individuality
of mind that was not at all imaginative; which did not, however, exclude
him from spiritual truth, for that is not the work of imagination, but
is discerned by the spiritual sense, being as objective as what is
discerned by the five senses (a transcendental objective, not a material
one). The respectful interest with which I treated him gave him a happy
confidence in his own thought, which was my opportunity for observing
the natural order of mental development. In short, the conversation we
had was a genuine one as between equals, unless, indeed, he was the
superior in giving to me the divine laws of the spiritual order. He
often surprised me by his next question, and was so disarmed of all fear
by my consideration and tenderness, that he revealed that which is
always the individual's secret, and I gained as much as he did by the
conversations, and certainly I gained certainty in what was previously
only conjecture on my part. I was sometimes obliged to say I did not
know, and remember his asking me with surprise, "Don't you know
everything?" "Oh, no!" said I. "Only our good friend knows everything
and gives us our thoughts all the time. Doesn't he give new thoughts to
you every day?"
"Yes, he gives me a great many new thoughts all the time," he replied
with animation. On another occasion, when I had become perfectly
exhausted in answering his questions, I said to him:--
"I am very tired, but I will answer that question, provided you will not
ask me another before dinner."
As he walked away he said, "Oh, I wish I had asked another question
instead of that!"
"Well," said I, "what? Perhaps I will answer that one."
Turning back, he said eagerly, "Will our good friend answer all my
questions when I go into the sky?"
I said, "Yes, every one; for he knows everything, and can never be
tired."
The expression of complete satisfaction with which he went away from me
was most expressive.
You will observe his expression of "when I go into the sky," and
consider it together with the words that he interpolated saying, "I have
a good friend up in the sky," in repeating to Mrs. Doyle that first
morning when I had told him that his good friend who gave him thoughts,
and joy, and goodness, and love, had a sky full of goodness. The sky is
the natural symbol of the unbounded and infinite and the essentially
spiritual, and the conception of GOD into which I had led him, and which
I named his good friend, pervaded all space.
The subsequent questions of how GOD looked, and upon His whereabouts,
and the conversation on this, by identifying Him with the Love that he
felt within himself, had revealed to him _Immortality_ before he had
defined mortality.
The GOD he felt within him in his conscious Love and without him in all
manifestations of beauty and power, gave him assurance that he would be
sometime wherever GOD was. I have lost the connection and place in the
narrative of another conversation I had with him on the omnipresence of
GOD. He often had said his thoughts were in his head, and his feelings
were in his bosom. One day he was sitting in my lap close to a table,
with his feet bare, and I put my hand under the table and pinched his
toe. He said:--
"What are you pinching my toe for?"
I said, "How do you know I pinched your toe? you cannot see what I am
doing under the table."
"I think you pinched my toe, because I felt it."
"I thought all your thoughts were in your head, and all your feelings in
your bosom, not in your toes."
"My feelings are all over my body," said he; "and when you pinched my
toe, the feeling ran right into my head and turned into a thought."
"So you see," said I, "that you live all over your body and in any part
of it, just as your Heavenly Father lives all over the world and in
everything at once."
"Yes," said he, "I did not know how that was before."
The date of this conversation was some weeks, perhaps months, from the
beginning of our intercourse, as I know from the use of the word
_Heavenly Father_, which came after a time to take the place of _good
friend_, and it was preceded by some other conversations. He was always
overflowing with expressions of love to me. When I gave him anything, he
would embrace me, and I would ask, "Which do you love best, me or the
thing given?" (an apple perhaps, or whatever it might be). He would
always say, "You, you." Once he said, "I love you more than all the
apples in the world." Once when he was kissing my hand, I said, "Which
do you love best, me or my hand?"
"I love both," he said.
I persisted, and said, "Supposing my hand was cut off, would you love me
as well?"
"I should love you a great deal more," said he, energetically; "for it
would hurt you so to have your poor hand cut off. Would it not hurt you
dreadfully?"
"I suppose it would, but by and by it would get well and what I want to
know is, whether you would love me as well without my hand as with it?"
