delicious harmonies like a beautifully tinted flower. Oh, if I could only shout aloud with ten thousand lung-power the truth that I now tell you in silence! Then would I make the ears of a hundred thousand men ring with it! What keenness of sensation, what a soul, what a mind, what force of will and active energy, what dexterity and skill of muscular movement and of perception, and what calm and patience, will not all these things call out in the children! How is it that parents are so blind and deaf, when they profess to be so eager to work for the welfare, the health, and peace of their children? No! I cannot understand it; and yet a whole generation has passed since this system first delivered its message, first called for educational amendment, first pointed out where the need for it lay, and showed how it could be satisfied. If I were not afraid of being taken for an idiot or an escaped lunatic, I would run barefoot from one end of Germany to the other and cry aloud to all men:-"Set to work at once for your children's sake on some universally developing plan, aiming at unity of life purpose, and through that at joy and peace." But what good would it do? A Curtman and a Ramsauer, in their stupidity or maliciousness, make it their duty to stigmatize my work as sinful, when I am but quietly corresponding with just my own friends and sympathizers; for they say I am destroying all pleasure in life for the parents: "Who could be so silly as I, -amongst sane men who acknowledge that parents have a right to enjoy life,-I who perpetually call to these parents in tones. of imperative demand, 'Come, let us live for our children! › » (Kommt, laszt uns unseren Kindern leben!) O` MOTIVES From The Education of Man. By permission of Josephine Jarvis, NLY in the measure that we are thoroughly penetrated by the pure, spiritual, inward, human relations, and are faithful to them even in the smallest detail in life, do we attain to the complete knowledge and perception of the Divine-human relation; only in that measure do we anticipate them so deeply, vividly, and truly, that every yearning of our whole being is thereby satisfied, at least receives its whole meaning, and is changed from a constantly unfulfilled yearning to an immediately rewarded effort. How we degrade and lower the human nature which we should raise, how we weaken those whom we should strengthen, when we hold up to them an inducement to act virtuously, even though we place this inducement in another world! If we employ an outward incentive, though it be the most spiritual, to call forth better life, and leave undeveloped the inner, spontaneous, and independent power of representing pure humanity which rests in each man, we degrade our human nature. But how wholly different every thing is, if man, especially in boyhood, is made to observe the reflex action of his conduct, not on his outward more or less agreeable position, but on his inner, spontaneous or fettered, clear or clouded, satisfied or dissatisfied condition of spirit and mind! The experiences which proceed from this observation will necessarily more and more awaken the inner sense of man: and then true sense, the greatest treasure of boy and man, comes into his life. I APHORISMS SEE in every child the possibility of a perfect man. The child-soul is an ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity. The plays of childhood are the heart-leaves of the whole future life. Childish unconsciousness is rest in God. From each object of nature and of life, there goes a path toward God. Perfect human joy is also worship, for it is ordered by God. The first groundwork of religious life is love-love to God and man—in the bosom of the family. Childhood is the most important stage of the total development of man and of humanity. Women must make of their educational calling a priestly office. Isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create life. Without religious preparation in childhood, no true religion and no union with God is possible for men. The tree germ bears within itself the nature of the whole tree; the human being bears in himself the nature of all humanity; and is not therefore humanity born anew in each child? In the children lies the seed-corn of the future. The lovingly cared for, and thereby steadily and strongly developed human life, also the cloudless child life, is of itself a Christ-like one. In all things works one creative life, because the life of all things proceeds from one God. Let us live with our children: so shall their lives bring peace and joy to us; so shall we begin to be and to become wise. What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of their inmost souls. This earliest age is the most important one for education, because the beginning decides the manner of progress and the end. If national order is to be recognized in later years as a benefit, childhood must first be accustomed to law and order, and therein find the means of freedom. Lawlessness and caprice must rule in no period of life, not even in that of the nursling. The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood. A deep feeling of the universal brotherhood of man,-what is it but a true sense of our close filial union with God? Man must be able to fail, in order to be good and virtuous; and he must be able to become a slave in order to be truly free. My teachers are the children themselves, with all their purity, their innocence, their unconsciousness, and their irresistible claims; and I follow them like a faithful, trustful scholar. A story told at the right time is like a looking-glass for the mind. I wish to cultivate men who stand rooted in nature, with their feet in God's earth, whose heads reach toward and look into the heavens; whose hearts unite the richly formed life of earth and nature, with the purity and peace of heaven,-God's earth and God's heaven. |