Part 10 (1/2)

RELIGIOUS NURTURE

FRBEL speaks of the child as a trinity,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 h morality, which is the perforion, 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 ether, to ral education is wanting in those about the child, his intellect will be starved, confused, or darkened with error; and iion will more or less transpire in the individual

Frbel 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 optis eternal in the human breast” (for the pessireat h it be a low one, their ion having become a superstitious idolatry either of ical formulas)

The system of education which Frbel discovered, or invented, in consequence of realizing this, is e are endeavoring to learn and apply, that weout of the moral chaos around us the lost equipoise of the threefold nature in our children, by ourselves plunging into infant life in i its innocent heart and unfallen spiritual state, watching it in its own attes and its hu it by our own experience and e, from the errors and norant experis and means of occupation Frbel invented are to develop the intellect, and are a perfectwith the child is an art and a science that the kindergartner ion, 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 ious nurture; and therefore I ifts in their relation to the unfolding intellect as well as of the ”schools of work”

(as the series of es, pea-work, etc, are called, and which require your study the whole year) to your accomplished trainers to do justice to

But before I turn to my specific depart, which it was the special genius of Frbel to discover, is of equal importance; for it is the duty of man to worshi+p God with the _h 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 worshi+p God _with the mind_ means to develop the intellect; as to worshi+p Him with the _heart_ keeps pure the moral sentiments and quickens ht_ 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 Frbel's authority infrom 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 rowths of his ies_, 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 forested and partly carried soh 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 Frbel 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 har

There is unquestionably danger that the kindergartner enerate into uidance of the children, nevertheless in soer of doing injustice to the technique

On this last day of communion with you on the Frbel education, I would like to speak with soious nurture MarkThe religion that integrates huht It is the primeval consciousness of filial relation to God, who alone can reveal Hie 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 _datu,” 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 ive the naible to the heart, and which will identify its filial aspiration with the parental bounty, as another, yet the sae being liin in material nature, you should talk about God as little as possible, after having given Him the name that will excite the child's worshi+pful aspiration, and li enerously, 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 huenerally larger than the creed, as was once strikingly evidenced to artner, who had learned the art of kindergartning fro of his own experiot to the Lutheran Church that she could not theoretically ad her exclaim, ”Oh, Frbel's method is so beautiful!

because the affectionate plays and innocent occupations take the children entirely away froush of love and faith that showed howtotally eclipsed by shadows cast by the li, 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 tiust unconsciousness even prevents the immediate development of an intellectual conception of him The child in its infancy (infant, you re_) does not see nature as object, but feels it also to be hie is the expression of his intellect Hence the infant's sublier and absolute fearlessness, and its i upward out of its ! It stands, as Wordsworth has sung,--

”Glorious in the ht,”

and only gradually do

”Shades of the prison-house begin to close around the growing boy”

For, as the same poet has it in that ode which is asin the sacred oracles of the Hebrew or the Christian:--

”Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And even with so of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To lories he hath known And that Imperial Palace whence he cah inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that iht us hither; Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear theevermore”

The ”not unworthy aiive the child the sense of ”having life in hient, so that he may cooing counter to the from God in his activity This separation is _sin_, which is a short word for separation, and the first step in the development of individuality, and therefore pardonable, because it is finite