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THE NATURAL WAY
o o s; ^
The Natural JVay In Moral Training
FOUR MODES OF NURTURE
PATTERSON DU BOIS
Author of *^ Beckoning! from Little Hands," "The Point of Contact in Teaching-" "Chat Wood" etc.
Nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord.
— Revised Version. If ashed to interpret child nature in a single word the only word that meets the case is " hunger," — Thisblton Mark.
7^38
New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh
Copyright, 1903, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
{September)
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 6} Washington Street Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 30 St. Mary Street
LC 385
The Brief
BY invitation of tiie lamented Dr. Maltbie D. Babcock, in the winter of 1901 I de- livered a course of lectures to parents and teachers in the Brick Church of New York. Sub- sequently, the lectures were repeated, with cer- tain changes, before other audiences consisting chiefly of special students or of persons interested in aspects of religious training or of general edu- cation.
The present volume is an amplification of these lectures to meet the need of pastor, parent and teacher, in their common interest of upbuilding Christian character. It proceeds on the ancient doctrine of the Great Teacher and the modern ^ theory of pedagogy, that child-nature is the pivotal ^S point of education and that the neglect of this
• truth, by the church especially, has resulted in tl incalculable leakage and loss of power. The
• child not having had his due, humanity has suf- ^ fered accordingly.
Viewed as Nurture, education is not a mere question of the establishment and discipline of schools nor of teaching or preaching, but of the administration of every life relation. It is attitude and activity at all times. The educational con- sciousness must permeate and color all feeling, 5
6 The Brief
thought and action, if we would not thwart our own best purposes or ^^the ground from be- neath our feetf * This isi^P preposition.
The essential problem, then, is to make better educators of us all by presenting the great princi- ples that underlie the formation of character so that they may seem to have come of themselves in nature's own way; to conduct the pastor, parent, teacher, or any one uninterested in formal pedagogy, through the avenues of his own ex- perience to the easy possession of the laws of character-growth; to help him to interpret his own life and all life about him in terms of influ- ence and power. If this be possible there ought to be an increase of efficiency in the church, out of which should grow a like efficiency in the home, the school, and the state.
With very practical purpose this book is an essay towards such an end. The distinctive thing about it is its point of view and the method which grows out of it by analogy. There is ♦ nothing novel in its facts even though there be # novelty in their handling. The plan is to put familiar phenomena into usable relations; to marshal them, group them, focus them about ^ familiar natural centres. It therefore takes no ^ point of departure in the terminologies common to ethical, theological or other philosophical dis- ciplines, nor even in child-study as such.
The point of view is nutrition, which is the natural response to hunger, in the larger sense of need. When we move into the realm of the soul
The Brief 7
we call it Nurture. Only living things can be the subject of nutrition and therefore ministry to life becomes the central fact of Nurture, We com- monly think of food as the only mode of nutrition but in reality nutrition includes every agency and process that contributes towards health and growth.
Now the fundamental factors in nutrition, or modes of ministry to physical life are four: Atmosphere, Light, Food, Exercise. These con- stitute our categories. Every one knows what these terms mean. But as this book does not treat of physiology or hygiene in the physical sense, its function is to show the analogy and symbolic significance of those terms in the Nur- ture or education of the soul. It might be called a spiritual hygiene.
All the concrete facts and feelings, all the illus- trations from life, group themselves about these four agencies or modes of Nurture. Every lead- ing pedagogical principle is seen to emerge naturally from them. 'Pedagogy thus becomes an art of satisfying hunger, a response to need, a mode of life, rather than a philosophical system or code of science.,
Yet the book takes no exception to formal pedagogy. Its debt to educational authorities is great — as is evident from the freedom with which I have quoted them. It does not even aim to be complete in detail on its own plan. It hopes to be suggestive to all and perhaps, to many, in- forming. In its most practical intent it is a
8 The Brief
manual on the education of the feelings by atmospheric or indirect means; on the mental image as the great instrument of instruction; on direct prescription for acquirement of knowledge, and on the principle of self-expression, or the exercise of choice and freedom of the will. These are the four aspects of soul-nurture, sym- bolized in Atmosphere, Light, Food and Exercise.
As modes, they cover the essentials of practice, in the education of emotions, intellect, and will. They are a familiar touchstone by which all our contact with children and with men may be tested and directed. They do not solve all educational problems but no educational ques- tion can arise without their entering into it. The chapter on the education of the feelings is an effort to be practical in a field which has hitherto been little trodden. The importance of the feelings is acknowledged by psychologists and educationists but the literature of practice on the subject is very scant. In the chapter on the mental image, the instructional use of Bible stories is discussed in the light of certain investi- gations not heretofore fully published.
To the exact pedagogue the plan may seem too free and unconventional, if not uncalled for. Opinions may differ as to some definitions and analogies. The occasional repetition of fact, idea, or illustration, needs no apology. Each mode is organically related to the other three, and their interlinking necessitates recurrence of mention. But it is as a mode of the practical
The Brief 9
application of the laws of bodily nutrition to soul-nurture, that the book asks a friendly hear- ing. It means to serve those who, unready to view life through the lens of pedagogy, are pleased to view pedagogy through the lens of life.
Patterson Du Bois.
r>S A]^GHItES, ORIx,
Contents
I
The way of the Master 15
A Matter of Economy — Educational Consciousness of Jesus — Church and Home Educational Institutions — Christian Education a Matter of Method — Church's Failure to see the Child — Thwarting — Childless Church — Specimen Problems in Educational Values ih the Church — The New Education — Salvation — Church Falling Behind the School — Theological Sem- inaries Deficient — Progress Through Laymen — Church a Life-Giver — Remedy for Leakage — Peda- gogy Conceived and Applied as Nurture.
II
The Idea of Nurture 54
The Natural Way — A Cornfield — Nature Determines Nurture — Pauline Nurture — Soul-Hunger — Economy — Adult Habit of Mind — The Gospels Biological — Anaemia — Using What We Have — Four Modes of Natural Nurture — Atmosphere, Light, Food, Exercise.
Ill
Nurture by Atmosphere 69
Indirect Education of the Feelings — Premiership of the Feelings — Fundament of Character — Obvious in History — Suggestion — Censorships — Effect of Feeling on Pupils — Our Own Feelings not to Dominate Us — Kidd's View — What We Mean by the Feelings — II
1 2 Contents
Classification and Psychological Theories — Relation to Intellect and Will — Rhythm, Basis of Social Con- sent and Poetry — Threefold Duty Towards Children — How the Feelings are to be Educated- — Indirection and Atmosphere — Laughing at Children — Effect of Phys- ical Atmosphere on Morals — Home and Church At- mosphere — Stillness — Reverence — Ceremony — Sub- Conscious Self — Odor — Music — Pictures — Schoolroom Atmosphere — Theological Disparagement — Property Sense — Remembered Emotions — Justice — Authority — Patriotism — Heroism — Direction, Dejlection and Counteraction — Methods Illustrated — Depression Through Negation — Lack — Sin — Feeling Through Action — Six Obstacles — Fatigue — Law of Connection and Relativity — Thinking too Much of Our Emotions — Feeling Must Lead to Action.
IV
Nurture by Light 174
Education Through Vision : Power of Pictorial — Making Truth Visible — Mental Image the Great Instrument of Instruction — What Light Stands for Symbolically — Place of Sense of Sight — Light as a Purifier — Dreams of the Blind — Metaphor — Catechisms — Drama — The Working Principle — Sight of Action Our Spring of Action — Applied in Practice — Cartoons — Publication of Crime — False Syntax — Pictures — Fables — Story — Apt, Vivid, Wholesome — Grewsome Bible Stories — Strenuous Life — Heroism — Place and Rank of Bible Stories — Investigations and Conclusions.
V Nurture by Food 2(i}
Education by Direct Means or Prescription: Interest — What Food Is — Assimilation — Transfor- mation— Teaching Material — Place of Interest in
Contents 13
Determining Mental Food Prescription — Standards of Values — Interest is Hunger — Recapitulation Theory Misleading — Old and New Testaments as Food — Periods of Progress — Child Nature is Hunger.
VI Nurture by Exercise 278
Education by Self-expression : Choice and Will — Life Initiative — No Growth without Exercise — Uses — Self-expression — Froebel's Great Insight — The Soul as a Self-active Energy — Conscious Evolution — Free- dom— Danger of an Unassertive Will — Surrendered Will — Broken Will — Right of Choice — Obedience — Dante — Judgment — Subserviency — Alternative — Monotony a Form of Idleness and Ruinous — Insane Animals — Children's Difficulties — Will Attitudes — Habit — Heart — Education of Feelings Through Intel- lect and Will as Taught by W. T, Harris,
VII The Discipline and the Practice . . . .315
Vague Ideas of Nurture — Educational Consciousness — Thinking in Values — Terms of Nutrition — Interrogat- ing the Problem — Two Good Primary School Illustra- tions— Practical Hints to Preacher, Parent, Teacher and Superintendent — Bushnell's Comment — Spiritual Physiology and Hygiene — Difference between Growth of Body and Spirit in One Aspect — Test of Values — The Whole Man — No True Education or Nurture but the Christian — Problem Finding — Admonition of the Lord — God's Part and Man's — Our Responsibility for Our Powers and Their Use in the Natural Way.
The Natural IVay
THE WAY OF THE MASTER
MERE man has never y^learQed Nature's ari_-of being absolutely and entirely econoniigal. The Divine Mangaye the clue to it v^hen he. set the chHd in the midst. Paul followed this up with the caution against provoking the children to wrath and th^n pxe- scribing thdr nurture in the admonition of the Loid. Perhaps no text in the New Testament has been more piously quoted and disregarded than this. The id^ of admonition is pressed wliile that of nurture has drq££ed out, and with it the economy of the soul and of all life.
Michelet caught the point when he said, "No consecrated absurdity would have stood its ground in the world if the man had not silenced the ob- jection of the child." And a prophet of our day, Bishop Phillips Brooks, summed the whole mat- ter— to the church's shame — when he wrote, '(He who helps a child hejps humanity with a IS ^
l6 The Natural Way
distinctness, with an immediateness, which no other help given to human creatures in any other stage of their hurnan li/e can possibly give again.'*)
We do help children and so, in a degree, help humanity at the best end. But this is haphazard and often adventitious. We prescribe for them hoping that they will get some good out of our prescription — which we usually make in excess so that they may get all that they need out of our giving too much. We do not exactly mean to waste them but neither do we mean to economize them — or to so economize humanity. Salvation has no particular meaning for us as a practice.
In an article on "Musical Expression " the dis- tinguished musician, Sternberg, says, "I often tell my pupils, ' play any way you mean to, only play some way and be sure that it is the way you mean to play.' Now frequently they stop right then and there and their look of perplexity shows plainly that they caught themselves at not having had any thought at all in their mind. Whenever I succeed in making them thus catch themselves at being so thoughtless 1 feel that I have gained much. The rest is usually easy."
Do we, does the church, mean to play on the great instrument of humanity, and is it playing in the way it means to ? (Do we mean that tjie ch\i£ch — to s^ nothiiig of the hqme — shall be educative in its en^e adminjstratipn ?^ Do we mean to make it a house of nurture ? Where are the evidences that we have set the child in
The Way of the Master 17
the midst, that we mean not to provoke and dis- courage him, that we realize that his nature de- termines the mode of his nurture, that we regard his objection to our aduitism, and that we mean to act on the conviction that the basal way to help humanity is to help the child? (^'Play asjf the Master were listening, '^says Schumann. ("It is but a half-truth to say that the methods of Jesus were educational. The whole truth is that he not only educated his disciples, but that he meant to be educational, and that he was the mo_del towards which in its final analysis the sanest modern education is tending. The farther scientific pedagogy probes its problems, the more nearly do its conclusions find their prototypes in the principles and methods of the great Teacher. Whether he walked or sat or talked or kept silent, whether he praised or rebuked, whether He was secret or open, whether he healed or turned aside and withdrew from sight — he was the consummate teacher and trainer. The one unique thing about him as a teacher is that he seems never to have lost his educational con- sciousness or intent. He was the model nurturer^)
Similarly the church, standing, as Prof. E. A. Ross says, as "the repository of certain related ideas, convictions, ideals, symbols, and appeals which are admitted to have more efficacy in socializing the hurnan heart than any other group of influences known to western civilization," should be par excellence the institutional executor
l8 The Natural Way
of the pedagogy of the Master Educator. In ad- ministration and in substance of instruction it should be an economic model, never wasting an atom of vital force by neglect or misdirectj^on of energy.
Now the universal fact is that man wastes nothing so much as man. Life is loose with losses. Salvation is the imminent and perpetual need. Nature, science, and art alike repudiate loss. Life is essentially economic, and leakage is the one intolerable thing in the application of power to the world's work — whether it be me- chanical, physiological, asthetic, moral, or spir- itual.
Greatest of all world-powers, as the Christian church (including the home) is, we have scarcely begun to realize its possibilities. As an institu- tion, the leakage, waste, and loss of power which the church sustains is due in large measure to the lack of an educational cons^ciousness, the want of a sense of educational values, in every activity, interest, and influence. Says G. Stanley Hall, ('All human institutions are educational, and educational values are the criteria by which everything is to be judged. The true work of education is included in everything that brings man to be more nearly perfect.'^ Our Lord tells us, " Be ye therefore perfect."
In so far as the home and the church, as the "foci of effort," are responsible for the nurture and development of personal character, together with the culture of a social ideal — thus far are
The Way of the Master 19
the church and the home educational institutions quite as truly as the more systematically or logic- ally organized school or college.
And thus far also it is morally obligatory on the church and the home to have an educational con- sciousness and to know something of the bases of educational method as understood in the light of modern psychologic progress. To say this, however, is to say virtually nothing more than that the educational function should be exercised in the spirit and in accord with the practice of Jesus; for there is nothing basal in the principles of sane, modern education that has not always existed as principle in Christianity, as we find it illustrated in the life of our Lord. The "new education " is essentially as old as the Christian era. Indeed, its ceolral iiiea or law of a free-wjll self-activity received its first recorded sanction in E4en.
The church would seem to be the natural heir to the mode of Jesus as the modern trainer of men, and yet the church rests more or less in ignorance of, or in virtual defiance of, principles that are as plainly a part of the Gospel as is salvation or the Golden Rule. On other words, the weakness of the church lies largely in its failure to be consciously educative after the manner of the Master. ) Christian education is, therefore, not merely a matter of instruction in the tenets of the church or even in ethics, but it is a matter of consciously Christian method. Consequently it is not limited to "religious" in-
20 The Natural Way
struction, but is coextensive with the whole discipline of life. Professor Coe aptly says:
"Religious education has relations to general pedagogy that demand to be recognized and ap- plied. The teacher of religion and the teacher of arithmetic are dealing with the same child. Possibly learning arithmetic has something to do with learning to be religious. In any case the principles of development in the one sphere can- not be altogether separated from those in the other."
Now, notwithstanding modern education, fol- lowing the lead of Jesus, insists on setting the child in the midst and making him the centre of interest, it is true, as Professor Coe says, that the "weakest point in our campaign for bringing the world to Christ is the relation of the church to the young"; the "official status of children to the church has been altogether overshadowed by that of adults." Even the great Dr. Thomas Arnold was slow to give to youth its place. A recent writer says: "While his idea of educa- tion was wholly religious, his conception of the spiritual cultivation possible to boys would prob- ably not 'pass unchallenged even now, when all sections of Christians unite in honoring him. In a letter written after his appointment, but before his induction, he said, ' My object will be, if possible, to form Christian men; for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make. I mean that from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in
The Way of the Master 21
their full development upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morality in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in what I consider the boy- hood, of the race.' His opinions on this subject were afterwards modified, and, as most would think, happily modified by experience. He en- couraged even the younger boys to become com- municants, and was never more gratified than when there were a large number of them."
In every aspect of life we see the child gaining recognition — the church bringing up the rear. We see prevention in the child rated above the cure of the a4ult; we see forrnation put above refor- mation. We see this not only in our educational treatises and text-books, but in schoolhouses; we see it in surgery; in the examination of the eyes, ears and nerves of school children; in juve- nile courts; in play-grounds; in literature for children; in the abandonment of the congre- gate system for orphans, defectives, delinquents, and the friendless; in the free kindergartens; in nature study and manual training; in foreign mission schools for children; in the raising of the age of child labor and the war on child slavery; in the organizations for protecting children from cruelty; in such institutions as the George Junior Republic; in mothers' con- gresses and round tables; in the rise of normal schools; in tenement house improvement legis- lation; in the abandonment or reduction of corporal punishment; in scientific child study.
22 The Natural Way
In the church we see this progression — some- what timid it is true, and apprehensive that orthodoxy may suffer by it — in the primary Sunday-school; in the normal classes; in the dis- position to accept Buajinell's doctrine that <^the child is to grow up a Christian and never know himself as being otherwise; ') in the Christian En- deavor and kindred movements. {'Quite start- lingly Trumbull tells us, "Children's singing might almost be called an invention of the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was practically unknown before, with all its blessings to and through children. It went from America to Europe and the far East, after its value was learned here; and it has girdled the globe since then. A prominent friend of missions, who first visited Turkey and Palestine, nearly fifty years ago, and then again twenty years later, says that on his first tour he never heard a child's voice in song outside of Christendom. He heard native mothers sing lullabies to their children, but he heard no singing by children. On his second visit, children's voices were heard at almost every point, in our children's hymns and tunes, and he then thanked God that so many children were thus thanking God.';
Trumbull continues: " Under the old dispen- sation the man had the first place. Under the new dispensation the position of the child and of the childlike was first at the start, and ever onward. In the prophet's promise of yet better things to come in Messiah's completed reign the
The Way of the Master 23
child is to be still a child when a hundred years old, and he who is a hundred years old without being a child shall only be accursed. We have evidently been moving in that direction.
^" Jesus Christ not only gave children a place in His kingdom, He gave them the chief place. He did not say that if a child grew up to man- hood, having kept on improving, he might come to understand God's truth; He did say that the only way in which a mature man could understand this truth was in getting back to his child way of thinking. That this was not a mere figure of speech is shown by His having a real flesh and blood child before Him when He said it. This has been a hard saying for apostles and theolo- gians, and preachers generally, to realize the truth of; but they have been making a good start the past century. There is hope of them — the most childlike.")
But the movement in that direction has been slow and, on the whole, grudgingly given. The church waited for the world to take the lead in it and now, as a natural consequence, in some quarters, we find the church complaining of its want of growth. Even in those aspects of its progression towards the educational ideal of its Founder, it is continually deceiving itself by a timid patching of the old garment instead of ordering a new suit.
A recent medical writer says that some germi- cides— formaldehyde for instance — used in the nasal passages destroy the tissues along with the
24 The Natural Way
germs. Medicines that seem to cure, kill. This is a thwart, a boomerang.
Self-thwarting is common to us all as indi- viduals and as society. The nation thwarts itself in that it creates some evils which it is at the same time endeavoring to cure. We pro- duce criminals in our effort to reform them. We make paupers in our effort to prevent pauperism. We increase the difficulty of preserving peace by the display of the paraphernalia of war. Dr. A. F. Chamberlain^ searchingly shows that "while we are busy rescuing the individual child from the clutches of the adult, primitive peoples, who may be said to represent the childhood of the race, are being treated as once he was. . . . We ought to be as fair to the ' naughty race ' abroad as we are to the 'naughty boy' at home. If we are abandoning the old unscientific methods of treating the one we ought not to make them the basis of our dealings with the other. . . . ' War as a civilizer ' is still blest by the priest to whom the flag so often means so much more than the cross."
We cannot begin to estimate the loss to our missionary efforts through the counteracting effects of war. The brutalities of soldiers repre- senting Christian nations in China during the Boxer troubles are an incalculable thwart. And yet the church takes little note of the world's spiritual loss through war. On this point Mr.
1 The Peiiagogical Seminary, Dec, 1902.
The Way of the Master 25
Ernest H, Crosby asks, " What possible truce " there can be between the hell of war and the church or the kingdom of heaven. It is a fact, he says, that the church favors war; and the only audience he ever had unanimously favoring war was an audience of ministers!
in a Christmas sermon a few years ago, how- ever, Dr. C. H. Parkhurst in his direct, unevasive way, spoke of the commercial and other civilizing consequences of war — as claimed by those who ought to know more about such things than he — and added:
^' But when all those matters are put one side and we come on to ground that is distinctly my province as a representative of Jesus Christ, then I do not yield to you; and I am going to say to you, without any 'huts' or ' wheresoevers,' that to promote civilization by the use of swords and artillery is false to the word, example and life of Jesus Christ and of all His apostles, and alien to the entire genius of Christianity. If you say to that that there are places in the world where Christianity has sprung up as an after- growth of military conquest, undoubtedly: but that does not alter anything so far as relates to the point I have just made. It does not relieve filthy soil that flowers grow out of it. God is all the time doing that thing. It was indispensable to our Lord's mission that Judas should betray Him, but that didn't help Judas any.
" Or you may claim that the powder and shot method of extending civilization is more feasible,
26 The Natural Way-
works with greater promptness. A Krupp gun does quick execution; a missionary and a Bible are slow. I do not dispute that. 1 am not here to claim that Christianity is feasible. A great many Christians, laymen and clergymen of our own and other denominations, have during the past year confessed that Christianity is not feasible. Thou- sands of ministers have practically been confess- ing to the world these last twelve months that Christ's way of saving the world will not work, and that when Paul said that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal he stated a principle that he would have recanted if he had lived longer and known more. Perhaps they are right; at least I am not here to say that they are not right. 1 should be sorry to have to conclude that the Gospel is inadequate without gun-powder to support it, and when I do conclude that I shall stop preaching, out of self-respect; at least I shall stop calling myself a preacher of the Gospel.^
" So my friends you cannot go away and say that 1 have argued against the English slaughter- ing the Boers or our slaughtering the Filipinos. No more can you charge me with having claimed that shot and shell are not a necessary auxiliary to the doctrine of the Cross as a means of quick- ening men that are as slow as the Boers, or as a means of domesticating creatures that are as savage as the Filipinos. I have claimed nothing of the sort. I have simply dropped all questions of gold and diamonds and commercial perqui- sites, of which I know little, and have stated to
The Way of the Master 27
you the mind of Jesus Christ of which I do know something. Now you can ignore that mind and promote civilization by killing — which may be the best way — or you can adopt that mind and promote civilization by making alive, which is the only Gospel way."
In the totality of the moral life what are the consequences of the mode of Aguinaldo's cap- ture ? Have our boys received any new stimulus in the line of true courage, of open fairness, of fidelity, of truthfulness ? What of our "Century of dishonor " with the red Indian ? What of the church's uncertain attitude in the matter of mar- riage ? What of the Wilmington lynching and the action of the Presbytery on it ? What of the growth of lawlessness and mob-murders ?
How we thwart ourselves in the rage for manufacture! A Southern paper thus comments on child labor: "The employment of children at almost starvation wages forces out a number of men, necessarily; and so we have the starved and stunted child at one end of the line and the tramp at the other. No prosperity built on such foundations can last." " Their constitutions will be weakened, their bodies dwarfed, and their intelligence benumbed. Naturally this destroys in time the efficiency of child-labor."
But this is only the more harrowing kind of specimen of our moral suicide. The boomerang is our favorite instrument. Alas!
Dr. E. A. Ross notes* that a "person may be
> " Social Control."
28 The Natural Way
tender-hearted and yet do vast harm by dodging quarantine, or smuggling Coolies, or falsifying news, or stuffmg ballot boxes. He will not hurt a fly and still he will supply explosive kerosene or contaminated water to multitudes." He is a thwarter. In a suggestive article on " The So- cial Price," Ethelbert Stewart^ points to the "in- tangible social expense not carried to the price- lists nor paid by the consumer." Sooner or later society must pay the price for the present dis- counting of men over forty, and the putting a premium on child-labor. A just eye capable of penetrating the whole social structure — what waste of power, of human life — it would dis- cover! Such an eye would be the ideal educa- tionist, since Christian education is satisfied with nothing less than the whole man. For this, Jesus stood. In this, He was the Son of Man. Entire salvation was the way of the Master.
Not so with the church. It thwarts its own best intentions. If governments and individuals all do this kind of thwarting, in one way or another, for one reason or another, the church ought to be the first to shed tears over her slip- shod and ineffectual attitude towards the new education of Jesus and of modern progress. The church ought to be the first to take measures to prevent the leakage and loss created by her own efforts to stop them.
Take the primary Sunday-school. No nobler
■ The Outlook, May 23, 1903.
The Way of the Master 29
band of workers can be found than just here. Studious, self-sacrificing, laborious, loving. Yet their very enthusiasm carries them into the error of teaohing too_rnuch because they want tojeel hard-worked in a go^d cause. There is too much so-^called teaching, too littjereal_ nurture — the essentials of which it is the particular province of this book to make clear and practical. There is even a perversion of simple facts of nature through a desire to bring the name of Jesus habitually before the child. A writer in "Na- ture" gives this illustration: "I once heard a child ask its mother, ' What makes the flowers grow.?' Promptly came the answer, 'Jesus!'" Even if this mother wished to point to God's creative providence it would be better to say " God." (There is a disposition in some primary schools to ignore the naqie God and sub^stitute the name Jesjjs without discrirmnation. And there is a loss, too, in not leadjng chjjdren into^ clo^r union with God through a good honest intimacy with nature as His^ handry/prk. ^ But this demands that the child be answered in terms of natjaral process as well as in those of Divine authorship. I shall revert to this in the chapter on Exercise.
Take the Junior Christian Endeavor society, like the Sunday-school, as Forbush says,^ "smit- ten with the plague of uniformity." "No mat- ter what the local membership or circumstances, every band is urged to take the uniform topics
» " The Boy Problem."
30 The Natural Way
and to adopt the same affiliated ideas. . . . There is no indication that the wealth of recent child-study literature which is transforming edu- cation and home life has yet gotten inside the door of the Junior Endeavor movement. . . . The chief trouble with the plan is that it is a plan for grown-up people."
The key to the whole difficulty lies in the idea of nurture — but of this we shall see more later on. Suffice it to say that nurture turns on the powers of the nature that is to be nurtured. The child is the pivotal point of his own education. He "grows from within by assimilation, not from without by accretion. Therefore," as Coe well puts it, "the laws of the child mind yield laws for educating the child, laws as to method and laws as to material. Education is not to press the child into any prearranged mold, but to bring out his normal powers in their own natural order. Religious education has commonly pro- ceeded from the opposite point of view, namely from a fixed system of religion to which the child is to be shaped."
Thus we cut away the very ground from be- neath our feet. Although we can help humanity with greater distinctness and directness by help- ing the child it is about the last way that the church has thought of performing its most es- sential function.
Listen to an indictment from Mrs. Charlotte Brewster Jordan.^ Speaking of the church she
1 The Outlook, May i6, 1903.
The Way of the Master 31
says: "It is an organization which deliberately throws away its golden opportunity of stimulat- ing the intelligent devotion of the ranks from which all future congregations must be drawn. It is progressive with its order of service, its choral uniform, its individual communion service, and its methods of raising money for various missions; but what progress has it made in ren- dering its service magnetic to the children who enter its walls only under compulsion ? Appeal- ing more or less to the intelligence of the adult, the modern church, while exacting regular at- tendance of the child, and upbraiding bitterly if it be lacking, fails to bestir itself either to awaken or to retain the child's loving interest in church matters. Its youthful congregations are expected to learn what they can through some blind sys- tem of absorption, and through the habit of en- forced attendance to develop the love of church- going and worship. . . . The parent must take the church as she finds it, and no amount of expediency can alter the fact that in its present form it is insufferably dull and painful to the normal child. . . .
"The only course now open to the mothers is to insist upon attendance upon the church as it is ; to insist upon the uncomplaining swallowing of bitter medicine. In other matters, do we give bitter medicine, expecting the child thus to ac- quire a relish for it which will render it indispen- sable to maturity? Is it not preposterous! It would be humorous were it not so pitiful. In
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any other enterprise, do we struggle to foster fondness through dislike? I say 'struggle,' for it is a weekly struggle in two-thirds of our so- called Christian homes. . . . Do not the zeal- ous parents who insist upon regular church-going in the belief that so they are forming a com- mendable habit, practically defeat the object which they so earnestly desire, by giving children a pro- nounced distaste for religious things? They make no allowance whatever for that recoil from rigidity which leads to laxity and indifference; they forget that the atmosphere of artificial un- worldliness is entirely alien to child-nature, I believe that, if the statistics could only be ascer- tained, it would be found that insistence upon unsatisfied church-going makes ten renegades from the Christian army where it makes one re- cruit."
Is it not, at bottom, a question of relative values — one of human economy ? Think of the wasted energy put forth by Christians on a Sun- day morning, in an effort to train up their chil- dren for Christ! The idea of nurture does not enter into their proposition, for nurture rests on values as determined by uses for power.
Here let us stop to see by a few illustrations just what we mean by educational values in the purview of the church.
A prominent preacher of the Society of Friends says, that the Friends object to singing in wor- ship both because of the emotional stimulus and because, in the use of hymns, persons often sing
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words whose meaning they do not feel or respond to. This he argues tends to a disregard of the strict truth, especially when the sentiments ex- pressed in the hymns are not fully approved by the singer. No one can say that this argument is without force but the churches would claim that it is inadequate in that it loses sight of the esthetic value of music and poetry in cultivating the religious sentiments and affections. Hence the necessity of comparing the educational values of both arguments in order to see where the bal- ance of greatest efficiency lies. It becomes a matter of economy in soul-nurture.
Nor is this the end of such a question. Subor- dinate educational problems arise out of each con- crete situation. The call is for tact and judgment on occasion and the minister or layman versed in the essentials of nurture will be a thousand times more likely to work with the least spiritual loss than one who has never had a trained educa- tional consciousness. If music is rightly an ele- ment of worship what kind of songs will be ad- vantageous at any particular time.? This is a matter to be decided through the sympathies and the esthetic sense of unity, as well as the intel- lectual appreciation of those conditions which make for spiritual nurture. It is a problem of losses and gains and one not to be decided with- out standards. So far the church is an educa- tional institution, standing in need of a more defi- nite educational consciousness.
Take a few more random illustrations, in equa-
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tions. A Sunday-school teacher who presses the point of reverence in the exposition of a lesson offsets his own teaching when he is willing to leave the floor at the close of school strewn with Bibles and hymn books.
It is desirable that the singing at the Easter service of the Sunday-school be hearty and ap- propriate, and in order to secure this the hymns must be practiced. But if the practicing begins before the Christmas flavor has gone by, the in- congruity may damage the effect of both seasons. Cin any case it is a nice question how far the get- ting ready for a special occasion should interfere with the current and dominant purpose of the school. ) These are questions requiring the con- sideration of emotional conditions and atmos- pheric influences, as well as direct instruction.
The day is going by when churches raise money by illegal means. Yet the lottery is not alto- gether dead. The church's business is to save souls. To do this it must have a worthy sanc- tuary; for this it needs money. If the means which it employs are immoral or illegal it loses souls in the effort to save them, and thus thwarts itself.
Systematic giving, now so strongly advocated in some quarters, has its advantages; but to de- termine its educational value we must consider whether there is any loss through its mechanical exactness and the ignoring of the sympathies and emotions which must go with a true interest in causes. The amount of money collected by a
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church is always of less educational importance than the spirit and mode in which it is given. The cause ultimately profits most by the effect of the giving on the giver.
Little children who sit in warm schoolrooms with winter wraps on cannot be at their best, and the effort to train them under such circum- stances is in part lost. Their powers are not economized.
A church needing repairs permits contractors to "scamp" the work and pays the bills. No officer of the church probably, would permit the same thing in his own home or place of busi- ness. There is no dishonest intent but, as a business transaction, it is loose and unexemplary and therefore educationally bad. The church should be a model of order and exactitude in all her dealings. If she fails here she fails, so far, as an educator in the ethics of business relations, and so thwarts the utterances of her own pulpit, which is supposed to advocate integrity and exactness in moral standards.
Similarly, a church or Sunday-school that is habitually unpunctual fails in its duty of illustrat- ing the maxim that "order is heaven's first law." An unpunctual person is in a measure guilty of trespass upon the time and order of society. Punctuality thus assumes a moral aspect and the church as a moral teacher should exalt and ex- emplify it as a virtue.
Educational influences are impaired in a school where hymn books are too heavy and too
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scarce; where money is collected without in- forming the school where it is to go to or what has become of it after it has gone; where Bibles are held up for show and then discarded in the reading exercise; where prizes and banners are won and exhibited in a way to create a feeling among the children that the conditions are un- fair; where undue importance is laid upon records of unbroken attendance — (absence from the school may be the best thing for a scholar, if for instance that scholar is ministering to an afflicted mother); where all grades from middle- aged adults to children of five, use the same lesson; where teachers are supposed to be trained by giving them words to repeat instead of ideas to germinate; where there is a habitual resort to alliterations and initials as teaching ex- pedients; where children are addressed as though they were guilty or in danger of faults not on the level of their experience; where they get suggestions of evil in unnecessary cautions against it; where all grades are addressed as "dear children" ; where pledges and vows of any kind are forced on unappreciating minds and are permitted to be loosely regarded; where superintendents' talks from the desk are weari- some, or take such a trend as to overturn or dispel the effect of the teachers' work; where anniversary exercises fatigue by length and over- loading.
What is the educational effect upon the church at large of the manifest desire to pad statistical
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statements ? What of "vested interests" in les- son systems, wiien the lesson is on " The Riot at Ephesus " ? What of the tendency to place men of doubtful reputation in the business world in conspicuous positions because of their ability and prominence as men of affairs ? What is the educational influence on the nation of the large proportion of hymns written in martial terms ? Paul abounded in them ! He had reason to, which we have not. The essential idea of war is destroying and killing; that of Christianity is saving and life giving. Figures of speech ought to arise out of immediate circumstances rather than simply duplicate those of another age. How long shall the church fan the flame of war by juvenile verses!
These are merely specimen educational ques- tions for the church administration — only a hand- ful out of a worldful, a sample to practice on.
The "New Education " which we hear so much of nowadays, and which holds the child as its centre, is fundamentally but the education of the Great Teacher. The nineteenth century redis- covered it, although it was glimpsed by and is a gradual unfolding from the insights of Leonardo Luther, Knox, Bacon, Comenius, Milton, Mon- taigne, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Pestalozzi and Froebel. The last named brought it to both a philosophy and a detailed practice. The further the development proceeded the closer did it reach the educational principles embodied in the life of Jesus. It found difficulty in "freeing
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itself from medisevalism," in which it was, and is like the church itself. Properly the New Education and Christianity are at one in aim and meaning, " Seek ye first the Kingdom of God " was Froebel's animating motto. Christian educa- tion is the only true education. It makes for character, it means to save, to economize, the whole man, to utilize every atom of his potentiality. It " puts the whole boy to school." Pestalozzi and Froebel fairly set it in motion and it has since developed further through scientific child study and the insights of American democracy.
The church, then, has not in any conscious or pronounced way set the child in the midst. It is openly an institution of the adult, for the adult, by the adult — the children taking the hindmost part in the procession, although visibly scoring the heels of those who block the way before them. Nevertheless we may be glad to hail the dawning recognition by the church in its every grade of administration, of the truth already quoted in the golden words of Phillips Brooks: "He who helps a child helps humanity with a distinctness, with an immediateness, which no other help given to human creatures in any other stage of their human life can possibly give again." Could any other way be more natural or reasonable ?
The truth is that the church seems never to have fully realized itself as a Christian educational institution, or at least that its prime function is of
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necessity educational. I say this in face of the fact that Lutiier and Calvin both regarded edu- cation as a foundation stone in the Christian edifice. The former said that next to the min- istry the office of school-teacher is the "most useful, greatest and best." He adds: "I am not sure which of the two is to be preferred. For it is hard to make old dogs docile and old rogues pious, yet that is what the ministry works at in great part in vain. ... I would have no one chosen for a preacher who has not pre- viously been a school-teacher." Yet being a school-teacher does not guarantee the presence of an educational consciousness. Once more I quote Professor Coe,^ since it were impossible for me better to picture the conditions. He says, if the inner history of the relations between Chris- tianity and education could be written, " it would record many a strange fact, many a quaint idea, many a surprising contradiction. The church would appear now as the leading patron of edu- cation, now as an opponent or reluctant follower of educational reforms. We should find educa- tion pressed upon the young in the name of religion at the same time that the spiritual barren- ness of all culture is proclaimed from the house- tops. We should find the child held up as a type of the kingdom of God, yet declared to be de- praved by nature, and needing to be converted before it can see the kingdom. At almost every
> " The Religion of a Mature Mind,"
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point evidence would appear of an internal strain, an unreconciled opposition between two tend- encies. . . . Yet one thing Christianity can never do; it cannot let education alone. The debate over salvation by works and salvation by faith may seem to exhaust the alternatives, yet there always remains a back-lying assumption that the world's salvation is to be accomplished partly by educating the young.
"Is it not strange that salvation by education has never received doctrinal recognition? The churches spend vast sums upon schools and colleges; they maintain Sunday-schools at great cost of labor and of gold; they send a school- master side by side with the preacher to heathen lands; yet the principle that governs these things has never been put into words by any official body. We have elaborate theories as to man's part and God's part in other spiritual processes; why not some theory of how God and man co- operate in the education of a soul?"
Had the church realized that Christian education signifies education by Christian means as well as for Christian ends, it could not have been so remiss in the exercise of its prime function as an educational institution. But Christian education in this full sense is larger than any school idea as such. It is psychological as well as logical in administration as well as in curriculum, order, and program. It connotes influence everywhere and always. It prescribes environment and re- lations in the home, as well as in the church,
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Sunday-school, or other sub-organization. We often iiear that Christianity is missionary or noth- ing. Under that lies the more fundamental truth that it is educational or nothing. Nor does this in any sense take issue with the Scripture that the Gospel "is the power of God unto salva- tion."
Yet all through the ages the church has acted more or less as though she had an educational function. She established schools and universities and drew the teaching ranks from the clergy. Says Thomas Davidson:^ "From the days of Alcuin to the rise of Protestantism education was almost entirely in the hands of the clergy. Since that event, but particularly since the French Rev- olution, there has been an increasing tendency to withdraw it from their hands and place it in those of laymen. Along with this has gone a tend- ency to withdraw it from the church altogether and hand it over to the state. . . . It is not long since every college and university in the United States thought it necessary to have a clergyman for president. At present a very large number have lay presidents, and that number is yearly increasing."
Likewise we find public bequests diverted more and more from the church to the college, the library, and the hospital or asylum.
Manifestly there is a feeling that the school in one form or another is the progressive, investi-
' " A History of Education."
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gating, developing element in our civilization; that the church is conservative, apologetic, self- complacent, propagandic, and fossilized. This sounds hard, and yet in his excellent book, "Pastors and Teachers," the Bishop of Coventry says baldly, "While the school is being modern- ized, the church is being fossilized," The edu- cationist stands for freedom, the church for sub- jection— notwithstanding the explicit gospel that Christ came to set us free. The world seems not to look hopefully among theologians for educators, nor among preachers for teachers. The fact is that theology and Christian education — which is properly the only true education — do not yoke well together, since theology is scholastic and dogmatic, while liberal education is open-eyed, truth-seeking, and developmental. The one pulls for authority and subordination, the other for in- dividual, social, and institutional freedom under the law. The one studies the child before it brings him to book, the other studies the book and imposes it as an adult's prescription on the child.
Says Phillips Brooks : " Every theologian must own that his theology is harder than the New Testament. It is the New Testament and not his theology that he ought to teach to the child. The child's mind is natural and not artificial." In short, it is in education that the church in too large a degree parts company with its own Founder; and, singularly enough, through a process of evolution rather than through directly
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imitating Christ, modern education finds itself tending more and more towards the principles and practice of Jesus.
One church, at least, the Presbyterian, is in the anomalous position of technically denominating its ministers "teaching elders," while the sem- inary through which they have passed has made little effort to train them in the science or art of pedagogy or education! Scores of theological students in one denomination or another groan under the uneducational methods of the semi- naries. The curriculum through which they are passing is practically unmodified by the modern rediscovery of the child as an organism to be developed, to say nothing of the educational basis of the life of our Lord.
As to the seminary let us hear from a Doctor of Divinity — the Rev. A. F. Schauffler. He says: "These ministers are among the first to lament over the incompfetence of Sunday-school workers, and among the last to try and remedy the evil. Why? Because they have not been taught how to do it. In the seminaries from which they have come, they have heard lectures on lectures on the church Fathers, and have not learned anything about the church sons. They know a good deal about Tertullian and Origen, but next to nothing about Sam and Jim. Endless lectures are given on the theme of how the church has grown to what it now is, but few on how to make the church more like what it should be. The result of all this antiquated scholastic education, is to
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turn out armies of ministers, into whose hands the responsibility of the religious training of our age is placed, who do not know how to do much more than prepare sermons. . . . And is not this a lamentable confession to make in this age of pedagogical progress?"
And H. Clay Trumbull in an editorial in The Sunday School Times speaks with no uncertain sound thus: "It is certainly important for a Christian minister to know what message he has to deliver, and what truth he is to disclose and impress; and about this he can learn to the full through the teachings given to him in the average theological seminary or divinity school. But it is also important, in order to make the delivery of his message of any practical value, that he should know something about his auditors, — what lan- guage they speak or can understand, how they are to be approached or impressed most effec- tively, what is their special need at the time of his approaching them, and what is the chief barrier or hindrance in the auditors' mind or methods of thought to their receiving needed help from the preacher or pastor ? This is equally true whether he counts himself as seeking to win souls to Christ or to train them in Christ."
An educated ministry will be educative. The minister is the head of his church. He has to minister not only to individuals in person but to administer the affairs of the church which are carried on through lay workers of various grades of competency and character. Perhaps no task
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is more difficult if the educative standard is to be maintained throughout all forms of church and personal activity. It means a tactful direction, guidance, repression, stimulation, conciliation; a lofty personal walk and conversation, a sympa- thetic mood, an influential presence, a vivifying address, a wholesome purveying, an untiring zeal and a discriminate knowledge of human nature. This is administration, and in this the minister and his lay officers should always be moved by the educative consciousness or impulse — that is they should see the remote effect as well as the immediate, of whatever they order or permit, whatever comes under their supervision. The educative view is a view-of-the-world. It " sees all things in God," never losing sight of the totalities of effect.
What the church does it should do educatively, that is it must not shut its eyes to remote any more than to near consequences. Thus, in public worship the service should be so adjusted and ar- ranged that its value shall not be limited to the immediate duty of devotion but to a further, and perhaps indirect, function of educating towards deeper reverence, loftier ideals, wider horizons and renewed resolves. The service of worship has its immediate value as worship but it has also its concomitant totalizing value as a nurturer of the religious sentiments and feelings designed to result in the exercise of a Christian will. And so of all the activities of the church. Immediate re- sults must not stand in the way of larger benefits.
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The church is gradually working towards the view of the present life as over against the bur- dening motive of our fathers — that of getting ready to die. The ground has shifted from a view of death to a view of life and the shift is towards the motif of Jesus which was that of life in abundance.
Yet we must not too severely censure the church for its sluggish recognition even of the principles of its own Founder. It is naturally conservative. The same criticism may be made against the educators and teachers of the past. Speaking of Horace Mann the School Journal says: "A few only saw that this man, who de- clared the teachers were ignorant and taught by wrong methods, and left untaught the things they should teach, was speaking the plain truth. The fact will go down to posterity that the teachers wanted to hear no such truths; they wanted no lectures nor addresses on education; they were satisfied with things as they were. He was, with few exceptions, rejected by the teachers of Boston."
