Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber;
Thou hast no figures and no fantasies,
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.
Shakespeare.
All unrest and uneasiness, all impatience and disharmony are due to some misunderstanding of life and its unity, of its unchanging and unchangeable laws. Froebel’s recognition of this principle created his idea of education as growth by exercise, the greatest definition of training that has yet been given to the world. He says that education consists in relating the individual life to the external life, the inner to the outer, or, in other words, it consists in getting the individual into harmony with the whole of life.
This is the substance of the doctrine of all the great thinkers of the world, the essential oneness in the teachings of all the philosophers of every race and of all the ages. Each gives expression to the special side of this oneness that presented itself most strongly to him, but on the plan of life they agree.
Although many of the followers of these great teachers have been able to see the beauty of their conceptions, few have been able to transmit them as pure and bright as they received them. It is by no means easy to avoid interpreting what we hear in a merely personal way. Seldom do the “hearers of the Word” have the humility “of the broken and empty vessel,” so well expressed in a hymn at one time popular among revivalists:
“Empty, that He might fill me
As forth to His service I go;