Referring to Froebel's games, Elizabeth Harrison remarks:—
"In order that this activity, generally first noticed in the use of the hands, might be trained into right and ennobling habits, rather than be allowed to degenerate into wrong and often degrading ones, Froebel arranged his charming set of finger-games for the mother to teach her babe while he is yet in her arms; thus establishing the right activity before the wrong one can assert itself. In such little songs as the following:—
'This is the mother, good and dear;
This the father, with hearty cheer;
This is the brother, stout and tall;
This is the sister, who plays with her doll;
And this is the baby, the pet of all.
Behold the good family, great and small,'
the child is led to personify his fingers and to regard them as a small but united family over which he has control." (257 a. 14).
Miss Wiltse, who devotes a chapter of her little volume to "Finger-songs related to Family Life and the Imaginative Faculty," says:—
"The dawning consciousness of the child so turned to the family relations is surely better than the old nursery method of playing 'This little pig went to market'" (384. 45).
And from the father and mother the step to God is easy.
Dr. Brewer informs us that in the Greek and Roman Church the Trinity is symbolized by the thumb and first two fingers: "The thumb, being strong, represents the Father; the long, or second finger, Jesus Christ; and the first finger, the Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from the Father and the Son" (Dict. of Phrase and Fable, P. 299).
Mother-God.
The "Motherhood of God" is an expression that still sounds somewhat strangely to our ears. We have come to speak readily enough of the "Fatherhood of God" and the "Brotherhood of Man," but only a still small voice has whispered of the "Motherhood of God" and the "Sisterhood of Woman." Yet there have been in the world, as, indeed, there are now, multitudes to whom the idea of Heaven without a mother is as blank as that of the home without her who makes it. If over the human babe bends the human mother who is its divinity,—