Education in The Home, The Kindergarten, and The Primary School Part 8

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 G.o.d into which I had led him, and which I named his good friend, pervaded all s.p.a.ce.

The subsequent questions of how G.o.d 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 G.o.d he felt within him in his conscious Love and without him in all manifestations of beauty and power, gave him a.s.surance that he would be sometime wherever G.o.d was. I have lost the connection and place in the narrative of another conversation I had with him on the omnipresence of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, 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 grat.i.tude. 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 Frbel'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 Frbel with which I began this course of lectures, it was said that he posed his elder brother with his questionings of G.o.d'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 Frbel himself, later for mankind to whom the man Frbel has revealed it with such ample ill.u.s.trations 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 G.o.d's embracing unbounded s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.siduously, 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 G.o.d 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, G.o.d'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 G.o.d's love, that when life became too painful in the body it was taken away to enjoy itself with G.o.d.

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?"