Part 11

"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 GOD see me now, when I am all wrapped up in this shawl?"

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

I cannot conceive a more perfect proof that the soul of a child is a "sparkle of GOD," and its mind the intuition of the eternal reason--its image, than was given by this original illustration 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 GOD without materializing it.

The omnipresence and invisibility of GOD were mysteries that attracted my little pupil's mind and taxed it, but did not distress nor perplex it. Of the reality of GOD'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 passionate 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 passionate 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 Froebel 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 circumstances 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 Froebel'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 GOD, 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."

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.