He still declared he should love me more. I then said, "So you see my
hand is not me. It is only one of the things the Heavenly Father gave me
to make things with, and He gave me my feet to walk with, and eyes to
see with; but my eyes and ears and tongue are not me; and if I should
lose them all, still I would be all of myself, and you could love me?"
"Yes," said he; "but I don't want you to lose any of those things, for I
love them all together."
My object in these conversations was to see if he would separate in
thought the finite material body from the conscious soul or _himself_,
as I preferred to say, for to speak of one's self as a _soul_ makes what
is essentially subjective as objective as we desire to make the body,
the use of which is to reveal to others the feelings and thoughts of the
individual that otherwise the finite apprehension could not seize. I was
endeavoring to prepare him to minister to his mother, when I could
persuade her to let him know the fact of death, by appreciating and
defining that crisis of life as a step onward into the deep
consciousness of immortality, which I believed would lift her out of the
abyss into which her own consciousness seemed to fall at the utterance
of the word, in spite of all the intellectual views of immortality which
she had for many years cultivated, but which somehow did not meet her
exigency, when she felt herself on the brink of the separation of body
and mind. No intellectual process can give what the faith of childhood
has in its own immortality of which those who had the care of her
infancy had robbed her.
It was delightful to see how she enjoyed the child who had long been a
burden to her. She wanted him in her presence all the time with his
playthings, and to hear all our conversation, and that I should tell
her what we said in the little time that he could not be with her. She
declared that she never had known what the enjoyment of life was till
she had it in her sympathy with him. All the pleasures of intellect, and
also of personal affections of the happiest kind, were pale beside the
joy of this child--in his communion with GOD, who was in all his
thoughts, and had taken him from his dreariness and growing peevishness,
into that joy of childhood which Ruskin speaks of as so entirely out of
proportion to the occasions of its expression, and which still had no
painful excitement in it, but was simply a spontaneous outflow, not only
quickening his thoughts but informing his affections with generosity and
gratitude. The self that lost all sense of boundary, in its joy in the
unbounded, spread out to embrace all about it. He said one thing to me
which will, I think, explain to you what I mean. Of course, I was the
first person on whom the flood of his heart poured itself out, though he
did not stop with me, but also expressed his love to all with whom he
came into near or remote relation. When saying to me how much he loved
me, what a skyful of love he had for me, I said, "Yes, darling, I know
you love me as much as you can," he replied scornfully, "I love you a
great deal more than I can!" Was not that a wonderful expression of the
immortal essence of his love,--of Love Divine?
Without its being suggested to him to thank others for kindnesses, he
did so without a single exception. He would be taken to drive in the
carriage with his mother, and standing at the window, would shout with
delight at the things he saw on the way, and when he got home would
often run back to the gate to say, "Thank you, horsey!" and all his
habits of timidity were forgotten when the street musicians came by, and
he was allowed to take out pennies to them. Callers at the house, from
whom he used to shrink when they would have spoken to him, were in
wonder at his hospitable welcome and fearless but intelligent
interpositions in the conversation, which they thought indicated
precocity instead of backwardness. The length, breadth, and depth of all
the words Christ let fall in the last part of his life, of which I had
had some insight before, became doubly intelligible to me. I saw into
the beauty and meaning of mankind's being created in successive
generations, and I was thus prepared to enter into and appreciate
Froebel's ideas and methods, with which I did not become acquainted till
a quarter of a century later.
I want you to observe that in what I did there was simply the
spontaneous wisdom of love--love, not fondness, not desire of
reciprocation, but self-forgetting and reverent of its object. Only this
gives the creative method, or is the essence of creativeness, whether
human or divine.
You remember, in the memoir of Froebel with which I began this course of
lectures, it was said that he posed his elder brother with his
questionings of GOD's wisdom in the arrangement of the social sphere.
