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 The ^ree kindergarten 
 in Church Wor 
 
 By 
 Heber Hew ton
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 By Rev. R. HEBER NEWTON, D. D. 
 
 Republished from Barnard's American Journal of Education.
 
 .^
 
 1167 
 
 O 
 
 3 
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 BY REV. B. HEBER NEWTON, D. D., 
 
 Rector of Anthon Memorial Church, New York. 
 
 CHURCH WORK — EDUCATION. 
 
 Church work is slowly coming to be read, I think, in the light of 
 those great words of the Church's Head, which illumine his personal 
 mission. " And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up : 
 and, as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath 
 day and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the 
 j book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book he 
 found the place where it was written — The Spirit of the Lord is upon 
 me, because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor ; He 
 hath sent me to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the 
 captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that 
 
 ^, are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." " Now when 
 John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his 
 
 — disciples and said unto him — Art thou he that should come, or do we 
 look for another? Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew 
 John again those things which ye do hear and see : the blind receive 
 their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf 
 hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached 
 unto them." 
 
 The Master's mission was to heal the sickness and sorrow and suffer- 
 ing and si» of earth, in the power of that Holy Spirit which was to 
 continue his work, slowly developing " the regeneration " of all things, 
 in a new heavens and a new earth. His credentials were the signs of 
 his power to effect this herculean labor. The Church's work must 
 then be the carrying on of his task of social regeneration ; a labor ot 
 practical philanthropy led up into the heights of spiritual re-formation ; 
 and the " notes " of a true church will lie in its possession of the Master's 
 power to further the slow evolution of the better order. If only to 
 make earth the nursery for the heavens it must be put into order, the 
 frightful ills of civilization be healed, the dreadful disorders of society 
 be righted, and man be breathed out into the son of God. The mag- 
 nificent aspiration of St. Paul is the ideal unto which all church work 
 yearns — " Till we all come, (beggarly, diseased, vicious, malformed 
 
 . j runts of humanity) in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of 
 
 JJ the son of God, unto a perfect man (manhood) ; to the measure of the 
 ^ stature of the fullness of Christ." 
 J Such a church work must plainly be a task of education. And unto 
 
 v ^ this form of philanthropy every labor of love for suffering humanity 
 ^ is coming round. The experience of all who grapple with the legion 
 
 \a forms of social ill results in one conclusion. Prevention is better than 
 X 45
 
 706 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH "WORK. 
 
 cure; and prevention is — education. Sanitarians, prison reformers, 
 temperance advocates, charity administrators, pastors, all alike are 
 joining in one cry — educate. We grow hopeless of making over again 
 the wrongly made up, misshapen monstrosities charitably called men 
 and women, and feel that the one hopeful work is in seeing that the 
 unspoiled raw material, ever coming on, is better made up in the start. 
 Given a true education and we may hope for a true manhood and 
 womanhood, a true society growing steadily towards St. Paul's far off 
 ideal. The Church's work would then seem to be that which the 
 Master outlined in his parting word — " Go ye, disciple all nations ; " 
 teach men in the life of the perfect man, train them towards the ideal 
 manhood ; — a charge of education. 
 
 1. Defects of the People's Schools. 
 
 Education of one sort and another we have no lack of, but thought- 
 ful people are coming to see, that which the wisest educators have 
 known for no little time, that it is mostly very crude and raw. Along 
 with the conviction that education is the solvent of the social problems, 
 there is spreading fast and far the conviction that we have not yet 
 educated the true education ; that our present systems are viciously 
 unsound and so are building up the old diseased body social instead of 
 the new and healthy organism of the Coming Man. With all that is 
 good in our People's Schools they seem lacking in certain vital elements. 
 They fail to provide for a true physical culture, which, since health is 
 the capital of life, is the prime endowment for every human being. 
 They fail also to provide for any industrial training. Nearly all men 
 and a large minority of women must earn their daily bread, and the 
 majority of women must care for the bread their husbands earn. The 
 great mass of men and women must be chiefly busied with manual 
 work in the field, the factory or the house. To prepare this mass of men 
 and women to do this necessary work successfully and happily, finding 
 their bread in it honorably, and that bread of thought and sentiment 
 on which the finer part of their beings live in the interest it calls 
 forth — this would seem to be an essential part of a rational education 
 for the common necessities of the common people ; all the more impera- 
 tive since the old time apprenticeships have disappeared. In the 
 absence of this practical training all ranks of labor are crowded with 
 incompetent "hands," and domestic economy is caricatured in most 
 hom*'s; a restless discontent with manual employments is pushing a 
 superficially educated mass of men and women into the over full 
 vocations supposed to be genteel, and storing up slumberous forces of 
 anarchy among the workingmen ; thus sapping health and wealth in 
 the homes of the poor who must need both. 
 