And the late Colonel Parker, one of our ablest teachers, writing in the same journal of the progress of a century, says: "One thing is worth mentioning, that every progressive step in education has been taken in the teeth of the so- called ' leading educators.' When a new idea appeared, the * rabbis ' hurled at it all their logic, of which the effect might have been annihilating, had not the new idea been stronger than their
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logic. In 1879 a leading educator of the United States warned the teachers of Massachusetts, in their state convention, to use ' nature study very sparingly.' It was impossible for them at that time to use the subject more ' sparingly ' than they were using it; indeed, there was hardly a bit of it in New England. The kindergarten had its battles and its victories. Manual training was born in a perfect cyclone of illogical and violent attacks. Never to be forgotten is the National Superintendents' meeting at Washington, to which the best educational talent in the country had been summoned to stamp out the new ' fad,' manual training. The order has been something like this: first, zealous and unremitting attacks; secondly, a little thought, which admitted manual training into the high schools; then some more thought — some demonstrations of the benefit of manual training — and it crept slowly down into the grammar, and even into the primary school, where it is most needed. It is well to preserve this bit of history, for it is now difficult to find in America any educator who is not an earnest advocate of manual training, or perchance, the originator of the 'fad.' Child study has come in to reinforce the pedagogy of manual training.
"It is impossible to tell how all these won- derful changes have come about — not, surely, through one man or one group of men. Like all progress, the movement ahead in education has been a zigzag. It is curious to note that sug- gestions of reform came generally from intelligent
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laymen who saw clearly the defects in the exist- ing state of tilings. As the problem of self- government grew, it was felt that the schools did not keep pace with it. The needs of the masses brought the question of common education close to the hearts of thoughtful patriots."
It is the thoughtful patriots of the church — the laymen and the clergy of deeper insight and larger horizon than they obtained from seminary " chairs " — who are pleading now for a new view of Jesus and of Paul. They are asking that the child be set in the midst and that he be nurtured in the admonition of the Lord. " There are two distinct sources of pedagogic method — the nature of the mind to be taught, and the nature of the subject to be presented: whence arise psychologic method and logical method," says Professor Brumbaugh. This fact may profitably be brought into comparison with seminary, church, and home standards and methods. Dr. W. T. Har- ris observes, in his study of Dante, that "it is in Christianity that religion, for the first time, con- ceives man as perfectly responsible, perfectly free — a spiritual totality." Thus this, which is the new and the true educational idea, is strictly a Christian idea, and, in so far as the church fails to be conscious of it as an ideal, the educational science, which is conscious of it, distances the church in its own rightful field.
In spite of all this, and the enormous leakage and waste of power which arise from it, the church has done and does do a great educational
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work. In school and out, directly or indirectly, she, together with the home, has wrought mira- cles in personal progress. Says Lyman Abbott: '"'^' How many hospitals or asylums or public philanthropies of any kind would there be if there were no churches ? How much honor and integ- rity, how much honesty and uprightness, how much trust and confidence, if there were none of these reservoirs from which the springs are furnished .? . . .
"I know the faults of the church, I know its follies, its divisions, its coldness, its persecuting spirit, its apathy. But, spite of all, tell me where in human history there is such an organization of men and women, or ever has been, bound to- gether by so splendid a loyalty, holding so heart- ily the great fundamental faith in God, in the in- visible world and the living Christ, the revelation of them both, and working with an unselfish purpose in the world's redemption — as is to be found in Christ's church } It is a life-giver."
That is, it is a life-developer. Jesus Christ came that we might have life more abundantly. The church, producing, as it does, a development of life, says Rev. E. M. Fairchild, "is in the full sense of the word an educational institution and is to be classed with institutions of this kind." Normally and ideally this is true, and it is a truth which it is the mission of this chapter to show is too easily overlooked. The same writer, noting that neither the church nor the college as yet per- forms its mission fully (and we might add the
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home), says that the college "has determined its proper function and does its work systematically," while "the church seems to be in doubt and its work is desultory."
Now, in a real sense, just because of these con- ditions, the church, like the home, needs to have the great fundamental principles of education at its fingers' ends so as to avoid making that mul- titude of mistakes, both in administration and in formal teaching, to which desultory work is pe- culiarly liable.*— It is evident that in all its com- plex of personal or organized influences the church must be consciously educative or fail to realize itself. Nor does it need to establish schools or colleges in order to fulfill its obligation of exe- cuting an incessant and varied educational func- tion, so far as it goes. In the delicate interplay of soul on soul individually and in the mass, the church stands in need of a ready, untechnical, and easily applied pedagogy — one that sets the child in the midst and permits his nature to determine the method of his nurture. This is the divine, as well as the rational, remedy for leakage of power. It is the prescription of Jesus and of Paul no less than the sense of modern science.
Now the very words "education " and " peda- gogy," to the average mind, carry with them the idea of something formal, something labor- ious, philosophical, professional. They call up the image of the school desk, the text-book, the scowl of discipline, or the set curriculum. Peda- gogy is a good and necessary science but, having
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"finished his education," the man you casually meet would prefer to read about something else. The mother of half a dozen children next door and the pastor of five hundred souls in your church do not care to be burdened with the daily duty of being pedagogical. They cannot be on the alert to apply at any given moment the laws of apperception, unity, inner connection, creative self-activity, anschauimg, geniilth, interests, recon- ciliation of opposites, self-estrangement, and all the abstract terms which make up the nomen- clature of systematic pedagogy. Trained teach- ers themselves find it difficult to live up to the terminology to which they are committed. Even scientists forget that they profess evolution when it comes to the affairs of common life. We do not need to be learned in the history or philoso- phy of education to practice a natural nurture. It is unnecessary to label ourselves Herbartian, Hegelian, or Froebelian, in order to be measura- bly wise with children. But we must have some conscious principles to tie to, some visible foci for our thinking, some key-notes to tune by.
We may mean to be educative, developmental. But to the average parent, teacher, or preacher, this intention is too general for the best results. Or, conversely, it may be too special; the preacher may think of his educating only when in the pulpit, the pastor only when officially vis- iting, the teacher only when before the class. So there must be a more definitive idea, one in closer relation to the common processes and aspects of
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life. We want to take education out beyond the bounds of home, school, or church, and make it coextensive with the essential agencies and proc- esses of life itself.
Bishop Vincent aptly says: "The sharp line drawn between educational processesand ordinary every-day life is most unfortunate. The limiting of intellectual activity and its best fruits to institutions and libraries and formal curricula and class drills, leaves out the larger field of opportunity, worth as much as these, and without which these lose a large share of their value. It is like that other perversion which limits religion to the church."
Professor Dewey has profoundly noted that education is not merely a preparation for life, but that it is life. Now the one aspect of life — and of education — with which the whole world is on familiar terms, is nutrition — or in the larger soul- sense, let us say. Nurture. Says Dr. Oppenheim, "This thing called nutrition is the main fact of interest to those who believe in training." He is speaking of the physical nutrition only. But the body is not to be ignored as a factor in spirit- ual work. And Francis W. Parker asks, "Is there not a law of nutrition of the mind? Is it not possible that malnutrition of the mind causes mental deformity, just as malnutrition of the body causes physical deformity.?" And then what of the heart, the soul ? Is there not malnu- trition there ? We all suffer from it. If we find the terminology of pedagogy dry, forbidding, and too special for the incessant emergencies of life;
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if, having acquired the terminology we rest in it instead of in the consciousness of its meaning, and so fail to apply it — what then ?
We need an organizing idea of familiar every- day origin. If we can hold this up to the eye, and, looking through it, as a recent writer^ felici- tously says, then, "a whole forest that before seemed like a thick and tangled jungle of bushes and briers is seen to be in reality an orderly gar- den."
Such an organizing idea is that of nutrition, or, more largely. Nurture. Once adopt this as a key- word standing for the fourfold process of At- mosphere, Light, Food, and Exercise, and we are at home with the great essentials of education, couched in homely phrase. Let us next see what we mean by Nurture and then study its four es- sentials in detail, as guides to method.
^ C. S. Peirce in Tht Nineteenth Century.
II
THE IDEA OF NURTURE
THE rich greens of the spring landscape were suddenly interrupted by a brown acre of ploughed land. We were speed- ing on the electric wing through a fertile farming country in Eastern Pennsylvania. But the pace was not too fast to prevent my seeing that the mellow earth was dotted with innumerable little white patches ranged in rows, and that through the centre of each patch a baby cornstalk was peeping at the world.
The white patches were "fertilizer." The chemist had said that it contained some elements which, mingling with the earth, the corn would take up and incorporate into itself. What the farmer wanted was that his product should be the very best and biggest possible. He wanted full ears and a grain rich in certain qualities. To this end he not only fertilized the ground, but he prayed and hoped for exactly the right propor- tions of light and atmosphere — heat and moist- ure. Without these, his fertilizer would go for nothing. One thing more; the farmer knew that each grain of corn contained a potentiality — a power to become something larger than its pres- 54
The Idea of Nurture 55
ent self, a corn-producing energy. This he called life.
Now, observe the corn needed food; it could not grow without taking in solid and liquid at the roots, h needed light as an agency for pro- ducing certain chemical changes; it could not grow in the dark. It needed moisture and warmth of atmosphere; it could not grow in a frigid vacuum. It must be allowed its initiative of life. It must be self-active, self-determining. It must produce corn or nothing. All it asks is that it be furnished with the most suitable atmosphere, light, and food, and its life will do the rest by its own self-determining exercise. But the product will not resemble the elements of the process, for it will be corn; not earth, nor atmosphere, nor light, nor mere activity.
Again, bring me a piece of bread to eat. I call it bread so that I may be understood, but if by this word I mean food, then only my life- forces can determine whether or not it is bread to me. If, sooner or later, it reappears as power in my arm, firmness in my feet, or color in my cheek, then my body has been nourished and you have fed me. As the earth was transmuted into corn stalk, blade, and grain, so the bread is transmuted into a material me.
Again, since man cannot live by bread alone, bring me a text, a thought; bring me a truth, a sentiment, a deed, a vision, a story, a hero, a heart. If, sooner or later these reappear in me as motives, purposes, emotions, deeds, and finally.
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as moral character, then my soul has been nour- ished or nurtured — educated.
In either case, observe that what I took in must reappear in a new translation, a restatement in terms of my own powers of personality. And this was possible only because I was alive. My vital force accepted the bread, translated it into something different — call it blood, bone, muscle. A stone could not do this. You cannot feed a stone. Life is the arbiter, life determines its own need of nurture, and the limitations and possi- bilities of nurture are precisely fixed by the indi- vidual nature.
We may call the processes of bodily nourish- ment digestion, assimilation, metabolism; we may regard them as mechanical, chemical, or vital; the ultimate fact about the bread to me is that my vital power determines whether or not it is food to me, and whether or not it is good or bad for me. If it furnishes that which my organism needs for the repair of its breaks and wastes, and for a new increment of pow- ers and resources, then feed me with that bread for my life has declared it food to me and that it is my life-need. If my nature has not so decreed, then away with the stuff that may be food to you and give me something that will be food to me. If I am a baby. Nature understands me, for mother's milk changes in its chemical composition several times a day. Nature is the model nurturer.
This, too, is the whole principle of nurture and
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it is so evident tiiat the very statement of it may, to some, seem like saying " an undisputed tiling in such a solemn way." But call it the principle of Christian education and though we may assent to it we dishonor it in practice. It has taken the world nineteen centuries to glimpse it. It will take another century to become an educational consciousness or a nurturing habit.
Probably there is no text in the Bible more fre- quently quoted with less thought as to its real meaning than Paul's advice to bring children up " in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." This text it will be remembered follows the in- junction, "Children obey your parents in the Lord," which, however, is followed by a caution to the parent to provoke not his children to wrath. If we turn to the Revised Version, we find the first of these texts changed to " nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord."
The change is of capital importance and lifts the text to the first rank as a principle in Christian sociology. John 3: 16 states a fact of infinite worth to the individual. But this text (Eph. 6: 4) prescribes how we are to put the world into pos- session of the hope in John 3: 16.
Now it will be seen that the essential word in this text, the verb prescribing the action, is "nurture." Yet, strange to say, this is the very thing that is overlooked alike by the church and the home. It seems to be taken for granted that if the parent or teacher has a sincere and holy de-
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sire that the child shall grow up a Christian, familiar with Scripture and with the catechism and other theological statements which are sup- posed to epitomize the teaching of Scripture — it is taken for granted that all this constitutes the admonition of the Lord and is, therefore, nurture.
What Dr. Oppenheim says of physical nurture may be aptly repeated here of soul-nurture: " The prime factor of caring for every unit of energy, of avoiding every item of waste, of nourishing and protecting every budding func- tion, in other words, of conserving nutrition, is absolutely ignored." We suffer the child to be- come anaemic, instead of nourishing or nurturing him. Now, what constitutes nurture ? What determines whether or not any course that I choose to lay out for my child either in the phys- ical or spiritual realm, is nurture ? Manifestly, the child's nature itself, his life forces and their laws of action must be the determining factor.
There is such a thing as soul hunger, and to this nurture responds. We may regard them as correlative terms. This hunger is the demand which life makes upon its environment for its support. Its losses and waste must be made good. But observe, life, nature, decides what it needs. It has been well said that there are more rich people than poor that starve to death. This is not for the want of something which passes under the name of food but for the want of that sort of aliment which will nourish the particular person. Life is the great dictator. Nature is
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commanded by obeying her. It is the life force that accepts or rejects so-called food, that uses it to build up its tissues and sustain its functions. AH the reasoning in the world will not make blood if we do not so humor and honor the life forces that they will accept that which we ad- minister. Even in the case of medicine it cannot be said strictly that medicine cures. Life does the curing by making use of the medicine. Otherwise we could restore the dead or give life to a stone.
The whole problem of the physical or bodily life resolves itself into a problem of nurture. This means more than mere food; it means at- mosphere, light, exercise, and whatever goes to give life an opportunity to build up its habitation, in short, whatever makes for the fullest develop- ment of the physical man. The same is exactly true of nutrition, nurture, or education if we prefer to call it so, of that which, for want of a better term, we call the soul. Indeed the two are so intimately related that soul nurture must also regard bodily nurture. A fatigued body may mean a lean soul.
The practical application of it all is, that as the problem of the physical life is a problem of nur- ture, so likewise is the soul-life. Paul knew this, but unfortunately, very few of his readers seem to take him at his word. They prescribe lessons, commands, courses of so-called discipline, etc., based upon their adult experience, and upon what they want the children to be when they
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grow up to adulthood. They make these pre- scriptions, assuming that if they draw upon Scripture for the raw material and enforce certain ceremonial rites, with a view to forming religious habits, nurture must surely follow. Paul's em- phasis, however, lies on the idea of nurture. The nurture must be in the chastening and ad- monition of the Lord, but nurture it must be. Life, child-nature, must be respected and regarded before nurture is possible. If we could see the soul as we can see the body, what a horrible spectacle of starved, anaemic, wasted lives would be presented to our view as we look over the average Sunday-school and into the average home!
This is because we look at the religious life, and especially that which we call the religious education or training of the children, through the peep-hole of our adult habit of mind. If we could hold ourselves to the single point of view of nurture we should be less given to thwarting our own purposes.
An illustration of this adultic error is to be found in a typical clipping from an article "The Children and the Church," in a religious journal. With the most pious intentions but without the slightest regard for the idea of nurture the writer says: "If there is anything essential in the formal presentation of the truth by a living min- istry, few of the children are getting the benefit of this. Our own opinion is that neither the Sunday-school nor any other religious organiza-
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tion conducted in the interest of the children, can be a substitute for the preaching of the word, and it will require the coming upon the stage of another generation to reveal fully the folly of a system which undertakes the experiment.
" Parents who plan wisely for the proper edu- cation and training of their children will not neg- lect to carry them to the house of God, where their young hearts may be impressed by the word as it falls in earnest message from the man of God. What if they do complain of fatigue, and urge the objection that such services are irksome and without interest? The same objection is urged by children to the restraints of home, yet no wise parent will be willing to yield to them, and turn them over with license to abandon the home and run at large in the community. Ob- jection to church-going is a mere whim of child- hood, and usually comes at the suggestion of some who have been demoralized by foolish indulgence."
There is not the slightest indication that this writer has ever thought of nurturing the children. All he wants is the " formal presentation of truth by a living ministry." He admits no substitute for the "preaching of the word" — without pre- scribing that the preaching shall be nutritious. If the message is from the "man of God" he assumes that the young hearts will be "im- pressed " — without regard either to the form of the message or the nature of the young hearts. As for fatigue, he sees no bar to nurture in
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any amount of it. A regard for child nature would apparently be regarded by him as a fool- ish indulgence and concession to whim. The child's powers and condition do not enter into this good man's count. He has doubtless often quoted Paul's injunction, he would almost cer- tainly admit the truth of the words of Phillips Brooks quoted in our opening pages. Yet in his ruling, child nature is entirely wanting. The laws of life, the essentials of nurture have no place in his prescription for the child's training. And still, this excerpt is representative. It is typical of the church's way. The child is not set in the midst but in the farthest corner. He is peripheral rather than central. He is not to de- velop according to his nature but to be molded in our established forms.
Nature must be reckoned with or nurture can- not be reckoned on. Every proposition for teach- ing or training rests upon two bases — the nature of the person to be taught and the thing that we are to teach him; and the first principally deter- mines the second.
Children are to obey their parents in the Lord. But nothing is in the Lord which is at variance with His laws. The parent must, therefore, be obedient to God before he can rightfully de- mand obedience of his children. A part of this parental obedience will consist in his respect for the child's nature — his possibilities as an indi- vidual, a life. Says Froebel, "The purpose of nature is development. The purpose of the
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spiritual world is upbuilding. The problem of this world is an educational one, the solution of which is — proceeding according to fixed divine laws." These laws, be it noted, are to be found in nature — child nature — and not in our adult philosophies and intellectual formularies.
Our duty is clear. We must be obedient if we would have the children be. We must not pro- voke the children to wrath, — why not.? There is no nurture in it, even though there may be compulsion in it. The children are not to be stuffed with our adult formalisms, our traditions; there is nothing there for a young life to assimi- late. Paul preached nurture because he preached life. The whole trend of the teaching of Jesus likewise revolves about life. As a teacher, Jesus was the model because His bottom principle was nurture. In his work on the "Evolution of Im- mortality," Dr. McConnell well says, "If one should weave together the words of Christ as they are scattered through the Gospels he would find that he had before him a treatise upon con- duct and life, and death. , . . The alter- natives dealt with are not future pleasure and future pain, but living and ceasing to live. The Gospels are biological altogether. They speak a language which is more intelligible to-day than it has ever been before. The imagery is drawn almost exclusively from the processes and phenomena of life. The reason is evident: the illustrations are determined by the theme. The question is not of rewards and punishments, but
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of living or perisiiing. Whatever of pleasure or pain is implicated at any point is incidental."
The progress of applied science is simply the enlargement of our obedience to the laws of na- ture. Just so is it with physical and spiritual nurture. The progress of education is the prog- ress of our obedience to the laws of body, mind and spirit — whatever the distinctions here may be. Scriptural admonition is not necessarily nurture, any more than any other kind of admoni- tion.
As a practical matter it were well then if we could very simply formulate the great laws of soul-nurture that they might be understood and applied by all who sincerely and conscientiously desire to nurture the children in the Lord. If we think of this counsel of Paul's as a call for nutri- tion we may begin the more easily to apprehend its significance. Soul-ansemia is an all-prevail- ing condition among the children, in greater or less degree. The demand of their nature is for something which the life in them can make use of. The demand is for nurture. Nature asks for nurture — nutrition, and this term says Dr. Oppenheim, " cannot rightly be used to designate only the child's food. On the contrary, every fact which affects metabolism, tissue-change, must be included in this term, nutrition. . . . The child who assumes responsibilities beyond his years, who undergoes the wear and tear at- tending the course of a too rapid development, who lacks the beiiefits of a wise restraint and
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discipline, is bound to show the effects in a partial and one-sided development that bars him out from the full beauty of finished maturity. Such a child suffers from the effects of a mis- directed and vicious nutrition." This is true not merely of the physical or bodily life but of the mental, moral and spiritual, which for conveni- ence we may call the soul-life. If then we are so jealous of the truth that the principle of life is Divine and that man cannot produce it, we must honor it. We must give it the right of way. What constitutes nurture will depend upon the nature of the life to be nurtured. Admonition unassimilated is not nurture and no amount of unassimilable admonition will cure the soul's anaemia. Nobody understood this better than our Lord. His teaching was all nurture.
The idea of nurture then is, first, that of the preservation of the life that is, and second, the development of the life by giving it that which it can assimilate and out of which it can grow by its own creative self-activity. This growth can be only by its own exercise — by the use of the life which it already has.
No one is fully developed physically and spiritually. This is chiefly because no one makes the best of his resources within and without. No mere man has ever reached the point of absolute economy. We ask for more faith, not using that which we already have; we go in quest of more knowledge, forgetting that knowledge is power and power unexercised is
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power lost. Froebel went so far as to say, "Religious instruction can bear fruit, can affect and influence life, only in so far as it finds in the mind of man true religion, however indefinite and vague, if it were possible that a human being could be without religion it would also be impossible to give him religion." After all, this comes back to our Lord's declaration, " He that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath." The starting point of nurture is the sub- jective life within us and not the objective life without us.
This also is the starting point of the "new education," as it was the core of the educational mode of Jesus. He developed his disciples by setting them in certain surroundings, giving them special opportunities, speaking pictorially, and leaving them to work out their salvation by dis- covering truth for themselves. The idea of nurture was his ideal as it was Paul's.
Nurture then is a view of education to which we can always refer as a basal principle with which we have had a life intimacy. All our days we have extolled the virtues of atmosphere, light, food, and exercise as essential to bodily health and growth. Whatever else we may need in life we cannot expect to flourish without these at their best. True, we need heat, but this is a matter of sunshine and of the oxygenating power of the atmosphere. Drink, we may reckon with food. For our physical edification we need ask
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no other ministrants. This is universal experi- ence. It is no tissue of teasing technicalities but simple, every-day fact. As a working basis for the growth or development of the soul, all we have to do is to carry these four means or modes of nurture, by symbolic correspondence, over into the mental or spiritual — call it soul-realm and we are equipped at once with true educa- tional methods, standards, and tests with which the least proficient of us is on familiar working terms.
What kind of an atmosphere is the child breath- ing— one of filthy odors and poisonous gases — one of disorder, cynicism, jealousy, strife, hatred, impurity, suspicion ? It is unwholesome. Why these pale, pinched faces and scrawny hands ? They live in a dark cellar; and these shrivelled morals — they are bred where there is no Gospel light, no pictures of life in the beauty of holiness. Here is an anaemic, dyspeptic sufferer; he needs good food such as he can assimilate; and here too, is a starved soul, fed on the husks of hard words and empty forms. There is another, a case of arrested development, a weakling in will, a failure. He needs moral as well as physical and mental exercise, he needs to express himself. Give him his right of choice and set him free — make a self-determined personality of him by giving him his own powers. All these work to- gether to nurture a whole individuality, a healthy personality. Cheat the man out of his due of air, light, food or exercise and he suffers loss.
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The possibilities of his nature are never realized. His life is uneconomical. He needs saving.
This is what Coe has called "Salvation by education." In our terms v^e might call it salva- tion by nurture, and as true nurture is possible only in Christ so is Christ our nurturer into the abundant life. He makes us whole and is there- fore our Saviour. In particular, there is no true, healthful atmosphere but that which emanates from the Divine Man; no perfect light but the Light of the World; no substance of food but His Truth; no safe exercise of the will but in the will of God. All these are closely related, so that as agencies of development there are no sharp dividing lines among them. They are interde- pendent and nurture is a thing of them all. And now for the modes in particular.
Ill
NURTURE BY ATMOSPHERE Indirect Education of the Feelings.
IT was in one of the smaller and quieter New York hotels. The cold March winds blus- tered without while I sat musing before the blazing grate fire in a snug little parlor. A strange feeling came over me as 1 heard a man in the hall say, "White Star Line," followed, after a short interval, by the same voice spelling the name " G-e-r-m-a-n-i-c." The feeling that moved me was intensified. Perhaps I wished that that were my trunk. I had crossed the sea in that vessel. Reminiscences, coupled with longings, too com- plex and too vague to formulate themselves in words or even definite thoughts, took possession of me.
The next morning two men sat near me in the cafe at breakfast. I overheard one say to the other, "I have nothing to carry but a stick and an umbrella. I have taken that old stick with me for thirteen years, and have lost it several times, and it has cost me shillings and shillings to get it back again." The speaker's voice betrayed him as the one who gave his orders to the porter the night before. Apparently he was going back to his dear old England. Confused sentiments about lovely England, historic England, stole through 69
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my organism with a pleasant affection — "Sensa- tions sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart." But the old stick, — what a nuisance it must be! That is, it would be such to me. But I could not help thinking that he had a feeling for it, as I have for some other old things. And then it came to me how children cling to their old broken toys, sometimes even in the presence of the new invoices of Santa Claus. Affections for inanimate things may be unreasonable, but they are feelings deeply and healthily rooted in living hearts, and must be reckoned with and respected.
Now let us move down the street. Here come two men in earnest conversation over a business venture. The earnestness is a matter of feeling. There sits a crippled woman trying to earn a living by selling newspapers. Her condition ap- peals to us through our sympathies, and we buy a paper of her in preference to yonder able- bodied crier. She did not have the Times or the Sun, and we were compelled to take a paper of the more sensational sort. We have a feeling of disgust for the prominence given in glaring head- lines to matters of social scandal and revolting crime. Now look at that man gazing into a showcase. Evidently it is his own picture. What sort of feelings have possession of him now ? And there is a woman who has just es- caped being run over by a swift and stealthy auto- mobile. She is blanched with fright, while her friend shows indignation and anger at the driver.
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The day is nearly done, and I am seated by the window in an express train on the way home. I turn from my paper to view the sun just settling into a soft haze on the horizon. The weather has grown mild and calm, and the brown earth and bare trees borrow a temporary gloss of rose- tint from the skies. Like me, the stranger at my side has been busy with his paper, but, seeing my fixed gaze, he dares to break the silence with, "Pretty sunset, isn't it!" I turn to respond to his unexpected advance, when he repeats his note of admiration with increased emphasis. It was in the esthetic sense that we found our first point of contact, but from this developed a conversa- tion mainly in the direction of scientific and in- tellectual interests. But looking back I can see that every step of progress in the discovery of congeniality grew out of common emotions or states of feeling — appreciations, admirations, as- pirations, regrets, delights, enthusiasms — rather than out of any mere discussion of facts or things in themselves, even though it was these very intellectual interests that formed the staple of conversation, and gave it its excuse for con- tinuance. Yet our first feeling of character in each other was in the enjoyment of the beautiful, which among all our pleasures, says Sully, is "the purest and the richest in respect of the variety of its elements." Thus, Wordsworth:
" While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony and the deep power of joy. We see into the life of things. . . ."
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" And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air. And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things."
/. The Premiership of the Feelings.
Reviewing these fragmentary bits of personal narrative, we see how fundamentally life rests on feeling. There is hardly a mention here that does not involve either the finer instincts and sentiments or the grosser passions and tendencies which go to make up the emotional or, what may be better generally termed, the affective life. And the very commonplaces of this narrative testify to the truth of Schiller's insight when he said, "While philosophers are wrangling over the government of the world, hunger and love are doing their work."
The intellect may have a place in the world's official cabinet, but feeling has always held the premiership, and always will. Says Emerson, " In my dealing with my child, my Latin and my Greek, my accomplishments and my money, stead me nothing, but as much soul as I have avails." The intellect, says Ribot, is not "a fundamental constituent of character; it is its light but not its life, nor, consequently, its
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action." "The blind faith in the power of ideas," says the same authority, "is, in practice, an inexhaustible source of illusions and errors. An idea which is only an idea, a simple fact of knowledge, produces nothing and does nothing; it only acts if it is felt, if it is accompanied by an affective state, if it awakes tendencies, — that is, motor elements." ^
Feeling, then, rules the world. It was not the intellectual convictions alone of Paul, Savonarola, Luther, Knox, Bunyan, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Wil- berforce, Washington, Mrs. Stowe, Whittier, or Lincoln, that wrought such reformations, but rather their ardor, their zeal, courage, sympathy; their hates and loves, their hopes, and fears, — in short, those stirrings of the soul which stand im- mediately behind the will as goads and credentials to action. Indeed, Schopenhauer draws no line between the emotions and the will.
Feeling is the fundamental constituent of char- acter. We can only be said to have character according as we feel and use our feelings. An idea, as Ribot says, only acts if it is felt. And Brumbaugh notes that, as it is the keen feeling that makes noble action, our literature "must touch at every turn the springs of feeling that there may flow forth a steady stream of worthy acts. We do not want to think our literature, we want to feel it and live it."
In his keen critique of George Eliot, Mr.
• "The Psychology of the Emotions."
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Brownell, speaking of the decline of her vogue, says: "Our attention is so concentrated on what they [her characters] think, that we hardly know how they feel or whether — in many cases at least where we, nevertheless, have a complete inventory of their mental furniture — they feel at all. . . . The soul, the temperament, the heart — the Scriptural sense, — the whole nature plays a subordinate part. The plot turns on what the characters think. ... In her agony of soul, Romola goes to Savonarola and Gwen- dolen to Deronda for light, not heat." George Eliot's characters, therefore, "are rarely our companions, our intimates, as the characters of even inferior novelists are. ... It is the sense, the volitions and the emotions, rather' than the intellect of people that, in fiction as in life, attach them to us." And, notwithstanding this emotional barrenness in George Eliot's char- acter-painting, she herself says (in "Janet's Repentance"), "The only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him, which gives us a fine ear for the heart pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion."
Look back at the bit of commonplace narrative that opens this chapter now, and see how true these criticisms are. Take the emotion out of its verbs and adjectives, and nouns, and see how much life there is left. Which is the most read and best loved book in the Bible .? The Book of Psalms. Take the emotion — the joy and sorrow,
1
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the love and hate, the aspiration, and heavenly transport out of it and how much of the Psalter have we left ? It is the refuge of a world seek- ing encouragement, cheerfulness, hope, sym- pathy, solace and joy.
Dr. Hugh Black says, "The horizon of life is broadened chiefly by the enlargement of heart," and Dr. Parkhurst sounds a genuine note when he says, "We can help make people bright by our keenness, but we can never accomplish any- thing towards making people good except by our tenderness." The Rev. William C. Covert ob- serves that our Lord's " personality makes the profoundest appeal to men's emotions that the history of the world affords. The meagre group- ings of facts from His life in the four Gospels provide the tenderest spectacle in the literature of the race.
" Those recorded facts play upon men's feel- ings involuntarily as the winds move the strands of an seolian harp. The virgin mother, rapt in the secrets of her solemn thoughts, moves men as young motherhood only can do. The glorious advent of the Child with such meanings to the world and such spectacular accompaniments in earth and sky moves the heart both to silence and to song.
" The murder of contemporary babyhood shocks men to the depths of their being. The pathetic flight of the divine Child and the suc- ceeding years of His obscurity start mingled feelings in the human heart.
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"The invariable unselfishness of His public teaching; the self-denial of His living; the sweet- ness and evenness of His temper before the wounding skepticism of His own family circle; the gentleness of His spirit in the presence of both cowardice and treachery in His disciples; His sustained hope for the kingdom in the dark- est hours; His calm and possibly tearless resigna- tion in the agony of the garden; the beautiful care of His mother in the moment of His death; His forgiveness of those who hung Him on the cross; the whole bitter tragedy with which His life closed, softened and sweetened by traits of tenderness and aspects of human lovableness that are unthinkable apart from tears — these are among the facts of His life that melt the heart and suffuse the religion of Christ with inexpressible emotion,
" There is a profound appeal to the feelings in the life and teachings of Jesus, and we do wrong to slight the fact and make this acceptance a proposition for the intellect alone. The strength, not the weakness, of the Christian religion is in its tenacious hold upon men's emotions and its lofty and healthy incitement of men's feelings."
The consensus of philosophers, scientists, edu- cators, critics, poets, clergymen, novelists, is all one way, — feeling is basal and primal. Without it we should have had no " Uncle Tom's Cabin," no "Pilgrim's Progress," not even the Epistles of Paul, — intellectual, logical Paul! Armies are routed and banks are broken through panic—
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feeling. A correspondent in South Africa said of De Wet that he was never discouraged, and under his encouragement men demoralized at night fought like heroes in the morning. Cheers and hisses sway legislation, and a laughing audi- ence is an orator's toy. " Gentleness and cheer- fulness," says Robert Louis Stevenson, "these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one nor the other." Look at the display of national feeling on the death of Victoria and of McKinley. Was it not the aroused feeling of the world that released Dreyfus ? The offensive remark and the odious reflection lead to war. And the commercial spirit? Back of that lies feeling, — cupidity, avarice, love of power, etc. Says Bishop Spald- ing, speaking of the child at school, "To imagine that we are educating this being of infinite sensi- bility and impressionability when we do little else than teach him to read, write, and cipher, is to cherish a delusion." It is his destiny to be- come a man "who holds to sovereign truth, and is swayed with sympathy; who looks up with reverence and awe to the heavens, and hearkens with cheerful obedience to the call of duty," — largely a life of feeling.
Why is it so difficult to get the submerged male population to vote a reform ticket? A recent writer, Mr. J. E. Chamberlin, says acutely, "The poor voter feels himself near to the source of power through his own little immediate boss,
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and he really is. This man can get things for him and — what is sometimes much to the point — can prevent for him things which are un- pleasant, even terrible." He feels this, and, feeling, backs his will, and leads to the deed.
Here we must pause to note the great law of " Suggestion," which Dr. Mark Baldwin describes in simple general terms, as "any and all the in- fluences from outside, from the environment, both physical and personal, which get a lodg- ment in consciousness and lead to action. A child who is 'suggestible' to a high degree shows it in what we call 'motility.' The sug- gestions which take hold of him translate them- selves very directly into action." But everybody is more or less "suggestible" and a large part of our education comes to us subconsciously by suggestions directly or indirectly received from our environment, animate and inanimate. Hence the trend not only of individual but of social thought, feeling, and action grows largely out of suggestion. Indeed Dr. Boris Sidis contends that " man is social because he is suggestible." Hence, too, we have exaggerated social feeling in epidemics, panics, stampedes, etc. But of the importance of suggestion as a mode, in educa- tion— in nurture — we shall see more hereafter.
In passing, however, mark how the contagion, the infection of suggestion is appreciated by the Turkish and Russian governments. A native writer tells us that no such word as "dynamite " can be printed in the Sultan's dominions. " Lee-
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tares of all kinds, whether political, religious, or literary even in private and college entertainments must, if written, go to the censors before de- livery. . . . Words such as ' equality,' 'revo- lution,' and 'liberty,' are not allowed in speech or print; they are even cut out of the diction- aries."
How feeling can thus come, through sugges- tion, to a frightful dominance is well illustrated in an article on " Bloodthirst," a portion of which is here quoted from The Spectator.
"The passion of which the word ' bloodthirst' is truly descriptive seems to be a kind of tempo- rary mania excited in human beings by killing human beings, and in them only by that act. Animals are free of it. Even the great felidae, with their ferocity developed by generations of hunger, never display it, — never, for example, attack whole herds for the pleasure of killing beasts which they cannot eat. . . . The human being with the bloodthirst on him wants most to kill after he has been killing. Soldiers, otherwise most respectable, have acknowledged the feeling as rising in them after a hard-fought day when many friends have fallen round them, and there are moments in battle when, as the soldiers say, they 'see red,' and in many armies, perhaps in all, it is difficult for their officers to induce them to give quarter. Killing relieves their burning thirst for vengeance. There are moments in almost every campaign, as all mili- tary historians know, when even highly dis-
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ciplined soldiers seem to lose their reason, when their officers are powerless, and perfectly useless carnage cannot be stopped. The existence of this passion, which no experienced soldier doubts, is the true explanation of the awful slaughter which occurred in some ancient and some Asiatic battles, and of that ghastly incident of warfare amongst savages, their almost constant habit of killing out the wounded. It explains also the devilish excitement and thirst for more slaughter which, as the record of scenes like the St. Bar- tholomew murders or the murders recently com- mitted in Constantinople proves, falls upon a crowd which has shed much blood."
But to come back to nearer interests let us quote what the late Professor Hinsdale has to say of the effect of feeling in the schoolroom:^ "The mental atmosphere of the schoolroom is a subject of very great interest, and suggests to the teacher practical problems of no little difficulty. If the feeling of the pupil runs in the minor key, he will accomplish little in the way of study or learning. Then if his feeling is of the opposite character, and is particularly strong, he will ac- complish little or anything more.
" Children's intellects will not work with vigor when they are excited by strong feeling, no matter what the character of the feeling may be, whether of pleasure or of pain. If they are un- duly excited, or unduly depressed, they cannot
> " The Art of Study."
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really study, and so cannot really learn. For ex- ample, a pupil who is full of rage, deeply morti- fied, consumed by envy or jealousy, or is strongly expectant of something that lies outside of his school work, will accomplish little or nothing so long as he remains in this condition. Nor is this all; a single pupil in a state of violent excitement, will communicate his own feeling to the school of which he is a member, and thereby interfere most seriously with its proper work."
Your pupil, under the agitation of strong feel- ing or depressed by disheartenment, can neither study nor recite. Feeling holds the premiership in his personal self-government, — as, in one form or another, for good or for ill, it does in us all. Severe science thus sums it all up in the language of Dr. Hall: "Just now empirical psy- chology is reaffirming the doctrine that the higher mental powers are evolved out of the larger life of feeling. . . . The value of your teaching is not the information you have put into the mind, but the interest you have awakened. If the heart is trained, the rest grows out of it. The mind is evolved out of heartiness. People do not have mind worth thinking of unless they have capacity for sensitiveness. The characters of great men prove this. Whether in picture or in prose, we are always coming up against the great fact that it is enthusiasm that governs the world. We have not realized the educational possibility of it. Of all things in the world, love is the most educable, the most plastic; it can entwine itself
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about the lowest and most indecent things in the world and spend its energies there, or climb the heavenly ladder, as Plato said, and identify itself with all that is most worthy, most precious and most lovely." And Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler witnesses that that subtle sense of the beautiful and the sublime which accompanies spiritual in- sight, and is part of it, is the highest achieve- ment of which humanity is capable. Prof. Frank M. McMurry notes that the child wants to endow his playthings with his own characteristics. "He endows his doll with the ability to feel, to become sick, to be comforted, to take medi- cine, and to be made well again. Boys and girls weep with Crusoe when he is seriously ill, and they rejoice when he becomes well again. Thus feeling is produced the moment personality is introduced," — and herein, in part, lies the edu- cative value of the story. How often are we cautioned against becoming "personal" in a discussion, — which means that feeling is showing itself, and is likely to make trouble.
Enough has been said to show that, from any point of view, feeling rules the world. It wounds and it heals, it breaks down and it builds up, it paralyzes and it energizes. How important, then, that the feelings should be so educated that they will exercise their natural premiership wisely and energetically! Are we always to give sway to the feeling that first asserts itself.? By no means. Feelings may be wrong as well as right. Some must be inhibited and suppressed at one
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time or another, and some must be given the right of way. We must neither speak nor act as we fee! just because we feel. But we must feel if we would act, and, if we would act right, the right feeling must rule. This calls for education.
The Sunday School Times has said, with truth, as well as with feeling, that there is "prob- ably no more fertile source of idleness than the idea that it is not worth while to attempt any- thing until we feel like it. We seem to take it for granted that if we could get rid of all depres- sion and anxiety, we should then do great things, but as for undertaking any of those greater things until our mood just matches them, it is not to be thought of, — it would be almost a sacrilege.
"If one should take the trouble to look care- fully over what he did in the hours of exaltation that have already come to him, he might be far less certain about the matter. The days in which 'we felt good' do not seem to have materialized in such great things, after all. Can we not re- member days in which we felt so good that we did nothing all day, because occupied exclusively with thoughts of how good we felt } While in this blissful state it also frequently happens that everything looks so good that nothing seems to need having anything done for it. Our mood covers the whole world with such a mantle of charity and kindliness that we find it far easier to forgive all its shortcomings than go to work and do something for it. . . . The point is not that all exuberance is a mistake, but rather that we
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should demand it only at the right moment. — at the end of a matter finished, rather than at the threshold of something just begun. Let one throw himself just as he is diligently into the work in hand, put himself into it, stop asking whether he feels like it or not, and somewhere in the midst of his work the fire will leap out of it, — if not in some sudden flash, then in a steady glow and warmth which shows that he is fusing with it."
No doubt on this point, which, however, is a matter of the will, back of which lie the emotions and the intellect. Combined in their proper rela- tion these three constitute what we call " heart " — of which more hereafter. The point is, we ought to "feel like it," without thinking too much about our own feelings. "Joyous emotions about the self stop the association of our ideas," says Professor James. And any "strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free associa- tion of one's objective ideas and motor processes."
Yale University paid a high tribute when it con- ferred the honorary Master of Arts on James Whitcomb Riley. In conferring the degree Presi- dent Hadley said, "We present this degree in rec- ognition of one who has been an exponent of the joy and pathos of country life in America." Joy and pathos ? It was not as a philosopher, or as a scientist, or as a scholar that Mr. Riley was ex- tolled, but as an exponent of two commanding emotions of the human breast.
Robert Louis Stevenson, speaking of the great
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missionary, James Chalmers, said, "You can't weary me of that fellow; he is as big as a house, and far bigger than any church where no man warms his hands." A cold church, an unfeeling, unsympathetic church was to Stevenson no church at all. Our present business is merely to call at- tention to the fundamental place and import of the feelings — their self-appointed premiership, whether we like it or not. So far, we have simply presented a variant testimony — all point- ing one way. We have sought the facts. The very fervor of the foregoing wise caution against deferring the performance of duty until we feel like it, is itself feeling.
In his "Social Evolution," Benjamin Kidd as- serts that in the Christian religion a new force was born into the world. This force "was in no way the product of reason or of the intellect. No impetus came from this quarter. As in all movements of the kind, the intellectual forces of the time were directly in opposition. . . . We are apt to consider the abolition of slavery as the result of an intellectual movement. But he would be a bold man, who, with a clear apprehension of the forces that have been at work, would un- dertake to prove that slavery was abolished through the march of the intellect. . . . It [the cause] is to be found in that great fund of altru- istic feeling generated by the ethical system upon which our civilization is founded."
The first step in emancipation has always been "the formation of a great body of feeling or sen-
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timent in favor of the demand." The revolt of labor which characterizes our times, says Kidd, "has its roots in a single cause, namely, the de- velopment of the humanitarian feelings, and the deepening and softening of character that has taken place among the Western peoples." The social development of our civilization is not the product of the intellect, but the real motive force behind it originates in that fund of altruistic feel- ing which is a product of the Christian system. Indeed, Kidd goes so far as to aver that the pos- session of the highest intellectual capacity not only does not compensate for the lack of right feeling, but without it the intellectual possession "distinctly tends to further lower the social effi- ciency of a people."
