came to a sentence in which were the words "morning and evening prayer."
He immediately stopped her and asked her, "What does that mean, that
word _prayer_?" She said, "Many grown up people, when they wake in the
morning, and find that God has taken care of them in the night when they
could not take care of themselves, and given them a new day after their
good sleep, feel very thankful, and love to tell God so, just as you did
the other day when you thanked God for so many things; and besides,
remembering that there are a good many things they ought to do, and that
He gives _the love and goodness_, they like to ask Him beforehand to
give them what they shall need _to be good with_ when the time comes to
want it; and at night, after they have got through the day, they like to
thank Him for all the joys of the day, and they ask Him to take care of
them through the night that is coming, when they shall be asleep and
cannot take care of themselves; and this loving talk with God is called
the morning and evening prayer." I think she added that when she was
little she used to say, when she was going to bed:--
"Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take;"
and that was her evening prayer. "I think it is a very good way," said
he, "and I mean to do so this very night when I go to bed." And it was
true that when he went to bed, he remembered and made a similar
thanksgiving to his former one in kind, and closed with this little
verse. And again in the morning he began the first thing to thank God
for the new day, etc. Nor did he forget afterwards, night and morning,
to give thanks and utter prayers spontaneously, and seemed to enjoy it.
One morning he waked me with his loud singing, and as soon as I opened
my eyes, said to me, "Aunt Lizzy, I am _singing_ my morning prayer." I
said, "There was a wonderful little shepherd boy once, whose name was
David, who loved God as you do, and who always sang his prayers."
Immediately he wanted to know all about him, and I told him the story of
David in his childhood and up to the time he was sent for to sing to
King Saul; and I ended with saying that I would read to him some of
David's _psalms_ (as these sung prayers were called); and this I did,
and the eloquence of the sweet singer of Israel seemed to vivify his
idea of the Heavenly Father, and of His connection with the soul within
us all and the world without. Especially I tried on him the effect of
the Psalm beginning, "The heavens are telling of the glory of God,"
whose rhythm had charmed my own childhood, even before I fully
comprehended it; and he liked to hear it, too. Before this, I had read
considerably from the Bible to him, for he had one day said that he
wondered how the world began to be in the first place, and I had said:
"_Yes_, everybody wonders about that. But there is a book (pointing to
the Bible) where one of the first men told about how it seemed to him,
and I will read it to you." So I opened the book and began the first
chapter of Genesis, without introductory comment. When I came to the
words "_And there was light_," he sprang up and shouted, "Directly when
He said 'Let there be light,' there _was_ light _directly_!"
I wished Longinus could have heard the confirmation of his great
criticism. Immediately he ran into my father's study, which was across
the entry, and burst out, "Dr. Peabody, when it was all dark and there
was nothing made, God said, '_Let there be light, and there was light_'
directly! directly!" This was not enough; he ran to find my mother and
sister, and again repeated the simply sublime words.
Then he came back to me to hear the rest, and I finished the chapter
which he wanted me to read to him again and again, day after day. I read
afterwards the parable of Jotham, which he liked to hear very much. I
cannot help thinking how much more I might have made of that very
parable for his moral culture had I then known of Froebel's _gospel of
work_. I can hardly bear to think how stupid I was; the effect of not
having had the kindergarten education myself.
But he was too soon taken away from my observation, not without my
acquiescence, however; for it was to go to his father, who, I thought,
needed his companionship. And as it was at a distance that he lived,
and, as afterwards my own life was full of vicissitude for many years, I
lost the run of him entirely. There was a mutual misunderstanding
between his father and me, for several years, from his thinking I wanted
to be free from the care of him, and I thinking he did not desire my
personal influence on him, and we were both mistaken, as we found out
afterwards. When he went to Harvard College, he came to see me, and the
interview was very interesting. He had a sweet, though it had become a
dim, remembrance of a happy time with us, succeeded, as he told me, by a
_lack-love_ experience of years of a dark, gloomy time at a
boarding-school, to which he was sent when he was eight years old,
because, as he said, his grandmother thought he ought not to be living
with his solitary father at a hotel. But the boarding-school proved more
than a heart solitude, as the boys were rough and cruel to him in their
unguided play. While he was with me, on the occasion of this call, it
happened that my sister Sophia's children came into the room where we
were. They had a very vivid idea of him from their mother, she having
often spoken of him to them, and telling them of his joy in learning he
had a Heavenly Father, when he had never thought or been told of it.