Unable to answer him, the instinct of his love led him to divert the
child's attention into a department of nature where apparent discords
were seen to be harmonized for the production of beauty and use, that
the poor little perplexed and bewildered child might enjoy himself
legitimately. He gave him the clue to the labyrinth and the strength to
conquer the Minotaur. He had no idea of educating, but only of
comforting. Thus, unconscious of any theory of education, he solved the
problem practically, first for the child Froebel himself, later for
mankind to whom the man Froebel has revealed it with such ample
illustrations as to make an era in human history that, as we hope, shall
retrieve the past. Childhood understood, leading in the promised
millennium of peace on earth and good will among men, will make mankind
forget the Babel confusion of its first experimenting, and enter into
the mutual understanding of the Pentecostal miracle.
LECTURE VII.
A PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION.
PART SECOND.
IN our little F.'s case, as it became perfectly plain to his mother that
he conceived clearly of God's embracing unbounded space as well as time
in His Infinite Essence, she became desirous of knowing how he would
receive the fact of death, so painfully and prematurely forced upon her
own soul,--whether his mind would leap the gulf in which hers seemed to
sink at the utterance of the word.
But the difficulty for him seemed to be to conceive of death at all. I
tried to approach the subject in such a manner that he should have the
initiative, as it were, in any conversation upon it. There was a poor
old man who occasionally passed the house in the clothes of a pauper,
supporting his steps with a stick. One day when he did so, F. asked me,
"What makes men old?" and before I had time to answer, added, "Mary [the
name of a former servant] used to say _many days_, when I asked her. Do
many days make men old?"
"Yes," said I, "just as many days make your clothes and shoes old. That
old man has walked on his poor old legs so long that they are quite worn
out, and he has looked so long with his eyes that they are dim, and
listened so long with his ears that they have grown dull, and his back
has grown weak, and his whole body is so worn out that it will not do
what his thoughts tell it to do, as your little fresh legs and eyes and
ears and as your whole body does."
He received this intimation quietly, but raised no question as to the
ultimate result; and as often as the old man walked by, he would ask the
same question and receive the same answer.
At last I took down from the book-closet Mrs. Trimmer's story of the
robins and read it to him, and he became very much interested in the
little nest and its inhabitants. After a while, the children in the
story had birds of their own in a cage, which they took care of
assiduously, but at length on one occasion went away and left them for
many days uncared for, so that they died; I read right on through the
page on which it was told that on going to the cage when they came home,
they found the birds lying on their backs with their beaks wide open,
stark dead! I paused in my reading, and he repeated, "stark dead! what
do those words mean? What was the matter with the birds?" I laid the
book down, and said, "You know that some things live, and some things
only keep." "Yes," said he. I continued, "You know that living beings
feel pain or pleasure, one or the other, all the time, and that things
that only keep do not feel at all."
"Yes," said he.
"Well, things that live and feel--living beings--always eat and drink;
they continue to live by eating and drinking, and God tells them to eat
by making it pleasant for them to taste things. Now these little birds
lived by eating and drinking, and if they had been free, they would have
found food and drink somewhere in the world; but those children had shut
them up in a cage; and when they were so thoughtless as to go away and
forget the birds that they had undertaken to take care of, the little
birds grew hungry, and you know it is not pleasant to feel even a little
hungry, but they grew hungrier and hungrier till their poor little
bodies were as full of pain as they could be. Now our Heavenly Father
could not possibly have them suffer so much pain, and so He told them
to come to Him, and their life went right out of their bodies, and then
their bodies were just like everything else that only keeps; they could
feel no more pain."
"What a dear, dear, dear Heavenly Father it is!" said the child; "what
nice ways He has about everything!"
"Yes," said I, "He has the ways of love."
He asked no questions at this time, nor made any generalization. I took
up the book, and read on about the children's burying the bodies of the
birds, etc.
Thus the death of the body was first presented to his imagination as
only a relief from pain of the life that inhabited it. He was immensely
interested, and the subject became the most common topic of
conversation.
There were some books in the house which had pictures of hunts, and one
was of a stag-hunt, the stag at bay, the dogs seizing him, the huntsmen
firing. These books had been carefully kept from him. I now took them
down, and showed them to him, interested him in the timid stag running
for its life, and its ingenious devices to elude the dogs by swimming
across streams, and at last when the dogs had seized it, or the huntsman
fired the cruel shot which tore the breast or side of the poor beast,
the final release, God's call of the life to Himself! At which the child
would utter exclamations of delight: that final escape was _the best of
all_.