This introduction of the intellect into the dis- cussion may lead some to ask just where lies the dividing line between the intellect and the emo- tions or feelings. There are no sharp, black lines in nature. The intellect and the emotions are closely interlaced. We do not need to write a psychology here. This book is for intelligent, popular practice. Nevertheless it will be wise to say something about the feelings, indicating their variety, scope and relationship to the reason or intellect. We have thus far sufficiently estab- lished the basal place of the feelings to justify our agreeing with Dr. W. H. Payne when he says, "At least the half, and perhaps the better half, of education consists in the formation of right feelings. He who teaches us to look out
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upon the world through eyes of affection, sym- pathy, charity, and good-will, has done more for us and for society than he who may have taught us the seven liberal arts." And Thomas David- son says that "Education, in the widest sense, may be defined as the upbuilding of a world in feeling or in consciousness."
2. What We Mean by the Feelings.
The Lord Chief Justice Russell is quoted as say- ing "Civilization is not dominion, wealth, ma- terial luxury; nay, not even a great literature and education widespread — good though those things be. Its true signs are thought for the poor and suffering, chivalrous regard and respect for women, the frank recognition of human brother- hood, irrespective of race or color or nation or religion; the narrowing of the domain of mere force as a governing factor in the world, the love of ordered freedom, abhorrence of what is mean and cruel and vile, ceaseless devotion to the claims of justice."
Examining these phrases closely we find in them the elements both of thought and feeling — of intellect and emotion. But it is easy to see that these signs of civilization are most deeply rooted in the feelings. The leitmotif of the whole paragraph is in the realm of the affective or emo- tive state. We act less because we know than because we feel, — even though feeling may dissi- pate without efficient action. The scientist says.
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"The intellect is not a fundamental constituent of character; an idea which is only an idea, a simple fact of knowledge, produces nothing and does nothing; it acts only if it is felt." Feeling, therefore, is the fundamental constituent of char- acter. The poet says, "While philosophers are wrangling over the government of the world, hunger and love are doing their work." Poetry and science agree, and all life substantiates their testimony in the concrete. Take a celebrated case, already referred to :
The world felt, and Dreyfus was released. Years prior to this, a French army clique felt, and Dreyfus was incarcerated. The two feelings were different. The world resented injustice and abhorred inhumanity; the clique was moved by jealousy, race antipathy, or what not, and there- fore conspired to do the deed that ultimately aroused the world's feelings, and so brought the two into open hostility. When the world thought Dreyfus was proved a traitor, it had a feeling against his supposed treachery, even though it felt a pity for his suffering in exile. But when the world became intellectually convinced that Dreyfus was a victim of conspiracy, and was not a traitor, then a feeling in the interest of justice and humanity was aroused to dominancy.
Now it is evident that two sets of psychic proc- esses were at work with both parties. These were feeling and reason (or intellect). The clique felt a hatred, and called on reason to aid it by constructing an ingenious plan, or plot by which
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feeling could gain its vindictive purpose. The two together succeeded.
At the second trial reason was still only the henchman of the clique's feeling. The world's reason was appealed to through the logic of the defense. The world's instinct, or feeling, of jus- tice was now offended, and its feeling of com- mon sympathy outraged. This feeling became the chief lever for the victim's release.
In this case we see how the two great processes of intellect and emotion interact and support one another, — feeling, or emotion, really holding the rein and wielding the whip, while reason simply directs the way. Often feeling does not permit reason to do even so much as this. The illustra- tion just cited — as is the case with any other illus- tration from life — confirms Ribot's statement that "it is not reason that uses passion, it is passion [feeling] that uses reason to reach its ends." And Dr. Stanley Hall says that feelings " represent the race, while the intellect expresses the individual. . . . When we perceive and reason, it is our own isolated individual self; when we launch upon the great sea of feeling we represent hu- manity itself."
Now the question arises, Can we surely draw the line between the reason and the feelings ? What do you mean by feeling ? says the man who is always calling for definitions. We do not need in such a paper as this to be very defin- itive. As Coleridge puts it, "Make any spiritual truth too definite, and you make it too small."
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So far as emotions are concerned, Professor James says: "As inner mental conditions, emotions are quite indescribable. Description, moreover, would be superfluous, for the reader knows al- ready how they feel." Therefore, although we may doubt whether we should call fear an in- stinct or an emotion, or whether curiosity and emulation are properly feelings, and, although we find authorities disagreeing in cataloguing the feel- ings, yet on the whole we need have no trouble in discussing them as a class of manifestations. No sharp line divides the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but in common conversation the indefi- nite demarcation does not trouble us; we do not confuse trees with horses. Neither need we be disturbed about the shadowy division of the rea- son from the feelings; we reason out a problem in grammar or arithmetic and we feel pleasure or disappointment according as we succeed or fail in the attempt at solution.
In attempting to draw a line between the intel- lect and feelings, or between thought and emo- tion, one distinction is comparatively obvious. We can give a new idea to another person; we cannot convey to him our feeling by description unless he has already had the same feeling in some degree in his own experience.
Of course, this is no place to study the psy- chology of the feelings or emotions. But we ought to get an idea how complex and varied they are. Those who have not thought much on the subject will naturally be somewhat surprised
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at the almost infinitely numerous variations and shadings of these affective states. No wonder authorities differ in their modes of classification. Some insist that the emotional life is always one of pleasure or pain; others deny this. However, it is agreed that pain and pleasure play a very im- portant part in the emotional life.
Professor James divides the emotions into the coarser and the subtler. The former comprise anger, fear, love, hate, joy, grief, shame, pride, and their variations. The latter comprise the moral, intellectual, and esthetic feelings. He shows how their numerous shadings are recog- nized in our common speech in such synonyms as hatred, antipathy, animosity, resentment, dis- like, aversion, malice, spite, revenge, abhorrence, etc. Others discuss states of "pure feeling" — beatitude, ecstasy, depression, sadness, fear, ex- citability, apprehension, unreasoning fear, etc. Then there are what are sometimes called primi- tive emotions — fear, anger, and affection. Some may be coupled or paired thus: fear is defensive, anger offensive. There is the self-feeling, show- ing itself in the sense of strength as in audacity; or of weakness, as in timidity. Out of this feel- ing of strength grow such forms as pride, vanity, ambition, curiosity.
Again, there are esthetic feelings or sentiments, and there are "tender " emotions, and from an educational point of view there is a vast differ- ence between them and the moral emotions. There is an intellectual emotion showing itself in
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surprise, wonder, or admiration, curiosity or in- terrogation. Descartes calls admiration one of the six primary passions. It is easy to see why these are called intellectual feelings, as they lead to investigation and the acquirement of knowl- edge. Max Muller says that all science begins and ends in wonder. This intellectual emotion is a kind of self-feeling showing most often in a sense of power or the reverse, which again ap- proximates the property sense. The same emo- tion shows itself in doubt and mysticism. Some emotions are rated as simple, others as mixed or complex. Then there are religious and moral feelings.
The distinction between instinct and emotion, according to James, is that the former is a tend- ency to act characteristically, while the latter is a tendency to feel. According to Halleck, feeling is the simple agreeable or disagreeable side of any mental state, while emotion is the complex agreeable or disagreeable side of a mental state. Bain classifies the emotions in eleven groups — love, anger, fear, sentiment of property, pleasure of power, pain of subjection, pride, vanity, ac- tivity, knowledge or intellectual feeling, esthetic emotion, moral sentiment. Love and anger he calls "the giants of the group, the commanding and indispensable members of the emotional scheme." Pleasures and pains go with all. Ribot thinks this classification a failure. An- other writer, Mercier, gives a hundred and eight feeling manifestations recognized by our com-
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mon language. These he divides into six classes, namely, those affecting the physical or mental organism, those affecting the perpetuity of the race, those relating to common welfare, those re- lating to the welfare of others, those beyond the region of utility, and the intellectual feelings. But it is perhaps most common to divide the emotions into three groups, viz. : the egoistic — hope, joy, courage, cheerfulness, pride, etc. ; the social, or altruistic emotions, — love, sympathy, gratitude, scorn, etc. ; and the higher sentiments — intellectual, esthetic, and moral.
"Feeling," says Dr. William T. Harris, "may be said to be intellect and will in an unconscious form. On the side of unconscious intellect we have all the feelings that are passive or contem- plative— sensations, emotions, and affections. On the side of unconscious will, we have in- stincts, appetites, and desires. On the one side the feelings look towards the intellect, and tend to become conscious and pass over into cogni- tions, motives, and reflections. On the other side, the feelings tend to rise into conscious voli- tion and become deliberate and responsible.
"On the intellectual side we have (a) sensa- tion which is partly physical, using the five sense- organs and the general or common sense — some- times called the feelings of vitality (as in such sensations as rest and weariness, sickness and health), (b) Emotions — (i) hope, terror, despair, fear, contempt, etc. ; (2) esthetic pleasure in the presence of the beautiful and sublime; (3) the
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religious emotions, (c) Affections — benevolence (or kindness, sympathy, pity, mercy, etc.), grati- tude, friendship, family love, philanthropy, etc., and the opposite affections of malice, wrath, jealousy, envy, etc.
" On the will side we have (a) instincts which move us unconsciously to acts performed by us as animals — laughing, crying, winking, dodging a missile, etc. (b) Appetites for food and drink, sleep and exercise, etc. (c) Desires for happi- ness or pleasure, or knowledge, and such other desires as ambition, avarice, vanity, pride, etc."
Enough has been said to give an idea of the subtlety, complexity, and variety of the emo- tional life. No attempt has been made to draw sharp distinctions between the terms instinct, emotion, passion, impulse, sentiment, sensibility, tendency, and feeling. They all shade into one another, and stand for that general manifestation of the whole organism which is first both in im- portance and in development, and which we know by the most general term of "feeling," or the " affective state."
Feeling is the pioneer of knowledge, as Ribot says, and is the anticipation of an ideal. An idea may excite a feeling, but a feeling may also end in taking concrete form in an idea. And there may be feelings in which the intellect has no part, as in those awakened by music and rhythmic movement. An able and suggestive book by Prof. Francis B. Gummere on "The Beginnings of Poetry," goes so far as to demonstrate that
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rhythmic utterance and rhythmic movement lie at the bottom of the making of society. Rhythm, which is mainly emotional, brought the great joys and the great pains of life into a common utterance. Man is necessary to man. And out of these communal emotions grows the social foundation. Thus again the evidences of this premiership of the feelings as the world's great controlling power, are visible on every side.
Here is a business man noted for his sagacity, integrity, and generosity. Yet a failure to reckon with men's emotions as factors in business weakens his value sometimes, in counsel. Here is another, whose failure to appreciate the es- thetic side of men obstructs his vision as a financier. And here is another without any knowledge of financiering whose whole success lies in his art of appeal to the finer sensibilities and instincts of the public. And here is a fourth whose counsel is valuable because he takes all these factors into account in any proposed course of action.
Ribot notes that the intellect is capable of in- stantaneously finding out a new truth, or recog- nizing an idea as just and conformable to the na- ture of things. But it needs the emotional color or tendency to become effective. That which is discovered so rapidly by means of logic takes years, or even centuries, to become a motive for action. Just how this emotional coloring works upon the intellect to result in action has been in- dicated in the Dreyfus story; and it is well illus- trated by Hoffding, who says: "If the Greeks
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were unable to extend their feelings of humanity so as to include the barbarians, the cause lay, not in intellectual insufficiency, but in the arrestive power of their national feeling. Christianity overthrew these barriers, not by means of intel- lectual reflection, but by the effect of an acute and deeply seated feeling. Afterwards, within the limits of Christianity, intolerance raised new barriers, and fettered the natural development of religion."
A most capital illustration it is of the relation of feeling to intellectual ideas, showing its power to make the latter effective or ineffective, sooner or later, by arresting action or by inciting to it. This is in fact the history of ourselves as indi- viduals, as churches, as nations, or however we may regard the world's life. Manifestly then the education and training of the feelings is of supreme importance. Their power is danger- ously absolute.
It is undoubtedly true that we ought not to think too much about our own feelings, dance attendance on them, or use them unduly as a plea and a motive. A friend of mine used to say that he had no patience with people who are al- ways getting their feelings hurt — that is, using their hurt feelings as a line of defense for their own actions.
On the other hand, our best success in life de- pends largely upon our recognition of the feel- ings of others. In professional, in mercantile, and in laboring life feeling is a larger factor in
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the real meaning of the phrase "business is business," than we commonly give it credit for being. A distinguished alienist has said that sympathy in a nurse is worth as much as, if not more than, scientific training. Hospitals and other philanthropic institutions and charities are always in danger of growing cold and even harsh in their routine administration to de- pendents. As Stevenson has said, the trouble with moral men is that they are lacking in gentleness and kindness.
"Business," so-called, is apt to scorn feeling. But in time, standards change and methods are modified at the behest of the sympathies. There was a day when the insane were treated as criminals or as outlaws. Now they are treated as patients and are sent to hospitals. Keepers and castigators have given way to physicians and attendants or nurses. In another realm, that of the esthetic emotions, we need not look far to see what power good taste has in controlling capital, and developing business.
Hence the necessity of reckoning with the feelings in all aspects of life. This is noted alike by the philosopher and the man of affairs. Here for instance is an editorial recognition of it in the Philadelphia Public Ledger: "Feelings of hate, anger, jealousy and revenge cherished in the heart certainly disqualify a man for forming any rational estimate of the one thus hated. . . . In the same way we see that intense desires weaken, and sometimes destroy, the ability to
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think correctly. The poor drunkard, over- whelmed by his fatal thirst, cannot listen to the voice of reason; the miser, bent on accumula- tion, cannot see the folly of his greed; the violent partisan has no power to weigh an argu- ment; the thoroughly selfish man, with eager desires for his own advantage and none for that of others, is utterly unable to understand the laws of justice, which he is continually violating; the jealous and suspicious nature fancies that he finds confirmation for his ungenerous misgivings where none exists. That this close connection between feeling and judgment is universal we cannot deny, nor can we abrogate it if we would. It does not, however, as some may think, reflect any dishonor upon emotion as such. The feelings of the heart are as truly a part of human nature as the thoughts of the mind, and as deserving of respect. They shed brightness and warmth upon human life, as the sun does upon the earth. Were it possible to eliminate their influence, joy would vanish and vitality would perish. It is only when they overstep their boundaries and escape from all control and govern us, instead of being subject to our government, that they warp the reason and disturb the judgment. A wholesome self- discipline will never seek to crush them, but rather to bring them into harmony with the rest of the nature. It is not so much that feelings are too strong, as that judgment is too weak. One needs more guidance, the other more exercise."
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Hence the advantage of what Jacob Abbott calls "gentle measures "Mn child training. By gentle measures he means those which do not react in a violent and irritating way but which exert a calming, quieting and soothing influence on the mind or produce only such excitements as are pleasurable, as a means of repressing wrong and encouraging right action.
All this being true, so far as we ourselves are concerned, it must be that we cannot rightfully ignore the emotions, the feelings, the heart, in training children. And if this be so we are con- fronted by a triple duty, (i) To respect their feelings; (2) To lead them to respect the feelings of others; (3) To cultivate, economize, and train their feelings by recognizing their right both to expression and to silence, and by guid- ing them into right relations to the reason and the will. So much then, for the importance of the feelings and their nature and variety. So much for the fact of their dominance and the science of their classification and relations. We have now to consider more specifically the method, the art, of their education, which is essentially one of indirect means and influences, which because of their subtilty and unobtrusive- ness we may call atmospheric.
3. How the Feelings are to be Educated.
A policeman's uniform has a function beyond
' " Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young."
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that of merely distinguishing him from the ordinary citizen. It tends to increase his self- respect as an officer of the law. Other things being equal, the efficiency of employees in certain situations is likely to be increased by the donning of gilt bands and buttons. These things are agencies of moral education. They do not strengthen the intellect but they do stimulate sensibility and feeling. But bands and buttons give no orders, and exercise no restraint upon their wearer. They are indirect agencies working beneath the threshold of an official con- sciousness where the man issues his own orders to himself subconsciously, so that he lives in an atmosphere of the authority of law and order.
Here then is the key to the education of the feelings — it is indirect and atmospheric. Prof. John Dewey says, "The feelings and sentiments are the most sacred and mysterious part of the individual, and should always be approached and influenced indirectly." Evidently then, we should avoid questioning children closely about their feelings — much less should we demand of them reasons for their likes and dislikes. This is well illustrated in Wordsworth's inadequately appreciated poem, "An Anecdote for Fathers," in which a child is so closely pressed for a rea- son of his preference that he has to invent one. Likewise, we must be careful as Miss Blow advises, to "avoid the too common error of reading into the actions of children our own
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stronger and more conscious feelings." "We must not impute to them deliberately evil inten- tions in a stage of development whose char- acteristic mark is simple incontinence; nor must we transfer to them by analogy our own struggles and victories." Yet we must respect their obvious feelings for their life is largely one of feeling. We must respect their modesty, their impetuosity, their likes and dislikes, their affections and repulsions, their joys, anticipations, fears, and their sense of justice.
Probably every one is more or less lop-sided in his affective, or feeling, life. Some right feelings crush out others just as right. We must learn both to give them play and to restrain them. Take a simple illustration. A child has naturally a strong feeling of curiosity; the investigating spirit is active in him. He must peek and peer. Now we would cultivate also a joyous love of the beautiful in him; we lead him to look for birds and flowers. In his eagerness to pluck a bit of beauty he robs a bird's nest, or trespasses on a choice flower-bed. But he is not thereby a thief or a robber. We have quickened his holy joy in beauty by a pursuit of animated nature, while we have not cultivated in him a property sense. The owner of the flower-bed is angered; his feeling of ownership and propriety is out- raged. He pursues the child, and the child feels fear, which begets resentment, anger, hatred. Out of the transaction may grow feelings such as audacity, timidity, vanity, self-importance, etc.
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Out of the joy which the child originally found in beauty have sprung the roots of new, and per- haps dangerous, elements of character. Yet anger, resentment, and the emotions or passions of this class, are not without their rights in the scale of personal motives. But there must be an adjustment. The pursuit of the beautiful in na- ture must still go on. The adjustment must be educated into a habit.
We must educate the children's feelings, then, because they lie at the root of power, and it is our first duty to put the children into possession of their powers. To this end we must respect the children's primal feelings simply because of what they are. This is the first essential towards leading them to respect the feelings of others. Then they must be aided towards both the ex- pression and the repression of their emotions. They must spend and be spent, and — what is the most necessary part of all spending — they must be economized.
Froebel gives an illustration of our tendency to misread the cause of a child's antipathies. He says, " I know of two little boys whose mothers used to sing to them; and whenever the latter sat down at the piano, the boys would go and ask her not to sing. 1 wonder whether the distor- tions of the face, that accompany the act of sing- ing, with the majority of performers of the art, are the cause of this childish antipathy? For it is just this sort of singing which the boys did not wish to see." It might have been just a question
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between a child's ear and his eye — which should be gratified, when the two were antagonistic.
Very aptly does Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Oilman say, "Childhood is not a pathological condition, nor a term of penal servitude, nor a practical joke." " Who of us," she asks, " has not seen a clear-eyed child struck dumb and crimson by the rude laughter of his elders over some act which had no element of humor except that it was new to him. . . . Now if an adult foreigner were learning our language, and we greeted his efforts with yells of laughter we should think ourselves grossly rude. . . . The errors of a child are not legitimate grounds of humor. . . . We might laugh with our children even more than we do, and yet never laugh at them. The pathetic side of it is that children are even more sensitive to ridicule than grown people. They have no philosophy to fall back upon; and ... if they try to turn the tables on their tormentors, then the wise ' grown-up ' promptly punishes them for ' disrespect.' " Thus a child is in etTect taught disrespect for the feel- ings of others by the disrespecting of his.
This subject is taken up by May H. Prentice in an article in The Kindergarten Review, on "The Facetious Attitude Towards Children." She writes: "In the thought of the child's choices, wishes, desires, and self-directed ac- tions as absurd, as incongruous with his place in the scale of being, as the result of chance and having their outcome determined by chance, — in
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this thought, I say, unformulated but existent, originates the facetious attitude towards the child. To those who hold it, kindly people often, the child is a creature of unexplainable caprice, and, above everything, amusing. There are certain elements which make practical jokes, as a rule, obnoxious. They are: Implied supe- riority on the part of the joker, and embarrassing ignorance, defect, or weakness on the part of the victim (note that victim is the accepted word); hence the ludicrous mental confusion or shame of the latter, in a greater or less degree these elements are present in the facetious treatment of children, and are seldom altogether absent from the most good-natured fun that is 'poked at' them.
"In many, and the worst, of the jokes (?) 'which originate in the habitual facetious attitude towards children, another element is added to or substituted for shame or mental confusion; — namely: fear, sometimes amounting to terror.
"The following harrowing incident (which I would gladly omit were it not for the unmeas- ured evil which comes to timid and sensitive children through foolish jesting) occurred last year. A little seven-year-old girl was watching a servant prepare a turkey for roasting. 'That,' said the servant girl, and doubtless smiled to see the child's eyes grow large, ' is the way they bake babies in New York.' That night the child's parents were wakened by her screams of: ' Mary is going to bake little brother! Oh, don't
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let her bake little brother!' She lived two weeks, never regaining her reason, and then died, literally frightened to death. . . .
"The joke based on some peculiarity of the child's appearance is as cruel as it is common. This is Laurence Hutton's experience as given in his charming book, ' A Boy I Knew, and Four Dogs': 'Nobody except The Boy knows of the agony which the rest of the family, uncon- sciously, and with no thought of hurting his feelings, caused him by the fun they poked at his nose, at his fiery locks, and at his unhandi- ness. He fancied that passers-by pitied him as he walked or played in the streets, and he sincerely pitied himself as a youth destined to grow up into an awkward, tactless, stupid man, at whom the world would laugh so long as his life lasted.' And Mr. Hutton's boyhood experience is not ex- ceptional. Possibly, indeed, the child studying the mirror, sadly acquiescing in the supposed views of his relatives, is further accused of vanity!" And that would be another example of misreading the child's feelings.
Miss Prentice continues with this important observation: "And, strange as it may seem, the buffoon is sometimes a self-defensive develop- ment of the shrinking, sensitive child. What good teacher does not know, and, knowing, fold into the tenderest place in her heart and wrap about with steadiest sweet courtesy, the big boy whom fate or fault has lodged among smaller children, and who has blundered against
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the laughter of others until, in a sore and des- perate effort to save his self-respect, he has shielded himself in such an armor of pretended mistakes and pretended desire to be laughed at" as only to become an enforced buffoon, - And so we might say of other emotional states. We must go even farther. We should not only respect the finer feelings or emotions but the physical feelings of children. Many a child is permanently injured by a process of supposed "hardening," or by a rule compelling him to eat that which he recoils from. Within bounds, the appetite can be trained, but enforced eating is often enforced dyspepsia and the numerous ills which proceed from it. There is a deal of cruelty too, in the dressing of young children. The soundness and comfort of the body has an im- portant part to play in the education of the soul. Indeed it is impossible, in education, to draw the line between the physical and the spiritual, so interdependent are they.
In passing, at this point, it is interesting to note the effects of the physical atmosphere itself upon human conduct. A series of scientific tests, re- ported several years ago by Prof. Edwin G. Dexter, showed startling results of educational import. Careful records were taken, from the New York weather station, of each day in the years 1888-1897 inclusive. Likewise a record of misdemeanors observed by the police force, and by teachers in the public schools; a record of deaths, a record of errors made by clerks in
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banks, and strength tests in the gymnasium of Columbia University — data in all amounting to over four hundred thousand. To make a long story short, we may note a few of the conclu- sions resulting from the investigation. Moder- ately high temperatures are accompanied by excess in misdemeanor; low temperatures go with diminished misdemeanor. Intense heat is not favorable to offensive conduct, but it is favor- able for death, suicide, and clerical errors. Winter variations of temperature have little effect on as- sault. Low humidity — that is, dry atmosphere — is productive of misdemeanor, probably because it is energizing; while high humidity, however " cross " it may make one feel, is depressing, and, whatever ill effects it may have on temper, it is too weakening to affect police records, even though, as Professor Dexter hints, it might affect profanity and other less tangible offenses. Death and suicide alone are excessive on calm days. Misdemeanor is surprisingly infrequent on cloudy and rainy days, although bank-clerk errors are then frequent. Fair days are chosen for suicide, and especially during the months of May and June. Dr. Dexter thus concludes:
" Perhaps the most interesting general con- clusion to be drawn from the study, is that during those meteorological states which are physically exhilarating, excesses in deportment, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, prevail to an abnormal extent, while death and irregular- ities in mental processes (error in banks) are be-
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low expectancy. During such weather con- ditions, without doubt the quality of the emo- tional state is more positive than under the reverse conditions, but the results seem to show that in the long run an excess of energy is a more dangerous thing, at least from the standpoint of the police court, than the worst sort of a temper with no energy."
It must be noted that the foregoing investi- gation is apart from the general effects of climate upon racial traits, the study of which has pro- duced a comparatively large literature. The present investigation is individual and personal rather than racial and general. Because of the results of these scientifically handled data we are not, on the one side, to give fresh credence to every claim made for the weather as a moral in- fluence or pathological cause. ' ' It's the weather " is an easy scapegoat. Nor, on the other side, are we to ignore the power of physical atmosphere on our children. It must not be overlooked that the atmosphere is the real source of our bodily heat. This is a matter of chemical combustion, which is itself but a matter of oxygenation from the oxygen of the atmosphere. This opens up a large subject, from ventilation to the more subtle mental effects of meteorological conditions, and suggests that atmosphere in the literal or physical sense is a factor in the formation of character as truly as atmosphere in the figurative sense — which is what we started to make our chief con- sideration.
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Before taking up the treatment of particular emotional states, or feelings, let us pursue this general matter of indirect or atmospheric moral influences a little farther.
Some homes are atmospherically poisoned by a critical, censorious, sneering, iconoclastic, or bur- lesquing spirit. They are rife with depreciation rather than with appreciation. Now nothing is more indicative of character than that which we admire. Kinds and degrees of admiration are the thermometer of character — but especially degrees. When a child has developed an admiration, an attachment, an affection, — an appreciation, in short, — it must not be ruthlessly broken down, even though at first sight it may seem objection- able. Under training the object of admiration may be changed or improved, but the spirit must be fostered. There is something good in every ideal, even though it be a Robin Hood. This good element must be admired with the child, even while a contrast may be — not too directly, however — drawn with the unadmirable qualities of the heroic ideal. The child's enthusiasm may be for a person or a thing, an attachment for a toy, a garret, a song, an admiration, of an achievement, a sense of mystery and awe. Under no circumstances must the sanctity of ideals and loves be subjected to ridicule, or un- qualified and summary challenge. " A sour father may reform prisons, but, considered in his sour- ness, he does harm." And for the word "sour" we may substitute the censorious, burlesquing.
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depreciative spirit too common with men and women who are good enough to reform prisons and build hospitals while they are engaged in a ruthless razing of ideals. Sometimes this idol- breaking arises from a chronic censoriousness, sometimes from a habit of being " funny,"
Now this most subtle, most intangible, part of education, the training of the feelings, is not to be accomplished through much talk about the feelings or much open direction. On the con- trary, the bottom principle of the education of the feelings is that it is to be done indirectly, through suggestion, h is 2ifelt education rather than an understood one. It is atmospheric, as has been already indicated, rather than alimentary nurture, odor rather than food, oxygen rather than bread.
Education — or call it stimulus, incentive, incite- ment— through atmosphere, in a figurative sense, is quite commonly recognized. We often speak of the advantages of living in an art atmosphere, a musical, literary, scientific, or other intellectual or affective atmosphere. It is our indirect train- ing which we feel to be not only congenial, but essential. Yet we seldom realize its potency as a method of child training, much less as typical of the only method for the education of the child's feelings.
We must, in fact, show feeling, in order to be- get like feeling in others; and we must respect their feelings before we can train their emotions and sentiments into healthy action. If a child
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has a strong like or dislike for a picture, a song, a symphony, a wall-paper, a carpet, an animal, a study, or what not, we are not to laugh it out of countenance, even though it seems to our larger culture to be vicious or evanescent. The first re- quirement of a wholesome atmosphere is sym- pathy. Differences of sentiment and variances of feeling are quite in order then. But their ex- pression must be kind, respectful, and just. In- terest generates in feelings, — it is feeling, in fact, — and if we want to train our children's feelings we must have an interest in their interests. Con- versely, if we would take an interest in their interests we must respect their feelings.
The vision of a father standing for duty, how- ever unpleasant and exasperating, will rise in the child's later years as an ideal, a sentiment, an instinct of soul, or an incitement to right action, and as a far more effective moral stimulus than any mere abstract maxims, texts, or codes of ethics.
This again suggests the importance of this law of association and recollection in the education of the feelings. Music and pictures, and kind words and heroic affections, have their immediate value as refining and ennobling influences. The child in the home is more or less played upon by them as atmospheric or environing forces, but this is not the end of their educative function.
Some day the boy grown to be a wayward man will see a picture in a shop window, or mayhap on a saloon wall, and then all the old
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home atmosphere will envelop his soul, and he will be, at least for the moment, a child with pure and saintly surroundings again. Cases are not rare where a phrase, a verse, a tune, a picture, an odor, a bit of landscape, a book cover, or what not, has wrought its final triumph through mem- ory awakened by association.
Now note, — a helter-skelter, whimsical, disor- dered, inharmonious, unsystematic, unpunctual, worrying, inconstant household is not likely to be a very healthful present or future influence. Even if the walls display good pictures or reecho good music, or the shelves hold good books, or the windows open on fine vistas, the tone of the moral atmosphere called up in after years by as- sociation with these very things may be anything but a healthy memory. It will make a difference whether an odor of cake or pudding recalls a mother moving with cheery grace among her domestic duties, or whether it recalls one belated at meal-time by a whist tournament. It will make a difference whether a strain of music re- calls a family settled at the fireside, or a deserted room whence the father and the elder brothers have scattered to clubs and theatres. Some things are not wrong or harmful directly in themselves, but they are deleterious in making the atmosphere cold, heavy, stagnant, and spirit- ually soporific, if not pernicious. Says George Eliot, "In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues."
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In his " Reign of Law " James Lane Allen has this fine passage: "O ye who have young chil- dren, if possible, give them happy memories! Fill their earliest years with bright pictures! A great historian many years ago wrote it down that the first thing conquered in battle are the eyes; the soldier flees from what he sees before him. But so often in the world's fight we are defeated by what we look back upon; we are whipped in the end by the things we saw in the beginning of life."
Some years ago Mr. Henry T. Bailey of Massa- chusetts wrote an article on " Fatherhood," sub- titled "A Radiant Memory," — which begins by saying " I have no theories of fatherhood to pre- sent, only a radiant memory." He then goes on with fine, frank simplicity to describe the father of his childhood.
Among other recollections is that of his break- ing a pane of glass with a stone, and the agony of following his mother's advice and telling his father about it. But the confession brought forth kind words from the father, and a kiss on the forehead. "The memory of that kiss will go with me as a benediction forever," he now writes. And he gives a glowing account of the moral atmosphere of that home. He tells how his father played with the children; how he sometimes found his father alone with his Bible or upon his knees. And he adds, " He never made us boys a promise which he did not keep; never deceived us, . . . never required the
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formation of an intellectual or moral habit which he did not himself exemplify," etc. Observe the man of station and character now living in the influence of that indirect teaching, — that whole- some atmosphere of family life. It might be in- teresting, if there were space for it, to go farther into detail. We should see how unconsciously the emotions were trained in respect, reverence, cheerfulness, joy, hope, forgiveness, sympathy, a delight in order and in things of beauty, gen- tleness, and peace. With these would come the instinct of power and the desire to be and to do, — the will to perform.
Froebel tells how^ in his early boyhood he one day found a tiny five-petaled flower hidden be- neath a hedge of white roses. Hundreds of fairer flowers bloomed in his father's garden and were cultivated with anxious care. Yet this lone and insignificant floweret so entranced his im- agination that he "seemed to have discovered a bottomless depth." For years he watched this flower, and then forgot it. In youth after he had left his home he rediscovered the same kind of flower beneath a hazelnut bush, and with the awakened stirrings in his soul. Again it passed out of mind. In mature manhood he once more found his flower again to be awakened by the same mysterious feelings which he now saw to have a symbolic significance. Thus often is the feeling rather than the thought of childhood car-
* " Mottoes and Commentaries," by Susan E. Blow.
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ried into later life by seemingly the most trivial associations.
One more noteworthy illustration is to be found in the distinguished Pasteur. On the house of his birth he placed a commemorative tablet thus inscribed: " O my father and mother, who lived so simply in that tiny house, it is to you that I owe everything! Your eager enthusi- asm, my mother, you passed on into my life. And you, my father, whose life and trade were so toilsome, you taught me what patience can accomplish with prolonged effort. It is to you that I owe tenacity in daily labor."
Observe these two states, — enthusiasm and tenacity, — both possible only through the strength of feeling in which they are rooted, and both finding their outlet through a will that worked wonders for the world. Mere intellectual capac- ity never would have made Pasteur a success. Intensity — enthusiasm and tenacity — made him the world's benefactor, for they moved him to triumphant deeds.
In the cases just cited we cannot say how far the home atmosphere or indirect influence was deliberately designed as a mode of education, and how much of it was simply a matter of personal character. We do not need to know. The sim- ple fact is that these parental traits and personali- ties were markedly educative, and continued as felt influences through life. Neither do we know how much formal effort at teaching and training those parents made, nor do we need to know that either.
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The interesting fact again is that the memories of these sons are radiant with the feelings which moved the fathers and the mothers to just and useful hves. Carlyle acutely says that "the his- tory of a man's childhood is the description of his parents and environment."
One of the important constituents of moral at- mosphere is stillness, or silence. The value of this is recognized at times by large bodies or con- gregations— notably of the Quakers, but fre- quently in exercise of silent prayer in other re- ligious gatherings. We feel the effect of it in cathedrals and churches, at funerals and even at weddings, as also in the forest or on the moun- tain top. It is a mighty factor in the training for reverence: " Let all the earth keep silence before Him." Five minutes of absolute stillness in a schoolroom is often a wholesome corrective, and, to the individual, "the quiet hour" is a blessing in many ways. We become almost conscious of subconsciousness,
" While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things."
Maeterlinck sees and says, " It is well for bod- ies of men to group themselves into gatherings for the observance of silence, for by that attitude of mind alone can the reverent frame be attained by which the soul can commune directly with its maker." And Margaret Deland is quoted as say- ing, "There is, I think, a danger in the free ex-
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pression of one's aspirations. The best things of our nature fashion themselves in silence, and if encouraged to talk about them, the aspirations and ambitions of a child are apt not to take a very deep root in the heart."
Father Tabb, the poet, makes this suggestive inquiry:^ "As it is the interval m language and music that determines the sense, may it not like- wise mean more in pathology that has yet been conceived? Something of this physicians ob- serve in fevers and spasms; but has any one yet studied the intervals of pain? The slightest variations of temperature are noted, and may it not be that as much lies between as is found in the indicating symptoms themselves }"
Is not art very largely a matter of selection, elimination, interval, omission — silence } And shall the art of life ignore it ? Noise is a waster, silence a saver. Other things being equal, a noiseless machine is a conserver of energy.
A story is told of a farmer, who being under treatment in a hospital, was seriously disturbed by the early morning milkman. When he re- covered he had his own milkmen and horses rub- ber-shod and their wagon wheels rubber-tired. He even presented a rubber mat to his customers. Needless to say the move for silence was a com- mercial success. On this a writer in The Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette remarks: "There is a lesson in the above instance that I believe will
• Addressed to T/it Literary Digest.
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be of great benefit. Let us all endeavor to re- duce the noises of our cities. The rubber-tired vehicles have reduced greatly the noises on our streets. Many people are learning the personal advantage of wearing rubber-heeled shoes; this is materially lessening the street din."
On "The Moral Value of Silence," Dr. Felix Adler has spoken v^ell: " In the Monastery of La Trappe, France, and in its affiliated Monasteries in this and other countries, there prevails the rule of perpetual silence, broken only by the voice of prayer and of brief and solemn salutation when the brothers meet. Without going to any such lengths, without attempting to depreciate the kindly offices of human intercourse through the medium of the spoken word, I yet maintain that some of the holiest, loveliest things in life are best preserved when kept in the casket of reti- cence, when the seal of silence upon them re- mains unbroken. . . . Indeed, all our deep- est feelings have about them this characteristic, — of being incommunicable. . . . We think with contempt of the chatterer who can talk glibly of his gratitude or his love; we judge that his nature is shallow, that his emotional life is superficial. The very fact that he talks so freely about what he feels is proof of that. We say of the grief that vents itself in sighs and groans, in cries and lamentations, that though it may shake the soul like a tempest, like a tempest it will pass away, . . . There are certain intimate thoughts which we express onJy to our intimate
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friends; nay, certain thouglits which perhaps we do not divulge even to these, which even our nearest ones must content themselves to guess at, to divine. There is, or ought to be, for every one, a certain territory which he may properly fence in against all comers."
One of the best instances of these subduing, elevating, inspiring effects of stillness, together with the power of a remembered moral atmos- phere, is told by W. C. Coup, the famous circus manager.^ He says, "Of all the Sunday runs I ever took, however, I recall one that was espe- cially pleasant. It took place back in the seven- ties, and was a run of some three hundred miles across an Indian reservation between a town in Kansas and another in southern Texas. The day was beautiful, and as we bowled along the prairie I felt that the 'stillness' — comparatively speaking — (so seldom enjoyed by circus people) was most refreshing. I don't suppose there ever was a country-bred boy who lived long enough to forget how, in his younger days, the Sabbath seemed, always, a day of stillness and quiet. The cessation of all business and the chiming of church bells produced an effect that could not fail of indelible impression; and that Sunday morning ride over the reservation brought back the scenes of childhood to many a rough and rugged circus man. Towards noon we halted
' From " Sawdust and Spangles : Stories and Secrets of the Circus," by W. C. Coup.
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and erected cooking tents and stables. The horses and animals were looked after and a din- ner was cooked by the attaches. After dinner they formed congenial knots and strolled around while the 'hash slingers' washed the dishes and the men once more loaded up. We carried at that time an excellent troupe of Jubilee singers, and with the light heart and impressible feelings of their race, they burst into song, alternating their quaint camp-meeting songs with others in which the majority of the attaches could join. The band, too, caught the infection and produced their instruments, and we enjoyed a vocal and instrumental feast. Just at dusk when the stars were beginning to appear, before starting for the night's run, the 'Jubes ' sang ' Nearer, My God, to Thee ' to the full accompaniment of the band and with a refrain swelled by every one able to sing.
"I have, in the course of my travels, visited many grand concerts and operas, but their most solemn and sacred effects are dwarfed into ab- solute insignificance compared with that of this impromptu performance. The rolling prairie, the beautiful trees, the perfect weather, the joy- ous spirits of every one present, the melodious voices of the Jubilee singers, and the grand strains produced by thirty skilled musicians, combined to produce music such as man seldom hears — that, on account of its spontaneity, thrilled the hearts of all present, then seemed to go right up to heaven, and ' die amid the stars.'
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(< <
AH aboard!' is shouted, and every one climbs into the car. The whistle sounds and off you go, past miles of beautiful scenery and oc- casional Indian villages. Everything is quiet and every one seems to be ' drinking in ' the beauty of the scene or sits lost in thought. No more singing or playing. All seem to be so solemnly impressed with that last grand hymn that the si- lence is unbroken. That Sunday run will always stay in my memory! With quiet 'good-nights' one after another slipped off to bed to awake to another day's hurry and bustle."
No one better understood the power of silence than Wordsworth :
" One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man Of moral evil and of good Than all the sages can."
And Whitman:
" When I heard the learned astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns be- fore me.
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them.
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick.
Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself.
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars,"
Here is a hint of the educative value of rever-
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ential attitude — a hint for the home, the church, and the school.
One of the most beautiful instances of the in- direct or atmospheric education of children's feel- ings in reverence and lofty aspiration through attitude in the presence of the glories of nature, is given by Wilhelmina Mohr. She is describing a walk she took in Germany with a little girl of eleven years. They were roaming the mountain meadows in intimate appreciation of nature when, as she says, "One evening as we were in the"^ beautiful Taunus forest, we heard soft strains of music. I listened, wondering where they came from. Soon we saw a large number of children coming up the hill, holding in their hands bas- kets filled with wild berries and bunches of flowers. As they reached the summit they stopped to look back into the beautiful valley. The teacher pointed out places of particular in- terest. As they gazed at the glorious sunset their young faces lighted up. The teacher took off his hat, they all stood with bowed heads, then they joined their leaders in singing an evening hymn. It was a touching sight. I said to myself, ' Truly this is education.' "
Note the three educative factors here — natural charm, stillness, and then the indirect suggestion of the teacher by attitude, followed by a rever- ential outburst of the expression of emotion through music. How easy it would have been to damage for all time this inspiring occasion! An ill-timed remark, a discordant jest, an un-
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seemly act, might have robbed the moment of its invaluable potency for good. Indeed our lives are seriously impoverished by such iconoclasm.
Hear George Eliot in the guise of Theophrastus Such on this point : ' ' The art of spoiling is within reach of the dullest faculty: the coarsest clown, with a hammer in his hand, might chip the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand grinning at the effect of his work." Many \yorthy and timid persons need the " courage to ^ay that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their children of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men, by burlesque associations. ... I have been amazed," continues George Eliot, "to find that some artists, whose own works have the ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damaging tend- ency of the burlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro, and up and down, on the earth, seeing no reason (except a precarious censorship) why it should not appropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to make up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love."
Observe that it is these noble sentiments, in- stincts, or feelings, that are here catalogued as treasure. The same author continues: "Parents will put into the hands of their children ridicu- lous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous 'il- lustrations') of the poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carry them to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, or solemn crises, through the me-
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dium of some miscellaneous burlesque, which, with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their primary associations, and re- duce them, throughout their time of studious preparation for life, to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at what might have stimulated their high emulation, or fed the fountains of compas- sion, trust, and constancy. . . . We soak our children in habits of contempt and exultant jib- ing, and yet are confident that, as Clarissa one day said to me, ' We can always teach them to be reverent in the right place, you know.' "
The educational consciousness never loses sight either of the making or of the breaking power of fun in its various aspects, knowing, however, that we cannot teach reverence "in the right place " if we yield to an irreverent habit in any place.
Our "child-training" is to^ talky, too noisy, too full of cornrnand. With all its educative value, however, silence and stillness are not in themselves to be overestimated. A buzzing Sunday-school room or class is not necessarily disorderly. Youth must be permitted its outlet of activity, or deteriorate. Through it all there can be an evidence of control and appropriate- ness— in which order consists.
A valuable aid to atmospheric nurture is a measure of form and ceremony, of feasts, fasts, and holy-days. Something beyond mere rational sanction is demanded by the instinct of rever- ence. Here we find one secret of the power of
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the church of Rome. And we find, too, the ne- cessity of social etiquette, which becomes rigid and exacting at the royal court. Coronation pro- cessions and ceremonies are simply the indirect mode of educating a nation's feelings. Even the ethical culturists recognize the value of ceremony, as Dr. Adler showed in an address before the So- ciety. He advocated "holy days," rites, and ceremonies mainly because ideal human relations demand expression. "We must guard against the idea that forms and ceremonies in religion are merely of poetic value. I have never been contented with that definition. Poetry deals with products of the imagination; the distin- guishing mark of religion is its insistence on reality. As soon as the reality goes out of a doctrine or form it lapses into poetry. Religion must be real to deserve the name; it must cor- respond in its ideal with something that exists." Dr. Adler continues: "My view is that we need forms and ceremonies as helps in order that we may have the higher thoughts and moods which ethical culture seeks to attain. Even a church is sanctifying if the building is so ar- ranged as to have the effect of arousing medita- tion. I do not believe we can dispense with re- ligious buildings. I do not believe a lecture hall is sufficient, that a theatre has the right environ- ment of morality. . . . We should have music, a responsive service in which the congregation could join. The main reason that we need cere- monies is that ideal relations should be expressed.