When I said to them, "This is F.," one of them said, "Is this F.? I
thought he was a little boy," looking at him wonderingly, surprised to
see a grown-up man. I told him they were well acquainted with his
childhood. It touched him very much, and the conversation that ensued
touching on several things I have told, brought back the old time more
distinctively, and he said he should often come to recall it by my help,
and to learn more of his mother, whose beautiful face haunted his
dreams. But just afterwards I left Boston for some years, and did not
see him again until after his return from Vienna, where he went after
leaving college, and remained till he had completed his medical studies.
I promised then to show him his mother's letters to me, written in her
girlhood, and to tell him how much the early experience of his own
childhood had ministered to her a heavenly consolation. But again
inexorable circumstances interfered. He became a practising physician in
Worcester, and I went to Concord to live, and we procrastinated a
promised visit until at last Death mocked our slow affections. I saw him
last wrapped in the flag of his country, for when the war broke out in
1861, nothing would do but he must go to it; and he went as one of the
surgeons of the 15th Regiment, which was terribly cut up. For a year and
a half he did an incredible amount of work, for he would always have his
hospital on the field of battle, and the 15th was in a great many
battles, and left but few survivors, most of whom are maimed or halt. He
took care of those wounded ones who could not be taken from the
battle-field, wrote letters for them, and never took a furlough, as
every other officer and surgeon did. In the last letter that he wrote to
his father, he said that this year and a half was in one sense the
happiest time of his life; for it was the only time when he seemed to be
of any use. He was killed at last, walking up through the main street of
Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the van of the regiment, as was his wont,
and his death was instantaneous. His patriotism and his bravery were
the fruits of his piety. Every year his father and I met to decorate his
grave until his father's death in 1883-4. He is buried at Mt. Auburn by
his mother's side, whose body was removed from the tomb in the old
burial ground of Cambridge. I have a photograph of him taken at the same
age as his mother when she died,--thirty-one years. It was the year
before he went to the war, a drooping head, pensive as if marked for
early death. But when I saw him dead, his brow was lifted, his whole
countenance had become grand and heroic, and it was plain that he had
found his ideal vocation. His funeral was celebrated in the city of
Worcester with military honors, the wounded soldiers of his regiment
following the hearse in carriages, and the sidewalks of the city
thronged with the multitude of spectators. A discourse upon the text,
"No man can do more than lay down his life for his friends," was
pronounced over him at the church, and the beautiful hymn sung, "Nearer
my God to Thee," which seemed to me the most appropriate conceivable,
though he had never been far from Him, after he knew a name for Him.
After the funeral his father's relatives and friends gathered together,
and we talked of him. I told my recollections of his childhood, and all
of them expressed the feeling that the life he had led was in perfect
harmony with such an early acquaintance made with the Heavenly Father.
LECTURE VIII.
RELIGIOUS NURTURE.
FROEBEL speaks of the child as a trinity, meaning a unity in threefold
relation (with God, with man, and with nature), and says that education,
to be perfect, or even healthy, must help him to be conscious of all
these relations _at once_, in order to ensure the equipoise of heart and
intellect with his spiritual power (or freedom to will), in which
inheres his just self-respect and natural religion.
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,--
"Glorious in the might of heaven-born freedom on its being's height,"
and only gradually do
"Shades of the prison-house begin to close around the growing boy."
For, as the same poet has it in that ode which is as much inspired as
anything in the sacred oracles of the Hebrew or the Christian:--
"Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her innate man,
Forget the glories he hath known
And that Imperial Palace whence he came.
* * * * *
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
The "not unworthy aim" of the "humble nurse" is to give the child the
sense of "having life in himself" as an individual free agent, so that
he may come into intellectual consciousness of the laws of GOD by going
counter to them, which reveals to him that he is separating from GOD in
his activity. This separation is _sin_, which is a short word for
separation, and the first step in the development of individuality, and
therefore pardonable, because it is finite.
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
"In the embers was something that did live,
And Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive."
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.