This story was so interesting, it absorbed his attention, and he did not
generalize. But it took its place among the good deeds of God's love,
that when life became too painful in the body it was taken away to enjoy
itself with God.
His mother, in whose presence were all the conversations, was intensely
interested; but still as he did not think of human death, she hardly
felt that he had conceived the idea.
I told him about the metamorphoses of insects, and their depositing
their life in eggs as soon as they were born. When the old man came by,
as he did nearly every day, we commented on the wearing out of his
body, but he did not think of death as a relief for him.
At last one day it happened that stretching out of the window for some
purpose, he nearly lost his balance, and it was only by my timely
seizing him that he escaped falling out. I said, "F., what if you had
fallen out on those rocks and been broken all to pieces!" He shrieked
with horror, "I don't want to! I don't want to!" "But what if you had!"
said I, calmly. "You came very near it. What should you have done?"
"What could I?" he screamed. "What could I do, all broken to pieces!"
"Why, don't you think," said I, smiling, "that your Heavenly Father
would have taken you right into His own bosom?"
A heavenly smile spread over his face and a look of perfect satisfaction
and acquiescence, and he said after a moment's pause, "I forgot my
Heavenly Father. Oh, what a dear, dear, dear Heavenly Father He is!"
Then, after another moment, he said in a distressed voice, "But must I
be broken all to pieces when I go to the Heavenly Father?"
"Oh, dear, no!" said I; "but when we are broken all to pieces, or
starved, or are very sick, He takes us; but generally people grow to be
old like the old man, and all their bodies get worn out, and they get
very tired and kind of go to sleep, and the Heavenly Father takes them,
so they do not wake up again in their old bodies, which are buried as
the children buried the bodies of the robins."
He expressed himself very happy, and asked a great many questions, and
it seemed as if he had already known of the fact of death. At all
events, he now accepted it as the common destiny, without any painful
feeling, and it seemed to give new realization to his mother's feeling
that her own was indeed nothing but a morbid feeling, and that normal
nature did not shrink from death. The subsequent questions were
innumerable. I read to him Krummacher's parable of the caterpillar and
butterfly in the garden of Thirza, after the death of Abel, as it was
paraphrased by Mr. Alcott when he read it in his school, in which I was
assisting him at the very time that I was called away to the child's
mother. And it was the study I had made of childhood in his school which
had enabled me to pursue with so much confidence the method I took with
the child, though it was in my own childhood I conceived the plan; and I
remember speaking of it to Dr. Channing in 1824, and how much interested
he was in the idea, though he told me that in his own case he was
indebted to the symbolism of nature, especially the ocean seen from the
beach at Newport, for clearing his mind of the effects of the teaching
and preaching which he had heard. These grand objects, and later the
beauty of some manifestations he had seen of love giving courage and
power to the weak, kindled his ideal, and gave form and substance to his
consciousness of God.
For a time there was nothing but delight expressed in the fact of death,
the relief from all suffering, the enlargement of life and joy and new
knowledge of God and His ways. At last a little incident showed him the
shadow which attends death in this world.
We often went to call on the family of the physician who attended his
mother. One day when we went, the Doctor, who was very fond of F., took
him into his lap while I was playing with the baby in his mother's arms.
They always called it "baby." I said to Mrs. D., "Has not baby any
name?" The mother replied, "His name is Edward." F. looked up at the
Doctor with a bright, joyous expression, and said, "Where is your other
Edward?" The Doctor's face changed instantaneously; he clasped the child
close to him, and said, "Oh, he has gone to his Heavenly Father," with a
burst of grief. F. stretched himself back, looked into the agitated
face, and said with a look of the greatest concern, "Are you sorry that
he has gone to the Heavenly Father?" "Oh, very, very sorry," said the
poor father. "Should not you be sorry if he should take away your dear
mother?" and putting the child down, he immediately left the room. Mrs.