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They should be expressed in a set address and in simple forms, music, poetry and riles. We need ceremonies in private life; for instance, tlie mar- riage ceremony. There is something unspeak- ably bald in the idea of marriage as a mere legal contract."
Here we find even bald "ethical culture" it- self tending to those forms of ceremonial ex- pression, which we call " churchly." Without them, there is deficiency of atmosphere and a loss of nurture power. Of course, ceremony, is easily overdone, to the point of being ridiculous and of substituting mere form for substance, but the educational consciousness is one that is in con- stant exercise of that " tact for the concrete situ- ation," which preserves a wholesome balance of educative power. We can see here the value of taking litjje children to church occasionally and can see, too, that the Sunday-school or Bible- school is not a " children's church." [But the hab- its of inattention acquired by children in adult worship, the weariness in it, are also a factor to be regarded in any estimate of the nurture-power of a churchly atmosphere for young children.)
(Nor is the value of ceremonial order reserved exclusively for the church or public occasion. The honie has a need for it. At table, at the family altar^ for instance, we have the n[ce duty of being intimate, familiar, and easy, without losing that sense of propriety and respect for self and each other, as well as for habits which make for righteousness and efficient character. Every
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parent must remember, too, the right of the child to a degree of privacy — of heart silence and soul stillness. "Ht is possible to be top rigid in in- spection and ovej;si^ht, too inquisitorial and in- terrogatory.
In his study of "The Subconscious Self" Dr. Louis Waldstein thus speaks of the educative function of blended emotional impressions which constitute atmospheric power in religious moods. He says, "During high massjn the cathedral all the senses are occupied, and the result is a blend- ing of impr^sions, all the more vague because numerous. The temperature of the air is differ- ent from that outside, the color from the stained windows gives to the dim light an effect quite its own, while the odor of incense, the chant of the choir and music of the organ combine to create a mood to which all the senses are contributing in a vague but powerful manner. Is it not remark- able that those churches have lost the fewest of their follo\yers whose manner of worship has always been most impressive.?" Here again the educational consciousness will need to bal- ance values. Must high churchism prevail as the most religiously educative ? Perhaps not if Christianity is a daily life, a matter of conduct. But the educational church and the home will need to regard values depending in a degree on temperaments and circumstances.
There is a factor in atmospheric nurture noted by Dr. Waldstein but not usually given its full due, and that is odor, or perfume. The Roman
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church understands this. Anything that ap- proaches the srnell of incense in any place, im- mediately, by association, carries the VQtai;y into the stably and solemn cathedral or church aisle, recalling the strains of music, the worshipful atti- tude, etc. Oftener than we suppose, are we transported to old homes and hallowed haunts by a passing odor. It is not too much to say that the smell of a bit of cake, a peach, a hay or clover-field, a box-bush, a roasted chestnut, like a strain of music or a picture, has moved many a fallen man towards restoration, or at least charmed the harried soul into peace.
,Prof. E. E, Slosson writes interestingly on this point. He claims that the origin of mo,st ritual is mnemonic. And he goes farther: "In reality the foundation of ritualism is not historical or theological, but psychological. Any long-es- tablished religion develops unconsciously those particular rites that are best fitted for exciting re- ligious emotion. This is done in two ways: by association and by direct stimulation through the senses. One of the main objects of ecclesiastical forms is the development of a religious life by isolating it from common life. The set days and hours with which no other duty must interfere, the sanctified place or building where nothing profane is allowed to enter, the ecclesiastical architecture and furnishings, the archaic pro- nunciations and peculiar intonations, the vest- ments and music, the postures and movements; all these are associated with religious emotions
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and experiences, and with nothing else, so that they have the power of reviving and instigating devotional feelings. If all one's religious train- ing and experiences from childhood have been connected with certain sights and sounds, these will have an influence over the emotional nature that is astonishing to one who has been other- wise trained."
Perfumes, says Professor Slosson, have been used in all ages to stimulate emotion. " I do not mean to say that inhaling volatized gum benzoin directly inspires reverence for any particular saint or belief in a particular creed. It does, however, excite a vague emotion which is plastic to the dogmatic mold. This, too, is the function of music in ritualism. It has been proved by ex- periment that music does not convey ideas or definite emotions; but that these are supplied by words or suggestion, acting on the emotional nature aroused and made sensitive by the rhythm and harmony.
"Ordinary sights and sounds have for us no emotional content. They are neither agreeable nor disagreeable. But almost all odors excite at once some emotion; they are decidedly pleasing or displeasing. The emotional nature once aroused, it may be turned in almost any direc- tion. An excited mob may be led to acts of self- sacrifice and generosity, as well as cruelty and malice; and the orator knows that the easiest way to make an audience cry is to get them to laughing first, then skillfully pass from humor to
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pathos. So the sense of smell, the most power- ful in its effect on the emotions, should not be left out of a ritual, the main purpose of which is to arouse the emotional nature and use it as an incentive to right living. Incense is as legitimate an aid to devotion as genuflections, pipe organs, or stained-glass windows. Let the forces of El Shaddai attack the fortress of Mansoul by all its five gates."
It is not merely in worship then that the olfac- tory nerve is to be called to service but its asso- ciative power is to be remembered by the educa- tional consciousness in any situation, as one of the indirect instruments of atmospheric nurture.
Dr. Waldstein notes Jacobsen's dictum, "The church-bell has rung Gf d.in_to our soul." Who can look upon Millet's picture of "The Angelus" without feeling the touch of a reverential mood ? Speaking of the church-bell as a part of the cult of the church of Rome, he says the early morning and the evening times of arousing from sleep or of relaxation from work are favorable to emo- tional impressibility. At such a time there floats through the air a choir of bells and turns the mind towards religious things. " The reader who has travelled in Italy or Spain will agree with me in thus recognizing a subtle power in the church- bell which cannot have failed to contribute to the forces that have given to the Catholic Church its predominance in those parts."
It is, in simplest form, the subtle power of music. "Tones," says Daniel Gregory Mason,
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" are unique in our mental experience as being at once more directly expressive of the emotional essence of life than any other art material and more susceptible of orderly structure." Perhaps this tonal address to the emotions is their only direct educative appeal. Even so, they are at best indefinite and with most of us virtually indi- rect and so largely dependent upon association that their moral nurturing power must be classed as indirect and atmospheric rather than cate- gorical, direct and concrete.
As a direct appeal to the feelings, however, music has an educative power in worship en- tirely apart from words. So much has been written on this subject that it is unnecessary to do more than give it a passing reference here. Ruskin is right when he says, " Music, which of all the arts is most directly ethical in origin, is also the most direct in power of discipline."
Speaking of all art, again Mr. Mason says aptly, and superbly, " It is just at these moments, when the mind momentarily fails in its unequal struggle with reality, that we discover the deep meaning and the supreme service of Art. For Art is the tender human servant that man has made himself for his solace. . . . Seeking to prove noth- ing, making no appeal to our logical intellects, requiring of us no activity, saying nothing of aught beyond itself, it is supremely restful. Finding us defeated in our search for rationality, it says, 'Search no longer, puzzle no more; merely listen and look; see, here it is!' Its
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beauty answers our problems never directly, but by gently making them irrelevant."
Speaking more particularly of music he says, "Joy and grief, hope and despair, serenity, aspiration, and horror, fill our hearts as we listen to music. They come in their pure essence not as qualities of something else. And this is what is meant by the familiar statement that the other arts are representative while music is presentative. Poetry, painting, and sculpture show us things outside ourselves, joyful or grievous things per- haps, hopeful or desperate or beautiful or ugly things, but still things. But music shows us nothing but the qualities, the disembodied feel- ings, the passional essences. . . . From the swelter and jungle of experience in which it is our lot to pass our mortal days, days which philosophy cannot make wholly rational, nor love wholly capable of service, nor religion wholly serene, we are thus privileged to emerge, from time to time, into fairer realms. Tantalized with an unattainable vision of order, homesick for a rightness never quite realized, we turn to art, and especially to music, for assurance that our hope is not wholly chimerical. Then
" ' Music pours on mortals Its beautiful disdain.' "
Thus do we see again the value of art, of music, of order, in the church, the home, the schoolroom, as a power for soul-nurture quite its own. And the simplest art has its function—
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a mere harmony of color line or tone. Dr. Waldstein gives a fine example of this. He writes: "The refined tastes and joyous dis- positions of the elder children in a family with whom I often came into contact was a matter of some surprise to me, as I could not account for the common trait among them by the position or special characteristics of the parents: they were in the humblest position socially, and all but poor. My first visit to their modest home fur- nished me with the natural solution, and gave me much food for reflection. The children — there were six — occupied two rooms into which the sunlight was pouring as I entered; the remaining rooms of the apartment were sunless for the greater part of the day; the color and design of the cheap wall-paper were cheerful and unob- trusive, bits of carpet, the table-cover, and the coverlets on the beds were all in harmony, and of quiet design in nearly the elementary colors. Everything in these poor rooms of poor people had been chosen with the truest judgment for esthetic effect, and yet the mother seemed sur- prised that I could make so much of what seemed to her so simple a matter."
Have we not an indirect confirmation here of the tremendous educative value of the labors of such a man as Jacob A, Riis in the reform of the tenement house, the beautifying of ugly city localities with small parks, the establishing of children's playgrounds ? And we have another inference to draw. Let us concede to the poor
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the right to a bit of ornament. Let us not con- fine our gifts to things of utility, but recognize the uplifting power of the graces of art however inexpensive. The factory "hand" has a soul to be satisfied, and a vase on the rude mantel-shelf, a picture on the wall, a flower in the window may be worth more in the atmosphere of his soul- nurture than a new tea-kettle, or a ton of coal. Miss Belle Pratt Magee, a kindergartner, calls attention to a bit from Hugo's " Les Miserables," — how the good bishop answered his housekeeper when she expostulated with him for giving one whole quarter of his garden to flowers, claiming "'twould be much better to grow salads there." "Ah, Madam Magloire," said he, "the beautiful is as useful as the useful. I'm not suj:e but 'tis more so."
Books — the mere presence of books is an element in a wholesome home atmosphere. This is doubly so when there is a knowledge by the young members of a family that bad books are excluded. Dress is another indirect educator either for vanity or for a refined simplicity of char- acter. Nurture by atmosphere, indeed, is per- vasive and constant. It is the order of life not a curriculum of hours.
In the matter of schoolroom environment and the suggestive atmosphere including the suggested feelings of personality, Prof. C. C. Van Liew has given some hints worth quoting, and not inapt to the church and the home: "Children are ex- tremely sensitive to the suggestions of their
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environment. It is for this reason that the teacher should make a study of wholesome schoolroom environment. Foremost among these factors for suggestion is the teacher her- self. It lies in her power, for example, through the suggestions of her own physical personality to do for the child physically what gymnastics often fail to do. It is because her erect and graceful bearing, her freedom and vigor of movement, are the expression of mind, of decision and firm- ness of character, of reserve power, of beauty of soul, and of moral worth, that they are so power- ful in their suggestions to the child, so emphatic as to leave lasting impressions. Too often there is great need of that which, because it is itself an expression of life and vigor, can bring physical alertness and character into an entire schoolroom. Just as often there is equally great need of sug- gestions of the opposite nature, of repose, or reserve power, of quiet but effective expression.
"If this power and these opportunities, lie within the control of the teacher as the most em- phatic and prominent feature in the school en- vironment, a similar influence must hold good of all features of that environment. Suggestion is our greatest argument for the exclusion of de- fectives and incorrigibles from the school, al- though we must at the same time confess that our argument works both ways and that if the defectives and incorrigibles are grouped by them- selves, they must also, by the same law of sug- gestion, tend to intensify what separates them
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from society, especially wherever they create social forms and means of communication pe- culiar to themselves. . . . Finally, the gen- eral atmosphere of the schoolroom as regards order, neatness, quiet, habits of industry, social- ity, etc., are responsible for suggestions that are reflected in the conduct and moral fibre of the pupils. There is no escaping the influences of some sort of suggestion from these sources."
Dr. David Gregg thus preaches that men were brought to Jesus in the beginning by the creation of a Christ atmosphere in the community. He says:
" The disciples in the beginning filled the air with the name and works and praises of Jesus Christ. They talked Him into popularity. They repeated His sayings, and retold His parables, and preached over His sermons wherever they went. They talked of His miracles to all they met, and said publicly one to another, * When the Messiah cometh will He do greater works than these?' They took the atmosphere for Christ and made it a Christ atmosphere. They made the air literally ring with His coronation shout, 'Hosannah to the son of David: blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord: hosannah in the highest.' Now you can see the result of the creation of such a Christ atmosphere in the land. It was this: everybody wanted to see Jesus, and hear Him for himself and herself. Jesus became the desire of all people. Hosts of people came of themselves to Jesus: they came
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without any one going after them, and the Christ atmosphere explains the reason why they came.
" For example, this atmosphere penetrated the home of Zaccheus, and filled him with curiosity so that he climbed a tree to get a glimpse of the Christ. This atmosphere reached even so far out that it enswathed the regions where the outcast lepers lived, so that one of the lepers waylaid Christ and rushing into His presence cried: 'Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean.' And Jesus said, 'I will, be thou clean': and he was cleansed from that very moment. Yea, ten lepers came in a group to Jesus and were cleansed. My fellow-men, let us learn this lesson: |A Christ atmosphere is a mighty power in bringing men to Christ. Let the churches make that atmos- phere, and the people will come to them seeking Christ.')
Our need is less a matter of direct teaching and preaching than of atmospheric influence — ex- ample, suggestion, pure speech, gentle manner, sweet temper, strong handling, firm stepping in virtue. In an address before the Unitarian Sun- day-school Society the Rev. Samuel A. Eliot said: "There is no danger that we shall get detached from earth, our common sense is not in danger, but we have to fear loss of spiritual ardor. The educational power of the Sunday-school is nine- tenths in the atmosphere and the personality of the teacher. The Unitarian Sunday-school is in danger of congealing for want of fire. There is
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a possibility that a broad church will be a thin church. Shall we suffer the spiritual passion to die out in our work, and shall we be reasonable and not inspiring ? The teachers must seek for the ardor that will make them true mediators be- tween truth and life." There is no atmosphere without feeling. Indeed our bodily heat comes primarily from the oxygen of the atmosphere.
We have seen that a large part of this mode of education, or nurture, is so diffusive, inarticulate, undefined, shadowy, subtle, contagious, so much a matter of absorption or unconscious in-breath- ing that I have called it symbolically or metaphoric- ally atmospheric. But there is yet a considera- ble residue of indirect nurture requiring to be more specific and fitted to particular times, environments, occasions, conditions, and tem- pers. There is a necessity for something more specifically fitted as well as generally befitting. Without attempting to be more than illustrative let us note more concretely some forms of the emotional life and the mode of dealing with them.
Thus, reference has been made to the property sense or the feeling of possession. This is closely connected with the feeling of justice — than which nothing is more fundamental and primal in the domain of morals. A teacher gives this incident. "Little Rachel was spelling her kindergarten beads, when her father rose to take them away from her. Her little hands tightly clasped her treasures, and every muscle was
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tense, as she cried, 'No, those are mine!' The fatiier recognized her feeling and withdrew his hand. Then the child rose and said gra- ciously, 'Papa can take Rachel's beads now.'" Doubtless many a child has grown up to be a thief and a deceiver simply because his sense of property was not respected. Perhaps the sense of justice and of personal rights is earliest and oftenest offended. In George Madden Martin's remarkable little story of "Emmy Lou" there is an illustration of the child's first recognition of property right, when the teacher put her book into the fire. Emmy Lou felt that the teacher "had no right."
Just here let us take a suggestion from a test made by Dewey. He asked about a hundred students to state some typical early moral ex- perience of their own and the impression left by the outcome upon the mind of each. The re- plies, among other things indicate the strength of a child's sense of justice; his consciousness of the wrong of being punished for that which he had no means of knowing to be wrong; an early development of the altruistic sense; the mental revolt of the child against control through merely superior physical force; the total misap- prehension of the parent's orders; a suffering from personal indignity in certain corporal punishments so strong as to blot out the original offense; the antipathy created against God by the threats of his espionage and retribution; the natural interest of the child in his own part as
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one of the components of social structure; the mode in which other people react to his actions, — all these mental conditions of the child, chiefly on moral points, are quite clearly indicated. It will be seen too, that the impression carried in the memory is largely weighted with the feelings of childhood — justice, altruism, dignity, resent- ment, community sense, personal rights, etc.
A teacher writes feelingly thus: "What does it suggest, the practice of thoughtlessly taking away the children's property and committing it to the waste-basket or the stove ? The worth- less whistle — how the grimy hand clutches it in the depths of his crowded pocket, and the sullen lips mutter 'It is my whistle,' as he is bidden to throw it away. The knife with the broken blade that digs the desk, the marbles that will roll upon the floor, are they not the result of a trade with Jack, when the new glass ' agate ' went ' to boot' ? And to have these treasures thrust into the teacher's box with nothing to name their owner! It is too much. The big tear is scowled away, but the sense of injustice stays, rankles, and keeps him from believing that the teacher is his friend."
Rousseau says,^ "One error in the education of to-day is, that by speaking to children first of their duties, and never of their rights, we com- mence at the wrong end, and tell them of what they cannot understand, and what cannot interest
»"Emile."
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them." The first idea to be given to a child, he believes, is rather that of property than of liberty. The story of Eden would seem to suggest this. Rousseau gives some excellent suggestions in the matter of property sense in children, as in- culcated by gardening. The child plants a bean and comes to see that the care and labor he puts on it gives him a property right in it. This feel- ing of possession, of rights, of justice is of fundamental importance and is too easily neglected as an element of indirect nurture.
Then, there is the sentiment of respect for law, for authority, for government. Take an illustra- tion of indirect direction— not from child life: Some time ago I was compelled to wait for a belated train in a small way station late at night. There was no ticket office nor any official guard- ian of the station, and when I arrived there in company with some others who were returning from a social function, the station had been taken possession of by a tramp. Some of the party being averse to coming into such close quarters with the unsightly creature, remained outside. Among those who came in was an elderly gen- tleman, who, after seating himself at the farthest possible remove from the tramp, took out a cigar and made ready to light it. I immediately pointed to a sign which the gentleman had not seen, as it was on the wall directly over his head. He looked disappointed as, throwing away the match, and putting the cigar in its case again, he said loudly and clearly, " I am much obliged to
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you, sir; it is a good thing to obey the law." I felt quite confident from his manner that he was in- directly suggesting to the tramp that, even though there was no officer of the law present to enforce it, and that even though he were a man of large means and influence, who might be supposed to have some privileges, yet he respected and obeyed authority. Whether the tramp took the lesson or not, it was a true specimen of the mode of influ- encing by indirection; and no one can say but that, by the psychic law of association, the lesson might, at some future time, return to the forlorn wayfarer's conscience as an efficient cause of moral reformation, or at least for respect for authority.
Now every parent owes it alike to his country and to his children to create in his own home a sentiment of respect for ordained powers. He can do this better than by simply ordering or preaching obedience in the abstract. When a concrete situation arises, let him do as the gentle- man did in the railway station — he spoke his sentiment and acted on it. The real spirit of anarchy and infidelity takes root in homes where law is triumphantly circumvented or openly de- fied. A family arriving from Europe can be taught a wholesome lesson by a father's attitude towards the Custom-house law and regulation, even though he protest against its injustice or unwisdom.
A child's feelings, sentiments, or instincts, can thus be given direction indirectly, rather than by
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prescription or formal instruction. ^A father mj4St say some things and do many things quite super- fluous in his own Hfe for the sake of creating atmosphere and accentuating impressions. He might pay his customs duty in sullen silence, and so lose to his children the lesson of honor which they might take from a more open expression of his respect for obnoxious law. It might not seem necessary to a father to display a flag on a national/?/^ day — especially if he felt a little lazy about getting it out and making it fast to the window-sill. Yet the feeling of patriotism would be inspired if he were to display enthusi- astic energy in common with the community.
But there are other ways of stimulating patriot- ism and especially personal heroism, than through hurrah methods. The New York Evening Post calling attention to an article by President Eliot enumerating the opportunities for the display of heroism says, "There could not be a better an- swer to the fallacy which does so much service among jingoes, male and female, that to elicit a man's highest qualities you need to give him a 'foe' — that is, something to kill or destroy, in- stead of something simply to save or succor. From this fruitful source flows two-thirds of the blatherskite one hears about the value of war as an improver of character."
And the Philadelphia Ledger: "If Dr. Lazear had been killed in battle, he would be regarded as one of the nation's heroes, but as he merely gave his life in a self-sacrificing study of yellow
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fever, with a view to delivering his countrymen from its ravages, he will soon be forgotten. The three physicians, Lazear, Carroll and Reed, who went from the United States to Havana to study the yellow fever epidemic, took their lives in their hands as heroically as any three officers who figured in the war with Spain, and the proof of it is that Lazear died of the disease^ while Carroll narrowly escaped the same fate. True civilization would rank these men with the heroes of the army in popular estimation; but does our civilization do so?"
It is advisable for a timid father to display courage before a timjd child, whether that cour- age is in encountering a wild beast, in breasting a blizzard, in voting against a b^d political candi- date, or in taking a dose of repulsive medicine, In such cases courage is not inspired by mere bluff and brag, but by an obvious timidity reso- lutely overcome.
Neither is the child to be inspired with courage by simply insisting that he must be courageous ■ — some day. Brave deeds must be referred to in the concrete with expressions of admiration and applause. What a father admires goes far to- wards the nurture of a child's higher sentiments. The heroic deeds of the coast life-saving service, the city firemen, the hospital nurses, the scientists who risk life in their study to save life must be admiringly pointed to — not as though one were pointing a moral but as a spontaneous outburst of personal applause for noble deeds. In fact the
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nurturer must hold himself before his children as living in what Professor Royce calls a "World of Appreciation."
It is easy to see how a process of assimilating motives, desires, propensities, dispositions, sensi- bilities, etc., will go on through the suggestions of environment. A neat, orderly, tasteful home; a household free from censoriousness or incessant iconoclasm, and one where the signs of respect and affection are always in evidence, — these be- get feelings of their own kind.
But when we come to meet the problems of deleterious yet unavoidable surroundings as well as those of accidental and unhappy situations in the concrete, as a bad example from an outside influence, an unfortunate remark by an injudicious guest, or any other incitement to evil emotions, weakening passions, or unwholesome instincts and tendencies, — how can such be dealt with in- directly ? How can feelings which an accidental or unhealthy environment has stimulated be in- hibited,— shorn of their power for mischief ? A child who has spent an hour with a disparaging, desponding, pessimistic adult, — how shall he be led out of that blue, asphyxiating atmosphere into a rosy and oxygenated one ? How shall a child who lives in peril of being poisoned with a caviling, disobedient, disrespectful, defiant pres- ence be rendered fairly immune and kept healthy ? Says Jacob Abbott, "There is, perhaps, noth- ing more irksome to children than to listen to ad- vice given to them in a direct and simple form,
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and perhaps there is nothing that has less influ- ence upon them in the formation of their characters than advice so given." When advice on conduct is given them it ought to be divested "entirely of all direct application to themselves in respect to their past conduct."
Here are three rules which every parent needs to have hung up in the most accessible corner of his brain, so that they may be taken down for immediate use on the shortest notice. They are:
1. The rule of Direction.
2. The rule of Deflection.
3. The rule of Counteraction.
Now note that we call one a rule of direction even though we are including it under the general head of indirect methods. The conflict, if there be any, is but verbal. We direct the child's feel- ing when we deliberately place him in an atmos- phere from which he is expected to imbibe wholesome affectional sentiments and ideals, more or less unconsciously it may be, but none the less positive and real. And we direct him also in such specific cases as have just been exemplified. The tramp's lesson was one of indirect direction. He does not see that he is di- rected, as one does see when a parent or teacher or employer gives him a positive order. He is indirectly directed, and that as a general and abiding course, rather than as a special antidote for emergency or concrete situation, — in which latter case the second and third rules are available.
To be more explicit, we indirectly direct when
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we address ourselves to the child's constructive sense, bringing to him ideals through nature, art, and human deeds, and motives. We deflect when, seeing the child subjected to all manner of unwise suggestion, unfair treatment, unnecessary hardship, cruelty, ill-timed conversation, bad lit- erature, pictures, or terrifying and brutalizing stories, we do what we can to draw off or de- flect his attention or rescue him from the limbo or slavery of his custodians. We counteract when, having misjudged the child, or having found him absorbing that which is unwholesome, and going the road of bad suggestors, we take every subsequent occasion to counteract the harm done, and to uproot the poisonous seed which is al- ready sprouting into habits of thought and feeling.
Before giving more particular illustrations of these modes — especially deflection — it will be well to cite in brief a few general principles ap- plicable throughout, and laid down by Prof. James Sully. In the first place some undesirable feelings, instincts, or desires, must be led to re- pression, while desirable emotions and sentiments need stimulating into expression.
I. As to repression and weakening it must be seen to (a) that the objectionable feelings are not too powerfully excited. A timid child should be to some extent shielded from terrifying causes; (Jb) that the intellectual side of the child's mind be strengthened to call in the support of reflec- tion and judgment; {c) that the undesirable feel-
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ing be opposed by the excitement of some con- trary feeling — as in the exercise of a sentiment of regard for otliers' good qualities tending to enfeeble a child's conceit.
2. As to stimulation, (a) The child may be introduced to objects, circumstances, modes of activity, which are fitted to excite a particular feeling — through real life or story; or we may induce him to put forth activities calculated to set him in the way of acquiring experiences and dis- covering new modes of pleasure, (b) Much may be done by the habitual manifestation of a par- ticular feeling — as already illustrated in the matter of patriotism, respect for law, justice, rights, ad- miration of heroes, etc.
Not all feelings usually catalogued as undesira- ble are to be utterly crushed. It may be neces- sary to arouse pride, ambition, and emulation in lethargic and listless children. These self-feel- ings need a new direction rather than actual re- pression. The child may be led up from a fear of physical evil to a fear of moral evil.
Then the social feelings must be fostered. The community sense must be ministered to. Sym- pathies must be aroused and led. The teacher must show ardor and the spirit of cooperation. Curiosity is to be inducted to lines of definite in- quiry. The esthetic faculty has been already dwelt upon in the special consideration of atmos- phere. In the matter of music Dr. Stanley Hall, some time since, wrote, "Our census of many hundred favorite songs of children shows that
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songs of sentiment, like love and home, lead all the rest, and increase up to the age of eighteen. Next come songs of patriotism, soldiering, and marches, in which boys excel girls, and which culminate in the twelfth year. Songs of nature come third, religion fourth, with comic songs far behind. Thus home, country, nature, God are the chief themes children love in music.
"Thus the chief qualification for a teacher in kindergarten and lower primary is first the knowl- edge of a good number of the very best ballads and folk songs, and power to sing them sympa- thetically. There is nothing so educational as to cadence the soul in this way early, and nothing so anti-pedagogic as appeals to the intellect by notation and reading methods, which should come in gradually."
And as to pictures. Dr. Hall says: "The good picture from an educational point of view, is either like a sermon, teaching a great moral truth or like a poem, idealizing some important aspect of life. It must palpitate with human interest. . . . The most important ministry of pictures, then, is the education of the heart, — in teaching the young to love, fear, scorn, admire those things most worthy of being loved, feared, scorned, ad- mired."
To continue Sully's category, the educator must not be a cold personal abstraction. He should show love, tenderness, devotion. The child should see how meanness and baseness distress his teacher. Finally the child's moral judgment
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should be cultivated, and his standards estab- lished. "To be differently afifected by two mu- sical composers or two authors, to be differently responsive to all the possible nuances of moral coloring in a lie, is the mark of a refined emo- tional nature."
Most of these principles have been already illus- trated, but let us go particularly into the matter of deflection.
As to Deflection. — As has already been said, children are subjected to an incessant rain of un- wise suggestion, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the suggestor, to say nothing of the more positive forms of injustice and brutality un- der which they suffer, most often in the pious name of discipline. Perhaps the most difficult task to which any adult can set himself is that of remaining, when in the presence of children, un- ceasingly conscious of the presence of child-na- ture. In saying that this is difficult, I do not mean to imply that it is ever wholly possible. It is impossible for the adult ever to put himself wholly in a child's position. When I say, there- fore, that he ought to do this, 1 mean to use terms approximately.
Even those adults who have such a degree of sensibility as to be approximately a child in the presence of children need to have quickness of judgment and great tact in exercising the power of deflection in their office as the child's protector and defender. Oftentimes the process of deflec- tion must not be evident to those whose mischief-
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making power is to be deflected, and it should seldom be evident to the child in whose interest we are producing the deflection.
I speak not now of those grosser forms of temptation and evil which the child's guardian ought to deflect by open condemnation or oppo- sition. It is obvious that a parent ought to let the child see that it will be unsafe for him to keep evil company. But upon this obvious proc- ess of deflection I do not need to speak. It is well enough apprehended as a motive even though too little understood as a process.
But as to deflection in its subtler and less ap- prehended form, let us suppose a case. It is at the family dinner table. There are several guests present. The conversation runs to the pettier forms of personal criticism. The child at the table sits quietly absorbing everything.
Now the parent must throughout have a child's eyes and ears, and a child's interpretation of what is said and done, and be incessantly draw- ing a child's inferences. While this goes secretly on in the parent's mind, he must likewise be a polite and pleasant host. It will be the part of wisdom and of tact on his part, for the child's sake if for that of no others, to discover the switches in the track of the conversation and turn them without manifesting his plot or purpose. He can run the train of talk from that of persons to that of things. So much for topics.
Sometimes in such conversations one of the persons present will use a word which is objec-
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tionable when it becomes too free and habitual. Suppose it is the word "hate." If the child has any adequate idea of the fullness of meaning in the word "hate," either the word will be weak- ened as part of his vocabulary, or, what is much more important, the critical, captious, unchrist- like spirit in its free use will come to dominate his own attitude towards his fellows. If any of the persons present have a habit of expressing their little dislikes, either of persons or of things, by a vehement declaration, such as "I just hate him," or "1 just hate it," the alert parent will, serving in his capacity as child, yet as parent ob- jectively viewing himself as child, feel in his own mind a gradual lowering of standards.
His course must now be to deflect the evil in- fluence by tactfully using the objectionable word himself. He may take up the thread of conver- sation, and, without the appearance of malice aforethought, use the word "hate," then, cor- recting himself, — "No, I do not hate it at all;" or, if it is a person that is under consideration, " I do not hate him, it is simply that he has that about him which does not suit me, — although perhaps there are things about me that do not suit him." He can then run glibly into the gen- eral conversation. He has in all probability put a check in the career, or shunted the train, of the child's interest, which was in immediate danger of moving morally, as well as mentally, down- hill. He may, indeed, have done double duty in leading the guests to be a little less voluble in ob-
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jectionable words, if not in ideas, as well as in leading the child to see either that the guest has probably not meant all the evil that he seemed to say or that it is better not to say things which sound evil when evil is not intended.
There is another form of deflection sometimes less difficult to manage. So far we have consid- ered deflection — that is, turning from or aside — of the destroying power. But we may also do just the converse of this. We may turn the child himself aside. The child's attention may be drawn off by a little personal and private pleas- antry with him, leaving the company's conversa- tion to look after itself. The parent's ears, how- ever, must be open to all that goes on, even though all his attention now seems centred on the child.
y4s to Counteraction. — It frequently happens that environment has, innocently or designedly, done its nefarious work, and the time has gone by for its deflection while it is yet an oncoming force or a present atmosphere of suggestion to the child. The evil which has been wrought must be, so far as is possible, positively counter- acted. It may seem as though the instance which has just been given of the treatment by the parent of the word "hate" is in a degree a counteracting. The parent's exhibit of the right and wrong use of the word was, it is true, in effect a counteracting of the evil which the guest had already wrought in the child's mind. It was also a deflection in that it probably prevented the
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word being again used in that loose way on that occasion, or in being as potently noxious when used. It is not possible, even if it were neces- sary, to draw a distinct line where one process begins and the other ends. Deflection and counteraction are really but two modes of de- fense and protection. They are further removed in their essence from direction than they are from each other. They are less positive, more subtle, less obtrusive.
As in the case of what I called the grosser and more evident and ordinary forms of deflection quite patent to all who have any interest in the training of children, so in counteraction there are the grosser and more obvious forms. Punish- ment, for instance, as such, comes under this head in so far as it is supposed by the child's guardian to be a counteracting force in the es- tablishment of the child's character. Spanking, it is true, is not exactly a subtle and unobtrusive process. It is seldom a counteracting force, but it is administered piously in the interest of coun- teraction, and illustrates what I mean by the grosser and less subtle form of this mode of in- fluence,— if influence it may be called, — at least so far as the spanker's motive is concerned.
But now as to the more subtle process of counteraction. Let us again assemble at the same family board. A delicate lady makes a re- mark about a special article of medicated diet which has been prescribed for her, adding that she has grown very fond of it. Immediately
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there is an outcry from the more youthful and giddy-minded guests lii^e this: "I hate that! I don't like the smell of it." "Nothing would hire me to take that!" The invalid replies, "Why, it isn't bad and it has done me good," And again the giddy heads, " I know I shouldn't like it. It makes me sick to think of it." All this has occupied but a fraction of a minute. The alert child-minded father of the absorptive child realizes the situation. Deflection proper is out of the question. The time has gone by. There must be counteraction.
The whole essence of the process consists in adroitly extorting from the incident a new prin- ciple which is thrown into the opposite side of the scale as a counterweight — or counteractor. The child-minded father feels that the child has probably deduced the false principle that dislike for a thing is sufficient reason for refusing to have anything to do with it. The child's deduc- tion may be strengthened by the fact that he has a peculiar affection for one or more of the giddy suggestors, or if less than that, it is at least natu- ral to the child to look upon the adult as exem- plary. The father in his far-sight foresees times when the child will need to do that which he dislikes, perhaps in the very matter of diet or medicines at a critical time. This one occasion may undo the training work of weeks or months or years. The father must not show his disap- proval of such conversation in the presence of his guests, because he cannot expect to control
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the table-talk of guests simply because his child is present. What is he to do ?
Two general plans of procedure are open to the father. The ordinary one is to let the matter go by and take it up at a subsequent time in private with the child by openly making an issue with the trend of the bygone table-talk. The other plan is to act immediately — not by seeming to argue the case but by suggesting a principle as a natural outcome to the situation. Suppose, then, the father should nonchalantly say, " Well, I don't like that stuff either, but there are times when we must do what we don't like, and if my physician ordered me to take it, I should do it whether I enjoyed it or not." It will be observed that this remark begins in harmony with the re- marks of the mischief-makers, but it leads up to a principle which cunningly counteracts the ef- fect of all that preceded it. It throws into the other side of the scale the weight of the vital principle, that our likes and dislikes cannot de- termine our modes of action. The higher law of right and necessity is paramount.
The virtue in both these modes of influence is in their acting at the time as an integral or or- ganic part of the occasion which called the de- flective or counteractive force into play. The child will, as a rule, be better influenced if he is addressed when he is interested.
On such an occasion as that just instanced, the child is led into a principle by what seems like a natural course. If the father should take it up as
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a counter-argument, the child would be given an alternative. He would have before him a pro and con of debate as such, and he might decide that his father's argument was the weaker, and so be harmed by it. But no one is likely to take issue with the principle which the father has led up to, that there are times in life when we must do that which is not an agreeable thing to do. The child is therefore not likely to hear this gain- said, and it remains with him as an established principle of action.
The illustrations here given of these two modes of influence — deflection and counteraction — are chosen, not because they contain anything re- markable, but because of their homeliness and commonplaceness. One illustration of each mode is sufificient. But it is not meant to imply that the range of possibility of situations and of courses of action in meeting the situations is not large and varied. Treatment of a case may be deli- cate, subtle, imperceptible, or it may be heroic. As a rule, however, the obtrusive and the heroic are the more commonly resorted to, and come less under that which we call indirection, and are less efficient.
The modes of procedure included in this for- mula of direction, deflection, and counteraction lay no claim to novelty. They are practiced, in whole or in part, appropriately or inappropri- ately, vigilantly or carelessly, regularly or spas- modically, by every well-meaning, conscientious parent and guardian of the child. But it is an
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advantage to have a motto, formula, or catch- word which stands for a definite principle of procedure. It makes one's thinking definite, and this is to make one's action more certain. He to whom these three words have now become defini- tive symbols of process is less likely to be incon- stant, haphazard, and ineffectual in dealing with the child in all that fickleness of environment to which he is inevitably subjected. But they are simply specific forms of the general method of education by indirection and suggestion, and are constituent elements of a nurturing atmosphere. The conditions of the first, " Direction " are posi- tive and initiative. The second and third, "De- flection" and "Counteraction" are corrective. The first is always in order, the latter two are re- served for occasions when mischief is threatened or has been done.
But let us take one more case of counteraction. A little girl of refined and sensitive temperament, of generous impulses and sweet acquiescence came to her father and said, " Papa, this dolly is jealous of that dolly." She was about to enlarge on the signs of the doll's jealousy, when the father — educationally conscious — suspecting that some young companion or adult visitor had put the idea into the child's head, interrupted the child with, "No, no; that dolly isn't jealous, we don't have any jealous people in this house; oh, no! that is a mistake to say that any of our dolls are jealous." The child never reverted to it again, and grew up without knowing what the
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feeling of jealousy was — thoroughly honorable, unselfish and discriminating.
Jealousy is an easy flame to fan. Tell a little boy that his nose will be out of joint because a baby sister has come into the house and his nose has good reason for following the suggestion and getting out of joint for life. But if the child has any tendency to jealousy, at once set him to helpful deeds for the newcomer.
One thing to be guarded against is depression of the child's feeling through over-negation, and undue emphasis on his weakness. Professor Van Liew again says: "As a rule we expect the effects of a suggestion to become manifest in something positive, /. e., in the desired or sug- gested action. The opposite may be the case. At times either inactivity or the opposite action from the one desired may result. The persistent use by the teacher, for example, of 'Now be careful,' suggests to the child the possibility of carelessness. The latter, if the teacher's habit persists, is soon associated with a negative emo- tional tone of fear of the undesired, which is often strong enough to destroy all motor accu- racy and an awkward failure is the result. The mysterious and awful movements of the peda- gog who cannot live without giving periodical examinations, become, at the crucial moment, so full of negative suggestion, as often to destroy the student's power to think and act with any- thing like his normal powers. . . .
"Inactivity sets in when the child begins to
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find the general tone of his environment negative towards him; every one seems to him to expect of him the undesirable, the catastrophic; in many cases they really do. What is the difficulty? The emphasis is placed entirely on what he lacks, on what he is deficient in as compared with others, on what he cannot do. As a result he responds to the suggestion of expected failure; he either does not do, or his efforts are too feeble to encourage even himself; he relapses into a state of indifference, of disinclination towards effort along new lines, and so far as school life is concerned, of mental lethargy. The writer has seen just such cases, especially among school- boys. Negative suggestion, among other things, is productive of the incorrigible. The writer has also known a reversal of the character of sug- gestion in such cases, from the negative to posi- tive, to remove the difficulty entirely, and to bring progress into the mental life of the boy. As a rule the teacher needs above all to keep alive in her pupils a consciousness of what each is positively able to do. It is the strong feeling of powers already in possession, that must be for each child the foundation for steps in advance, not the depressing realization of powers it yet lacks."
It is a terrible mistake, of some parents, to be continually telling how "bad" their child is, in the presence of the child himself. Who will tell them how bad they are to do this ?
Pursuing this principle we see how much
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evil is wrougiit by too constant a depressing reference to man as a sinner. Sin must be met but not courted into intimacy. Stevenson says with truth, "It is certain we all think too much of sin. ... To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagina- tion and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us we should not dwell upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted pleasure." The fact of sin is neces- sarily a large factor in theology but in the process of education it easily becomes a bad suggester and a poisonous vitiator of right atmospheric nurture.
Nevertheless we must not forget our economy of values and our balances. Dr. Hall speaks for the other side, thus: "There is a tendency to underestimate the value of proper emotional culture. We are greatly in danger of eliminating the enthusiastic, the emotional out of our lives. In schools it is hard to get the children to display emotion or read emotional works. It is not easy to get them to sing where the display of emotion is really required. They cannot now be induced to declaim with double gestures and work them- selves up to a pitch of excitement that was possible twenty-five years ago. If the country is in danger of losing this enthusiastic tempera- ment, it is a sure sign of decay. This tendency is seen in the colleges. You rarely see any more a freshman who is green and awkward. He is.
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in truth, an accomplished, bright man, perhaps a little overripe in the forms of indifference, and perhaps a little world worn. If we could only have in the world a little more of that old con- viction of sin to check this immodest growth of indifference that makes culture run off a man like water off a duck's back, and along with it a deep sense of ignorance, 1 think it would be a great gain for the emotional life. There is nothing that makes for shallowness like a sense of per- fection. And if we could permit ourselves to use elements, which of course are so easily sus- ceptible of abuse, it would be well."
On the contrary again, Colonel Parker insists that "the old teaching of evil, so that by know- ing evil the child may avoid it, is fundamentally and everlastingly wrong — pernicious to the last degree." But here we are trenching on another subject, that of nurture by exercise — which in- volves the right of choice as an essential in the development of the will. The safe course lies between Hall and Parker — the concrete case de- termining. What Stevenson says is pithy and pertinent, and accords in motive with Bushnell.
Steeped in a Christian atmosphere, a child ought, as Bushnell contended,' "to grow up a Christian, and never know himself as being otherwise." Beecher cautions us against treating our children as if they were doomed. And Bushnell says it should not be that "the child is
> " Christian Nurture."
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to grow up in sin to be converted after he comes to a mature age. . , . There could not be a worse or more baleful implication given to a child, than that he is to reject God and all holy principle till he has come to a mature age . . . [that he] is old enough to resist all good, but too young to receive any good whatever."
Yet here is something from a book of ad- dresses to children by a minister whose heart's desire is for "the lambs in the fold." Thus he speaks to them : " Children, don't complain that you have been bound without your consent: we bind you in secular things without your consent. Both God and the laws of your country, as well as the requirements of society, bind the young without asking their leave. The child is always bound by the father's act.
"Children, grace has descended from gener- ation to generation in an unbroken line of pious ancestry down to you, and now is that line to be broken by you ? Are you to be the first who, through unbelief, will cast away from you the heritage of the Lord ? Oh ! shrink from break- ing those covenant engagements; court not the condemnation of sin, nor try to break those cords with which Christ seeks to draw you to Himself and bind you forever to His own heart."
Could anything be more depressing, more spiritually debilitating than this sort of " admoni- tion " ? Certainly it is not to be given under the name of nurture.
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Finally, as action grows out of feeling, so con- versely, feeling grows out of action. Says Prof. William James, " In rage, it is notorious how we ' work ourselves up ' to a climax by repeated out- breaks of expression. Refuse to express a pas- sion and it dies. . . . Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable precept in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in our- selves, we must assiduously, and in the first in- stance, cold-bloodedly go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate. The reward of persist- ency will infallibly come, in the fading out of sullenness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial com- pliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw."
Therefore, assume brisk, cheerful attitudes though you feel dull and depressed. Teach kind- ness not by saying "be kind," but by the kind deed. Say to the child " run and take this orange to that poor man," rather than simply stir emotion by expressions of pity.
