LECTURE VIII.
RELIGIOUS NURTURE.
Frœbel speaks of the child as a trinity, meaning a unity in threefold relation (with God, with man, and with nature), and says that education, to be perfect, or even healthy, must help him to be conscious of all these relations at once, in order to ensure the equipoise of heart and intellect with his spiritual power (or freedom to will), in which inheres his just self-respect and natural religion.
Nature (that is, the material universe, as I have said before) is God's expression of mathematical and all correlative laws, the apprehension of which builds up the intellect of the individual who, through his sense perceptions, on which he reflects and generalizes, gains knowledge of his surroundings, beginning with that part of nature which is within his own skin.
It was the grand intuition of Oken which has been splendidly illustrated by Dr. J. Garth Wilkinson in his Human Body in its Connections with Man, that the human body is the metropolis of material nature, in which may be found in vital order all the elements of the material universe which are, outside of the human body, in a more or less chaotic state. This development of the individual intellect needs more or less aid from the human environment, simultaneously with that nurture of the heart which means man's conscious relation to man. But though morality, which is the performance of man's duty to man, is not religion, which is man's consciousness of relation to God, it leads to it inversely, because it shows the heart its need of a Father of us all, in order to be happy. All three processes, the intellectual, the moral, and the religious, must go on together, to make a perfect education, for in proportion as integral education is wanting in those about the child, his intellect will be starved, confused, or darkened with error; and immorality and irreligion will more or less transpire in the individual.
Frœbel perfectly realized the deficiency of this integral education to be the cause of all the evil that is the present experience of mankind, in spite of Church and State and the optimism which in form of hope "springs eternal in the human breast" (for the pessimist is the exception, not the rule among men, the great mass of whom are pursuing some ideal aim, even though it be a low one, their moral sentiment having been perverted and their religion having become a superstitious idolatry either of material forms or of logical formulas).
The system of education which Frœbel discovered, or invented, in consequence of realizing this, is what we are endeavoring to learn and apply, that we may bring out of the moral chaos around us the lost equipoise of the threefold nature in our children, by ourselves plunging into infant life in imagination and realizing its innocent heart and unfallen spiritual state, watching it in its own attempts to understand and use its material surroundings and its human environment, to the end of guiding it by our own experience and matured knowledge, from the errors and misfortunes it inevitably falls into if left to its own ignorant experimenting unrevised.
The playthings and means of occupation Frœbel invented are to develop the intellect, and are a perfect miniature of nature, and to use them in playing with the child is an art and a science that the kindergartner must add to her moral affections and religion, which are also her indispensable qualifications.
I wish to say this very emphatically, all the more because this part of your education (the art and science that develop the intellect) is not my part of your training course, but the moral and religious nurture; and therefore I must leave the exhaustive analysis of the gifts in their relation to the unfolding intellect as well as of the "schools of work" (as the series of embroideries, foldings, drawings, weavings, pea-work, etc., are called, and which require your study the whole year) to your accomplished trainers to do justice to.