Education in The Home, The Kindergarten, and The Primary School Part 7

"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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d's name. Of course, the mother craved to know exactly what had pa.s.sed 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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sent, 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 G.o.d see me now, when I am all wrapped up in this shawl?"

The elder one replied very earnestly, "O yes! G.o.d 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 G.o.d sees everything, because He knows everything."

I cannot conceive a more perfect proof that the soul of a child is a "sparkle of G.o.d," and its mind the intuition of the eternal reason--its image, than was given by this original ill.u.s.tration 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 G.o.d without materializing it.

The omnipresence and invisibility of G.o.d were mysteries that attracted my little pupil's mind and taxed it, but did not distress nor perplex it. Of the reality of G.o.d'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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sionate 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 Frbel 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Frbel'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 G.o.d, 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.

Another advantage I had with this child was, that besides the arrested 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."