D. said, "The Doctor has never got over the death of that child, and we
never name him in his presence."
I immediately left the house, and we walked some distance in silence,
and as I found F. did not incline to speak, I said, "F., did the Doctor
look glad when you spoke to him about his other Edward?" He pressed
himself close up to me, and said eagerly, "No, no! he looked very sorry.
What made him sorry? Did he not like to have his other Edward with the
Heavenly Father?" "Oh, yes! he liked that, but then he wanted to have
him in his own arms. You see he cannot see him now, and he wants to kiss
him." "Yes," said F., "he hugged me!" I continued: "You see, the Doctor
is very strong and well, and I suppose he will live in his body a good
many years, and he has Mrs. D. and Julia and the rest, but he wants that
other Edward, too, every day of his life." F. replied sympathizingly,
"He was large, and white, and bright, and when I go into the sky, I
shall look all over to see where he is." I said, after a little while,
"Shall you say anything more to the Doctor about his other Edward?" "No,
indeed!" said he. "I never shall say another word about him. Do you
think I want to make the poor Doctor sorry?" I told his mother, when I
got home, of the whole affair, and we agreed that it was well he should
see the sad side of death for the survivors.
It was soon a question with F. how we were to live without the body, and
he asked me. I told him I did not know exactly how it was to be, but I
supposed God would let new eyes, ears, and whatever limbs we should
need, grow out of us, made of the finest stuff like air, which we could
not see because it was so delicate, or even feel, as we did the air when
it moved, but which souls could use just as they pleased. He said, "I
have seen some pictures of souls that had gone out of their bodies, and
I did not know before what they were." Surprised, I asked him how they
looked. He said, "They were nothing but heads with wings."
The delightful thing was to see the effect of all this earnest prattle
upon the mother; and one day, after I had returned from a visit to a
friend in the town, she told me she had had a conversation with F. on
her own approaching death that was very satisfactory.
She said she had his bread and milk put on a little table opposite her
easy-chair, and when he was happily engaged, she said, "F., I think our
Heavenly Father will soon take me to Himself." He looked up with an
expression of great feeling, and said tenderly: "Do you? Then you will
get rid of that poor, sick body, and your cough;" and he added
presently, "Perhaps he will give you _wings_!" She said nothing could be
likened to the impression of peace and sweetness which these simple
words made upon her. Soon after, he said, "But what will be done with
your poor old body?" (She said he spoke as if it was of not much
importance.) She replied, "Your father and Aunt Lizzy will take it to
Cambridge in a carriage, and put it into the ground; and the grass will
grow over the place, and sometimes you can come to the place; and I
guess I shall look out of heaven and see you." But in a few minutes he
began to cry, and said, "I want to go with you into the sky." She said,
"Oh, you have a nice little body, which gives you a great deal of
pleasure, and you must stay here with poor, dear father! What would he
do when he has no wife any longer, without his little boy to make him
happy, and take care of him when he grows old?" After a little more of
such remonstrance he said, "Well, I will stay with him!" It was curious
that in talking with me he never referred to this subject of his
mother's approaching death, which evidently had touched him tenderly,
and I did not introduce the subject.
It was also a curious circumstance, that after this matter of death
was, as it were, settled satisfactorily, and the mind of his mother
freed from all trouble on the point, _the love of this life_, to which
she had hitherto been more than indifferent, sprang up in her with great
energy, and she proposed to break up the house, and go to Florida for
cure! Her husband and I could not share the hope, but we could not but
sympathize in the new joy in life, that she seemed to have received from
her now happy child, with whom she had learnt _to live_ in the spirit.
Things were so arranged that she made her husband's father's house,
about thirty miles distant, the first goal of her journey. She reached
with great fatigue this first stage, and stopped to rest, and never
mentioned Florida afterwards. She breathed on another year, during which
time I only saw her in weekly visits, having returned to Mr. Alcott's
school in Boston. Her disease was not very painful, but so lingering
that every trace of her former beauty was lost in the ghastly
emaciation.