This is illustrated in a little article on Kinder-
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garten Experiences by Mary E. Sly, which I quote: "In the sixteenth ward of Chicago a child's first impulse at sight of animal life is to torment, and in the feebler animals, to kill if possible. That is not natural, and 1 have made it my business to help childhood back to its true condition of loving companionship with animals. The first step was protection for dog and cat, and then came the birds. The sparrow is the only bird they know, and it has been wonderful to me to see the magical progress the children have made in regaining their lost estate. To most of them the sparrow no longer suggests a stone to be thrown at him, but a loving desire to watch and see where he has a nest, and to try to call him to be petted. They have found out that the cat will come to the child who has treated it kindly, and the pet rats in the kinder- garten love best the children who are gentle and kind, and will seek out such a child in the circle. The rats have demonstrated to the children that with the true relationship once established between man and the brute crea- tion, the animal is more anxious than man to perpetuate it."
Thus we must not only incite the right emo- tions in the child but we must provide oppor- tunities for their expression in action. Senti- mentalism is the necessary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from action, says Dewey. And Froebel advises us to "seek to give out- ward form to the feelings that stir the child's
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heart; for even the child's love may fade and die if it be not cherished."
" Welcome each small offering That a young child's love may bring, Though perchance he stint himself Of some childish joy or pelf; For love grows with being spent, But starves in its own plenty pent."
Another kindergartner, Mary G. Trask thus counsels:
" Giving to those whom they love is a pleasure to children as well as to 'grown-up' people; and sometimes we don't let them have enough of this pleasure, but stunt the generous impulse by giving too much to them, and failing to en- courage effort and self-denial on their part. A friend tells me of a scene she witnessed be- tween a father and a little child. The father asked the baby for a piece of her candy; but when, after a little struggle with herself, she broke off a piece and handed it to him, he re- fused it, saying: ' Oh, no! Father doesn't really want it. Baby can have it all!' 1 think we ought never to refuse the gifts that children offer, however crude or unattractive they may appear, if we wish to encourage in them the spirit of giving."
It is not alone with children that kind and generous emotions are thus dissipated by for- bidding their spontaneous action. The mistake of refusing gifts and ministry from the very poor
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is only too frequent among the kind but in- judicious rich.
The kindergarten games are valuable in furnish- ing pattern experiences to children; and through stories ideals of valor and virtue are built into the child's feeling consciousness, as will appear in subsequent chapters. Then as to affections these must have opportunity for exercise. There is such a thing as putting too much pressure on children to be self-sacrificing. At an orphanage fifteen children gave up sugar in their coffee for one month, and one child sold her kitten for fifty cents — all for sweet charity's sake! Might not the child's feelings have been as well cultivated through that kitten as through the gift of half a dollar to a charity ? It is a question of values at least worth considering.
It remains now to consider, briefly, the six obstacles and interferences to the development of the child's best and most worthy emotional re- sources. The first is our failure to respect the child's feelings and to lead them, when they are shown, either towards repression or development according to whether they are evil or good. The second is the directly bad suggestions that the child gets from us, in the display of wrong feel- ings towards him, towards others, and towards God. On these two points enough has been said, directly or by inference, already.
The third interference arises from physical conditions. We cannot get the best musical re- sults in a Sunday-school, for instance, if hymn
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books are heavy to hold and too few in number to go round. We cannot get the best incitement to reverence if there is no place to keep Bibles but the floor. We cannot get spiritual inspira- tion out of a "good sermon " if the church is so close as to make us drowsy, or if there is such a draught on the back of one's neck as to keep him conscious of a probable cold. "Body for the sake of soul," is to be reckoned with in the education of the feelings. We have already seen something of the effects of atmosphere on morals. Fatigue is poison. Along with fatigue usually runs soul-weariness, spirit-depression. Dr. Stuart H. Rowe in his book on "The Physical Nature of the Child," speaking of the reduction of nerve force by fatigue, notes that it may be- come permanent and pathological, through con- stant drains such as " lack of proper food, out- door air or sleep, baths, irregularity of habits, unhygienic conditions of home, school, or per- son, overpressure, disease, overwork, studying too hard, confusion, ambition, fear of teacher, dreams, or dread stories, etc." In short the emotional life is a highly sensitized one and it responds in one way or another to physical conditions as well as to human environment.
Fourthly, as educators, and nurturers we are perpetually thwarting our own purposes. We live imprudently and deplore the results. We put ourselves in the physician's hands and while under his treatment do the very things that foil it. We neglect the home and children in order
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to run to meetings in the interest of home and family life. We live a self-obstructive, self- thwarting, suicidal life. Similarly, our very efforts at the training of the young fail through incongruity. Froebel says, "The law of connec- tion is the most important law of the universe, of humanity, and of life in general." The failure to be educationally conscious is the failure to maintain this law. We do two opposite things at once; we put on the draught at the bottom to keep the fire going, and break it at the top in order to keep it from burning. Women sit buttoned up in sealskin coats and fan them- selves at the same time. So do we excite in- congruous emotions. Sunday-schools begin to practice Easter Hymns before the Christmas tree is dry. In the effort to excite right feelings in their children, fathers provoke them to wrath. A thwarting incongruity, then, is a source of failure in the life of feeling nurture. Says Alice W. Rollins, "You plan an elaborate hour of instruction for your child in the morning and carry it out with extreme care; in the afternoon you take him out to walk to 'amuse' him, and something that amuses him will accomplish or undo in his mind all that you have wished to effect or counteract. . . . We decide what we will teach our children, by Sunday-school lessons, or gentle moral tales, or direct reproof; but behold! some single gesture or sudden ex- pression of the face, or careless word, or unpre- meditated action, has taught them something,
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or rather made them feel something, which will outweigh in influence, for good or evil, all that we have supposed ourselves to be inculcating."
Fifthly, mere emotion that evaporates without a deed is weakening. Hence the harm of crying at the theatre and "with no language but a cry." Any working of the feelings without opportunity to act is likely to result in impairment. It pro- duces a soft sentimentality. Hence the common outcry against emotionalism.
Sixthly, we must not think too much about our own emotions and must therefore beware of leading the children to think or speak of their own. Professor James in his "Talks to Teach- ers" speaks with no uncertain sound on this point, thus: "There is, accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay pri- mary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we only don't strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or insulting word that which we shall regret as long as we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling which is not.
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"Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheer- fulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were al- ready there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to feel kindly towards a person to whom we have been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things. One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our at- tention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an Arab and silently steals away. The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiter- ate the maxim that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever."
Professor James then quotes Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, in substance, "Act faithfully, and you really have faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel." And in Mrs. Smith's own words, "It is your purpose God looks at, not your feelings about that pur- pose, and your purpose or will, is therefore the
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only thing you need attend to. . . . Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God pleases, and make no account of them either way." Alice Wellington Rollins, however speaks thus: "The whole value, the just claim to originality of method, in the kindergarten system, is that it labors to associate emotion with knowledge. The prejudice against the word 'emotional' is intended only for emotion that ends in mere emotion. It is a pity for you to weep with ap- preciative sympathy over the sorrows of Dickens' Little Nell, or Dombey or Oliver Twist, if your interest in the story ends with that, or perhaps actually prevents your doing something for an unfortunate child, whom you are yourself neg- lecting for the pleasure of reading how other people neglected theirs. But if the book inspires you to look up a few instances in real life, you will do it more heartily from the emotion that has been stirred in you, than if you had merely read the town statistics and made up your mind that it was your duty to call a meeting and vote for investigation of the poor houses. This is why the cultivation of the beautiful is not always an inspiration to nobility. Exquisite sensitive- ness to beauty in music, art, nature, or manners, may become an esthetic impulse that develops to deadly selfishness. The result is an effort, not to bring harmony out of chaos, but at all haz- ards to avoid chaos, and to insist upon ignoring everything that might jar on that 'artistic tem- perament' which is so often presented as an
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excuse for the most hideous forms of selfish- ness."
Thinking about our own feelings is one thing and regarding the feelings of another is quite an- other thing — especially when that other is a child. In the early part of this chapter reference was made to our debt to the feelings of Paul, Savon- arola, Luther, Knox, Bunyan, Froebel, Whittier, Lincoln and others. But it is hardly to be sup- posed that they spent much time thinking of their own feelings. They not only felt but acted. But in a knowledge of their actions our own feelings gain inspiration and training for right and heroic deeds. When we read of these impassioned heroes of humanity we live in their atmosphere. They are our nurturers, our educa- tors; and shame on us if we do not grow mor- ally better and more valiant by the wholesome nurture of their example!
IV
NURTURE BY LIGHT
Education Through Vision : The Power of the Pictorial.
FOR months, and even years, the attitude of Spain towards Cuba, and her methods of dealing with the Cubans, created a widespread feeling of indignation and even animosity among the American people. Under the frequent recital of the sufferings of the impoverished colonists, a tidal wave of retributive emotion swept over the United States, although few could think of resorting to war. But there came a moment when an explosion sent the battleship Maine to the bottom of Havana harbor, and this — as a discerning editor said — simply made Spain visible. On this dramatic spectacle the entire American gaze, in imagination, was turned. It was never proved that the Spanish government was in any direct sense responsible for the destruction of the battleship, but the name of Spain was no longer a mere abstract emotion; it became a concrete visible image in the form of the Maine, imprinted on the retina of the American mind's eye. As we shall see, im- mediate action was almost inevitable. 174
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Here we have embodied a profound and essential principle. We grow by what we see. "The lamp of the body is the eye," and the lamp of the soul is the mind's eye. We grow like unto our visible environment.
As Professor Dewey puts it, the mental " image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it." The character is glorified in be- holding the glorious; it is debased in viewing the base, the lewd, the lascivious. Dante finely says:
"All Are blessed, even as their sight descends Deeper into the truth, wherein rest is For every mind. Thus happiness hath root In seeing, not in loving — which of sight Is aftergrowth."
"To see clearly," says Ruskin, "is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one." And Browning thus sums all in few words:
" In the seeing soul, all worth lies, I assert."
A little volume of essays,^ by H. Clay Trum- bull, contains some suggestive headlines as well as passages appropriate to our purpose here. In the essay on "The Transforming Power of a Gaze," he notes that "what we eat and drink has its part in refining or in debasing both the outer and the inner man, because through the outer
> " Seeing and Being,"
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man it reaches and affects the man within." Indeed the body is the avenue to the soul; and in this sense cleanliness is next to Godliness. " But peculiarly is it true," says Trumbull, "that that on which we deliberately, or with consent, fix our visual and mental gaze, becomes a shaping and transforming power over our innermost being; so that, as it is true in one sense that what we see shows what we are, in another sense it is true that what we gaze at decides what we shall be.
" He who deliberately fixes his gaze on things foul and loathsome, delighting himself in their attractions, will be found to lower himself stead- ily towards the level of the foul and loathsome; while he whose gaze is constantly fixed on things lovely and admirable is thereby helped towards the standard of the lovely and admirable. The street scavenger's tastes, trained through his per- sistent looking for refuse, must be more and more away from the tastes of the purposeful student of the beautiful and the elevating in art."
We may have art for art's sake, but art is bound to have a moral effect because of its appeal to the eye. The "admiring gaze attracts and centres, and gradually shapes, the longings and endeavors of the gazer's entire being, until he lives for that which has held him in thrall, and is, in fact, the embodiment of his supremest as- pirations. . . .
" In classic fable, he who looked into the face of the frightful Gorgon became thereby trans-
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formed into stone; and because of this trans- forming power of that face, the face itself was set into the shield of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, as a means of petrifying every enemy of the goddess who turned his gaze against her."
On the other hand, continues Trumbull, "after Moses had been gazing into the very face of Him who is invisible, his own face shone with the preternatural light that came of his added likeness to the object of his gazing. The inspired writer, urging the Christian to lay aside every hindrance to success in the race of his earthly life course, enjoins it upon him to be 'looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith'; and the beloved disciple assures us that, if we will but keep our loving gaze on Him who is invisible, then, ' if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is'; or, in other words, to see him as he is, is equivalent to being in his likeness, transformed through our loving looking towards him."
Now physical light is the medium of physical sight. It is that out of which vision is made. That all through the ages light has been the symbol of knowledge, is easily understood. We speak of getting light on a subject; we con- done the erring when they have lived up to their light; we praise a bright mind; we laud a lu- minous writer; one shines in society; the wit is brilliant; the lamp, or the torch, is the favorite symbol in the realm of learning and progress.
Scripture teems with the metaphorical use of
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light and of vision as a means of instruction. Our Lord continually testified to the character- forming function of the eye and the sense of sight. "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness." The beam in the eye is the sign of the hypocrite. "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out." And St. John, — " The lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." Again, the Great Teacher: " I am come, a light unto the world " ; "Ye are the light of the world"; "Let your light so shine before men"; "The life was the light of men "; " While ye have the light, believe on the light, that ye may become sons of light." It was in ineffable light that Jesus was trans- figured; in a blaze of light Saul was converted. All the way down the ages, epochal events have turned on vision. Men saw a great light and followed it.
Our Lord was a doer because he was a seer: " Verily, verily, I say unto you. The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing; for what things soever he doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner. For the Father loveth the Son, and showeth him all things that himself doeth; and greater works than these will he show him, that ye may mar- vel." That which the Father made visible to the Son was the Son's moving ideal.
In the previous chapter it was demonstrated
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that the feelings are to be educated by indirect means — not by talking about them or by making the child conscious of them. Chief among these indirect modes of securing those right habits of ac- tion and thought which beget right feelings, is the setting before the mind a worthy image — a living deed or a picture. Thus do we find these two modes of nurture — atmosphere and light closely interrelated and interdependent. Says Fiske, " In a very deep sense all human science is but the increment of the power of the eye, and all human art is but the increment of the power of the hand. Vision and manipulation — these in their countless indirect and transfigured forms are the two cooperating factors in all intellectual progress," And Haeckel, speaking from the physicist's, or biologist's, point of view, start- lingly tells us, "The whole marvellous pano- rama of life that spreads over the surface of our globe is, in the last analysis, transformed sun- light."
So true is it that all human knowledge, or science, is but " the increment of the power of the eye," that it is difficult to draw the line between the literal and metaphorical, or spiritual, in think- ing of the educating power of light and of vision. The material and the symbolical, the physiolog- ical and the psychological, are so intimately welded that natural vision passes into spiritual vision. Imagery grows out of images and char- acter seems to build itself out of the beams of literal light. Between the natural or outer eye,
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and the mind's eye — the memory, imagination or fancy there is close partnership of interests.
Says Prof. M. V. O'Shea, "Seeing for most of us is at least part imagination, in the sense in which this term is commonly employed. We behold that which arises within rather than that which is presented from without. If in a word there is enough of the old form to awaken the memory of the word, we are likely to take the memory to be the thing which is appealing to our senses. . . . Some one has said that a person always finds what he is looking for. What you expect to see and hear will be likely to come your way, at least so far as you are your- self concerned in your beliefs. One who an- ticipates that another is going to slight him will be only too apt to be slighted in his own estima- tion at any rate. In passing graveyards people see ghosts because they are expecting to see them. In the stories which have been told them, ghosts and graveyards are usually connected to- gether, and they are almost certain to arise to- gether in the mind in later life. Expectation really means from one point of view that in- ternal images are attaining a certain vividness which may go so far as to be taken for reality. Anticipation is the initial stage of happening for the one who anticipates. Much of children's misrepresentation of the world is due to this tendency to take to be real what has been put into their heads through stories. Bears and forests get connected together so that when any
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forest is seen the bears often make their appear- ance too."
As in the previous chapter we saw how moral conduct is affected by the piiysical at- mosphere, so here we may pause a moment to note how large a part physical light plays in the laws of growth and health. As men and plants must breathe to live so, also, must they have light to flourish. A healthy human organism is better capable of God's service than a sickly one. Education in the Christian sense means the de- velopment of the whole man and the nurture of the body is a contribution to the nurture of the soul.
Light and atmosphere therefore are more than mere symbols — although it is chiefly as symbols that we are considering them. As a sanitary agent light is a moral agent; as a cleanser and disinfectant it is an aid to moral purification; as a life-giver it is a spiritual developer. Medical science grows into a deeper appreciation of the sunbeam. Some time ago the Journal des D^- bats S2i\d, " It has been stated recently, that if a bottle full of impure water is exposed to the direct rays of the sun only one hour, all the germs will be killed. ... It has always been supposed, for that matter, that the sun is a powerful antisep- tic, and it has always been customary to expose the clothing of the sick and dead to its light. Prof. E. von Esmarch recently conceived the idea of finding out whether this light was really effica- cious in killing the pathogenic germs adhering to
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the surface of stuffs. He took pillows, coverings and gowns, wiiich he had impregnated with bacteria, and placed them in the sun. The ex- periment proved that the influence was absolute when the germs were on the surface, but was lost in a measure when they were less exposed. More recent achievements of the Finsen light cure, and the mysterious effulgence of the metals radium and polonium, and even of the human body, are among the marvels of modern dis- covery.
Indirectly then, nurture of the body by light is an aid to the nurture of the soul through the mental image. Physical light promotes moral growth through the development of the bodily health. But this is aside from our main study. Light is the medium of vision and back of the eye lies the mind's eye. Here is where we feel the "power of a remembered vision"; here we feel the "transforming power of a gaze"; here we perceive the base or the beautiful, here we recognize the mean or the noble; here originates the impulse to do what we see.
The preeminent importance of this sense of sight, this faculty of imaging, is shown in the prevalent use of the verb "to see." To take an idea is to "see" it. Even the blind speak as freely of seeing as do those who literally see. And psychology finds it convenient and appro- priate to speak of the auditory and the tactual image for those remembered impressions of sound and touch. Here we may note the result
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of some investigations with reference to the dreams of the blind, reported by Prof. Joseph Jastrow. Nearly two hundred persons of both sexes in institutions for the blind, were person- ally examined and the results recorded. Professor Jastrow writes:
" Beginning with cases of total blindness (in- cluding under this head those upon whom light has simply a general subjective 'heat-effect,' enabling them to distinguish between night and day, between shade and sunshine, but inducing little or no tendency to project the cause of the sensation into the external world), I find on my list fifty-eight such cases. Of these, thirty-two became blind before completing their fifth year, and not one of these thirty-two sees in dreams. Six became blind between the fifth and the seventh year; of these, four have dreams of see- ing, but two of them do so seldom and with some vagueness, while two never dream of see- ing at all. Of twenty persons who became blind after their seventh year all have ' dream-vision ' — as I shall term the faculty of seeing in dreams. The period from the fifth to the seventh year is thus marked out as the critical one. Before this age the visual centre is undergoing its elementary education ; its life is closely dependent upon the constant food-supply of sensations, and when these are cut off by blindness it degenerates and decays. If blindness occurs between the fifth and the seventh years, the preservation of the visualizing power depends on the degree of de-
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velopment of the individual. If the faculty is retained, it is neither stable nor pronounced. If sight is lost after the seventh year, the sight- centre can, in spite of the loss, maintain its func- tion, and the dreams of such an individual are hardly distinguishable from those of a seeing person.
" I had already entered upon this research when I discovered that I had a predecessor. So long ago as 1838 Dr. G. Heermann studied the dreams of the blind with the view of determining this same question, the physiological significance of which, however, was not then clearly under- stood. He records the answers of fourteen totally blind persons who lost their sight previous to their fifth year, and none of these have dream- vision. Of four who lost their sight between the fifth and the seventh year one has dream- vision, one has it dim and rare, and two do not definitely know. Of thirty-five who became blind after their seventh year all have dream- vision. The two independent researches thus yield the very same conclusion. Dr. Heermann includes in his list many aged persons, and from their answers is able to conclude that, gen- erally speaking, those who become blind in mature life retain the power of dream-vision longer than those who become blind nearer the critical age of five to seven years. He records twelve cases where dream-vision still continues after a blindness of from ten to fifteen years, four of from fifteen to twenty years, four of
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from twenty to twenty-five years, and one of thirty-five years. In one case dream-vision was maintained for fifty-two, and in another for fifty- four years, but then faded out."
It is this persistence of vision, this self-per- petuating power of mental images in the imagi- nation and the memory that gives to the eye such commanding importance. Says Jastrow again: "Man is a visual animal. To him 'seeing is be- lieving'— a saying which we can imagine a dog translating into 'smelling is believing.' We teach by illustrations, models, and object-lessons, and reduce complex relations to the curves of the graphic method to bring home and impress our statements. Our every-day language, as well as the imagery of poetry, abounds in metaphors and similes appealing to images which the eye has taught us to appreciate. One grand division of art is lost to those who cannot see. The eye is the centre of emotional expression, and reveals to our fellow-men the subtile variations in mood and passion, as it is to the physician a delicate index of our well-being. There are reasons for believing that it was the function of sight as a distance-sense that led to its supremacy in the lives of our primitive ancestors. Whatever its origin, the growth of civilization has served to develop this ' eye-mindedness ' of the race and to increase and diversify the modes of its cultiva- tion.
"The eye, thus constantly stimulated in wak- ing life, and attracting to its sensations the focus
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of attention (possessing, as it does, in the retinal fovea a most powerful instrument of concentra- tive attention), does not yield up its supremacy in the world of dreams. The sight-centres sub- side but slowly from their long stimulation, and the rich stock of images which these centres have stored up is completely at the service of the fanciful imagination of dream-life. In fact, we speak of a dream as a ' vision.' "
It is difficult for us to realize how completely we are made up of our images from the external world. We are under an incessant rain of them. We not only get them through direct sight, but through memory and imaginatively through verbal metaphor — the basis of which is, in every case, the previous real intake of the eye.
Metaphor is the life of speech because it is pic- torial. Dull writing is wanting in images. The "cartoon" is graphic metaphor and every one knows that a cartoon is the most effective pub- lic opinion-maker. It defines a situation in a flash. Science itself resorts to metaphor when it wants to give definiteness to the intangible. It speaks of the "stream" and of the "threshold" of consciousness. Prof. William James makes psychology fascinating to the unscientific mind by the vividness and aptness of his imagery. In his chapter on the will, for instance, foreground reasons in deliberation "burst through the dam and carry the motor consequences their own way." The background is always there as a "fringe." The "nerve centres are so organized
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that certain stimuli pull the trigger of certain ex- plosive parts." Nervous centres become a "sluice-way pathologically unlocked," etc. Thus the poetic imagination is a light to scientific discussion. Indeed the writer who lives writes in pictures. Many a dull speech or sermon is redeemed by one well-told story or even a vivid rhetorical figure. Fable, parable, and allegory, at their best, penetrate the deepest and stick the longest.
One virtue of these speech forms is that in addition to being pictorial they call out our own powers of interpretation and so gain the nurture of exercise. A capital illustration of this is in "A Filipino Fable," credited to Judge Charles G. Garrison of New Jersey. It was written during the American struggle with the Filipinos. Here it is: "A boy who had a brindle dog on a string was so tired that the dog was on the point of achieving independence, when a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals accosted the boy and chided him for not giving the dog his freedom, and finally bought the string for the sum of twenty-five cents. The last the boy saw of the kind-hearted stranger he was kicking the stuffing out of the dog because it hung back when he pulled on the string." This is a verbal cartoon, and so far as it goes, exceeds in effectiveness the abstractions of argument.
i^sop's Fables live because of their concrete pic- torial character. Their morals stated in abstract terms would have died long ago or fused into
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general proverbial literature. The same is true of the "Pilgrim's Progress," of the Fables of La Fontaine, of Dante's " Divine Comedy," etc.
Nothing is more marked in the teaching of Jesus than its pictorial visibility. Some- times it was acted, as in the miracles, the washing of the disciples' feet, the "show me a penny," the setting of the child in the midst, the blessing of the little children, the cursing of the barren fig tree, etc. Sometimes it was given in vivid word picture or story, as in the parables; or in visual illustration such as the smitten cheek, the stolen coat, the two women grinding at the mill, the widow's mites, the Good Samaritan, the last supper, etc. Wendt observes that "the whole active work of Jesus was an exposition of his teaching through his own example." He made it visible in his own life. Then he abounded in simile and metaphor, and figurative illustrations by comparison; in parables involving comparisons utilizing com- mon things; in allegories. In fact the incarna- tion itself is, as it were, a divine announcement of the principle. Men needed to see the ideal man in the real; they needed the image of the actual, of perfect manhood in the concrete, in order that they should themselves know God bet- ter.
We know how prominently vision is a mode of instruction in the Old Testament. The prophets got their orders largely through im- agery. Prof. Thiselton Mark well says, "Is not
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the twenty-second chapter of Genesis an illus- tration of direct doctrinal teaching, giving Abra- ham a new and higher thought of God than he had ever had before by an intuitive or picto- rial method ? " And Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness that the people might be im- pressed through the visual image. It was quite natural that an ignorant old colored woman should say that she liked the book of Revela- tion because it was so easy. Peter's vision of the great sheet let down from heaven was the most impressive way of teaching him that there was no longer a middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile. Note that Paul's defense before Felix, Festus, and Agrippa was little else than a simple picture of the leading events of his life.
Maeterlinck says, "There is one thing only that the soul can never forgive; it is to have been compelled to behold, or share, or pass close to an ugly action, word, or thought. It cannot forgive, for forgiveness here were but the denial of itself." That is, the soul deteriorates by just so much evil as it beholds. There is reason in the Oriental dread of the curse of the " evil eye." Primitive man appreciates the peculiar place of vision as a power.
It has been recently stated of Charles Dickens that "The cause of his death was a mental pic- ture, made several years before, which was re- peated with depressing effect every time that the revolving year brought to his mind the memory of the railroad wreck with all its horrors. The
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recurring date gave occasion for calling up the terrible picture, each time with greater vividness and depression as the physical body became weaker — that picture seeming real to his deli- cately sensitive nerves, so that his friends said that he was wandering in mind — until the frail body sank beneath the heavy burden which human thought had imposed, on a 9th of June, the anniversary of the railroad wreck."
We scarcely look for imagery in legal docu- ments, yet the Governor of Pennsylvania most effectively used it in vetoing a bill authorizing any railroad corporation to sell or transfer any part or parts of its road, rights, or property to any other railroad corporation whose road con- nected with such part or parts. The Governor is reported to have said in his veto message, "There is no attempt to define what shall con- stitute a part. There was once a man who was cut to pieces. One piece consisted of a frag- ment of his finger nail, the other piece was the rest of his body." Here is a word-cartoon. In less than thirty words the argument is presented not by abstract reasoning but pictorially by illus- tration.
It would be impossible to estimate the result upon the American mind of the story of Wash- ington and the cherry-tree. Fiction though it be and the subject of incessant jest, it has pleaded the cause of veracity far more eloquently, be- cause pictorially, than could any mere record of Washington's truthfulness in the abstract or any
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ethical treatise on the evil of falsehood. As Dean Hodges in fine simile says, "Abstract statements, dogmatic pronouncements, ethical precepts, are like a library in the dark; the truth is there, but we cannot see to read it."
It is because they present no pictures, no con- crete images that catechisms are so dry and use- less as educational means. Nothing is so per- sistent in the memory as an image, nothing so controls ideals. When one acquires an ideal or impulse through an abstract discussion it is be- cause past images are called up and recombined into a living, visible ideal. It is doubtful whether conscience ever works abstractly. Conscience insists on our doing or not doing some particular thing seen in the objective vision or in the mind's eye.
The writer has carried many a Christmas-tree into the house and up the stairway, but never without putting the butt end forward. He in- variably sees in memory a picture, familiar to his boyhood, of a negro boy carrying such a tree with the top forward — the picture being called "All against the Grain." No mere line of ex- planation in the story would have been likely to remain in the mind's eye for a lifetime as did the picture illustrating the statement. Every one can probably witness to similar experiences in evi- dence of the power of the mental image to per- sist and to control thought and action. How much more intelligible is a picture of a bit of network than Dr. Johnson's dictionary definition
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'—"Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, witii interstices between the intersec- tions." And yet the definition is true.
At the second annual session of the National Negro Business League, the president, Booker T. Washington, said to his associates:
" As a race, we must learn more and more that the opinion of the world regarding us is not much influenced by what we may say of ourselves, or by what others say of us, but it is permanently influenced by actual, tangible, visible results. The object lesson of one honest negro succeeding magnificently in each community in some busi- ness or industry is worth one hundred abstract speeches on securing opportunity for the race,"
The power of the now famous fifteenth cen- tury "morality play," "Everyman," lies in its putting into visible concrete form certain ab- stractions, like good deeds, knowledge, fellow- ship, death, beauty, strength, discretion, etc. These are impersonated abstractions, not human characters; and in this, the play differs from the ordinary drama. The characters are not individ- uals but qualities or universal truths, allegorically related and displayed. This play was " published early in the reign of Henry VllI and is given from a black letter copy, preserved in the library of the church of Lincoln." The subject of this piece is the summoning of man out of the world by death; and its moral, that nothing will then avail him but a well-spent life and the comforts of religion.
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The power of metaphorical image to impress and lead the mind is shown in its misapplication as well as in its proper use. Many a hearer or reader, many an audience has been swept into a false conception by a vivid imagery which seemed to illustrate although it really darkened counsel. It was at an educational institute that one of the speakers deplored the neglect of writing, spelling and composition. He said, " It is a cause of uni- versal complaint; year after year new studies have been added to the curriculum, which require special teaching and valuable time. The multi- plication of primary studies in our schools is an evil, to my mind serious.
"Let me use an illustration. A father saw that his son had been filling his mind with trashy novels; he had him bring in a basket half full of chips, and then bade him put a basketful of apples into the half-full basket. So these new subjects, singing, drawing, nature study, algebra, sewing, cooking, and language lessons, crowd out the older seven cardinal branches." To this, President Eliot replied, "I have seen a great deal of damage done to the cause of education by the use of false similes. In introducing the elective system into Harvard, I encountered a simile pointing out the roundness of the human mind; that the mind is round, and it ought to be de- veloped on all sides, therefore specialties are un- wise. The mind is not round; it is rather like a sharp cutting tool. In relation to the simile of my old friend, Dr. Guild, about the basket get-
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ting full, that is a misconception; the more you put into the mind, the more you may still put into it."
But enough for the present on the importance of vision and the visual image — whether immedi- ately present to the bodily sense of sight — the eye — or, through the memory and the imagina- tion present to the mind's eye only. A true kinship exists, as Gallon says, between mental imagery and ordinary vision, and we have taken light, the medium of ordinary vision as the sym- bolic key to soul nurture through the mental image by whatever course it comes. And out of all the evidence of the commanding importance of sight we may deduce a commanding truth in Professor Dewey's phrasing — " What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it." Hence,
The Working Principle.
If the images which a child forms are all that he gets immediately out of any subject presented to him, we may safely assume as a working principle that The Image is the great instrument of Education. That prince of educators, Francis W. Parker, said that attention is imaging. Words and phrase expressions are functioned only when they are followed by a mental image. There is no real teaching through dead forms of words, which because they call up no image, do not function.
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Now let us go a little further and ask what is the scientific law that underlies our working principle that the image is the great instrument of instruc- tion. When a bicycle learner thinks of himself — imagines himself — running over a bank or into a tree, over the bank or into the tree he goes. He follows his mental image. A man of vivid picturing power and little nervous control looks down from the Eiffel Tower, sees himself pitch- ing headlong and is in danger of doing that very thing. We gape when we see another gape, smile when we see another smile and weep when we see another weep. Thus Professor James: "The deepest spring of action in us is the sight of action in another. The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own effort." And Professor Ritchie of St. Andrews: " The idea of one's self as acting in a certain way becomes a new factor in the mind ; it may attract desires and feelings round it, and so be- come a new motive determining conduct. A man may be turned from idle and evil courses by the image of himself as a good man and a useful citizen, provided, of course, this image of him- self as acting rightly is not merely a piece of day- dreaming, but an ideal that stimulates effort."
"Conscious states tend to project themselves in action" — says Dewey. And James, again: "The fact is that there is no sort of conscious- ness whatever, be it sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend to dis- charge into some motor effect. The motor effect
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need not always be an outward stroke of be- havior. It may be only an alteration of the heart beats or breathing, or a modification in the distribution of blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or else a secretion of tears, or what not. But, in any case, it is there in some shape when any consciousness is there; and a belief as fundamental as any in modern psychology as the belief at last attained that conscious processes of any sort, conscious processes merely as such, must pass over into motion, open or concealed." Again, Prof. J. Mark Baldwin puts it, "The idea of a movement is already the beginning of that movement." In short, the fundamental psycho- logical law is that All consciousness is motor.
The image is the great dictator of movement. When we are in doubt how to spell a word we stop to think how it looks; the drunkard sees the bottle and the glass; the burglar sees himself in the attitude of housebreaking; the sensualist feasts his mind upon lewd pictures and vile deeds.
In an article on "Education and Selection"^ M. Alfred Fouillee writes: "The child's brain is a battle-field of ideas [or images] and the im- pulses they generate; every new idea is an ad- ditional force encountering ideas already installed and impulses already developed. Education is, then, a work of intellectual selection. Let us
' Popular Science Monthly ; translated from the Revue aes Deux Mondes.
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suppose a mind still void, into which is abruptly introduced the representation of movement, the idea of some action, as of raising the arm. The idea being solitary and without any counterpoise, the disturbance begun in the brain takes the direction of the arm, because the nerves abutting in the arm have been disturbed by the representa- tion of it; consequently the arm rises. To think of a movement is to begin it. A move- ment once existing cannot be lost, but is com- municated as of necessity from the brain to the organs — unless it is arrested by some other representation or impulsion. . . .
"Chevreul's well-known experiments with the exploratory pendulum and the divining rod show that, if we represent to ourselves a motion in any direction, the hand will unconsciously realize it and communicate it to the pendulum. The tipping table realizes a movement we are antici- pating, through the intervention of a real move- ment of the hands, of which we are not con- scious. Mind-reading, by those who divine by taking your hand where you have hidden any- thing, is a reading of imperceptible motions by which your thought is translated without your being conscious of them. In cases of fascination and vertigo, which are more visible among chil- dren than among adults, a movement is begun the suspension of which is prevented by a paralysis of the will, and it carries us on to suffering and death. When a child, I was navigating a plank on the river without a
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thought that I might fall. All at once the idea came like a diverging force, projecting itself across the rectilinear thought which had alone previously directed my action. It was as if an invisible arm seized me and drew me down. I cried out, and continued staggering over the whirling waters, till help came to me. The mere thought of vertigo provoked it. The board lying on the ground suggests no thought of a fall when you walk over it; but when it is over a precipice and the eye takes the measure of the distance to the bottom, the representation [or image] of a falling motion becomes intense, and the impulse to fall correspondingly so. . . . Temptation, which is continual in children be- cause everything is new to them, is nothing else than the force of an idea and the motive impulse that accompanies it."
Says James: " Ask half the common drunkards you know why it is that they fall so often a prey to temptation, and they will say that most of the time they cannot tell, it is a sort of vertigo with them. Their nervous centres have become a sluice-way pathologically unlocked by every passing conception of a bottle and a glass. They do not thirst for the beverage; the taste of it may even appear repugnant; and they perfectly fore- see the morrow's remorse. But when they think of the liquor [image itj or see it, they find themselves preparing to drink, and do not stop themselves: and more than this they cannot say. Similarly a man may lead a life of incessant love-
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making or sexual indulgence though what spurs him thereto seems rather to be suggestions and notions of possibility than any overweening strength in his affections or lusts." Such a man images lascivious scenes. " As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." He courts the debasing image and is thereby most debased in the action which follows the imagining. "The trend of all human thought," says Colonel Parker, " is towards expressive action."
The following is a recent newspaper item: "Morris Hickey, a young man who has served time in jail for window smashing, went to the City Hall last night and said he felt an uncon- trollable desire to break the plate glass window of Dalton's bakery. His request to be locked up was complied with. Hickey has broken Dalton's window with a cobble stone five times. He says the impulse affects him periodically, and he can- not resist it." This poor fellow sees himself per- forming his old act and not having strength of will to turn aside from following the image asks to be restrained by force. "The deepest spring of action in us is the sight of action in another " — or in our past selves. A man thus becomes an ex- ample, a suggestion, an incitement to himself. The controlling power of the visual image was long ago noted by the poet :
" Vice is a monster of so hideous mien As to be dreaded needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with its face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace."
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But even the first gaze at vice, repulsive though it seem, is a menace to virtue forever — or while its memory lasts. The converse is, of course, true of pure and noble images or ideas. Let us not forget the principle — the image is the great instrument of education. What we see shows what we are and what we are likely to be- come. We take our color from our environ- ment. We build ourselves out of what we see in others. Consciousness is in its very nature impulsive. "The point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea." An idea is more than an image, but it depends for its ex- istence originally upon mental images. So we do because we have seen.
The Principle Applied in Practice.
It remains now to discover how this fact of the prevalence and the importance of the mental image ought to affect our methods of dealing with the young and our behavior before them. To quote Prof. John Dewey again: "I believe that if nine-tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things were spent in seeing to it that the child was form- ing proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated. 1 believe that much of the time and attention now given to the prepara- tion and presentation of lessons might be more wisely and profitably expended in training the child's power of imagery and in seeing to it that he was continually forming definite, vivid, and
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growing images of the various subjects with which he comes in contact in his experience." '
Persons differ, of course, according to whether their imaging power is strongest in the visual, auditory, motor, or tactile pouter. We have taken the visual as the king and symbol of them all. The verb "to see" has dominated the language in the expression of all perception and understanding. The physiologically blind "see " a point and gain "light " on a subject.
Persons differ in the degree of their visualizing and imagining power. Says Francis Galton,
"There are great differences in the power of forming pictures of objects in the mind's eye; in other words, of visualizing them. In some per- sons the faculty of perceiving these images is so feeble that they hardly visualize at all, and they supplement their deficiency chiefly by memories of muscular strain, of gesture, and of posture, and partly by memories of touch; recalling ob- jects in the same way as those who were blind from their birth. Other persons perceive past scenes with a distinctness and an appearance of reality that differ little from actual vision. Be- tween these wide extremes I have met with a mass of intermediate cases extending in an un- broken series. . . .
"The power of visualizing is higher in the female sex than in the male, and is somewhat, but not much, higher in public schoolboys than
* " Educational Creeds," p. 1 6.
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in men. I have, however, a few clear cases in which its power has greatly increased with ad- vancing years. There is reason to believe that it is very high in some young children, who seem to spend years of difficulty in distinguishing be- tween the subjective and objective world." We here glimpse a reason for many of the so-called lies of children — and even of some adults.
Now as our actions follow our conscious ideas or images it becomes a matter of supreme im- portance what things our children see. What they see with the natural eye forms the basis of what they see by the eye of the imagination. Hence it makes an eternal difference to our chil- dren what sights they witness, what stories they hear and read, what pictures they see. A phrase, a word, will call up past visions. Even an ab- stract term may by association function as an image. The mother who tells her child to "be a good boy " during her absence, is giving an or- der which can affect the child only in so far as certain concrete acts reproduce themselves in his mind. He sees in memory definite deeds which have been called good or bad in the past, and these he does or refrains from doing according as he is obedient or disobedient, it is the image that instructs him and determines his conduct. In course of time these abstract terms come to carry definite ideas, but even in adult life their potency lies only in the images which by long association they awaken. To quote Fouillee again: "There are feelings under all our ideas
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which breed even under the cooling cinders of abstractions. The mind itself has a force, be- cause it arouses all the feelings which it summa- rizes. Thus the simple words 'honor' and 'duty' resound through our consciousness in in- finite echoes, giving rise to legions of images." But this is impossible in young children. Until such words as "duty" and "honor" have through story or through life come to awaken definite feelings they can mean no more than the specific deeds to which they have been applied.
In view of the principle involved, it ought now to be evident that one of the sure ways of lead- ing a child into an evil act is to forbid it — espe- cially when he had not himself thought of it. A schoolmaster told the boys that he hoped none of them would climb on the woodshed at recess. The boys never had thought of it, but the image had its sway and at recess the entire school was found on the roof. Professor O'Shea tells a story of a father who took his little boy to the clock and admonished him not to attempt to take it apart in his absence. The child had never done such a thing, but the motor idea was irresistible. The father returned to find the clock in hopeless disruption. The error is a common one, in the home, the school, and in the pulpit. The writer once heard a minister tell a Sunday-school how he told a lie in his boyhood — adding parenthetic- ally, " and where is the boy that won't lie some- times?" Another minister addressing a school told how he disliked to go to Sunday-school in
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his youthful days, suggesting that the young folks before him no doubt disliked it just as he did. Suggestions of this kind are sure to create images that awaken feelings directly opposite to those intended, and lead to wrong conduct.
By none is this mistake of suggesting evil in the prohibition of it, more frequently made than in story writers for children. They picture a boy in mischief and then show how he was caught and punished. But the mental image of the boy in his mischief dominates. The punish- ment is a secondary matter, for that is a risk that may be run. Moreover the punishment is less vivid because the boy is passive rather than active.
In the chapter on the feelings reference was made to the censorship of Turkey and Russia. Such a word as " revolution " or " dynamite " is cut from the dictionaries as well as the public prints because of its imaging and consequently its motor power. This matter of suggestion through story was understood in the far past. Isaac D'Israeli notes that " a Gothic bishop trans- lated the Scriptures into the Gothic language, but omitted the Book of Kings lest the wars of which so much is there recorded should increase the inclination to fighting, already too prevalent."
It is in this potency of the visual image to build character that the theatre has so much to answer for. A recent article by a Russian writer ^ takes
' I. N. Ignatoff : translation by The Literary Digest.
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the ground that moral plays are not necessarily of virtuous effect.
The great fault of the theatre is, according to this writer, its tendency to encourage and strengthen passivity in the spectators — to de- velop the restraining centres of the psychical sys- tem. He says: "All plays, good and bad, have for their direct effect this strengthening of the auditor's disposition to passivity. Of course, if a habitual theatregoer were to see on the street a real Othello attempting to strangle his wife, he would not remain as passive as he does in the theatre; according to his temperament and proclivities he would reach some decision — to throw himself on the murderer, run after the police, or cry 'Help!' Still, whenever the cir- cumstances, in a real case, favored inactivity, the habitual theatregoer would be prone to yield to his disinclination to act and behave as he does in the theatre, where he restrains himself under ex- citement and grows enthusiastic over the artistic form while giving no expression to his feeling of indignation. . . .
"The spectator [in the case of an emotional play] leaves the theatre overwhelmed, crushed, depressed, perhaps esthetically gratified, but at the same time mentally paralyzed and incapable of action. He has lived through a great deal, but this experience has not taught him any lesson, has not provided him with any guide to future conduct. Grant that his sympathy has been en- listed on the side of the weak and poor; all the
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same, this will not enable him to realize his humane aims."
Observe that the passivity is harmful because the stage image incites to action, which the ob- server cannot respond to. He consequently gets no further than the mere emotion and lapses into an inert sentimentalist. On the other hand, when the play displays scenes that are in themselves vicious and debasing, the picture remains in the mind as a taint and a menace to virtue and an evil influence forever. The same is true of lewd posters, advertisements and allusions.
