Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

I have somewhere, very careful memoranda, made at the time, which I have unfortunately mislaid, but I will present from present recollection as well as I can the whole psychological observation, though I am aware that I shall leave out many little things said and done which were perhaps not unimportant links in the chain.

Before I begin, I will observe that I tell it to the class to show the difference between talking to and conversing with children, and to illustrate several truths.

First, There is an innate Idea, not as a thought but as a feeling, given to every child, of an all-embracing Love (named by Jesus, Father), one in substance with the deepest consciousness of self;

Second, That this Idea becomes a child's personal and individual perception only when he has a realizable name for it;

Third, That such a name is not an empty vocable, a mere movement of air, but a sign, to which the intuition of his heart gives vital meaning;

Fourth, That an adequate name for God is the axis of the intellect, and the revolution of thought around it gives perfect globular form and solidity to the mind, balancing the centripetal force of individual self-assertion with the centripetal force of a Divine Love, comprehending all Being. Before God was named to and by this child of whom I am about to speak, you will see that he was a dreary little chaos "without form and void." After he had learned to utter intelligently the name of a Heavenly Father he was what I am going to tell you.

But first I must tell you how I had this opportunity and privilege of being the first person to name God to this child when he was four and a half years old. He was the son of a most conscientious mother whose early orphan life had been saddened with religious terrors. Her earliest recollection, as she told me, having been the death-bed, and immediately after, the burial of her mother, whom she saw, when she was too young to comprehend death, shut up in a coffin and put into the ground; and she remembered how her agonizing cries at what seemed the frightful cruelty, were peremptorily hushed, with the declaration of the person taking care of her, that God who made the heavens and the earth willed it to be so and would punish her if she did not acquiesce. Little did the thoughtless and heartless person who thus dealt with the distressed little heart think, how disastrously she was emasculating the word God of good by associating it with such an image of ruthless power divorced from tenderness, as she unheedingly did. It was not till long years after that her imagination was cleared of the frightful falsehood; and when she came to have a child of her own, her governing thought was to keep him ignorant of the fact of death, and the name of God, until he should be old enough to understand them, as she said. She was a person of deep feeling, upright and benevolent, but her imagination, probably by reason of this life-long depression, was of feeble wing, and she was taciturn. In consequence, her child, though most tenderly cared for as to his body, was starved in mind and spirit. His face continued to be an infant's countenance, and he was strangely without that childish joyousness called animal spirits, and grew more and more peevish as he grew older; for he was sequestered to the society of his silent mother, who would not even be read to in his presence, lest, as she said, some chance word which he could not understand should excite some fear.

Suddenly a hemorrhage of the lungs brought this mother to death's door. She had been, for a few years before her marriage, my pupil in my own house, and she used to say she owed to me all the happy views she had of God and Heaven, as well as of human life and death, and I was sent for in this extremity as a mother to a child.

Since her marriage she had lived in a city distant from me, and I had seen her but little. Her child was so very timid I had made no acquaintance with him in transient interviews, and of me he had no impression but of one little story that I had told him six months before when I met him at the house of her husband's parents. This story I had half invented to explain a picture in the "Story without an end," that I was showing to him. (See [Appendix].)