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

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

"What was that word?" she asked, with the most eager interest.

"Pardon," said I, "for all past wrong-doing that you are sorry for."

"Oh, Miss Peabody, I never thought of the meaning of that word before."

"Yes, darling," said I, "and that is the reason of all your trouble. Now think of it always; and thank God that He sent Jesus to say it. That lie of yours God has pardoned long ago, just as you would have pardoned little Edward. We all do wrong things when we are children, and learn by doing them not to do them again. Now from to-day begin all your life over again. When you miss in your lessons, instead of crying, just let it go, and ask me to help you try again. So in making other mistakes, and when you feel cross, which comes in your case because you are so easily discouraged,—for that makes you have dyspepsia,—just forget it as soon as possible and go and do something pleasant, and think that God loves you, and only lets you do wrong to show you that you need to be getting wisdom all the time, and you will grow stronger continually, and the older you grow, the better you will understand."

I never knew a moral crisis in any child's life so marked as this was. She had a very hard path in life to walk and suffered much, but she never again lost the hope by which we live, and at length, full of years, joined "the Choir Invisible," from which commanding standpoint she doubtless sees the end from the beginning, and how God's redeeming Providence completes His creation of a free agent. What I insist upon is, that a child should never be left to doubt, but should always be helped to feel sure that God is loving him better than he loves himself; is sorry far more than angry with him when he has done wrong, and therefore it is that He will not let him succeed in doing wrong, but has so arranged things that the wrong always gets checked; that God is especially good precisely because He "makes the ways of the transgressor hard." Never let the Infinite Power appear to the naughty child's imagination as punishing, but only as encouraging, inspiring, helping! It is recorded as characteristic of the highest manifestation of God and Educator of man, who appeared to His most spiritual disciple as the "Eternal Word made flesh," that He did not "quench the smoking flax or bruise the broken reed," but distilled upon humanity—especially in its flowering stage—the gentle dews of blessing,—taking little children in His arms to bless them.

You may ask, But what if a child proves in some instances incorrigible to the method of love? What shall we do then? I think it will be sufficient to ask any Christian, What did Jesus do when the Jews proved insensible and incorrigible to his long-suffering, brotherly love, making it the occasion of their own capital crime? Did he abandon the method of love when they nailed him to the cross, or even doubt it? Let us dwell on this a little. Was it not the special trial of Jesus Christ's human life, the last temptation through which he was constrained by his apparent failure of accomplishing the work of redeeming Israel, by leading them of their own selves to judge and do what is right to cry out, My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me? For instead of their coming to him to get the waters of life he offered, they had made it the very act of their religion to murder him as a blasphemer. I ask, Did he, even then, exchange his method of forbearing love for cursing? Did he not, even then, hold fast to the principle of brotherliness by commending his spirit (which was his work) into the hands of the Father, with the words: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do"; showing that he felt that this ignorance was infinitely more pitiable than his own apparently forgotten bodily agonies? And, in this great humane act of forbearance, and divine act of faith did he not reveal in its fulness the loving character of God, whom he had always called Father, and with whom he proved himself one by this very token, which converted the Jewish thief and the Roman centurion on the spot; and which, step by step, is slowly but surely (by inspiring his disciples with the same spirit and method of dealing with their fellow-beings) converting the world? The moment of despair of an immediate spiritual good we are trying to do, is often the moment of our doing a higher and greater good.

As Jesus resigned his own finite will, as the son of David, which was fixed on bringing the Jewish nation to fulfil its national mission of "blessing all the families of the earth," which he understood to be the motive inspiration of Abraham's emigration from Babylonian civilization into the wilderness; and as he accepted the will of his Father, which seemed to be that the privilege to do this patriotic duty was not granted to him as he had grown up thinking, the will was lifted, and he found himself doing more—becoming the Saviour, not of the nation of the Jews merely, but of all men, and so sat down on the right hand of God. For he proved himself to the heart of all humanity, God's Son, loving, not for the sake of men's reciprocation and appreciation of himself, but for the sake of the salvation of humanity. Therefore Christ's method is the one for every man and woman on all planes of activity, however humble. I have heard more than one mother say, that when they had tried every method they knew of to influence their child to give up some wrong object on which the irrefragable free will was bent, and all tender and violent measures had failed, the irrepressible tears of their despairing love had most unexpectedly melted the hardness of self-will at once, and effected the cure. Love, when it is understood, is irresistible. Our sacred oracles teach us that the origin of evil is in a doubt of God's love. In Eden it was a suspicion that He had some selfish ends in forbidding even one thing in a world of free gifts.

The conquest of evil, on the other hand, they represent, was in Jesus Christ's trusting God's love, in a lost world, amidst the physical agonies of his cross, and the moral anguish of a disappointment of the grandest aim that ever one born of woman had set to himself for his life-work. In faithfully trying to do the lesser good just at hand, he developed the power to save all men from their sins; not merely his own people.

To the training class of kindergartners I would say, your special work is rather to prevent, than to conquer sin, in the objects of your care; therefore you should, in your own imagination, associate yourself with God creating, first leading children to realize that all He has made is very good and must be kept so, which is giving the religious nurture.

That great word of Frœbel, man is a creative being, has said in the world of education, whether religious, moral, or intellectual, "Let there be light," and is never to be forgotten in its uttermost meaning.