"Come away, and let him talk. He's only chicken-hearted."
The scholars knew that there was no cowardice in the heart of Lincoln. They felt the force of the scene. The boys and girls of Andrew Crawford's school never forgot the pleas that Abraham used to make for the animals and reptiles of the woods and streams.
Nearly every youth exhibits his leading trait or characteristic in his school-days.
"The tenor of our whole lives," said an English poet, "is what we make it in the first five years after we become our masters"; and a wiser than he has said, "The thing that has been is, and God requireth the past." Columbus on the quays of Genoa; Zinzendorf forming among his little companions the order of the "Grain of Mustard-Seed"; the poets who "lisped in numbers"; the boy statesmanship of Cromwell; and the early aspiration of nearly every great leader of mankind—all showed the current of the life-stream, and it is the current alone that knows and prophesies the future. When Abraham Lincoln fell, the world uncovered its head. Thrones were sorrowful, and humanity wept. Yet his earliest rostrum was a stump, and his cause the natural rights of the voiceless inhabitants of the woods and streams. The heart that throbbed for humanity, and that won the heart of the world, found its first utterance in defense of the principles of the birds'-nest commandment. It was a beginning of self-education worthy of the thought of a Pestalozzi. It was a prophecy.
As the young advocate of the rights and feelings of the dumb creation was ending his fiery discourse, the buttonless Tunker, himself a disciple of Pestalozzi, came into the school-grounds and read the meaning of the scene. Jasper saw the soul of things, and turned always from the outward expressions of life to the inward motive. He read the true character of the boy in buckskin breeches, human heart, and fluent tongue. He sat down on the log step of the school-house in silence, and Mr. Crawford presently came out with a quill pen behind his ear, and sat down beside him.
"That boy has been teaching what you and I ought first to teach," said Jasper.
"What is that?" asked Mr. Crawford.
"The heart! What is head-learning worth, if the heart is left uneducated? As Pestalozzi used to say, The soul is the true end of all education. Religion itself is a failure, without right character."
"But you wouldn't teach morals as a science, would you?"
"I would train the heart to feel, and the soul to love to be just and do right, and make obedience to the moral sense the habit of life. This can best be done at the school age, and I tell you that this is the highest education. A boy who can spell all the words in the spelling-book, and bound all the countries in the world, and repeat all the dates of history, and yet who could have the heart to crush a turtle, has not been properly educated."