But before I turn to my specific department, I would say that this intellectual part of the training, which it was the special genius of Frœbel to discover, is of equal importance; for it is the duty of man to worship God with the mind, as well as with the heart and might, though that is a part of the great commandment, which seems to have been systematically overlooked by many of the churches, if not virtually denied.
To worship God with the mind means to develop the intellect; as to worship Him with the heart keeps pure the moral sentiments and quickens moral action; and to worship Him with the might lifts the will, quickened by the heart and enlightened by the mind into oneness with the Holy Spirit, more and more forever. And here let me recall to you what I said of Frœbel's authority in my second lecture, and beware of deviating from the path he has pointed out (he was nearly fifty years in inventing his technique); and be very careful about adding to his Gifts or Schools of Work, though I would not have you mechanical followers. There will be legitimate outgrowths of his method. He himself, in one of his Pedagogies, published after his death by Wichard Lange, has suggested a "school of drawing" upon the curve, which Miss Marwedel has developed, leading the child naturally through vegetable formation; and Mr. Edward A. Spring, the sculptor, has also suggested and partly carried some children through animal forms, from the worm to the "human face divine"; and we hope both these "schools" may be published and used. In the musical line, also, in which Frœbel was personally rather deficient, Mr. Daniel Bachellor, now of Philadelphia, has suggested a series of exercises by means of the correspondence of tones and colors, that makes the children as creative in the discovery of melodies, as they are of the harmonies of color in their weaving and painting.
There is unquestionably danger that the kindergartner may degenerate into mechanical imitation and rote-work in this part of her guidance of the children, nevertheless in some of the charity kindergartens I have seen there was danger of doing injustice to the technique.
On this last day of communion with you on the Frœbel education, I would like to speak with some comprehensiveness and particularity on the subject of religious nurture. Mark me, I say religious nurture, not religious teaching. The religion that integrates human education is not to be taught. It is the primeval consciousness of filial relation to God, who alone can reveal Himself; for human language has no adequate expression of God, founded as it is on the material universe, which is the finite opposite of Creative Being. Every individual child is a momentum of God's creativeness which the human Providence of education must take as its datum. Only childhood symbolizes God as "the sum of all being," realizing itself in joy incommensurable. Ruskin has happily said the joy of childhood is out of all proportion to the occasions that call forth its expression, and in order to make God the central conscious truth of the child's intellect, we must give the name father or mother to God, which is intelligible to the heart, and which will identify its filial aspiration with the parental bounty, as another, yet the same.
But what I want you to observe is, that language being limited in meaning by its origin in material nature, you should talk about God as little as possible, after having given Him the name that will excite the child's worshipful aspiration, and limit yourselves carefully to regulating moral manifestations, leading children to act kindly, generously, truthfully, in your own assured faith that God is present to inspire the truth, generosity, and loving will that is practically prayed for with good resolution. (Good resolutions are the special prayers of faith, as children should be taught expressly.)
Kindergartners cannot carry out this course quite irrespective of the theory of human nature declared in their creeds. But the heart is generally larger than the creed, as was once strikingly evidenced to me by Louisa Frankenberg, a dear, devout old German kindergartner, who had learned the art of kindergartning from Frœbel himself, in the very beginning of his own experimenting; but she was such a bigot to the Lutheran Church that she could not theoretically admit as a Christian any one who did not swear by its dogma of total depravity. Yet I remember hearing her exclaim, "Oh, Frœbel's method is so beautiful! because the affectionate plays and innocent occupations take the children entirely away from the depravity of their hearts." She said this with a gush of love and faith that showed how much the unbounded human heart is beyond being totally eclipsed by shadows cast by the limited human intellect. It is neither feeling or thinking, but righteous doing, that gives us victory.[11]
The child in the first era of his life has no individual consciousness of separation from God, and for a certain time it is obvious to all observers that this august unconsciousness even prevents the immediate development of an intellectual conception of him. The child in its infancy (infant, you remember, means not speaking) does not see nature as object, but feels it also to be himself, and hence he has no language, for language is the expression of his intellect. Hence the infant's sublime unconsciousness of danger and absolute fearlessness, and its impulse to spring upward out of its mother's arms, the laws of gravity notwithstanding! It stands, as Wordsworth has sung,—
"Glorious in the might of heaven-born freedom on its being's height,"
and only gradually do