And how much capable mothers might derive from Wordsworth's poetry for the spiritual nurture of their children! Capable mothers are, alas! comparatively few; but forces, to be noticed further on, are now at work, which are increasing the number of such mothers, and will continue to increase it more and more, as the ideals of a true womanhood are more and more exalted and realized. The kind of regeneration which the world, at present, most needs, will have to be largely induced by woman, and she will induce it according as her true rights, which are involved in her 'distinctive womanhood,' are recognized and granted her, by her not over-generous brother.
Spiritual education is not a matter of abstract instruction. It must be induced on the basis of the concrete and the personal. The spiritual faculties have no affinities for the abstract. Christianity was introduced into the world through the personal and concrete; rather, it is the personal and the concrete, and its arch-enemy has ever been the abstract, in the form of dogma and stark-naked doctrine. Dogmatism implies materialism. As one advances spiritually, dogma declines with him, in inverse proportion. Christianity is essential being, and not a doctrine, not a body of opinions, not 'a matter of antiquarian pedantry or of historical perspective.' In the great words of the 'De Imitatione Christi,' 'Cui æternum verbum loquitur, ille a multis opinionibus expeditur' (he to whom the eternal word speaks, is freed from many opinions); and to fit the soul to be spoken to by the eternal word, is the true, the ultimate object of spiritual education. The permanent, the eternal, that which is alive for evermore, should, indeed, be the object of all education. Phenomena, in themselves, are not educative. A feeding on them alone, if that were possible (man naturally, whatever his condition, seeks other pabulum), would soon result in a general atrophy of all the faculties, intellectual and spiritual. To use the words of St. Vincent de Lérins, which he applied to the Catholic Church,—would that the Church had always made them its controlling principle!—'magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est' (it must be especially seen to, that we hold to that which everywhere, which always, which by all, has been believed).
There is no exclusiveness in the eternal word; it speaks to every one whose ears are open to it; it enters wherever it is not shut out. It speaks through Nature, through every form of Art (which to be art must be a manifestation of it), through Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' through Music, Sculpture, Painting, Architecture, through all sacred books, and, above all, through sanctified men and women, of the Present and the Past, 'the noble Living and the noble Dead.' In the words of Emerson:
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,—
The canticles of love and woe.
The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
The kind of books which the young should read, is, of course, an important consideration. If 'a general insight into useful facts' be regarded as the main thing in a child's education, such as 'the royal genealogies of Oviedo, the internal laws of the Burmese empire, by how many feet Mount Chimborazo outsoars Teneriffe, what navigable river joins itself to Lara, and what census of the year five was taken at Klagenfurt,' and other matters not having much to do with the advancement of the millennium, why the question is easily settled as to the kind of books a child should be provided with, and be required to learn, and recite; but if some vitality of soul, the indispensable condition of intellectual vitality, in after life, be the aim, then a different kind of books will be needed—such books as will serve to vitalize and guide the instincts, to bring the feelings into a healthful play, and awaken enthusiasm, and thus to prepare the way for the later exercise of the reasoning faculties, and for the comprehension of moral and religious principles. There is a time to feel the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, and a time to regard all these, as far as may be, under intellectual relations. If 'the years that bring the philosophic mind' be anticipated in a child's education, it will be likely, by reason of the premature philosophy served out to it, to become a stupid man or woman, with a plentiful lack of both intellect and soul. Upon the closed bud of reason, while it is not yet ready to be unfolded, must be brought to bear the genial warmth of sensibility, sympathy, and enthusiasm; and when it opens in its own good season, it will not be dwarfed nor canker-bitten.
Sensibility, sympathy, enthusiasm, I repeat, are the elements of the atmosphere in which the intellectual, the moral, and the religious nature of a child can alone germinate and healthily grow, and in later years, bloom and shed a wholesome fragrance.
Stories written for the young must be concrete representations of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good; in other words, they must be works of art. Says Browning, in 'The Ring and the Book,'
Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,