“My countrymen are at my mercy, I know; but had I a thousand grudges against them, I beg you to believe that I am not so base as to take advantage of my unique opportunity to do them harm! We are a young people, as I said awhile ago, a very young people; and in many respects we have the innocent audacity of babes. Yes,” I added, “I have told you the truth,—but not all of it; Earth, too, is pinnacled with great names,—of Masters, like yours, and poets, and painters, and scientists, and inventors. Even in the darkest ages there have been these points of illumination. What I chiefly wonder at here, is the universality of intelligence, of understanding. You are a teacher of children, pray tell me how you teach. How do you get such wonderful results? I can comprehend—a little—‘what’ you people are, I wish to know the ‘how,’ the ‘why’.”
“All our teaching,” she said, “embraces the three-fold nature. The physical comes first of course, for you cannot reach the higher faculties through barriers of physical pain and sickness, hunger and cold. The child must have a good body, and to this end he is taught the laws that govern his body, through careful and attentive observance of cause and effect. And almost immediately, he begins to have fascinating glimpses of similar laws operating upon a higher than the physical plane. Children have boundless curiosity, you know, and this makes the teacher’s work easy and delightful,—for we all love to tell a piece of news! Through this faculty, the desire to know, you can lead a child in whatever paths you choose. You can almost make him what you choose. A little experience teaches a child that every act brings consequences, good or bad; but he need not get all his knowledge by experience, that is too costly. The reasoning faculty must be aroused, and then the conscience,—which is to the soul what the sensatory nerves are to the body. But the conscience is a latent faculty, and here comes in the teacher’s most delicate and important work. Conscience is quite dependent upon the intellect; we must know what is right and what is wrong, otherwise conscience must stagger blindly.”
“Yes, I know,” I interrupted, “the consciences of some very good people in our world have burned witches at the stake.”
“Horrible!” she said with a shudder.
She continued: “This, then, is the basis. We try, through that simple law of cause and effect, which no power can set aside, to supply each child with a safe, sure motive for conduct that will serve him through life, as well in his secret thought as in outward act. No one with this principle well-grounded in him will ever seek to throw the blame of his misdeeds upon another. We teach the relative value of repentance; that though it cannot avert or annul the effects of wrong-doing, it may serve to prevent repetition of the wrong.”
“Do you punish offenders?” I asked.
She smiled. “Punishment for error is like treating symptoms instead of the disease which produced them, is it not?—relief for the present, but no help for the future. Punishment, and even criticism, are dangerous weapons, to be used, if at all, with a tact and skill that make one tremble to think of! They are too apt to destroy freedom of intercourse between teacher and pupil. Unjust criticism, especially, shuts the teacher from an opportunity to widen the pupil’s knowledge. Too often our criticisms are barriers which we throw about ourselves, shutting out affection and confidence; and then we wonder why friends and family are sealed books to us!”
“That is a fact,” I assented, heartily, “and no one can keep to his highest level if he is surrounded by an atmosphere of coldness and censure. Even Christ, our Great Teacher, affirmed that he could not do his work in certain localities because of prevailing unbelief.”
“There is one thing which it is difficult to learn,” went on Ariadne, “discrimination, the fitness of things. I may not do that which is proper for another to do,—why? Because in each individual consciousness is a special and peculiar law of destiny upon which rests the burden of personal responsibility. It is this law of the individual that makes it an effrontery for any one to constitute himself the chancellor of another’s conscience, or to sit in judgment upon any act which does not fall under the condemnation of the common law. It is given to each of us to create a world,—within ourselves and round about us,—each unlike all the others, though conforming to the universal principles of right, as poets, however original, conform to the universal principles of language. We have choice—let me give you a paradox!—every one may have first choice of inexhaustible material in infinite variety. But how to choose!”
I quoted Milton’s lines: