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 Frœbel 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 Frœbel himself, later for mankind to whom the man Frœbel 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.