My book of Conversations, held with Children in Boston near forty years
ago, has found an admiring reader at last. He writes:--
"I have just found in a second-hand bookstore your two volumes
of Conversations on the Gospels, and have read them with benefit
and delight. Nowhere have I seen the Gospels so spiritualized, so
rationalized, Platonized. The _naïveté_ aside, it seems the product
of a company of idealists. Is it possible that common human nature in
children, thrown upon its own resources, can exhibit such intelligence,
or instinct, if you please to call it so? Were these children taken as
they came, or were they selected, culled?"
They came from families occupying various social advantages, and were a
fair average of children thus born and bred. I give a sample of one of
the conversations as reported from their lips at the time. Their ages
were from six to twelve years.