What is true of the drama is true of real life. It was formerly the custom to give children a holiday on the days of the execution of criminals, in order that they might witness or contemplate the dreadful consequences of crime. The Academy in reviewing a book on "Old-time Punishments" says: "One thinks what a pic- ture Mr. W. E. H. Lecky might have drawn of the change that has come over England in the present century with regard to the infliction in public of brutal punishments. Take the subject of hanging in chains. The present writer will never be able to banish from his memory a passage in ' The Fairchild Family ' — one of the few books that he was permitted to read on Sun- day— where an estimable parent could find no better means of deterring his children from the sin of lying than to take them to behold a parri- cide rotting on a gibbet ; and the same sentiment is expressed by Mercy in ' The Pilgrim's Progress.' "
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Police reports and news of crime displayed in the newspapers are responsible for much of the crime of the day. Waiving the open question of the advisability of printing them — on which there is much to be said on both sides — the em- phasis which is given them by the display head lines increases their mischief. It virtually says that this scandal or that murder is of superior importance to a score of other matters — educa- tional, religious, political, social, commercial, literary. The following is an extract from an editorial which appeared in the Boston Daily Standard some years ago:
"There have been cases where boys, excited by the* story of an execution, have actually hanged a companion. Nor is this impulse to imitation confined to the young. It is not un- usual among the ignorant peons of Mexico for one of their number to imitate Christ in his pas- sion and crucifixion, and actually to die on the cross while hundreds of these people wear crowns of thorns on Good Friday, and every traveller knows how the flagellantes scourge each other to prove their faith.
"The burning of a child, perhaps to death, by its little playmates at Haverhill, who had heard of how martyrs were burned at the stake, or it may have been Indian prisoners, is a striking illustra- tion of the force of suggestion on the minds of the immature. It is out of the question to sup- pose for an instant that anything like guilt at- taches to these little ones."
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The boy criminal, Jesse Pomeroy, who more than a quarter of a century ago was sentenced to death (since commuted to life imprisonment) for murdering two children and torturing another, gave every evidence of a fiendish nature while in prison at Charlestown, Mass. The Boston Trav- eller in an article about Pomeroy after years of his incarceration, reported: " The warden says that Pomeroy is reading books of a higher tone than was formerly his custom. He said that Pomeroy had told him that he was led to commit the crimes through reading the yellow covered type of literature. He has expressed to the warden his regret that the public should believe that he was born with such a fiendish nature."
A news item from a Philadelphia paper runs thus: "John Turner, aged eighteen, deliberately turned a switch and wrecked a freight train on the Ohio Southern Railroad, near Jackson, Ohio, on Monday night. Turner said he ' had been reading a novel about train wreckers.' "
Here is an item from London: "A horrible case of youthful depravity came to light in Plais- tow, an eastern suburb, to-day, when Robert Coombs, aged thirteen, and Nathaniel Coombs, eleven years old, confessed before a magistrate to murdering their mother.
" The boys killed their mother by stabbing her through the heart while she was asleep. The only reason given by the lads for the crime is that Mrs. Coombs whipped Nathaniel. After their bloody deed had been committed, the two young
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fiends pawned a number of valuables they found in the house and proceeded to enjoy themselves by taking trips to various places on the river, vis- iting cricket grounds and indulging in other forms of amusement. . . . The minds of the boys seem to have been upset by reading novels, which made heroes of cutthroats, robbers and the like." The St James's Ga:{ette thus com- ments: "Evidence has accumulated proving a direct connection between juvenile crime and the habit of ' penny-dreadful ' reading. Readers of newspapers do not need to be told that it is a matter of almost daily occurrence for boys to be brought before the courts charged with offenses whose psychological genesis is to be traced in the literature found upon them. The Plaistow matri- cide seems to be a case in point. It is no merely isolated instance. If magistrates, coroners, and solicitors and barristers whose practice lies in the criminal courts could be induced to draw upon their experience, overwhelming testimony would be forthcoming that literature of the class we have in mind is a prolific cause of crime."
In his work on "Criminology," Arthur Mac- Donald cites similar cases : "A woman of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1885, killed her four children, then tried to commit suicide. In her autobiography were these words: 'As a woman did it, which was in the newspaper.'" Again: "A lad of fifteen years stole from his patron; when the money was spent he found a child and stabbed it in the abdomen, and as he cut its throat he said:
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' I have often read novels, and in one of them I found the description of a scene parallel to this which I have executed.' "
Once more: " Tropman, the celebrated crim- inal, who killed a family with poison and pick- ax, confessed that the cause of his demoralization was the reading of novels. By living in this imaginary world he developed a strong passion for heroes of the prison who recover honesty with the spoils of their victims and die adminis- trators of some charity."
A woman in Paris created a sensation by saw- ing off her child's head. Soon after, "a. mother of four children came to the doctor who had di- rected the consultation in regard to the murderer, and said, 'I am in most terrible despair since hearing of this murder. I am tormented by the devil to kill the youngest of my children. I fear I cannot resist it. Will you recommend me to Dr. Esquirol that he may admit me into his hos- pital?'" Another woman having heard of this same murder asked to be locked up, and still " two other cases are known to have been caused or occasioned by the knowledge of this one murder."
h is easy to see that all the foregoing criminals had vivid mental images of criminal deeds of which they had heard or read the details. Any one can see how certain crimes become epidemic through the detailing of them in picture and in verbal description. A famous kidnapping case is quickly followed by others of the same sort.
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Forms of suicide become prevalent by imitation or suggestion through the publication of the deeds.
On this point we have the testimony of Coro- ner Burke, of Cleveland. He is said to advocate the suppression of details in publication of sui- cides, adding: "The publication of suicide stories under glaring headlines, giving every detail of the crime, is most harmful to the public at large, and is the direct cause of so many suicides. I have noticed that when a suicide by carbolic acid is printed, a number of suicides immediately fol- low, all taking their lives in the same manner. The same may be said of a suicide by shooting or any of the other ways that are more com- monly employed."
When Mr. Ashbridge was coroner of Philadel- phia (since mayor) he was reported by the Even- ing Bulletin (June 5, 1898) as thus expressing himself:
"I believe it would be a wise thing for the public if the publication of sensational details in connection with suicide and homicide cases was eliminated. I do not wish to be understood as accusing the newspapers of Philadelphia of being too sensational. Quite the contrary. I know that they are freer from sensationalism than the journals in almost any other large city. What I want to say is that details in connection with certain cases should not be published. Persons with morbid natures are influenced by reading sensational accounts of crime. I do not speak
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from hearsay. My opinion is based on personal observation.
"For instance, about two years ago a widow, fifty years old, who lived in the upper part of the city, committed suicide by hanging. She fas- tened a rope to the knob of a door in her bed- room. Then she passed the other end over the top of the door and stood on a chair while she adjusted the noose. After completing these ar- rangements she kicked the chair to one side. Her body hung so that when the door was opened it swung with it. The sensational de- tails of the affair were given wide publicity in the newspapers, and in less than a week two women living in the immediate neighborhood took their lives in precisely the same manner. I investigated the cases thoroughly, and found that the last two women had taken their lives with- out any cause. Like the first suicide, they were each about fifty years old. One of them was a wealthy widow. The other was a married woman with a family. Her home life had al- ways been happy. Neither of them had been sick, inquiry showed that they had eagerly read every detail connected with the first suicide. One of them had even sent a servant out to pur- chase for her a copy of every paper containing an account of the first case. She had fairly satu- rated her mind with the sensational details before hanging herself.
"There was another case. A woman killed herself by swallowing a concoction of alum and
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laudanum. Her husband had been imprisoned for something, and she told her friends she couldn't stand the disgrace. This case was also given a great deal of publicity. Mark what fol- lowed. In less than six weeks there were five other persons in Philadelphia who ended their lives by drinking laudanum and alum. The mix- ture forms a rare poison. Before the first suicide, I don't believe that one of the other five knew what a deadly poison it is.
"Then, too, we had the case of a ten-year-old girl, who hanged herself because her parents chided her for some slight offense. For days the newspapers printed long stories about the affair with the result that a nine-year-old boy copied after her, and half a dozen other little ones who had read the sensational accounts, made attempts to take their lives.
"A few years ago there were comparatively few cases of suicide by the inhalation of illumi- nating gas, because its powers as a means of ending life were not generally known. Now it is one of the commonest means of self-destruc- tion. I attribute this to the sensational stories that are printed every day about persons who take their lives by breathing gas.
" I will not attempt to say that 1 have ever been able to find a person who was led to take human life through reading sensational accounts of homicides. 1 do say, however, that the details connected with some homicides, owing to their brutality and atrocity, had best not be published.
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Their publication has a great influence on some natures. Newspapers go into our homes, and children get hold of them.
"The reading of horrible details is bound to leave an impression on their minds. The effect is not immediate. It may not manifest itself un- til by sickness or worry the person has been temporarily changed. Then bad impressions are apt to work evil in some natures. The sensa- tional description of executions is something else that I believe could be checked with good re- sults."
It is said that there is a law in France that a paper shall only be announced by its title. It is, therefore, not permissible to shout, "All about the great murder!" or " Latest news of the big fire in London! "
In his letter condemning lynching President Roosevelt said: "But even when the real crimi- nal is reached, the wrong done by the mob to the community itself is well nigh as great. Espe- cially is this true where the lynching is accom- panied with torture. There are certain hideous sights which, when once seen, can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation. This is a thousandfold stronger when instead of merely seeing the deed the man has participated in it. Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must for- ever after have the awful spectacle of his own
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handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man."
Crime thus appears to be contagious. But the contagion is only by imitation, or suggestion, in which the mental image dominates the action because consciousness is motor. Discussing the bull-fight in Spain Katharine Lee Bates says, "No sight is more common in streets and parks than that of a group of boys playing al toro — one urchin charging about with sticks fastened to his shoulders for horns, or with a pasteboard bull's head pulled over his ears and others waving scar- let cloths and brandishing improvised swords and lances. It is said that in fierce Valencia youths have sometimes carried on this sport with knives for horns and swords, the spectators rel- ishing the bloodshed too well to interfere."
It is difficult to estimate what an amount of trickery, fraud, and lying has resulted, how much, in short, the moral estimate of truth has been lowered by the mode of Aguinaldo's capture. On this point Dr. Parkhurst, in a sermon on lying uttered no uncertain sound, being reported thus: " Funston violated the laws of war, the laws of hospitality and the laws of God, and the people of the United States, with some excep- tions, instead of mutinying against the act of damnable perfidy, thought it a rather shrewd trick on Funston's part, and the Senate promoted him. Even a heathen general (Alexander the Great, I think) said, 'The gods forbid that I should steal a victory in the dark,' and yet a
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Christian nation applauds this abominable act."
Good teachers understand this principle of the dominating tendency of the mental image. Some go so far as to oppose the exercise of correcting false syntax, believing that the pupil gets a sug- gestion of error which does him more harm than the act of correction does him good. The writer once had a Latin tutor who would never allow him to repeat a false ending or other error even to discuss its correction. The tutor was a German and when his pupil ventured to speak of his error the tutor would start in alarm, hold up his hand beseechingly, and say, "Oh don't; don't say it; it sticks in de ear." And in the matter of orthog- raphy the Journal of Education some years ago editorially noted: "Miss Agnes Stowell of Weston, Oregon, has revived the interest in spell- ing by producing a 'Pedagogical Spelling Blank,' founded upon the principle that the child ought never to see his misspelled word. When the blank is returned to him with nineteen words correctly spelled, and one incorrect with an X against it, he sees that incorrect word, and no one of the nineteen correct words. To obviate this. Miss Stowell has made a blank from which the teacher tears off, by means of perforation, the en- tire list of words, at each lesson, and keeps them, with the pupil's name, while the words mis- spelled she writes correctly on the stub, which remains in the book."
Out of this compelling power of the image
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comes the present day liberal use of pictures in the newspaper, the magazine, the school text- book, the lecture hall, and on the schoolroom walls. Comenius was the first to recognize the value of pictures in the instruction of children. His " Orbis Pictus" is a little primer in which each subject is illustrated by a small engraving — very crude of course for it was issued in the middle of the seventeenth century, at Nuremberg. Comenius believed that the child should become acquainted with the thing and its name at the same time. He consequently resorted to the use of pictures and also advocated the pupil's going out to Nature and learning directly from her.
Froebel, however, gave the great modern im- pulse to nature-study through the kindergarten. The child outdoors is addressed through all his senses and the mental image is built up to the best purpose. But the function of pictures is im- mense. Who can guess what their influence has been in the Roman Catholic Church alone ? That there is a possibility of overdoing the picture method is evident. It is questionable whether it were not better that no attempt to paint the Christ had ever been made. It is an educative question, one involving a balancing of values.
On these points Dr. G. Stanley Hall writes: " The limit and range of what pictures can do is steadily increasing. Not only is every kind of movement now faithfully reproduced, sometimes to the dismay of traditional methods of represent- ing them in art, but one can know many of the
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wonders of the vast new world of the microscope and telescope without ever having looked through an eyepiece. It would be a curious question for an imaginative mind to work out how far an education based upon a wise selection and proper gradation of pictures might to-day be carried without the ability to read. Pictures will never supersede printing or writing, and the world will probably never again have a system of hierographs as in ancient Egypt, or any other kind of schem- atized pictograms. If all written or printed record of the present time should be lost in some far-off future, it is surprising to reflect how much of all that makes life interesting to us could be reproduced by pictures alone. We could prob- ably afford to give up a great deal even of the literature of antiquity if we had pictorial represen- tations of life in ancient India and Egypt, or among the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans.
"Like every great movement, this has had some opponents. I have lately read two German pamphlets sounding a vigorous note of alarm at the modern picture cult or mania. One of them urges that by it knowledge is cheapened by being made too popular, vulgar, and easily accessible, but surely in this age and still more in a democ- racy like ours this is really a great argument in its favor."
Dr. Hall then goes on to say how any good thing is liable to abuse and that this shows the need for education and cultivation in and through the pictorial arts. He continues: "There is an-
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other general point of view which I deem very important in estimating the educational value of pictures. . . . There are several types of mind, and especially there are motor, auditory, and eye-minded varieties. This means that some of us tend to express ourselves in action and think easiest in its terms; some in language, and some in visual form and color. ... A very strong case could, I think, be made for the supe- riority of at least the eye-minded over the ear- minded type of thought and culture.
"Again we tend to think in images, and some philosophers like Taine, Froschammer, and Parish have represented that this is the form of about all human thought. However this may be, the imagination is one of the most potent of all human faculties, and is more creative than any other. Some high authorities have lately urged that if this faculty were well trained, all the rest would almost take care of themselves. By the imagination we escape the limits of time, space, and even all personality that hedge us in; our lives may be ever so limited and yet by this power we can almost become citizens of all time and spectators of all events. By it the poet, art- ist, and prophet have wrought their magic in the world."
As a practical application it may be noted that a man may often be moved through an appeal that creates a strong mental image when another appeal, virtually the same but weaker in pictorial power would fail. It is easier to get contribu-
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tions in visible objects tiian in money. Ask for a stained glass window, a library, a suite of fur- niture and it is more likely to find a donor than a request for the money to buy those very things. The donor is led on by the substantial image of his response.
There is such a thing as begetting a false im- pression by confusing literal fact and figure in the child's mind. Take this for instance, which is quoted from a Sunday-school "lesson help": " The Golden Calf has never been broken like the brazen serpent, for men are still worshipping the golden calf." This would do for pupils old enough to see that the last ' ' golden calf " is merely a figure of speech referring to wealth. But the child's mind works directly and not by analogies or parallels. The foregoing "spiritualizing" of the golden calf story would practically give the lie to the Bible record. The child mind sees an image of the calf and whatever is said of the calf means this same objective image and not an ab- stract idea of wealth.
In his famous "Water Babies " Charles Kings- ley thus phrases his central truth: "A man's soul builds his body just as a snail builds his shell." Here the child is misled by the phrase "just as" which does not bridge the chasm to the spiritual or the symbolic figurative, but stands for the material image of the snail build- ing a shell.
It does not follow, however, that the allegory and the fable have no place as a method with the
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child. The fable is a complete story within itself, and the child's mind can be trusted sooner or later to universalize and apply the truth. Ex- planations may befog the interpretation. But like myths and legends they must be judiciously selected.
The following valuable suggestions are quoted from an article by Mary F. Hall.' She writes: "Fables unquestionably exhibit general attributes of character and conditions of living in a very searching light. No elaboration of detail de- tracts from the strength of the outlines. Many fables, however, show phases of life that little children do not yet know. Such as show adult greed, duplicity, and perfidy, if they are under- stood, must shock the sensibility and the sweet trustfulness of the average young child. Some others, like The Fox and the Stork, are readily understood, but the very obvious ' tit-for-tat ' or other objectionable lesson does not harmonize with the Golden Rule.
" Many of them, however, exhibit the beauty of plain, simple virtues, or the weakness of cowardice, deception, mean excuses, and other faults to which children are prone, in a striking manner and without that taunting home-thrust, either wholly or partly expressed, of: 'Thus you see, dear children,' by way of conclusion, which ever takes away the force of a moral lesson. For this reason, carefully chosen fables
* Kindergarten Review, April, 1901.
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are adapted to many uses in the school- room.
"Selected fables show very strikingly the progressive character of both virtue and vice. As a study of the psychology of selfishness in concrete forms the following selections from y^sop are suggested :
"Selfishness, in thoughtlessness, or a com- paratively simple form, in The Porcupine and the Snakes; a growing tendency to disregard the rights of others, in The Arab and the Camel; selfishness developed into a conscienceless and calculating spirit which exacts hard and thankless service of its tools, in The Cat and the Monkey; selfishness confessing itself and justifying its cruelty, in The Wolf and the Lamb; and its latest and last form, where its heartlessness and cruelty is disguised, for greater effectiveness, by a claim or appearance of sanctimony, in The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing.
" Other similar studies are easily made. Many fables illustrate some essentially childish fault. Some of these give a lesson teaching the need of self-dependence; as, Hercules and the Cart Driver, and The Lark and Her Young Ones. Indolent over-confidence and its results are shown by The Hare and the Tortoise. The folly of a premature counting of chickens is seen in The Milk Maid; vanity as self-laudation or in listening to the flattery of others, in The Ox and the Frog, The Peacock and the Crane, and The Crow who lost his Cheese; the wisdom of yield-
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ing to the inevitable — a very important and diffi- cult lesson for children and the childish — as taught by The Oak and the Willow ; gentleness is a quiet force in opposition to a blustering self-assertion is beautifully shown by The Wind and the Sun; while the lesson of mutual helpfulness is taught in The Blind Man and the Lame Man and The Lion and the Mouse.
" The Ant and the Grasshopper and The Goose that laid the Golden Egg show improvidence and sacrificing the future to a present gratification; The Little Mouse that feared the rooster but ad- mired and praised the soft, purring cat, shows how easily the unsophisticated who would ' see the world ' are often deceived by appearances.
"Different motives for deceiving others and the prevalent thought of society upon such de- ception are shown by The Jackdaw and the Doves, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and The Boy who cried ' Wolf! ' The first shows a desire for easy and cheap success, the second black- hearted treachery disguised as innocence, and the third the discomfiture of a practical joker.
" The Ass in the Lion's Skin is a picture of the cowardice of a braggart; Sour Grapes, of dis- ingenuousness; The Dog in the Manger, malice; The Boy and the Frogs, cruelty to the weak and helpless; The Fly and the Horse, conceit.
"Ingratitude is made odious by The Viper killing the man who warmed it in his bosom; •while the force of unity is shown by The Bundle of Sticks.
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" Some of these same lessons, taught in a dif- ferent manner, are found in the Wesselhoeft stories, Mrs. Stowe's 'Queer Little People,' and other books for children; while a more complex and careful elaboration of the same themes is seen in Thackeray, Dickens, and the works of the great story-writers and poets. A comparison of the art used in these different forms is interest- ing work for the literature class."
This brings us fairly to a large subject — too large for exhaustive treatment here — the Story. The value of the story is in its power to present images, to quicken the imagination and to put the abstract in a concrete picture. Much has been written on this subject in the past ten years by educators and teachers of various ranks and qualifications, religious and secular.
The story is the primitive teacher's tool. From time immemorial oral story-telling was the potent means of instructing and training. There is a difference between story and history. The young child cannot appreciate history; he has no his- toric sense; his life experience is too limited. Professor Dewey has put the distinction most luminously thus: "Stories are histories brought up to date — regarded as part of present life. Children are interested directly \n present life, in the social conditions which exist all about them and with which they come in contact; and any genuine, any educative historic interest is simply a reflex of this interest in the existing social structure." Speaking of the myth, he says with
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searching wisdom, "The myth is a complete social product, reflecting in itself the intellectual, the economic, and the political condition of a certain people. . . . Now these myths, the best of them, told as stories, are a very excellent thing. I have a great respect for the educative value of the right story at the right time, but it is self-deception to suppose that they have a value other than that of a story — that by some inner affinity to the child's nature, he is being morally introduced into the civilization from which the myth sprung. ... Its permanent value [the story] is in the degree in which the child realizes for himself the elements of experience finding expression in the story — a condition more often met by the tales of historic heroes in the struggles of historic progress than in myths."
Dr. Hall urges' "that nothing organizes more complete unity out of so many diverse elements than a good story. The child's unities are dramatic, and the good story-teller does all that Plato ascribed to the good musician. He knits the soul into cohesions and cadences it to virtue by the endless repetitions, refrains and intona- tions that children love and thrive by." Dr. Hall then pleads for a new profession — that of the story-teller in the Sunday-school, " who has practiced on the standard tales told them to various grades and had them told back again, until they are as well developed in his or her mind
• Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1901.
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as the role of an actor in a play with a long run who never loses rapport for an instant with his audience and can pre-estimate the value of every point or even gag in it. . , . Rein makes, I think, thirty-six Old Testament stories about which he would have the third year of secular school-life focus. Others make many more."
Froebel forcefully argues * that to know a thing it must be compared with something else. Only the study of the life of others can furnish the necessary points of comparison with the life that the child or man has already experienced. "In these the boy, endowed with an active life of his own, can view the latter as in a mirror, and learn to appreciate its value. . . . The power that has scarcely germinated in the boy's mind is seen by him in the legend or tale, a perfect plant, filled with the most delicious blossoms and fruits. . . . He is attracted to the legend and fairy tale, not by the varied and gay shapes that move about in them, but by their spiritual life, which furnishes him with a measure for his own life and spirit, by the fact that they furnish him direct intuitions of free life, of a force spon- taneously active in accordance with its own law. . . . The story concerns other men, other circumstances, other times and places, nay, wholly different forms; yet the hearer seeks his own image, he beholds it, and no one knows that he sees it." 1 have italicized these words because
• " Education of Man."
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they are Froebel's putting of the bottom prin- ciple of this chapter, and it is at this point that they are most appropriately quoted.
As for the good story-teller, Froebel, like Dr. Hall, hails him as a great and ennobling influ- ence, a precious boon. He " must wholly take into himself the life of which he speaks, must let it live and operate in himself freely. He must reproduce it whole and undiminished, and yet stand superior to life as it actually is." This it is that makes the good story-teller — and his art is not easy. Observe, in passing, that art for chil- dren is not subject to the same rigor as that for the mature mind. Yet there is an art of appeal to the child-eye and it has its own rigor. Both arts have much in common, however, and it is safe to hold in mind Brander Matthews' defini- tion: "A short story deals with a single char- acter, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situ- ation."
We are not here to discuss the technic of the arts of story-writing. We are concerned only in a very brief way, with the essentials of the story, not as a work of art but as a means of education — an element of nurture. To this end the story must be apt, vivid, and wholesome. Let us look at these three essentials in concise detail.
I. The Story must be Apt.
It must be level to the child (or hearer's) ex- perience, and hence, related to what is already
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known. "Unrelated, uneducated," is a Froe- belian motto as well as a Herbartian principle. Indeed Froebel insists X\\2lX the law of connection is the most important law of the universe. No subject should ever be left hanging in mid-air. Hence Dr. Dewey's declaration that "the perma- nent value of the story is the degree in which the child realizes for himself the elements of experience finding expression in the story."
"One of the commonest mistakes in educa- tion," says Susan E. Blow,^ "is the presentation of ideals for which the mind is not prepared. Whenever this is done, it either confuses the child's intellect, leaves him indifferent, arouses his antagonism, or betrays him into hypocrisy. . . . Why is Hamlet the Sphinx of literature ? Is it not because so few people know the morbid introspection, the too curious consideration which paralyzes the will ? Literature is purgatorial when it reveals both the motive and the outcome of the deed. We understand the revelation only in so far as we find something analogous to it in our own consciousness. I am sure that many stories we tell children are not only valueless but pernicious, because the deeds portrayed remain opaque to imagination, and I am no less sure that one reason we tell such stones is because we do not consider that good is conquered evil, and that the only ideals the young child can understand are those which point to conquest of the faults into
' " Letters to a Mother."
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which he is constantly betrayed. If you will re- member this, you will know how to save Harold from staggering about in garments of thought which fit his mind about as the trousers and coats of his long-legged, broad-chested father would fit his little body."
Harold is the son of the mother to whom Miss Blow's letters are addressed. The reader will note the force of the image as Miss Blow paints it. This picture of the staggering child is worth a whole volume of abstract discussion and horta- tory appeal. It splendidly illustrates the purport of this chapter on the image as an educational instrument. Finally, it ought to make an effective appeal to the minister who is called on to address a youthful audience, to the "talking superin- tendent," to the Sunday-school teacher, and to the parent or child's care-taker in the home.
Now as to fables, the value of which has al- ready been pleaded in the quotation from Miss Hall. The fable has its educational value un- doubtedly. But this value depends upon the auditor. A fable might be good for youth and inapt for a little child. "The fable is an ani- mated proverb," says Horace E. Scudder.' " The animals are made to speak in accordance with some intended lesson and have this for the reason of their being. . . . Very little of the animal appears but very much of the lesson. The art which invented the fable was a modest hand-
' " Childhood in Literature and Art."
230 The Natural Way-
maid to morality." To this symbolism (for the kindergarten) Miss Blow objects because of its artificiality — the animals portrayed in the fable not being true brutes but human beings in brute disguise. The real life of animals she sees to be symbolic because it presents analogies to human emotions, relationships, and experiences. This virtually disposes of an immense fund of trashy sentimentalized animal stories for children which are untrue to life.
Miss Blow asserts that "most fables are open to objection, because they deal with motives be- yond the range of childish experience." This is our essential point. Citing Rousseau's analysis of La Fontaine's fable in which the fox flattered the raven into singing and then ran away with the meat she dropped in opening her mouth — Miss Blow asks, "Do we wish to inoculate chil- dren with suspicion and distrust? The snake which the farmer warmed in his bosom only to be stung, the fox calling the grapes he could not reach sour, are other examples of meanings we would not willingly make accessible to childish imagination."
Is the reader in doubt now, how far to go ? What shall be done with the fable? Apply the rule of nurture. Will your particular fable choke the child's spirit or produce moral indiges- tion and anemia ? The soul-nurturer must do his own thinking, his own diagnosing — once the essential principles have been set forth.
We have a higher type in Andersen's stories, in
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which, as Scudder shows, "the spring is not in the didactic but in the imaginative." Andersen had a remarkable power of " placing himself at the same angle of vision with children," as in the case of Little Klaus and Big Klaus, where death is treated as a mere incident in the story, a sur- prise but not a terror.
Children may sometimes be stimulated towards an interpretation but an apt story must not be ex- plained. The great fault of our Sunday-school teachers of little children is that they are not con- tent to let the image do its work but persist in being didactic, and abstract. Says Elizabeth Harrison, "The story, the fairy-tale, the fable, is a kind of reincarnation of some good, or some virtue which the child cannot take in its abstract form."
And Froebel: "No practical application need be added, no moral brought out; the related inci- dent of life, in itself, in whatever form it may ap- pear, in its causes and consequences, makes a deeper impression than any added words could do; for who can know the needs of the wholly- opened soul, of stimulated, wholly-conscious life?" The child's past experience and his own need, his heart hunger does the interpreting and the universalizing.
An eloquent speaker addressing an audience of children on "Purpose in Life" told some very effective stories with glowing descriptive power. At the end of each story he reiterated the abstract theme, "purpose in life." On the way home a
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father asked his child how she liked the speaker. She liked him very much, but there was one thing she couldn't understand; something he said over and over. " Was it ' purpose in life ' ? " asked the father. "Yes," said the child, "that was it. I couldn't understand that, but I under- stood all the stories." The images were self- explanatory but the abstract phrase "purpose in life " formed no image and had no function.
Tennyson being asked by the Bishop of Ripon, whether they are right who interpret the three queen companions of King Arthur in his last voyage as Faith, Hope and Charity, replied: " They are right and they are not right. They mean that and they do not. They are three of the noblest of women. They are also those three Graces; but they are much more. I hate to be tied down to say ' This means that,' because the thought within the image is much more than any one interpretation."
Similarly, Christ's parables are apt for what they are apt. They cannot be interpreted by complete parallel. Taken simply as story they carry their lesson by the image picturing the truth he wanted to teach. " The commonest error of interpreters," says Prof. George B. Stevens,* "is to apply the allegorical method to the parables, that is, to seek to find some special and distinct meaning in each detail of the parable story." A conspicuous example of this is in the
1 " The Teaching of Jesus."
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parable of the rich man and tiie steward (Luke 16). " The point of the parable does not depend at all upon finding a counterpart for these per- sons. They are necessary to the parable story, but the meaning of the parable turns on what the steward says, and not on who he is. . . . It is the action and not the personnel of the parable which contains its lesson." Similarly, look at the merchant seeking goodly pearls, the ten virgins, the unjust judge, and others. The point may lie in the whole picture or only in some single aspect or element of the picture. As a rule the parable is intended to teach one single truth. This brings us to our second essential.
2. The Story must be Vivid.
Much of what has just been said is applicable here. We can becloud the instructional image by didactic explanations and pointings of the moral.
The more definite and concrete the narration the better — except perhaps when we are speak- ing of the spiritual. Here Andersen is strong. An article by Nico Bech-Meyer in the Kinder- garten Magazine, thus notes Andersen's method of detail: "The child does not like vague ab- stractions; everything must be definitely ex- plained; positive facts must be stated, before the mind is at rest. Andersen knows this. In speak- ing about a very rich man he does not say, in common language, 'He was so rich, so rich!' No: 'He was so rich that he could have paved
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the street with gold, and would even then have had enough for a small alley.' Any child can understand this language. In the same story ('The Flying Trunk') he describes the son who squandered all: 'He went to masquerade every night, made kites out of five-pound notes, and threw pieces of gold into the sea, instead of stones, making ducks and drakes of them.' We see a child with wondering eyes and mouth half open listen to him while he tells this. And then the man became poor. ' At last he had nothing left but a pair of slippers, an old dressing-gown, and four shillings.' "
The same principle was observed by Jacob Abbott the prince of story writers for children a half-century ago.
Aptness itself is a condition of vividness and the foregoing considerations under that head are a contribution under this of vividness. Then, language must be simple and of the vernacular. Repetition is at times added strength. Wonder and surprise hold an important place. Narrative must exceed mere description.
It is a fault of many story writers for children that they aim to point moral less by image than by ethical dialogue. The writers have a " les- son " to carry and they attempt it by a discussion between a little girl and her mother or a boy and his father, rather than by narrative picturing a situation or action.
Action indeed is one of the indispensables of story for children. Says Froebel: "With boys
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the hearing of stories should always be connected with some activity for the production of some external work on their part. Again, the story, in order to be especially effective and impressive, should be connected with the events and occur- rences of life."
A chapter on "A Study of Children's Own Stories," by Clara Vostrovsky, in Prof. Earl Barnes's "Studies in Education," brings out the fact that the stories written by children them- selves abound in action and almost ignore senti- ment and moral qualities; they pay a little more regard to esthetic details, emotion, time, place and description. Action and names predomi- nate. There was somebody and that somebody did things. But where that somebody was, or when he lived, or what he felt or how his con- duct was rated morally, is of small account in the plan of the youthful writers.
Let us not forget our basal law — consciousness is motor. Images tend to reproduce themselves in action. All the stronger, then, is a moving image. Note how quickly attention is drawn to anything in motion. A procession at "halt" loses its interest. An automatic self-moving figure, however crude, will attract a crowd to a show window. Hence action in a story has great holding power and compels imitation.
We see why statistics are nearly useless when read to an audience. Numbers form no images — or weak ones at best. To the ordinary mind numbers are a poor appeal. But turn the num-
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bers into an image; make them pictorial and see the effect. Advertise the circulation of your paper, if you are a publisher, as 100,000, and you compel respect; but say that each issue would make a pile as high as your city church steeple and you awaken astonishment — simply because the image of 100,000 papers is too nebu- lous, while that of a pile of papers rising from the pavement to the vane on the spire is vivid. Or again, say that there are 1,147 miles of streets in Philadelphia nearly all paved with asphalt, granite block or brick; and that there are 951 miles of sewers. Your hearer thinks it large and thinks no more about it. But tell him that these paved streets would make a continuous driveway thirty feet wide, from Philadelphia to the Missis- sippi, and the sewers would form a water-course as long as the Ohio River, and you give him an image that astonishes him and is not easily for- gotten. The image of the driveway is more vivid than that of the water-course as almost any one will find in the degree of his own surprise at or interest in the statements. But the water- course image is far more effective than that of the mere numbers. Here is one of the secrets, not only of addressing children but of preaching to and writing for all minds. Advertisers under- stand it. Did you ever see a picture of a large ocean liner standing on end alongside of the Washington monument, or in a street of New York? Inasmuch as the hearer sees himself as the
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actor in the story it is easy to understand why it is worse tiian useless, as a moral expedient, to picture a boy concocting mischief for which he is subsequently punished. The story-writer means to deter the boy from doing that same thing by showing how the hero was caught and brought to account. But the moving suggestion comes from what the hero did rather than from what he subsequently suffered. The interest lies in his action, and this becomes the suggest- ing image, with the result that the story incites to more wrong than it deters from. Indeed Prof. J. Mark Baldwin observes: "And it does seem often as Sighele pathetically notices on a large social scale and as the Westminster divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming point of it, that [the child] takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than of the good."
The fact is that punishment occupies too prominent a place in our philosophy of child training. If we were to think less about it we should need to do less of it. Our tendency is to throw the searchlight on the ugly and wrong, to emphasize sin and evil, rather than to illumine the beautiful and right, and to accentuate noble ideals.
One of the essentials of vividness is unity and wholeness. The International Lessons in spite of their good points often ruin a good story by chopping it into bits. No one can get a vivid picture in that way. Take a picture one foot
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square, cut it into quarters and once a week look at one of the quarters. This is the way many of our Bible lessons are brought to us. There can be no just image where the essential parts are not brought into proper relation. This opens the subject of teaching by wholes; it points again to the law of relativity and all-sided connectedness. We cannot be vivid and fragmentary or desultory. Hence, too, the value of what is called a "world- view," to the teacher. We must see largely, connectedly, and with focus.
}. The Story must be Wholesome.
Educators are agreed that education is ulti- mately moral. We educate for character. Images, therefore, must be wholesome. A brightly colored picture of the daughter of Herodias bringing to her the head of John the Baptist in a charger; is it a healthful image for a young child to carry? A noted "child-evan- gelist" exhibits the thorn-crowned head of Jesus on the screen illumined with crimson light; is that a cheerful image for a child to carry to bed with him ?
One Sunday when the lesson had been on David and Goliath, some boys were arrested on the way home from Sunday-school for break- ing windows by slinging pebbles — like David. Should the story of the murder of Goliath be ruled out because of its suggestiveness ? Probably not entirely. Some stories with bad suggestions, carry too much that is educative, to be altogether
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black-listed. Again here we must decide the question of educative values. The balance of healthful value will depend largely upon the nar- rator's emphasis. Dore emphasizes the horrors of drowning in one of his pictures of the Flood. It is as easy to accentuate the saving of Noah as the perishing of the populace. Note again the slight accentuation of death in Andersen's " Little Klaus and Big Klaus." The picture of David laying off his armor is more worthy than that of his severing Goliath's head with a sword.
"I don't believe that Noah story," said one sensitive child to her teacher. " Tell me a story where there's nobody dead, nobody drowned, and nobody swallowed up," said another child to her mother. We have already noted that a Gothic bishop translated the Scriptures into the Gothic language, but omitted the Book of Kings because of the suggestive power of its bloody records.
A well-known writer of our day, on the other hand, advocates the horrible and the repulsive. She says, "We have seen many a child's lip quiver over the sacrifice of Isaac, have seen sides taken in the rivalries of Esau and Jacob." As to the latter Miss Blow ably demonstrates that a child is incompetent to take sides involving an estimate of Jacob because this story does not open up those remoter signs of his superiority in sus- ceptibility to ideals and his energy as an over- comer. As to the former story, why did the child's "lip quiver"? The quivering lip, the
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"lump in the throat," the weeping, seem to be deified by many persons whether displayed in children or in adults. Stage plays are lauded because they make people cry — as if there were necessary virtue in weeping!
To return to our writer. She continues: " There is the story of little Samuel, which is very apt, for the time being, to kindle a pious strain of feeling; the simple and sweet idyl of Ruth ; the gorgeous recital of the Persian splen- dors of Queen Esther and the king beneath the palms of Shushan; the story of Ehud, which reads like a Nihilist narrative; the description of Shamgar killing six hundred with his ox-goad, which always fires a boy's heart; while the supernatural wonders in the lives of Elijah and Elisha fill an imaginative child with poetry. The anointing of Saul and all his strong, proud, sorrowful story, the cleansing of Naaman, the leper, the building of the temple — these will hold any child breathless." How little appreciation of relative educational values we find in this indis- criminate praise of stories from the sweet sim- plicity of the boy Samuel to the horrid Shamgar! Surely there is need for a closer study of this mat- ter of the image as an instrument of instruction.
An article by Bishop Ellicott^ on "Reminis- cences of the Lectionary Committee," contains some suggestive matter worth recalling. The author says: " The last part of our work, so far
1 The Expositor, April, 1896.
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as I can recollect, and as memoranda made at the time seem clearly to indicate, was the important work of revising the proper lessons for Sundays. I seem to remember that we kept this work to the end, that we might approach it after having acquired much useful experience. One or two important questions had to be settled at the out- set. Were we to yield to the modern desire to cancel for public reading on Sundays all those lessons which might be considered to contain what has been commonly called painful matter ? For the most part we answered this question in the negative. We did, however, omit Gen. 34. This question came up once in the New Testa- ment, viz., in Romans i. It was proposed, I remember, that the lesson should stop just before a certain verse, and that the following lesson should begin at the verse after it. At first there was a little tendency to adopt the expedient; but some further consideration, to say nothing of the context, speedily disposed of the matter. . . . "A year then passed away. The Commission held its last, and one hundred and eighth, meet- ing on June 28, 1870. Its Report, including the tables of lessons, was presented to the Queen, and very shortly afterwards Parliamentary action was taken by the Lord Chancellor (Lord Hath- erley) who introduced the Tables of Lessons Bill into the House of Lords. The second reading took place on July 7, 1870. The bill was criti- cised by Lord Shaftesbury, and strong exception was taken by him to the omission of Joshua 10,
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which in the old tables was the first lesson for the morning of the first Sunday after Trinity, and contained the account of the sun and moon stand- ing still on Joshua's speaking to the Lord, and afterwards issuing the command (verses 12-15). I replied to Lord Shaftesbury by showing the reasons why the chapter, which from the be- ginning to the end was a recital of slaughter and extermination, was not retained as a Sunday lesson, though, in the early part (including the miracle), holding distinctly a place in the daily lessons. This answer was considered to be sufficient, and the bill passed the second reading without a division. In the committee-stage a change was made by Archbishop Thomson in the provision relating to the use of other lessons in lieu of lessons from the Apocrypha. This change was withdrawn on the third reading. The bill then passed the House of Lords, and subsequently the House of Commons, and, after receiving the royal assent, became law."
Some educationists insist that all sides of life should sooner or later be pictured in order to the full development of the man. There is truth in the contention, but it is a dangerous experiment for a boy or young man to enter a den of vice in order to gain an education. Few natures can withstand the motor demands that follow mental pictures that inflame the passions even if they excite disgust. " We first endure, then pity, then embrace." The number of characters that have been ruined by remembered images cer-
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tainly far exceeds the number that have gained virtue and pov^er for righteousness by them.
In a letter to the editor of Primary Education,^ Rachel Rexford takes the ground that the blood- curdling story damages by over stimulation. She says: "Now I do not believe that any reading is good for children that makes a simple unex- citing story of daily life seem flat and unenjoyable afterwards.
" Let us take the time-honored, Little Red Riding Hood. This has been considered as proper diet for children since girls, red hoods and wolves have existed.
"The children listen with their hearts beating faster and faster, while the wolf gains admittance to the grandmother's house; then — O, delightful! — the wolf eats the grandmother! The listeners are now bloodthirsty for another eating scene and hold their breath while Red Riding Hood goes to the bed to talk to the supposed grandmother. Every step towards the approaching tragedy is deliciously frightful, and when the fateful words, ' Better to eat you, my dear,' bring the thrill of the expected ending, the swift arrow of the huntsman dealing death to the wolf is an un- welcome interference and a positive disappoint- ment to the wrought-up audience. The open- mouthed little children come back to earth again and to the every-day affairs of life with a decided unwillingness.
• September, 1894.
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"Why do children plead for this story gener- ation after generation and never tire of it ? Leave out the danger and horror of it and Little Red Riding Hood might be as amiable and kind- hearted in carrying nice things for her grand- mother to eat, but the nineteenth century little children would never trouble themselves about her. She would be altogether too unexciting to 'draw.'
"Again I have seen Perseus given in a list of desirable stories for first year children.
"This young man is sent out for the head of the Gorgon Medusa, a ' most strange and terrible monster that had ever been since the world was made. Instead of locks of hair it had a hundred enormous snakes on its head, all alive, twisting, wriggling, curling and thrusting out their venom- ous tongues, with forked stings at the end ! Their bodies were all over scales and they had splendid wings that shone like pure gold as they went fly- ing about in the sunshine' (Hawthorne).
"At this stage of the story every shy little child who is afraid to go to bed in the dark will be brave enough in the daylight and with others about him to be ready to exclaim excitedly, 'O! what a lovely story! Tell us some more! Did he get that dreadful head ? '
"Now an ignorant nurse would be dismissed from service for telling children anything that ap- proached this in horror, and is it any better be- cause it is a classic }
" But wait till the dark really comes and these
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little children who have been properly instructed in classic literature at school; — what vision pres- ents itself then ? Is a Medusa head with a hun- dred snakes curling and twisting a desirable thing for a vision just as they are to go away alone to sleepland ?
" Does any teacher think I am exaggerating this matter ?
" Let her try to follow that story — even the next day — with a pure simple little story of chil- dren out in the fields with trees, and brooks, and butterflies, and have nothing strange or exciting happen to these children for an overstimulant to the imagination and see how long it will 'hold' the children! They will nestle about while she is telling it and invariably end up by asking you to • tell the other one again.' "
Some persons think this kind of criticism weakly sentimental. They would make the tor- ture of the crucifixion, the cruelty of Herodias, the atrocity of Shamgar vivid, just as our "Yel- low Journals " make crim.e and scandal pictur- esque, no matter how many lives are debased by it or how far it increases the population of our jails and almshouses.
Again it is a question of educational values, to be determined partly on general principles, partly by the temperament of the nature to be nurtured. But in view of our psychological law, that one tends to become like the image he beholds there would seem to be small room for doubt that the cause of character is better served by the image
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of the Holy One than by that of the Serpent, and that the Light of the World is a better nurturer than the darkness of hell.
Without discussing the relative merits or de- merits of the drama it may be noted that the weak point of the theatre is in its imaging by ac- tion the passions and emotions, some of which ought to be suppressed and others of which ought to be invisible to the public eye. On the other hand a circus, an acrobatic, a juggling per- formance, and feats of balancing, exclude emo- tions from the picture and present dexterity and agility in forms which show personal confidence, exactness, punctuality and control in their highest degree. They display the power to overcome difficulties as few other short lives can. The ob- jection to them lies largely in the risk incurred without adequate compensation and also in the nerve strain. There is also a humane element in the treatment of the horses of the ring, which are stimulated with music and the crack of the whip rather than the cut of the lash. These features of athletic precision are too seldom seen in their full educational bearing. But their value must not, because of their plea here, be overestimated when the balance sheet is drawn.
The hero does not need to fight men. Better that he should fight things — or himself. Presi- dent Eliot has finely pointed to the better em- phasis of something to save or succor, rather than of something to destroy. In an address before the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, he is re-
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ported as saying, he hoped a great many of the students would be physicians. " There would be plenty of opportunity for heroic action, for nerve, for courage, for resolution; more than most sol- diers ever need on the field of battle."
In spite of their drawbacks our daily news- papers furnish many an image of true heroism. Within a few weeks of each other two editorials appeared in the Philadelphia Public Ledger com- menting on current items as follows:
"To the long roll of every-day heroes, whose deeds find record only in a paragraph in the daily press, but who are as truly heroic as those who risk and lose their lives in battle, and whose names live in history, is added the name of Edward Nor- worth, of Camden, aged twenty-seven, who, on Monday last, lost his life in a brave effort to stop a runaway team, which was menacing the lives of five children playing in the street. Norworth ran to the middle of the street to stop the horses. The children were saved, but the bridle to which their deliverer was clinging broke. He fell under the wheels of the wagon and suffered mortal in- jury.
"This lamentable occurrence emphasizes the truth of the observation that ' in the most private life difficult duty is never far off.' It is an illusion of the immature mind that opportunities for the display of the heroic quality appear rarely. It is usually associated with war, with exploits in some conspicuous arena. But some of the finest exhibitions of human courage, physical and moral,
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are to be found in obscure places. The quiet man of the street, unknown to fame, and who has given no sign of courage, is suddenly called upon to perform an act of self-sacrifice for the safety of others, and acquits himself as nobly as those who lay down their lives on the fields of war to save a nation."
There is abundant opportunity for "the stren- uous life " without the rifle. The idea that one cannot be brave, energetic or manly without killing somebody or something is a relic of the dark ages and has no tap root in genuine Chris- tianity. Every Bible story has a place in the his- toric record but not every Bible story is good for everybody. We must discriminate and select our stories for children, all the way down from Cain, through the flood, the wars, the slaughter of the innocents, the beheading of John, the crucifixion, to the martyrs and the heroes of the Reformations.
Children should not catch the motive of ven- geance, retribution and bloodthirst, as a sacred one, through the accentuation of biblical images of this spirit. Some stories will prove whole- some to some natures and deleterious to others. But no story can be truly wholesome in which animalism and destruction remain as the resid- ual image to dominate the motor consciousness. See again the extract already quoted from Roose- velt's letter.
Out of an inductive investigation. Prof. George E. Dawson has summed up his conclusions on
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" Children's Interest in the Bible "* in some val- uable suggestions from which I quote briefly:
"At all ages children feel more interested in persons than in any other elements of the Bible. Even Bible scenes and stories appeal to them mainly through the man, woman or child that is the centre of the scene or the principal actor in the story. This suggests that the Bible should be given to children of all ages through its per- sonal element. Thus, the Bible should be given to young children through the child Jesus. Everything in either the Old or the New Testa- ment that could be properly used to make this human child Jesus intelligible and lovable should be employed. No theological explanation of his birth, nature, or mission need be attempted. The spontaneous love of one child for another may be trusted to give Jesus a secure place in the affections of children, if he is presented simply and attractively. And it is better that the affec- tions should be enlisted in this matter than the in- tellect. . . .
" Again, the Bible should be given to children from eight to nine years, on to thirteen or four- teen, through the heroes of the Old Testament. These heroes may be selected with especial ref- erence to their importance to history or prophecy, or with reference to their moral and religious ex- ample. The number is sufficiently large to give ample choice in these directions. When such a
' Pedagogical Seminary, July, 1900.
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selection of heroes has been made, their char- acters, deeds, and sayings may become the media through which the children shall be taught Hebrew history and geography, moral and re- ligious principles, and anything else that the Old Testament can supply for purposes of religious instruction. Finally, the Bible should be given to adolescents through Jesus as an adult, and, in- cidentally, through the disciples and apostles who have interpreted his character and teachings."
Through the columns of The International Evangel a few years ago 1 requested from readers over thirty years of age, an answer to this ques- tion: Which six Bible stories, learned in child- hood or youth, do you remember most vividly ? or rather, which come oftenest and most easily into your mind ? If you do not thus recall six with ease, frequency, and vividness, give as many as you do so recall. Do not study hard to re- member, or to discover how many you can re- call, but set them down immediately in the order in which they come to you on reading this notice. If there are more than six that clamor for recognition, this fact may be mentioned also.
The same request was made through the col- umns of The Perry Magazine, which is devoted largely to educational matters and had, at that time, a Sunday-school department. The number of answers received through the first was 128, and through the second 115. The proportion of best-remembered stories is about the same for each constituency. The replies came from many
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sections of the United States and even from Canada, Turkey and China. The number is very small compared with the number of persons more or less familiar with Bible stories from childhood. But the answers are perhaps fairly representative.
It is interesting to see how differently peo- ple look at a story. That some should in- clude the Commandments, the Beatitudes, the Twenty-third psalm in their count of stories signifies either that their affections run away with their discrimination or that they visualize the abstract into the concrete. Probably both conditions operate. Then some note large wholes, as the "Story of Jacob," others small wholes as "Jacob's Ladder." Some centre about or in an impersonal event, as the Flood, others centre in persons. Some concentrate and indi- cate vividness, others evidently scatter and are nebulous, remembering names and titles rather than the details of narration. The results of the Evangel experiment follow. The number set opposite each name represents the number of persons out of a total of 128, reporting that story as one of six best remembered since childhood.
Joseph 94
Daniel 75
David 63
Moses 62
Samuel 39
Noah 27
Abraham 27
Adam and Eve 22
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Elijah 20
Samson 19
Hebrew Children ... 18
Flood 16
Cain and Abel 16
Ruth 14
Esther I3
Jonah 12
Jacob , 10
Elisha 6
Solomon 6
Lot's Wife 4
Gideon 3
Naaman 3
Creation 3
Egyptians drowned in Red Sea 2
Crossing the Red Sea 2
Job 2
After these come Lot, Isaac and Rebelcah, Isaac, Joshua, Aaron, Absalom, Haman and Mordecai, " Jonathan's Love," Tower of Babel, Commandments, " Sickness of Hezekiah," Rainbow, Baalim, Passover, Ten Plagues, Brazen Ser- pent, Absalom's disloyalty, Manna, Destruction of Sodom, Fall of Jericho, Noah's Ark, " Twenty-third Psalm," War Stories of Chronicles and Kings. All of these have each one.
It is not always easy to differentiate the stories by the titles given them by the readers. In some cases the difference in titles has a significance, in other cases it probably means little. Thus, twenty-one report "Adam and Eve," and one reports the " Garden of Eden." In the foregoing tabulation they are set down as twenty-two to "Adam and Eve." Similarly, ten say simply " Esther," two " Esther and Mordecai," and one "Esther saving her people." Sometimes these titles indicate the temper or kind of interest. There is more feeling in " Esther saving her people " than in " Esther and Mordecai." Under
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the head of Elisha, reported above as six, the analysis really is "Elisha," two, "Children who mocked," five, and " Causing iron to swim," one. While forty-four persons reported "Daniel in the Lions' Den," one reported "Daniel rewarded for fidelity " and one for "refusing to eat the king's meat." The latter indicate more than a mere interest in the wonder story of the Lions' Den; they show sentiment, feeling, and a sense of moral heroism. It is not possible to go into an extended analysis with deductions in this book. Enough has been said to indicate direc- tions of values in the use of stories.
Let us, however, look at the New Testament, from which forty-eight titles are reported.
Birth of Christ 15
Crucifixion il
Jesus II
Prodigal Son 7
Raising Lazarus 6
The Boy Jesus 5
Christ blessing little children 5
Good Samaritan 4
Conversion of Saul 4
Ananias and Sapphira 3
Resurrection 3
Miracle of five loaves 3
Massacre of Innocents 2
Jesus walking on the water ....... 2
Paul 2
After these come a number having one vote each, some of them being parables, others very indefinite (as the title "John's Devotion"), and some not fairly to be regarded as stories at all, such as "Beatitudes." It will be seen also that
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some in this New Testament table include ot cover each other. The title "Jesus," for in- stance, properly covers everything that Jesus said and did, and the title " Paul " is too indefinite tc suggest any special scene or picture in Paul's life. The influence of the International Lesson courses seems to be in evidence. One would suppose that the story of Noah and the Ark would have, been reported by a larger number of persons. Had this test been made twenty-five years ago, doubtless it would have stood much higher. It must, however, be taken into account that the flood is given separately by sixteen persons, and it is altogether likely that in considerable degree, the two titles cover the same set of stories. It would be interesting to know how far the toy " Noah's Arks " affect the figures. Sunday-school teachers will be particularly interested to see that the story of Joseph is evidently the most popular of all Bible stories.
One more fact should be stated, — allusion in- deed has already been made to it. The various replies, of course, embodied many different forms of titling. In the first table given, for instance, Moses is put down as mentioned by sixty-two persons. As a matter of fact, the simple name "Moses" is mentioned by but twenty-five; then "Moses as a Child " by thirty-two; as deliverer of Israel, one; burning bush, one; the finding of Moses, two; Moses receiving the law, one. The same sort of variable specialization obtains with nearly all the principal Old Testament characters.
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In the case of Joseph, the simple name Joseph has fifty-seven mentions, after which come in greater or less numbers, various portions of the story. For instance, one writer speaks of "the cup in Benjamin's sack," another of Joseph's coat; another, the dreams; others, the selling, etc.; the whole, under eight different special titles, which represent aspects or portions of the general story, and sum up as tabulated under Joseph, ninety-four.
It is obvious not only that these Bible stories persist in different minds for various reasons, but that the lessons or ideals which they carry are very variable. Of course it has been impossible for many persons to know with certainty whether all the stories which they reported were learned in early childhood, — or even if so learned it would be difficult to say how far their springing to the mind on this occasion was due to their persist- ency from childhood or from their reanimation through the persons' having later in life told them to other children. All these interferences with an attempt to make close deductions, how- ever, do not vitiate the general trend of the investigation. For one reason or another the relative popularity, persistency or effectiveness of many Bible stories is satisfactorily shown. It is also clear that most of these stories centre around a personality; they are largely biographical in kind.
Apparently, also, some persons are a little confused, as in the mention of Baalim, when
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Balaam is probably intended. Another noted " Haggai (sic) in the wilderness and her boy longing for water." Images remain though names get mixed! Teachers have a hint here. Some, because of their affection for certain Bible passages, noted them, even though the passages were not stories at all, as in the case of the Beatitudes and the Twenty-third Psalm. The latter, however, has considerable power of mak- ing a pictorial impression on the mind and to a person who had led a rural or pastoral life, espe- cially if of a reflective turn of mind, portions of this Psalm would produce something of the effect of a story.
It may be of suggestive interest to record here some of the particularized Old Testament titles, showing sometimes the emotional coloring, the ideal, or the striking aspect or point of view of the narrative cited. 1 give them without quota- tion marks. General stock titles as in the fore- going lists, are mostly omitted: Solomon and wisdom; Daniel and three friends; Daniel in lions' den; Adam and Eve driven out; Elijah and chariot of fire; Elijah fed by ravens; Elijah and Shunamite's son; Return of dove; David's kind- ness to Saul in sparing his life; David chosen king; David and Jonathan; David and Goliath; David and sling; David playing harp before Saul; Jonah and the whale; Jonah and the gourd; Elisha and children and bears; Samson and blindness; Samson betrayed by wife; Samson and Philistines; Joshua commanding sun and
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moon to stand still ; Enoch ; Lot's wife ; Hagar and Ishmael; Absalom's death; Rehoboam and Jero- boam; Rachel and Leah; Benjamin; Naaman's leprosy and little maid; Three Hebrew children; Pharaoh and ten plagues; Creation; Feast of Belshazzar; Jephthah's vow; Worship of golden calf; Falling of Jericho's walls; Handwriting on wall; Wandering of Israelites; Serpent in Para- dise; Samuel's little coat; Samson tying foxes' tails; Samson with gates; Solomon's decision about a child; Elijah and priests of Baal; Baby- lon; Sodom and Gomorrah; Achan's sin. These are specimens of the definite and the indefinite, of the point of interest, of the emphasis of im- pression and expression. One woman said that when she read about the flood her interest cen- tred in the dove. The story of the wise and foolish virgins always had great interest for her and she never failed to pity the latter class. (It would be interesting to know what experience in life lay back of this pity.) The same corre- spondent says, " 1 think back with tender pity for that little girl (myself) who used to steal into the cold shut-up parlor, gather the ' big Bible ' into her lap and feast her eyes upon that one picture of 'St. John and the Lamb.' 1 had never heard of Murillo then." Another notes her remem- brance of "Nebuchadnezzar, the image that he made, and the three in the fiery furnace, and his downfall to a beast because of his great pride."
But one of the most interesting reports was from a woman of literary reputation, the daugh-
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ter of a line of distinguished ministers. Her father took great pains with her, for she was a brilliantly precocious child. Her report suggests that there are good Bible stories quite unfamiliar to most readers. The first is in Jeremiah 38 : 6-13, and is the story of Jeremiah in the dungeon. Ob- serve where the emphasis of her memory-image and the feeling lies. She says, " The Ethiopian leaning over to peer at Jeremiah in the well and to throw down to him the ' old cast clouts ' to make the ropes easy." Next she recounts "the story of old Barzillai who did not go to Jerusalem with David but who said with a daring that dared for the child ' Behold thy servant Chimham,' and so found place for the little son he loved " (2 Sam. 18, 19; also i Kings 2).
Next she notes the Golden Calf; Hannah com- ing up to the temple with Samuel's little coat; David and Jonathan; lastly she says, "Just a picture (2 Sam. 23: 20), ' He went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow.' " The father that picked out these stories from the larger story in which they are set was a man of vision. He knew a picture when he saw it. A wonderful bit of vivid story telling those eighteen words are, only one word exceeding four letters in length — a model to study. The correspondent is now a woman past thirty but the image holds, crowding many a standard stock Bible story out of her report. She adds, "I could always see it, the valiant man, the mighty beast, the blood- stained, trampled snow. In the first part of
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Pierre Loti's ' Romance of a Child ' he speaks of drawing a duck upon transparent paper when he was a little fellow, and of looking through it at the light and seeing his forlorn duck in leagues of desolate sea. He pictures vividly the intensity of the impression left on his mind and when I read it 1 thought of the lion in the time of snow." Thus there are many stories within stories in the Bible. Every vivid image, bearing significances that quicken feeling and beget ideals, is in effect a story.
Light is the medium of vision and the symbol of that larger vision of the mind's eye which we call knowledge. Whether the mental image is one that comes immediately to us through the organ of sight, from without; or whether it is conjured up from within by the imagination or the memory it is the fashioner of our ideals and the tempter to our deeds.
What kind of mental images grow out of our visible presence to the children ? What are they looking at — in nature, in art, in speech ? Are we engaged in the futile task of trying to instruct them through counsel void of metaphor and bar- ren of the stuff that images are made of ? This is the "foolishness of preaching" in the pulpit or out of it; in the class or at the home hearth.
When God wanted to impress his servants he gave them vision. To Moses the great nation- maker and lawgiver he gave a vision on the mountain-top and said: "See that thou make them after their pattern, which hath been shewed
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thee in the mount." When Elisha would restore the confidence of his servant he prayed, "Lord, I pray thee open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man and he saw; and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha." Commenting on this, H. Clay Trumbull says:* "In the light of that remembered vision, this world and its dangers seemed very different to Elishas servant from that hour onward. The memory of what he had seen forbade his having anxiety over what was to come."
Are we praying that the Lord would open the eyes of the young ? If so, what kind of pictures of life are we setting before them ? Or are we expecting them to gaze into the blank abstrac- tions of our dullness — if not upon meretricious attractions ?
There is an awful responsibility in a visible at- titude, a deed, a metaphor. The " power of a remembered vision " is eternal.
" A remembered vision of good is a precious possession," adds Trumbull. " He who can re- call a scene of beauty, of grandeur, of holiness, of peace, or who has before his mind's eye a character of rare attractiveness and worth, which was known by him, in the recent or the earlier past, has an ideal reality to look forward to, and to strive after, as no one without such a memory can have. . . . The best that we have seen
1 " Seeing and Being."
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of happiness or of character gives shape to our ideals of happiness and character. . . . It is not, as we are accustomed to say, that our ideals are visionary, but rather that our visions of the real form our ideals, and that the best that we have seen and known is the lowest line of our conceptions of desirable and attainable good."
There was a child went forth every day.
And the first object that he looked upon, that object he be- came,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child.
And grass, and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phcebe bird,
The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the supper table.
The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a whole- some odor falling off her person and clothes as she walks by.
The father strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, angered, un- just.
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture, the yearning and swelling heart.
Affection that will not be gainsaid.
— Whitman.
It is true that we walk by faith, not by sight. But it is no less Scriptural that "Moses endured as seeing him who is invisible" (Heb. 11: 27);
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that the Son is "the image of the invisible God'' (Col. i: 15); that "the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made" (Rom. i: 20); and that "if he shall ap- pear we shall be like him for we shall see him even as he is " (1 John 3: 2).
Sight of some sort there must be before there can be a following. It is the Natural Way.
NURTURE BY FOOD
Education by Direct Means or Prescription : In- terest and the Teaching Material.
SPEAKING of the baby, Dr. Oppenheim says/ "An excess of starch in his food may upturn a household." It would be difficult to show in fewer words, how depend- ent our soul life is on our bodily nourishment. Indeed the quantity of starch in a shirt collar may determine an exhibit of temper. Poor bodily nourishment is responsible for more of the ills of life than we generally suspect. Vicious and "incorrigible" characters have been prac- tically reformed and overcome through the ad- ministration of good food.
Similarly, with regard to vision. Increasing nearsightedness has much to do with a man's habits, attitudes, estimates, powers, and temper. And as to atmosphere, Dr. Oppenheim thus puts it: "A decrease of oxygen and an increase of carbonic dioxide in the air which the child breathes makes a decided difference in the elim- ination of waste materials; such matter when stored up, may produce varying degrees of in-
• " The Development of the Child," p. 90, 263
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toxication, of poisoning. And as a result, his ordinary characteristics are for the time changed. With sufficient repetition, the temporary condi- tion may become more permanent."
In his epocli-making work, "Christian Nur- ture," Horace Bushnell sums the situation which we are considering in admonishing parents that a very considerable part of their charge consists in giving their children "such di nurture in the body as makes them superior to the body."
As in the two previous chapters we have seen that atmosphere and light are true symbols of soul nurture as well as essential factors in bodily nurture, so now we pass to the consideration of the third factor in bodily nourishment, namely Food, in its symbolic aspect as a mode of soul nurture.
The atmosphere is the medium in which we exist. It so surrounds us that we are most of the time hardly conscious of it. It is intangible and continuous in its effects. The very heat of the body is produced by the oxygen in the air, hidden as the process is. Symbolically, there- fore, it stands for indirect educational influence or method. Over against this is the direct method, which we symbolize by Food. We se- lect and take it consciously. The operation is visible, tangible, direct. Feeding the baby is a different sort of process from giving the baby an airing or a sunning. Hunger for food is a much more material demand upon us than is hunger for oxygen or the actinic rays of light. Tell any one
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that you are hungry and he understands that you want food — even though it is perfectly true, as this book teaches, that Hfe hungers for air, light and exercise also.
Now while we seek to appease hunger and to nourish the system through food, we do not al- ways know food when we see it or taste it. Nothing is food to us if we cannot assimilate it. If in time it does not assume the form of bone, or tissue, or enter in some way into the structure of the body it is not food. This is a common- place, but when we come to apply the law sym- bolically, to soul-nourishment we find that it is not so commonplace but that we easily ignore it.
In the education of the child what kind of in- tellectual food will you give him ? That which his nature refuses or that which his nature ac- cepts and appropriates ? The answer is obvious and yet educational method is only just waking up to it. Jesus prescribed the child as the stand- ard of his own nurture. Froebel developed the prescription into a detailed practice. The child- study of to-day is busy analyzing and synthetiz- ing mental and spiritual foods for the child.
Atmosphere is the circumambient subtler in- fluence in which we place the child. Food is the prescribed curriculum of assigned and ordered tasks, lessons to be learned, exercises to be taken. In this assignment, we must first take the child where we find him, and where we find him must determine what we order for him. What we order for him will depend upon the images
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that he should have to the end that he may build himself out of them; and also what atmosphere he should breathe in order that he may derive from the external world the heat of emotion as well as the light of information.
St. Paul says (2 Tim. 3:16, 17), "Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruc- tion, which is in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work." He also tells Timothy that from a child he has known the sacred Scriptures. But Paul also says that we must nurture the children in the admonition of the Lord which qualifies the foregoing passage to the extent that every Scripture is profitable for mankind, but not equally for all persons in all stages. The differ- ence is infinite and eternal and the Church has grievously failed in its recognition of this fact that Paul demands only that which nurtures. He virtually tells us to select the foods according to the digestive powers of our subject. When Jesus told Peter, " Feed my lambs," his view of education was that of nurture, one of organic vital union of the food and the body through perfect assimilation.
Commenting on this Dr. N. C. Schaeflfer felicitously says: " A stone placed between the branches of a tree may ultimately be surrounded and covered by the trunk of the tree; but it bears no living relationship to the tree itself. A bullet may lodge in the human body; it may be encysted
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if it is not removed by the surgeon's knife; but it never can be said to be assimilated as an organic part of the human frame.
"It is possible to lodge in the mind of the child statements, definitions, and entire para- graphs which are, indeed, carried by the mind as the body carries the encysted bullet, but which is not assimilated in the living way. They may not be incorporated as an integral or organic part of the child's mental life any more than the lead is made part of the human body, or the stone is made part of the tree. Very much of the mem- orizing at school is a lifeless process. You can get at the bullet in the human body by a surgical process, and you can often get out of the mind what is learned mechanically by that surgical operation known as the examination. The re- moval of the bullet leaves the human body in better condition than before; the examination sometimes rids the mind of much useless stuff which is fortunately dropped as soon as the examination is ended; often, however, it only serves to fix the useless stuff so deeply that it can never be eliminated or forgotten. ' Of all the exercises of the school,' says Fitch, 'there is none which has so little heart in it as learning by heart.' 'To know by heart,' says Montaigne, ' is not to know at all.' Plato, indeed, expresses the same thought when in the Protagoras he says that knowledge is the food of the mind. Food is not assimilated as soon as it is swallowed. It must be transformed into something else; other-
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wise indigestion is the result. ... So im- portant is this transformation of knowledge that I . venture to recall to your minds a favorite illustra- tion of Gough. A crying child was disturbing the slumbers of every passenger on a sleeping car. A gruff miner from the far West, whose patience had been exhausted, at length exclaimed: 'I would like to know where that child's mother is.' The person in charge of the child replied: ' In the baggage car in a coffin.' The information communicated in those few words was imme- diately changed into sympathy. There was not another word of complaint throughout the journey. In the case of the old miner it was further transformed into will, into purpose; for ere long he got up from his berth and began to carry the child to and fro, doing his best to make it contented with the strange surroundings.
"If the lessons of Old Testament history, which are imparted in the Sabbath-school, re- main in the memory in the exact form in which they were given, and do not pass over into action, conduct, and daily life, the teacher has failed in spite of all the answers which the quarterly review may elicit from the class. If the lessons in United States history are not transformed into the sentiment of patriotism, if they do not pass into a purpose to live, yea, to die, for one's country, if they remain a mere tissue of dates and names, and stories of battle and court intrigue, then the lessons in history have not been properly assimilated; the teacher
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has failed, in spite of all the high marks which his pupils may have made at the annual ex- amination. This, 1 take it, is what Mr. Kall- mann means when he says: ' From experience, through thought, to action.'
" ' Except the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit' (John 12: 24). The ideas which lodge in the mind, must perish in their original form before there can be a harvest of thought and sentiment and purpose." This is the Natural Way.
Now as every Scripture inspired of God is profitable for teaching so is all nature created by God profitable — subject to the same lim- itations, however of the human nature to be nurtured. God is author of more than the Bible, and God's handiwork ought not to be contemned in a Sunday-school any more than the Bible ought to be excluded from the day school.
"The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child's own nature," says Dewey, And so says the "New Education " of Jesus, of Rousseau, of Pestalozzi, of Froebel and his later exponents. "Show me what he feeds on and 1 will tell you the kind of animal he is," says one. And vice versa, show me the kind of animal he is and I will tell you what he ought to feed on — what things are in the real SQnst food and nurture to him.
Says Charles Dudley Warner, "Good literature is as necessary to the growth of the soul as good
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air is to the growth of the body, and it is just as bad to put weak tiioughts into the mind of a child as to shut him up in a room that is unventi- lated." Right enough. But the question turns on the meaning of the word " good " as applied to literary food for the child. And it turns too, upon what we mean by " weak thoughts." The "law implicit within the child's own nature," and not the law of adult nature determines what is good for him.
Only through a knowledge of the child's inter- ests and his standards of value can we know where he stands and whence he is to be directed. It is the potential feeling that moves, and as Dr. Dewey says, interests are the signs and symp- toms of growing power; they represent dawning capacities; they prophesy the state upon which the child is about to enter. These interests are neither to be humored nor repressed. To repress them is to substitute the adult for the child and so weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, to suppress initiative and to deaden interest. To humor interests is to substitute the transient for the permanent. The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power. We may by humoring the interest substitute caprice and whim for genuine interest.
In an article,^ Miss Helen M. Bullis speaks on this matter of interest, out of a teacher's experi- ence thus:
• The School Journal, Nov, 4, '99.
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" The teacher who knows his pupils outside of school is often surprised to learn how small a part school plays in the manifold interests of their days. Because teaching is our chosen pro- fession, because it enables us to earn our daily bread it is apt to hold an over-large place in our thoughts. It is a good thing for us to learn how the uses of the subjunctive mood pale before the pursuit of a new bug for a collection of local in- sects, how unimportant a knowledge of factoring becomes by the side of a complete set of Colum- bian stamps or coins. It is possible that there is less relative importance in many things we teach than we often fancy, but without venturing on that heresy, there is no denying that a knowledge of the child's own standards of values, enables us not only to present subject-matter in a way that appeals to him from his own point of view, but, what is of far greater importance, gives a power to change, little by little, the standards themselves if they are faulty or incomplete, and so affect the soul to all eternity." The child's progress is shown in the "developments of new attitudes towards and new interests in experi- ence." Experience is the only real interpreter; life the only real educator.
There is such a thing as mistaking the com- monplace familiarities of a person's life for his genuine moving interests. This point is well taken in an article on " The teaching of English " by Dr. L. A. Sherman. He says:
" It is a fundamental error to suppose it easiest
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for a student to write on subjects that he knows most about. It takes a practiced writer, almost a genius, to do good work in such a case. If a boy be told to produce an essay on 'Farming,' or 'Fishing,' or 'Football,' the fact being that he has lived upon a farm, or has fished consider- ably, or is on the school eleven, he will find his subject almost wholly wanting in inspiration. Strangely to him, and perhaps his teacher, after some attempt at writing upon it, he will feel himself more or less intellectually compromised. The reason is, there is no potential idea, hence, no genuine, organic interest. The subject has been reduced already, so far as he is concerned, to definite and satiating knowledge. When this has happened, any such thing as complete atten- tion, to say nothing about momentum towards definite and adequate expression, is about im- possible."
Interest, then, as Dr. Hall says, " is the best in- dex of capacity or pedagogical ripeness. It is, like hunger, an expression of need." "For peda- gogy, indeed, interest is a word which looms up almost like the mighty word faith for the Chris- tian." Hunger must be met with true food. The child must be met at his point of interest in, or point of contact with life on the plane of his interpreting experience. The rule of the image points to the fact that what we bring to him must be concrete. The more pictorial the better. Abstractions are poor food if they really are food at all. Then the food must be simple, immedi-
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ate, positive, and related. All this however is so fully explained and illustrated in my previous volume "The Point of Contact in Teaching" that it were but duplication to go over it here. The reader is referred to it as a discussion of a sine qua non of education practically pre- sented.
One thing, however, remains to be said. It is quite in order nowadays to reiterate the "Re- capitulation Theory " as a sure guide to the child's stages of development. This theory has been hinted at by educators of the past, and was squarely taught by Froebel. Some present day educational psychologists and psycho-educa- tionists build solidly on it. The theory is, in brief, that there is a close analogy between the development of the individual and that of the human race. At one time or another the indi- vidual is in the hunting, the agricultural, or other stage of society, and must be appealed to accord- ingly. The theory is taking and so we find the educational journals fairly lurid with the doctrine that the child is "a little savage." The real meaning of this statement, granting that it is a credible scientific proposition, is, in the majority of third and fourth hand writers, over-strained or misapplied. Like the doctrine of heredity it has put many a teacher and mother in a wrong and harmful attitude towards the child, and has helped them to treat him as the white man has treated the Indian and the Filipino. Some hy- potheses are good for the genetic scientist and,
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in inexpert hands, bad for the practice of life. And this is one of them.
Dr. G. Stanley Hall in his article on Sunday- school and Bible Teaching' rightly says that the Old Testament " has a far greater variety of strik- ing events, a greater wealth of history, a larger repertory of persons, dramatic and romantic in- cidents," than the New Testament. But when he adds that " this is the stage of life when the boy who repeats and recapitulates in his develop- ment the entire life of the race, is at the same stage in which Old Testament events live, move, and have their being," he is, to say the least, on debatable ground — so far as a basis of pedagog- ical process is concerned. The American boy of to-day is so differently environed, the whole situation indeed is so different that even if the recapitulation theory be biologically and his- torically true, it cannot necessarily fairly domi- nate pedagogical practice. To begin a child's instruction with Genesis is unpedagogical because the child's immediate experience is the only point at which he can be reached in the concrete.
Carrying out his principle. Dr. Hall says that the New Testament is chiefly for adolescence; that it is a bad sign if boys before twelve or four- teen have an interest in the character, life, or teachings of Jesus; that there is little in their souls that responds to the Gospel. " Here again,'' he says, "it is easy to work up a superficial in- terest as a Sunday-school artifact, but this is be-
' Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1901.
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cause of the long historic and instinctive sub- jection of child to adult life. The danger is that precocious interest in Jesus will result in con- ceptions of his character and work that will dwarf more adequate ideas later, and that a pre- mature interest in him will interfere with the great deepening and enlargement of the affectional nature which the early teens bring. . . . Pre- cocious training before the advent of its proper nascent period is always open to two grave objections; the first that it is a waste of time to teach by labored methods what would come of itself later; and second, it leads to a preformation and preoccupation of both heart and brain that rub the bloom, zest, and force ofT these subjects so that when the time is ripe they seem stale or deflowered of interest, and are met with indif- ference and ennui. Third, and worst of all, narrow childish images, conceptions, and thought-forms are already developed and made so hard and rigid by the great sense of the importance of the subject that their transformation is difficult." "Adolescence," adds Dr. Hall, "is the time when Jesus' character, example, and teaching are most needed. . . . This is the golden period of life, when all that is greatest and best in heart and will are at their strongest. ... No age is capable of such hearty unreserved devotion to Jesus as adolescence. The sublimity of his teachings and his motives, the meanings of many of the fifty parables, the Messianic expectation now realized like the prophetic dreams of boy-
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hood at the advent of this age, the temptation, the Sermon on the Mount, the character of John and Peter, which in the Dawson census are pre- ferred even to that of Jesus, the heroism in the face of danger, the complete devotion that sacri- fices itself for what is dearer than life, the slow development of a subjective side of life and of an inner oracle of right and wrong, the tender bud- ding conscience newly polarized to right and wrong: — all these in their depth and inwardness appear a real psychic hunger." And let us add the hunger must be met with real food — that which is digestible, and which is transformed into the bone and sinew of the spiritual life.
Full of suggestive truth as these passages from Dr. Hall are, they are better as a deduction from a direct study of the child than as a consequent of the Recapitulation Theory. This hypothesis has doubtless become a heavy encumbrance upon many a would-be student of the child. It has warped observation and led to extreme measures in dealing with children in order to satisfy the theory.
What is this child capable of assimilating — that is the question. What kind of food can he transform into good conduct : Nurture by food concerns the direct task, the formal teaching, the curriculum of information and of work. The idea of nutrition is more evident here than in the less direct modes of influence, yet nurture is none the less the only road to growth and power, and the realization of the divine ideal. The child's
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whole nature is hungry. This is his interest in the broadest and deepest sense, and to this we are to address ourselves in any direct attempt to satisfy his hunger or his nature's sense of need.
VI
NURTURE BY EXERCISE
Education by Self-expression : Choice and Will.
INDISPENSABLE as air, light, and food are to physical nurture and bodily growth, their efficacy depends upon our vital energy and self-efTort to use them. The oxygen of the atmos- phere will not restore heat to a lifeless blood, the light-painting image will not traverse a dead optic nerve to the brain, nor will bread and meat build up tissue in a body when life is extinct.
To life belongs the privilege of initiative, the right to make advances to whatever is presented from without. This is a matter of activity, of movement, of self-effort or exercise. No one has adequately defined life, but this much we can say, — it is characterized at least by the power of self-movement and this is a power that grows by its own exercise. This is simply a general state- ment given in particular and concrete form in the parables of the talents and the pounds; and reiterated abstractly again by our Lord in his dictum, "He that hath, to him shall be given; and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath " (Mark 4 : 25). We 278
Nurture By Exercise 279
are to strive to enter in at the strait gate, and we are to work out our own salvation. If there is anything evident in the Gospels and in the Epistles it is that Scripture stands back of the popular adage that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, man must do his part.
Here let us pause to note again the tendency of the church to thwart itself through its lack of the educative consciousness. Believing its theology it does not sufficiently see the unwisdom of press- ing it as much on one stage of the individual's development as on another. The experienced Christian can sing " Oh to be nothing" without much danger of becoming nothing or of noting the fragmentary character of the prayer. But to young life it is grossly inconsistent with the sense of activity.
In his book on English Hymns, Dr. S. W. Duffield quotes the Rev. Alexander McKenzie of Cambridge, Mass., in criticism of Topladys, "Simply to thy cross I cling," as follows: "I know the beautiful line of the hymn; I would not take a note from its divine and blessed melody. It is true, but like most single lines it is but a fragment of the truth. . . . What did Christ ever say, what did the Apostles ever teach, which warrants you in saying ' All I have to do is to cling to the cross ' ? What did Jesus say about the cross ? He said, ' Take it up and go about obeying the will of God. ... By Christ are we saved and Christ we are to follow. Cling to the cross, but not ' simply.' " In other
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words, mere passivity has no place in the ideal of Jesus. On the other hand, such a hymn as
" Take my life and let it be Consecrated, Lord, to thee,"
is built upon the idea of responsibility for our powers and their consecrated activity. It is a hymn for any age or stage of life. The moral of it all is that we must select our hymns according to the natures that are to sing them. But this is a digression.
Exercise, then, is the very fundamental essen- tial of growth, of development — say of life. The processes of nurture find their validity in it. And exercise means far more than we generally think. It means the interdependent activity of the organs as well as the muscular movement of the limbs and the body. Food, sunshine, and air will not make an athlete of one who lies pros- trate all day. Is this a commonplace ? So com- monplace that we do not live up to the truth in it — especially when we carry it over into the realm of the soul. To regard the child's initia- tive, to concede to him the right to his own powers through their self-exercise — this is the thing without which he cannot develop, and the very thing with which we are quickest to inter- fere.
The terminology of this book is that of every- day life. What we call Exercise as an essential of nurture, modern education calls "Self-activ-
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ity " as an essential of education. The popular mouth says, "Experience is the school where man learns wisdom"; it says, "You may lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink." Carlyle says, " Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working." Froebel's principle was, "Learn by doing." The religion of Jesus is a religion of doing. We are to be "doers of the Word." Whosoever will do his will shall know of the doctrine. Froebel's inspiration came from a single text learned in childhood — "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God." In a friend's album he wrote, "Thou givest man bread; let my aim be to give man himself." His whole educational system plans to put the indi- vidual in full possession of his own powers.
It is trite nowadays to say that we educate for power rather than for mere intellectual ac- quisition; we educate for character rather than for mental property; we mean to "put the whole boy to school " — as Dr. Woodward points it. Swedenborg says the "Kingdom of God is a kingdom of uses." He who prays, " Thy king- dom come, thy will be done," virtually prays that he may make the most of himself. Unde- veloped power is an insult to the Divine Giver of the basis of power. Some years ago Herbert Spencer was asked for an opinion upon certain examination papers submitted to him. His reply is significantly in line with what has been said:^ "There is only one general criticism which I feel
^ " Various Fragments."
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inclined to make upon the examination papers you have forwarded — a criticism to which I think they are open in common with examination papers at large. They are drawn up with the exclusive view of testing acquisition rather than power. I hold that the more important thing to be ascertained by an examination is not the quantity of knowledge which a man has taken in and is able to pour out again, but the ability he shows to use the knowledge he has acquired; and I think that examinations of all kinds are habitually faulty, inasmuch as they use the first test rather than the last, by which to judge of superiority."
The potential idea, then, underlies education — nurture — as it does life itself. Absolute impo- tency is lifelessness.
Manifestly the soul, like the body, grows through its own exercise. Education is therefore not a molding process by the teacher's hand, but a development of faculties by the creative self- activity of the subject. Froebel's great insight, says Miss Blow,' is "that the human being is a self-expressing being; as a baby he expresses his abounding fullness of life in incessant move- ment; through movement, his inner force strengthens and unfolds, and he becomes an imi- tative being. . . . From imitation he rises to transforming and productive activity, and tries to stamp himself upon the little world which, through imitation, he had stamped upon himself.
» " Letters to a Mother," p. 58.
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Finally, he establishes within his soul the two contrasting yet complementary activities of self- revelation and investigation, and while on the one hand he expresses his own ideals in plastic, pictorial, verbal, or musical form, he strives, on the other, to discover by ceaseless search the meaning of the world in which he finds himself. The duty of education is to utilize the ascending modes of self-activity so as to help them realize their own unconscious aim." Through activity man creates himself. In activity he reveals him- self. Miss Blow further asks, "What, then, in its lowest definition is a soul ? There can be but one answer. It is a self-active energy. What is meant by self-activity ? The power of originat- ing deeds and giving shape or form."
Again :^ "No paradox of mind is more inter- esting than that which relates to the connection between imitation, moral freedom, and intel- lectual originality. The child who imitates any alien deed has formed an ideal and energizes to realize it. This is the beginning of moral free- dom. He has inferred a causal energy as the be- getter of a perceptible effect. This is the begin- ning of intellectual freedom. All higher degrees of moral freedom will be achieved by ascent from the imitation of external deeds to conscious reproduction of the ideals which lie back of such deeds. All higher degrees of intellectual free- dom will be attained by wider applications of the idea of causality. For to determine actions
' " Mottoes and Commentaries," p. 34.
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through ideals is to be self-determining, and hence free, and to make a causal synthesis of the elements of experience is to win intellectual free- dom, or in other words, to become original."
Self-activity is the great central fact of nurture or education. Self-activity is manifested in plants as a "formative power that can conquer other forms and impose its own form upon them."^ Animal self-activity is manifested in a formative energy in tissue-forming and locomo- tion. By the latter, the animal changes his en- vironment. Feeling is a self-activity, a reaction against environment.
"Self-activity is freedom," says Dr. Harris. " The so-called 'freedom of the will ' belongs to the highest degree of self-activity." " The will is the most direct and immediate form of self- activity. ... If there is no such thing as self-activity or self-determination there is no such thing as will power."
" The moral law is the law of activity of spirit, the living, the human, the divine. It is the law of self-activity. No self-active being can retain its freedom or self-activity except by conforming to moral law."*
The morality of Jesus is one of perfect free- dom, under the law. Man must be allowed absolute freedom to do right in order to be right. The will cannot develop save by its own initial exercise — no more than an arm or a leg can.
• " Psychologic Foundations of Education," by W. T. Harris. « Ibid, p. 317.
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"The history of humanity," says Hegel, "is a progress in the consciousness of freedom." "So shall I keep thy law continually forever and ever. And I will walk at liberty for I seek thy precepts" (Psalm 119).
" The truth shall make you free "(John 8: 32). " If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed " (John 8: 36). And James speaks of the "Perfect law of liberty" (James 1:25). It is the perfect law, for it is the only law under which man can develop through his own self- exercise. "Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty " (2 Cor. 3: 17).
That profound student, Thomas Davidson, notes* that "Aristotle maintained that man's happiness and perfection consisted in the actual- ization or energy of his highest and distinctive faculty, viz., reason, a view which was largely responsible for the mediaeval exaltation of con- templation, as against practice. Froebel holds that they consist in the progressive and harmon- ious actualization of all man's faculties, in the evolution of the entire human being." Froebel was the first to see clearly that education is con- scious, or ordered, evolution. He did not believe in mere unregulated spontaneities. But he did see, what few people see, continues Davidson, "that, though children are born with what are called evil tendencies, these may be starved into inaction, while good tendencies, though weak,
• " A History of Education."
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may be nourished into complete energy, by having their proper good supplied to them in the proper degree and at the proper time." Here is our idea of nurture. This " proper good " is largely a matter of images and of atmospheric suggestion — itself sometimes pictorial, sometimes a more subtly indefinable stimulant to the emotions and sentiments. But note that the process of nour- ishing into complete energy is possible only by the initiative exercise of the child — his self-ex- pression.
Pedagogy demands more than mere activity, it demands self-activity and that creative. This is the full meaning of exercise as we apply it to nurture. Give the child his right of initiative. There can be no soul grov^th without it. "All truth dies in the mind," says James L. Hughes,^ "unless it is lived out in practice. No truth is clear to any individual until he has applied it. There are thousands of teachers who can define 'self-activity' who never give their pupils an opportunity to be self-active."
Activity is one of the dominant characteristics of childhood. A little boy once earned twenty- five cents by what he confessed to be the most difficult task of his life; he sat still for one hour. A boy in a school for backward children was asked what he came to school for. "Just to set here and wait for school to leave out," he replied, evidently most impressed with ennui as a school- task. Prof. Sandford Bell thus comments:*
1 " Froebel's Educational Laws." " TAe Outlook.
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" One of the things which particularly inter- ested me was the marvellous recuperative power of a child in a brief period of time. It would play with all zeal, intensity, and abandon until apparently ' tired out,' then cut the rate of activ- ity down — never to absolute quiescence — for a few minutes, and afterwards resume it at concert- pitch as fresh as new. This was kept up throughout the day, with slightly diminished ability to rally towards nightfall. Such is true of a healthy, vigorous child. . . .
" We may say that this enormous activity in the child is the essential means which nature has supplied for its education. Activity means edu- cability. It means the multiplication of experi- ences. The number of experiences is one of the matters of first importance in the education of the child. Everything else being equal, that be- ing is best educated who has had the greatest number and greatest variety of experiences. But we know that everything else is not equal, and that a child can have experiences of a kind that are ruinous and can also have more of any one kind than he can stand, and a greater variety than is good for him. Nevertheless the point holds that, whatever of education the child gets in extent and in quality is obtained by means of his activity. Activity is his educational capital. It is the purpose of nature and the duty of the parent and teacher rightly to invest it."
How is it in the Sunday-school, for instance ? How far do we utilize the pupils' energies?
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How much opportunity do we give them to de- velop their moral judgment ? In Bible study there is a great field here. "The power to dis- cover new problems," says Hughes, "is much higher than the power to solve them. Children are naturally problem finders, the schools make them problem solvers." The school is thus in a degree divorced from life — especially so the Sun- day-school. And then comes the question whether Nature ought not to have a larger part in our Sunday-schools.
In a paper read before the American Associa- tion for the Advancement of Science, Miss Louise Klein Miller says : " Educators are becoming alive to the importance of school gardens as a potent factor in education, and the next five years will see rapid progress in this direction.
"The schools of Europe are far in advance of us in this phase of education, and the agricultural and horticultural progress is largely due to the efficiency of the school gardens. In Austria- Hungary alone there are 18,000 school gardens. In France, the teachers are required by law to be able to instruct their pupils in the elements of agriculture and horticulture, and normal schools have been established for the purpose of giving teachers such training. No plans for school buildings to which the state contributes are ap- proved unless accompanied by plans for a school garden. The study of horticulture is compulsory in Belgium. In Germany and England, school gardens are encouraged, but not regulated by
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law. Some excellent work has been done in this country, but in many instances the educative features have been made subservient to the rais- ing of vegetables.
" The theory and practice of gardening satisfies certain dominant interests in a child's physical, mental and moral evolution; affords an oppor- tunity to expend normally and naturally often misdirected energy; develops an appreciation of the proper values of things; quickens a knowl- edge of the close interrelations in nature; gives fundamental principles of great economic signifi- cance; suggests some of the great problems in the struggle for existence; teaches the dignity of labor and personal responsibility."
In a suggestive study of ' ' The Dangerous Class," Dr. James M. Ludlow, points out^ that "The danger to society comes from neither the rich nor the poor as a class, but from the degeneration of manhood of whatever social grade." This de- generation grows out of an undeveloped will. He continues: " In the parable of the Two Sons our Lord made a diagnosis of the most fatal disease in human character, and pronounced it to be an impairment of the Will. The father had commanded — ' Go work to-day in my vine- yard.' The younger son replied, ' I go, sir,' but he went not. This was doubtless a well- meaning fellow, honest at the moment; but some- thing diverted him from his purpose. . . .
"The Empress Catherine of Russia, looking
1 " Incentives for Life."
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around upon her broad-browed advisers who were holding up some policy which demanded immediate execution, longed to found ' Pro- fessorships of Decision ' in all the schools of her land, lest the Russian Empire should dissolve into the North Sea."
Of absolutely vital importance as the will is to the formation of character we still hear good men, in the pulpit and out, urging the "sur- render" of the will. Thus a distinguished preacher says: " We urge the duty of, present- ing the entire nature to the Son of God. We lay stress on the will. This must be entirely surrendered." Does he not mean conformed or better, consecrated, to the Divine will ? The man who "surrenders" his will has none left and is less than a man. Dr. Ludlow goes on:
"Whatever the occasion which makes it ap- parent, the most common weakness in character is an unassertive Will, a lack of volitional in- itiative.'
And yet with what pious intent are parents often advised to break the child's will! Even a self-willed person is weak-willed — wanting in the power to control himself. At one time when the Sunday-school lesson was on Absalom a well-meaning but misguided writer in a religious paper said: " There should be no peace nor rest in the family, and there will be none, so long as a child is habitually disobedient. If children do not obey their parents, they will not obey God. Parents, see, in the fate of Absalom, a warning
Nurture By Exercise 291
lest you spoil your children. Better break the will of a child than have the child break the heart of the parent." Think of that, Reader, as a statement of educational values! If alternative must be made, preserve the will-power of the child. But a proper nurture demands neither. The law of exercise calls for the right of choice. Only through choice is the will strengthened. "What is character but a completely fashioned will?" asks Miss Blow. "How shall will be fashioned save by free choices ? And how shall free choices be made unless the mind is confronted by varying — yes, even antagonistic — possibilities of conduct?"
Character may be defined as the sum of our choices. It is a system of self-controls, self- directing energizings. If there is anything sure in Scripture, from Eden to Jesus, it is the right of choice. The trouble is we are too anxious to be obeyed. We enjoy authority and we should rather exercise it than have the child exercise his will through conceding him a choice. The state, says Dr. Harris, "presupposes freedom and re- sponsibility, or else it could not punish." It says to the criminal: " Your deed is your own; take its consequences upon yourself." A little child is too ignorant of causes and consequences to be thus met in fact; but it is through his choices that he becomes a moral, because a willing creature. "Moral life begins," says Miss Blow, "when conscious motives take the place of blind im- pulsion. Where these are lacking there is self-
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determination in the forms of impulse and desire. Where they are present there is self-determination in its highest potency as free-will."
If we understand ourselves we are more anxious to be obeyed than to have the child obedient. We are ourselves disobedient to the heavenly vision of child-nature. All nature, human or other, is commanded by obeying it. Children suffer more deterioration through adult disobedience towards them than through their own disobedience (real or supposed) towards their adult guardians.
A willing obedience is the only true obedience. Mere compulsory compliance is not in a spiritual sense obedience at all. This willing or true obe- dience rests, as Miss Blow shows,^ on faith. "From the ninety degraded children whom he mothered at Stanz, the gentle Pestalozzi learned that not in force and not in appeals to reason, but in quickening faith must be sought the point of contact between the nurturing and the nur- tured life." Faith presupposes experience. The baby trusts his mother's arm because he finds it strong. In like manner he must learn to trust her wisdom and her love. He can only half be- lieve them if they are inconsistent and vacillating. Hence Froebel's insistence upon a mother's being all she would have her children believe her to be. If your child "trusts you he will obey you; he will hide nothing from you; he will not resent your punishments, and when he asks you ques-
1 " Letters to a Mother."
!
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tions whose answers are beyond his comprehen- sion he will humbly accept your simple state- ment that they cannot be explained to him until he is older. ... All individual relationships and all corporate life rest upon pillars of faith."
Referring to the study of Dante Miss Blow says, " Faith is the beating heart of the body corporate. What a revelation it was to us when we understood why the circles of fraud were placed lower in the Inferno than the circles of violence! Was treachery the blackest of sins because it not only loosed the tie of universal brotherhood but sundered the closer and more spiritual cords woven by free choices of the will ? Was all sin in essence the attack of will upon will and was violence a sin of less degree than fraud because its attack was merely external ? Was fraud the slaughter of will by will, the murder of spirit by spirit ? Conversely, if faith were the living cord which bound all individuals into one great hu- manity, and made possible the hierarchy of hu- man institutions, was not the nurture of faith the beginning of all true education, and was it not the prime duty of the educator to win faith by deserving it?"
The superb passage just quoted implies one thing — faith grows by exercise. We cannot im- part it even though we give the opportunity for its growth by showing ourselves deserving of it. It works from within voluntarily. In a sense, it may be induced but it cannot be compelled. Hence obedience, as resting on faith, must be a
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voluntary course. The writer on Absalom al- ready quoted says, "Absalom was never made to do right as a boy, and hence he would not choose to go right" when he grew to manhood. Perhaps he was made to do too much. His choosing power may never have been rightly ex- ercised. His will was weak for a self-willed man is a weak-willed man. Says Ludlow: " Given an absolute inertia of Will; let this con- tinue when the soul has passed into the spirit world. There, we may suppose, all the motives to holiness glow with the immediate prospect of reward. But the power of choice is gone. Will not this be perdition ? Will not conscious in- ability to take heaven be itself hell?"
The one power above all others, then, in which we should encourage development through its own judicious exercise is the power of judg- ment, of choice, of acting by free volition. Obe- dience is often a necessary act, but says that marvellous interpreter, Dr. George Matheson,^ "Obedience is in itself neither good nor bad — may be either good or bad; it depends upon whom we obey. Nor is the quality which you desire for your child that of absolute obedience. There is not a mother in the land who does not long for the day when the actions of her child shall cease to be dictated by her own will. The dearest moment to the heart of a parent is the moment of a child's spontaneity — the day when it anticipates the ordinary command and does the
I " The Representative Men of the Bible."
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deed of its own accord. What is the joy of that moment to the parental heart ? It is the recogni- tion that the reign of absolute obedience is past and that the reign of volition has begun. It is the perception that the child has ceased to be a subordinate and has become an equal — animated by the same motive, inspired by the same will. . . . The sweetest music to any parent is the voice of the child's cooperation, and the summer of a father's love is perfected in the hour when the relation of authority is superseded by the sympathy of communion."
But the obedience that rests on perfect trust and faith and love, is an act of choice, a voluntary act of compliance or conformity of will to will. This is the obedience of our divine Lord. "Not my will but thine" — this was the "sympathy of communion," the perfect trust, the willing, not the willess mind. " If ye love me keep my com- mandments,"— you will do it of your own free will, not from compulsion. "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you," — you will know that I know better than you, what ought to be done, and knowing this you will choose my way; you will know that there is good — virtue — in doing my will and you will choose an obedience which your faith in me guarantees to be a right obedience.
Suggestively, does Mrs. Oilman write,^ "The too obedient child has learned only to do what he is told. If not told he has no initiative; and if
• " Concerning Children."
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told wrong, he does wrong. Life to him is not a series of problems to be solved, but a mere book of orders. . . . The things we are compelled to do in obedience we make no prog- ress in. They are either obeyed or disobeyed, but are not understood and improved upon. . . . Those races where the children are most absolutely subservient, as with the Chinese and Hindu, where parents are fairly worshipped and blindly obeyed, are not races of free and pro- gressive thought and healthy activity. . . . The painful truth is that we have used childish weaknesses to make our government easy for us instead of cultivating the powers that shall make life easy to them."
These strong passages may easily be miscon- strued. Obedience is necessary because a child is too weak and inexperienced to be thrown en- tirely on his own resources. He must be given choices to exercise his will upon. He must be forbidden to do some things but he must be given an alternative. The parent has great re- sponsibility in his selection of opportunities for the child's exercise of choice. The problem is to enlighten the child's judgment and strengthen his will by exercise. This is the primal thing; the mere obedience is secondary and will follow in the wake of that faith in the parent which the parent's faithfulness merits. "To understand how to modify the child's action by such proc- esses as shall keep it still his own, to alter his act by first altering his feeling and thought and
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so keeping the healthy sequence unbroken " — that is the subtle and difficult task.
" A pretty state of things it would be if chil- dren were to be allowed to think they knew as much as their parents," says a mother; "there is no way except to break their wills at the be- ginning." And Helen Hunt Jackson replies/ "But you have just said that it is not to your will as will that he is to yield, but to your supe- rior knowledge and experience. That surely is not ' breaking his will.' It is of all things furthest removed from it. It is educating his will. It is teaching him how to will."
And H. Clay Trumbull:* "The measure of will power is the measure of personal power with a child as with an adult. ... A broken will is worth as much in its sphere as a broken bow. A child with a broken will is not so well furnished for the struggle of life as a child with only one arm, or one leg, or one eye. . . . Every child ought to be trained to conform his will to the demands of duty; but that is bending his will, not breaking it. . . . The term 'will' as here employed applies to the child's faculty of choosing or deciding between two courses of action. Breaking a child's will is bringing the pressure of external force directly upon that will, and causing the will to give way under the pressure of that force. Training a child's will is bringing such influences to bear upon the child that he is ready to choose or de-
1 « Bits of Talk." 2 « Hints on Child Training."
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cide in favor of the right course of action. . . . A child's will is his truest personality; the expression of his will in a free choice is the highest expression of his personality. . . . As God, our wise and loving Father in heaven, deals with us his children, so we as earthly fathers, should deal with our children. We should guard sacredly their privilege of personal choice; and while using every proper means to induce them to choose aright, we should never, never, never force their choice, even into the direction of our intelligent preference for them. The final responsibility of a choice and of its con- sequences rests with the child, and not with the parent. ... A conflict between a parent and a child, where the only question is. Whose will shall yield to the other ? is, after all, neither more nor less than a conflict of brute force. . . . All the way along through his training- life, a child ought to know what are to be the legitimate consequences of his chosen action, in every case, and then be privileged to choose ac- cordingly. There is a place for punishment in a child's training, but punishment is a penalty at- tached to an evil choice; it is not brute force applied to compel action against choice."
I have quoted liberally on this subject since the consensus is peculiarly suggestive — and might be indefinitely expanded by equally strong authori- ties. It must, however, be apparent, without further enlargement, that what we are treating as Exercise is the all essential element of nurture.
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It is life taking hold of the external and fashion- ing itself into the strength of a personality. Creative self-activity, self-exercise is the sine qua non of this development of character into a per- sonality made in the image of God and fit for eternity.
The principle of choice is universally applica- ble. In a Sunday-school the children ought occasionally to be allowed a choice of topics, of hymns, of appropriation to benevolences, etc. In the home, a child should have some choice of clothes, of his room arrangement and decoration. He should often be present when choice is being made even where he has no rightful voice, in order that he may see the grounds of judgment. Moral decisions should take him into the count. Professor Rider, the naturalist, ran away from school in order that he might pursue his studies!
Much has been said about the concrete in teach- ing. The image is always concrete; the con- science is always concrete. It says 1 ought, or ought not, to do this thing. The educational con- sciousness will see this truth at every turn. Take Psalms 66: 18; "If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me." We can do this only in the concrete. We must see some par- ticular iniquitous image before we can regard iniquity. Our heart may be wicked but it can only plot wickedness in some specified form mentally pictured in its mind's eye.
Abstraction, generalizing is a matter of exer- cise. To be a "good boy" is to do, or avoid
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doing, certain concrete acts previously ordered or forbidden. In time there comes to be a sense of goodness in the abstract, an induction from con- crete cases. The rule is, to give the child a concrete image from which he forms an abstract ethical principle and applies it in the concrete life again. But it is little use to teach by offering the abstract principle at the start. Few adults, even, can apply principles which are not of their own abstracting from the concrete elements of experience.
Under the head of Exercise comes also the whole idea of motor training — as in the manual training school, the workshop, the farm. " Chris- tian Endeavor " is too often a misnomer, devoid of any real self-efTort or self-expression.
"Love grows by serving," and the spiritual life grows by the exercise of giving. The body grows by its intake, but the spirit by its output no less than by its intake. Yet both grow by exercise or work.
Says the Sunday School Times: "From cor- ner-stone to keystone, work enters into the arch of life. Organ, and surgeon, and liturgy, and energy, are all the same word; different changes rung upon it, of course, but all the same word, and that word is ' erg,' or ' ferg,' — only an ancient form of our word 'work.' This word enters in as the basis of so many other great words, be- cause the fact enters in as the basis of so many other great facts. Goethe suggested a change in the translation of the first verse of John's Gospel,
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making it read, ' In the beginning was the work.' And the thought is true, whatever may be said of the translation, for Jesus said, 'My Father worketh even until now, and I work.' If we want any of these great words of art, or healing, or worship, or activity, in our lives, we must put some of this great word of work into our lives."
The fact is, that nothing kills like monotony for it permits of no outlet to the self-expressing powers. Monotony in work is a kind of imposed idleness. One rusts under either. This is one of the terrible things about child-labor when it is an exact and monotonous routine. A human being degenerates as soon as he is turned into a mere machine without outlook or outlet for the creative mind — which to some extent, every normal mind is. It is well known how solitary prisoners invent ways of exercising their powers. One poor fellow counted the verses, words, and letters of the Bible. A cell in the penitentiary at Philadelphia was elaborately decorated by a pris- oner, with colors extracted from yarns. The boy who is tending cattle whittles a stick or torments a spider. Something must be done, writes Thompson-Seton, "to respond to the natural craving for exercise, and to save their minds and bodies from actually withering from disuse. If instead of ' human captives,' " he continues, "we read ' wild animals ' in all this, we shall have a very fair portrait of what we may see every day in an ordinary menagerie."
The minds of animals in captivity, he contends,
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must be cared for as well as their bodies. The beasts in the travelling show are longer lived than in most gardens because they have change of scene, and such excitements as " keep them from torpid habits and mental morbidness." He quotes a successful manager, as declaring that certain captive animals end life in lunacy. Bears fall into sullen despondency. Foxes and cats go crazy and apes and baboons become vicious or break down. The very actions of many caged animals indicate that they are suffering from mo- notony and are seeking that exercise — self-ex- pression— which is common and essential to all normal life, human or lower.
All this is sensible and suggestive of our duty. We waste life with appalling recklessness, by re- fusing it a chance to " do its own do." Employ- ers waste their employees' and of course waste their own money in the end by insufficient regard for their need of self-expression in varied forms. Modern philanthropy is waking up to the need of regarding men's minds as well as their hands and their spirits. The library for the railroad man off duty is a mode of salvation. A well spent vaca- tion is work doubled in quality.
"Economy of energy," says F. W. Parker, "is the intrinsic mark of all progress in nature and art. . . . Education is the economy of self-effort." Bodily fatigue is costly to the soul as well as to the body. Yet, as Dr. Francis
» " The Study of Children."
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Warner notes ; ^ " fatigue is not itself unhealthy," provided it can be followed by rest and recrea- tion. If it is permitted to last day after day "a more permanent condition of exhaustion of great importance may supervene."
But we are often cruel and destructive in goad- ing children on in their studies when they are fatigued, or at all events, in expecting the best work of them at such times. Prof. M. V. O'Shea thus illustrates: "So in the direct mental tests, a pupil cannot after a half day's work in school do such an apparently simple thing as to divide a line into a given number of equal parts with the accuracy that he can earlier in the day. The same effects of fatigue are evident in the lessened power of retention of visual images, and of identification of similar impressions. In short, fatigue lessens mental ability; produces, relatively speaking, dullness, stupidity, and inaccuracy in thinking. . . . Some children, from what- ever cause, may be in a more or less constant state of fatigue all or most of the time; and since fatigue produces what is called dullness, these unfortunates will be distinguished as dull- ards and stupids, unless the greatest care be taken in home and school to conserve their nervous energy. If such care is not taken, a chronic con- dition is established in the nervous system which permits the energy to escape in useless ways; and if this continues long enough, perhaps through the college period, it is doubtful if the individual will ever fully recover, since the nerve
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cells probably acquire their permanent modes of action by this time."
The soul is largely dependent on the body and the Christian educator cannot ignore bodily needs in his zeal to save the soul. Eloquently does Dr. G. Stanley Hall plead this cause.^ "Men are, happily, just now beginning to learn what a power can be brought to bear against the king- dom of evil in the world by right body-keeping, . . . and what a sin and shame it is when our temples of the Holy Ghost are neglected and lapse to premature decay. Finally, this is a world and age of achievement. Men are coming to be measured more and more not by what they know or even what they feel, important as that is, but by what they can do and actively accom- plish in the world. Knowledge can never save individuals or nations. Subjective emotions are not enough. But there is one language and one only of complete manhood and that is willed action."
There is always pleasure in accomplishment through self-effort. Every boy or girl who sets out initiatively wants to win and enjoys the at- tainment of new power by success. For this reason difficulty is not to be eliminated from the child's life. But there are difficulties and diffi- culties, those that edify and profit and those that break down and waste. The trouble with most
' Pedagogical Seminary ; article on " Christianity and Physical Culture."
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teachers and parents is that they do not choose the child's difficulties wisely. Mere mystification is vastly different from mystery.
Look at the "catch questions" sometimes given at examinations for college admission to both boys and girls. They are altogether un- worthy of an institution that professes to educate. They have no part in nature's scheme of nurture, for they have no assimilable elements of power. In fact the narrowing effect of the requirements for college admission are painfully evident to any one who observes the cram. And so with home tasks and school tasks and workaday tasks. There is a fine art of removing difficulties by encouraging a child through them, and a gross art of increasing difficulties by discouragement. On this point listen to some words by the ever wise and winning Jacob Abbott:
"Never underrate the difficulties which your pupils will have to encounter, or try to persuade them that what you assign is easy. Doing easy things is generally dull work, and it is especially discouraging and disheartening for a pupil to spend his strength in doing what is really diffi- cult for him when his instructor, by calling his work easy, gives him no credit for what may have been severe and protracted labor. If a thing is really hard for the pupil, his teacher ought to know it and admit it. The child then feels that he has some sympathy.
" It is astonishing how great an influence may be exerted over a child by his simply knowing
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that his efforts are observed and appreciated. You pass a boy in the street wheeling a heavy load in a barrow; now simply stop to look at him, with a countenance which says, ' That is a heavy load; I should not think that boy could wheel it;' and how quick will your look give fresh strength and vigor to his efforts. On the other hand, when, in such a case, the boy is faltering under his load, try the effect of telling him, 'Why, that is not heavy; you can wheel it easily enough; trundle it along.' The poor boy may drop his load, disheartened and dis- couraged, and sit down upon it in despair. It is so in respect to the action of the young in all cases. They are animated and incited by being told in the right way that they have something difficult to do. Hence, even if the work you are assigning to a class is easy, do not tell them so unless you wish to destroy all their spirit and interest in doing it; and if you wish to excite their spirit and interest, make your work diffi- cult, and let them see that you know it is so; not so difficult as to tax their powers too heavily, but enough so to require a vigorous and perse- vering effort. Let them distinctly understand, too, that you know it is difficult, that you mean to make it so, but that they have your sympa- thy and encouragement in the efforts which it calls them to make."
See that the wavering mind is kept filled with the idea — especially the desirable side of it. "The essential achievement of the will," says
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James/ " in short, when it is most * voluntary,' is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast be- fore the mind. The so-doing is the fiat; and it is a mere physiological incident that when the object is thus attended to, immediate motor con- sequences should ensue. Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will."
We have seen how these " motor conse- quences " ensue in our discussion of the mental image. " If you want to go to Europe," said an enthusiastic tourist to one who hesitated, "the way to do is to begin to talk about it." The more the mind is filled with images the surer will it be to wax ardent in a desire to follow those images into the realization of them. The will's function is in compelling the concrete idea to stand in full view. The will applies itself to an idea. " Consent to the idea's undivided presence, this is effort's sole achievement," says James. When the will consents to hold the idea, to en- tertain the image, it consents to the idea and to the involuntary following of the image. Here we see the connection between this chapter and those that precede. The entertained image and the feeling of delight or repugnance which comes with it, result in those deeds which lay the track for future consent and control, and in this lies the making of character.
Hence our responsibility for our children's exercise in its largest sense — exercise all the way from the purely automatic actions of the organs
1 " Psychology."
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to the most conscious intent of will. We owe it to our children that we so environ them that they will react joyously to a healthy stimulus; that we afford them every opportunity for self-develop- ment; that we give them ample room to exercise their choice, establish a preference, follow aspira- tions, and act from self-determination.
Every true man is a self-made man. The will is the man. Says Miinsterberg,^ " Our personal life in its political, economical, religious, scien- tific, esthetic, technical, and practical aspects is a manifoldness of will-attitudes and acknowledg- ments." But we have much to do with these will-attitudes of children (and men) for we set before them the objects and pictures, the ma- terial of their vision, which they inevitably select to follow; we help to make the atmosphere which elates or depresses, ennobles or besots; we offer them husk or corn, mud or milk, out of which we expect them to build tissue or raise and follow ideals.
Out of self-effort and self-control comes Habit, which Professor James ^ with his aptness of metaphor calls "the enormous fly-wheel of so- ciety, its most precious conservative agent. . . . Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue." It is the great economizer of the expense of nervous and muscular energy — and education, nurture, is a matter of economy, an affair of values.
1 " Psychology and Life." « " Psychology."
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"As a habit grows," says Prof. John MacCunn,^ "conscious attention upon its conditions is minimized and therefore made available for other purposes. . . . When the habit is sufficiently formed to subserve its purpose con- sciousness retires from the scene. ... In forming habits the individual is making a moral tradition for himself."
Tendencies to bad habits must be self-sup- pressed as truly as must good habits be self-im- pelled. This means power of initiative, resolve, prompt and determined action. In other words it means a sound intellectual judgment, a deep feeling, and an executive will.
Here we reach the unity of personality in Emotion, Intellect, and Will. Now the feelings and emotions largely constitute what we com- monly call "Heart"; but as we have seen in the chapter on Atmosphere, the moral feelings must be educated only indirectly, and not by mere self-exercise. Yet nothing can grow without exercise. The growth of the emotions, how- ever, is not desirable except it be unified with the right growth of intellectual judgment and will-power. In this unification lies the heart. The good-hearted man does not simply pity, he helps.
The atmospheric or indirect method therefore appeals to the feeling largely through the intellect and the will. The feehng to be educated is not discussed nor appealed to directly. The appeal
1 " The Making of Character."
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comes in a roundabout way. " It will not be possible to cultivate the heart directly be- cause the exercise of the heart without the intellect and the will is simply the indulgence of the emotions," says Dr. William T. Harris. "This heart" — he continues, in a luminous ex- position, "This heart is the undeveloped mind; when it develops, it grows in two directions, on the one hand towards the intellect and on the other hand towards the will. The emotions and passions grow towards the will and the sensa- tions grow towards the intellect. The acorn contains the whole oak, but as yet undeveloped. When the oak grows it sends a root downwards into the ground and a stalk upwards into the light, to become the trunk of the tree with its branches. The heart has not yet polarized into intellect and will.
" On the other hand, when we get a new view in the intellect and express it often and in a great variety of ways, the view gradually becomes our form of seeing. It becomes immediate and thus becomes a feeling. We apply our view more and more instinctively, with less and less reflection, and finally we have it ready on every new oc- casion almost or quite in the form of a feeling or sensation. Again, when we adopt a new mode of action by our will, at first every repetition of it requires a careful effort. It becomes easier and easier with practice and by and by a habit or second nature. We then act spontane- ously. . . .
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"Now let us follow out this analysis by seeing the effect of educating either the will or the intel- lect separately. Let us suppose that the pupil who comes to our school for the first time is taken in the act of fighting a fellow pupil. We remonstrate with him and he informs us that his parents have taught him to * give others as good as they sent.' He believes in returning evil for evil. We all know that this principle causes us to desire to give others a little more evil every time than they have given us. The result of the adoption of this principle is that a man goes about the world with a chip on his shoulder. As a teacher we commence at once the education of the pupil's will. We inform him that any further action upon the basis of his principle must cease. If he fights he will be punished in this school. By direct influence of authority and penalty the teacher may secure a change of the pupil's will. Namely, he may learn to inhibit his tendency to fight. He will eventually acquire the habit of holding himself back from his tendency to fight. Perhaps the pupil will form a habit of this kind which will last him through life. But if his intellect remains unconvinced and he still thinks that it is the best theory to return to others the evil which they do to us, he will gradually re- cover his old habit of fighting and quarrelling when he comes to deal with the world. The education of the heart had proceeded only half way. The will had been educated into a habit, but the intellect was left with a theory which
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opposed the habit formed by the will. A con- tradiction has been left in the mind of the child; he has a habit of acting which does not agree with his intellectual conviction.
"Now, to become complete, the intellect should be educated into the same view that the will has already been educated into by the direct authority of the teacher. The teacher shows the child the true theory on which the civilization of the world is founded. He shows that the indi- dividual is related to his community as giver and receiver. ... He is taught the doctrine of the dependence of the individual upon the social whole for all that makes life worth living. This properly cannot be taught to the pupil by senti- mental moralizing. . . . Supposing that the intellectual view of the child is changed, and he sees by examples of the greatest men, that self- sacrifice is essential to success, and he sees that everybody gains good by self-sacrifice and forti- tude under persecution, then gradually his intel- lectual view changes, and he discovers the mis- take of his former moral principle. He adopts a new one: Do good to those who do evil to you. Now his new principle is in accordance with the habit which the teacher's authority has already imposed upon his will. He is obliged to prac- tice forbearance towards others who attack him, and he now does this in the full conviction that it is right. Speedily it becomes a habit — a second nature — and he finds that his immediate impulse on a given occasion is to act with a good heart
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and show benevolence and altruistic feelings and emotions. Now he has arrived at regeneration. Through a change of principles adopted by his intellect and a change of habits adopted by his will, he has attained a good heart.
"The important thing to see is not only that the heart expresses itself in intellectual ideas and deeds of the will, that is to say in thoughts and volitions; but also thoughts and volitions, the intellect and the will, become, through the habit, feelings and emotions again. When a new thought or view becomes familiar, it is used as a rule of action more and more unconsciously. Finally it becomes heart and is acted upon as if it were a mere impulse. So the will does deeds until its action becomes habitual and spontane- ous; then one acts from the heart."
Thus the word "heart" means more than mere feeling. It is the summarized moral per- sonality— the unit that feels, thinks and acts. And when this unified personality thinks, feels, and acts with a definite trend, so that it can be counted on as being free from whim or limp servility we think of it as character. This is the goal of all education, all nurture. If the trend is secured by Christian means and for Christian ends we have the highest type of character. Self-exercise, self-control, self-determination, self-expression — without this there is no resultant character, no growth, no true life. Choice lies at the root of all. "I have set before you hfe and death, blessing and cursing; therefore
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choose life . . . that thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice and thou mayest cleave unto him, for he is thy life."
VII
THE DISCIPLINE AND THE PRACTICE
IN sincerity and with fervor the preacher de- livers a sermon from Paul's text, "And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath; but nurture them in the chastening and admoni- tion of the Lord." In the very act he may pro- voke child-nature and violate the essential laws of the nurture that he is advocating. He may preach on the Saviour's setting the child in the midst and yet himself keep the child on the outer circle or in a lonely corner.
Here is a zealous writer who gives a store of impracticable advice to primary teachers, and adds, "Teach with blackboard, chart, or sand, as cir- cumstances and ability dictate, but let the illus- trating be lost in the glow of divine truth." What do the "circumstances dictate" and what is it to have the illustrating " lost in the glow of divine truth " ?
Here is another who discourses earnestly on the "religious nurture of childhood," saying that a "true nurture begun in time and steadily main- tained, in which the power of prayer, the attrac- tion of holy example, the assistance of grace by judicious instruction, and the energy of an intel- ligent faith have chief place, parents and the 315
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Church may look for the early appearance of the essential qualities of Christian experience and character, evidencing an unquestionable title to membership in the divine kingdom." What he says of prayer and example is right, but what is " judicious instruction " ? This is the very point. Nothing sounds better than to advise nurture; it is Pauline in strength and tenderness, but no ad- vice is likely to be more "icily regular," more "splendidly null," — because the real significance of nurture is not thought of in terms of soul-nu- trition, after the manner of nature in the bodily nutrition.
From the purely human point of view, then, the remedy for this ineffectual vagueness lies in the discipline of an educational consciousness. As a practical mode of inducing this conscious- ness, acquire the habit of thinking in educational values ; and as a standard by which such values are to be estimated and as a mode by which they are to be realised, think in terms of nutrition or Nurture. All education must come back to this idea of response to need. It is the natural way to growth.
This is the discipline. Interrogate your prob- lem in terms of nurture values. To be explicit let us take an illustration from a suggestive article, by a devoted teacher, in the Sunday School Times. The writer thus reports her expe- rience:
"Two comical instances of the persistency of children to adhere to the ideas which they have
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gained from a hurried and unexplained reading of the Bible story to them, occurred recently in my class. ' A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches' was the text. The child learned by ear, 'A good name is rather to be chosen than gray breeches.' It was almost im- possible to get her to change those last two words, or to make her see that the text as it stands in the original made better sense. A few words of introduction regarding riches, and how much people thought of them, etc., would have prevented this absurd concept."
Interrogate: Did the text furnish a single mental image or picture to the child } No. The child's eye is unsatisfied and makes up the best picture that association can find. In this case the sound of the abstract or general term, "great riches " easily led the mind to a concrete image probably already quite familiar to it — "gray breeches." Observe we are now thinking in terms of our second mode of nurture (Chapter IV). The image having been formed, of course it is difficult to obliterate it. That the text "great riches" made better sense to the adult did not at all affect the law of light, the persist- ence of vision in the child. It is doubtful whether the "words of introduction regarding riches " would have prevented "this absurd con- cept," unless some vivid picture in connection with the abstract term "riches" had invaded the child's mind, and probably that would have been just as absurd. The whole text was too abstract.
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The interrogation might even proceed farther, into the realm of the first mode, in which the child's fondness or antipathy for gray breeches might find a part; or it might proceed into the realm of the fourth mode if through association with a working father it stimulated his activity, etc. The text being unpictorial its educational value was small — or worse.
The same writer gives another capital instance. "We were having for our lesson the Israelites leaving Egypt. Ten or twelve in the class had heard the passage read at home, probably with- out comment. As a unit they had taken the word 'pillar' to mean 'pillow,' and when 1 asked how God led these people, who had never been out of Egypt so far before, one of them re- plied, ' By di yellow cushion, which showed them the way.' And another added, ' It was yellow on one side and black on the other.' It took me a few seconds to see the steps in the syllogism which had led to this absurd conclusion. 1 be- gan a most cautious presentation of my lesson truth, avoiding the word 'pillar,' using 'bright cloud' and 'dark cloud,' and describing it as reaching from far up in the sky down to the very ground, — my central lesson being that those who were doing right were in the brightness of God's loving care, and enjoying his smile of approval. For home work I suggested that they draw a cloud with crayons, making half of bright crayon and half of black, and that they put some marks for people on the bright side of the cloud — as
The Discipline and the Practice 319
many people as they saw doing kind, loving things that week, which showed that they were living in the brightness of God's smile and fol- lowing his leading. The home work came back, and, to my dismay, every one of those who had gotten that first idea of a 'yellow cushion ' (but only those few) had drawn a square sofa-pillow, orange on one side and black on the other,"
This being not an abstract text but a story, we naturally think first to the second mode (Chap- ter V), and being a prescribed lesson we think to the third mode (Chapter VI). As a story it ought to carry its own moral, or at least it ought to with very little suggestion. The teacher's moral — that of " living in the brightness of God's smile," itself was too far out of the realm of con- scious child-hunger to be assimilable and too much out of the focus of child-vision to make an apt or vivid picture — especially against such a vividly familiar suggestion as a sofa pillow! The idea of being led by a cloud instead of by the hand, being out of the ordinary experience probably left the minds in suspense until that one youngster, up to this age of luxury, relieved the situation by throwing a sofa pillow before the mind's eye. The result was inevitable and yellow and black crayons doubtless aided the pillowy conception. The whole case shows the truth of Dewey's law that what a child gets out of any subject pre- sented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.
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Some good persons act as though they thought it irreverent, if not atiieistic, to have regard to natural law in religious education. They seem to think it eliminates God because it does not leave a gap in the process to be bridged in some mysterious way by the Spirit. The result is that the aim and the means of such people are hazy, haphazard, and ineffectual.
But certain results depend upon certain human conditions. This is a divine fact, the ignoring of which is to eliminate God from the process — the very thing that the pious censor charges against the naturalist.
These critics, however, will not step from a high tower, or knowingly grasp a live electric wire.
"In God's universe," says Robertson, "there are no favorites of heaven who may transgress the laws of the universe with impunity." No truer maxim, none of wider application, ever was given by man to man than the Baconian "Nature is commanded by obeying her." Not one inch of progress in the arts or sciences has ever been made in violation of this principle. We of to- day are the witnesses of wonders achieved by man, which, fifty years ago, would have been deemed nothing short of miraculous. But not one of these things — telephone, phonograph, or trolley line — has become an every-day common- place to us except through the absolute obedience of man to natural law. When we seem to ac- complish ends by means at variance with known
The Discipline and the Practice 321
laws, it is only a seeming. It is in obedience to tile law of gravitation that a stone falls earthward and that a balloon rises skyward. In neither case is gravity disobeyed, however different the dis- play of direction may be to the superficial ob- server.
Successes which are an exhibit of marvellous nicety and exactitude are possible only because of the perfect response on the part of the actor to the inexorable laws to which he is subject. He who mounts a bicycle for the first time wobbles and falls because he does not yield himself abso- lutely to natural laws. The child is less rebel- lious, and hence the child rider is usually the best. It is because of the most complete and absolute yielding to such laws that Blondin could cook an omelet on a tight-rope stretched over the Niagara River. To us who cannot walk a railroad track or a log for twenty or thirty feet without falling from it, it seems as though Blondin had some superior power of overcoming or defying those natural laws. But on the other hand, it is be- cause he recognized, regarded, and utilized to the fullest every law to which he, under the circum- stances, was subject, that he never lost his life. Yet he was in no sense will-less or nerveless. Had he made an objection to the dominance of law over him, he would have met his speedy death in the amazing performances.
We do pay regard to many of nature's laws. Why should we not regard some of those which are most vital ? We do not think of insisting
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that a child shall have only one foot on the ground at a time, when he walks, or that he shall have two feet on the ground at once, when he runs. We simply know that to walk or run he must do that which nature dictates. We do sometimes heed the objection of an overloaded stomach. Sometimes we do not, it is true, and then suffer- ing and deterioration ensue, and we repent and promise to do better. Do we repent over a mental or spiritual dyspepsia ? Do we know the signs of the soul's anemia ? These disorders are as sure to the soul as to the body if natural law is defied.
We profess to see God in the bursting seed, the blowing bud, the springing blade; so too, in the fall of the cataract, the frostwork on the win- dow-pane, the voice of thunder, the rock-rend- ing earthquake, the unerring circuit of planets, or the infinite, but ever orderly, concourse of surts. He who sees in all these things — in every truth of nature, in fact — the thought, the wish, the plan, the purpose, the all- wise determination and eternal order of God, sees, in truth, a heavenly vision.
Are we, or are we not, obedient to the heav- enly vision ? As guardians of little children in the church and in the home, how blind have we been to that vision! In child nature God has written certain laws which we have too often disobeyed, either because we have not discerned them, or because of the spirit that worketh in the sons of disobedience.
So far as education is human, it is a matter of
The Discipline and the Practice 323
values and of the mechanism by which those val- ues are to be substantiated. The problem of nurture is that of "the statement of ends in terms of their realiT^ation." If the end is a nourished life we must be able to state the method in terms of such natural processes as will attain that end. We ought, as Dr. Dewey says, to strongly sus- pect "any ideal which exists purely at large, out of relation to machinery of execution, and equally a machinery that operates in no particu- lar direction."
It is a fault of our churches and our homes that their ideals do exist too much at large and out of relation to a mechanism of stimulus and inhibi- tion as designed and built for our use by nature.
To quote again: "I cannot understand the logic which says that because mechanism is mechanism, and because acts, aims, values are vital, therefore a statement in terms of one is alien to the comprehension and proper management of the other. Ends are not compromised when referred to the means necessary to realize them. Values do not cease to be values when they are minutely and accurately measured. Acts are not destroyed when their operative machinery is made manifest."
"The ethical personality does not go to school naked, it takes with it the body as the instrument through which all influences reach it. . . . In a word, the teacher is dealing with the psy- chical factors that are concerned with furtherance of certain habits, and the inhibition of others —
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habits intellectual, habits emotional, habits in overt action." These three classes of habits are covered by the natural mechanism of our four modes of nurture. Atmosphere, Light, Food, Ex- ercise. And in the main these are reducible to the two great essentials of seeing and doing, or vision and self-expression.
As a preacher, if you fill the mind's eye of your hearer with noble, apt, and vivid pictures you will stimulate him to act nobly; if with evil pictures, you may draw him their way; if with no pictures, you may put him to sleep or en- courage him to stay away. This does not dis- count the Scripture's own testimony to its being a power of God unto salvation. It simply pre- scribes your way of presenting truth. The same rule will hold good if you are a lawyer before a jury. If you are an editor you may send a man to perdition or to glory with a cartoon. Jacob Riis says that it is as bad to kill a man with a house as with an axe. It is still worse to kill him for eternity with a metaphor.
As a parent you make a genial home atmosphere that our children will thrive on, or a cold one that they will shrivel in. You may send them down to old age, cramped for want of the exercise of self-expression or dangerous to society because of their weak wills.
As a Sunday-school superintendent or teacher you may make skeptics by too early a caution against skepticism or by a labored effort to " prove " the Bible; you may lead into temptation
The Discipline and the Practice 325
by a premature condemnation of unsuspected forms of evil; you may bring on a systemic re- volt through the attempt to force down the indigestible abstractions of the catechism and theological nomenclature, utterly unpictorial and prohibitive of anything like self-expression or the exercise of initiative; you may endear sin by dignifying it with too incessant mention; you may destroy the Bible by chopping every good story in it into bits of petty homily and "im- pertinent moralizing" instead of presenting those stories in their fullness of outline and color.
Says Horace Bushnell, " We certainly know that much of what is called Christian nurture only serves to make the subject of religion odious, and that, as nearly as v^e can discover, in exact proportion to the amount of religious teaching received." The remedy, humanly speak- ing, as it is the aim of this book to demonstrate, lies in the true conception of nurture and its practice, as a hygiene of four interrelated modes. There is a physiology and a hygiene of the soul as well as of the body and the one, up to a certain point, parallels the other. It is true that the body grows upon what it receives, while the spirit grows by what it gives as well as by what it receives. Yet after all, this is but a lofty form of exercise, a high altitude of self-expression.
All education must come back to the muster test of values — to this idea of nourishment or response to nature's need, whether it be in the home, the church, the school. True nurture,
326 The Natural Way-
then, makes for the whole man. Christianity makes for the whole man. Education makes for the whole man. There is therefore no true nurture out of Christ, and no complete education that is not Christian.
As discipline, how many educational questions can you see in your daily life with the children and without them ? So far as the Church is con- cerned a few such questions are given in our first chapter. Can you state your problem and strike your balances in terms of nutritional values ? What emotion will be stimulated or repressed ? In either case what kind of activity will result or fail to result ? What mental image is likely to persist and to call for yielding or for resistance ? Will this atmosphere engender moroseness or cheerfulness ? What is the educational value of this story, this memoriter exercise, this picture, this song, this prize competition, — stated in terms of nurture ? Are you giving stones when nature asks for bread ? Are you working to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles ? This is not the way of nature and therefore not the way of nurture, and of course not the way of the Master.
What is the "admonition of the Lord".? According to Paul it is something with a nurtur- ing power. Here is the first test: Will my admonition to this child respond to the hunger of his needy nature ? Not if it stifles with an atmos- phere putrid with discord or heavy with adult intellectualism, not if it is without form and void
The Discipline and the Practice 327
of visibility, not if it is indigestible, not if it pre- sumes to order the individuality, or suppresses self-expression, or denies the initiative of choice and so paralyzes the will. We dare not call everything nurture that happens to sound piously like admonition. In common sense, if in nothing else, we are bound to obey nature if we would command her — soul or body. Nurture calls for no miracle to accommodate us. It is dishonorable to God to dishonor the natural resources which he has put into our hands. To give stones for bread is a mode of infidelity under cover of piety.
Where natural processes are concerned we must bring our methods to the test of nature. Education is a question of growth, of develop- ment; this becomes a question of the values of times and seasons, of ways and means. Let Nature answer in terms of nurture. Why should we so strain to avoid the natural way ? Whoso- ever shall not receive the kingdom of God naturally as a little child he shall in nowise enter therein. The earth beareth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear; — a matter of order, a dictate of life; the way of the Master, the Natural Way, We are to train up a child in the way he should go; this is the natural way. For this we have been given natural re- sources and powers. From Nature we learn how to use them — how to honor our responsibility for them. We stand committed to the natural way.
Say not therefore that the hand of God has no
328 The Natural Way
part in this discussion; there is no nurture with- out it. Say not that the Spirit is forgotten ; there is no true life but that of the Spirit. Say not that prayer is unnoticed; there is no faith, no hope in God, no working with God without prayer. And love ? there is no motive to nurture but in love.
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