 Then, to pass by other grave defects best behooving professional 
 educatora to speak of, there is a still more serious lack in our Common 
 School system which the churches are naturally quick to feel. The
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 707 
 
 greatest minds have always united in the view so tersely expressed in 
 Matthew Arnold's familiar phrase, " Conduct is three fourths of life." 
 The end of all culture must be character, and its outcome in conduct. 
 The State's concern in education is to rear virtuous, law-abiding, self- 
 governing citizens. The Church's concern is not something different 
 from the State's; it is the same plus something more. She too seeks 
 to grow good subjects, only running their relation to Law up and on; 
 men whose citizenship is in heaven. State and Church alike would 
 nurture good men, for this world or the next. To this the Church 
 believes with the State that moral culture is needful, but she believes 
 also that religious culture is none the less needful. The churches 
 feel the need of supplementing the education of the common schools 
 with some ampler provision for moral and religious training. If the 
 homes of the land were what they ought to be they would supply this 
 lack. But because of the utter imperfection of education in the past, 
 they are unfortunately far from being seminaries of character. Some 
 other provision must be made. 
 
 2. Inadequacy of Sunday Schooh and Parish Schools. 
 The churches have utilized a simple mechanism for moral and relig- 
 ious education in the Sunday-school. No word from one who owes so 
 much to this institution can ever detract from its just honor. It has 
 been and still is an indispensable provision for our present stage of devel- 
 opment. It is doing a noble work which else were left largely undone. 
 But its best friends are not blind to its limitations. The clergy generally 
 are painfully aware of its utter inadequacy to the great task it has as- 
 sumed. Superintendents and teachers feel that they are asked to make 
 brick without being supplied with straw. For an hour or an hour and a 
 half, sometimes two or three hours, on one day of the week, a crowd of 
 children, often reaching into the hundreds, are gathered into one room, 
 placed in the hands of a changing corps of volunteer teachers, mostly 
 very young, animated generally with laudable motives, but too often pain- 
 fully unconscious of the momentousness of the task they have lightly 
 undertaken, and all untrained for the delicate work of soul fashioning. 
 As a system of education in Christian character, such an institution is 
 grotesquely inadequate. For that education must be chiefly a nurture, 
 a tenderly cherished growth under the right conditions duly supplied ; 
 a training rather than an instruction, a daily not a weekly work. The 
 ideal of such an education of course will be the story of the Perfect 
 Man : a growth, gently nurtured, in a pious home, at the knee of a holy 
 mother, through patient years; hastened to the flower, under the soft 
 springtide of the soul, within the warmer atmosphere of the Temple, in 
 the opening consciousness " Wist ye not that I must be in my Father's?" 
 But again T say we are concerned with the unideal state of earth to-day, 
 whereon homes are not like the Nazarite cottage and mothers are far 
 below the stature of the great souled Mary.
 
 708 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 What is to be done now ? Something, plainly, the churches feel, and 
 are sore perplexed as to what that something is to be. A portion of 
 the churches seem inclined to try in some way to make the Common 
 Schools attend more carefully to moral and religious education. But 
 how to do it does not yet appear. The religious phase of this problem 
 is beset with baffling perplexities. Others of the churches are tending 
 in the direction of Parish Schools. But these cannot hope to compete 
 with the State Schools in mental culture, and so must offer to the par- 
 ents of the land the choice between a good general education with a 
 defective moral and religious training, and a good moral and religious 
 training (possibly) with a narrower and feebler general education. The 
 average American will not long hesitate in that alternative, when he 
 can relieve his conscience by falling back upon the Sunday-school. Our 
 people are thoroughly committed to the system of State schools, and will 
 not favorably view any apparent sectarian opposition to them. We 
 need, not a system substituted for the State schools and benefiting only 
 a small portion of the people, but, one supplementing the State schools 
 and benefiting the whole people. Is such a system discoverable ? And 
 can such a system for moral and religious nurture be made to supple- 
 ment the Common Schools also in the other defects alluded to, the lack 
 of physical training and industrial education ? 
 
 3. Importance of Infancy. 
 
 The most valuable period of childhood for formative purposes is 
 unclaimed by the State. The richest soil lies virgin, un-preempted, free 
 for the Church to settle upon and claim for the highest culture. It is 
 no new secret that the most plastic period lies below childhood, in 
 infancy proper. Thoughtful people have long ago perceived that the 
 chief part of all human learning is wrought in these seven years ; the 
 greatest progress made, the largest acquisitions won, the toughest diffi- 
 culties overcome. No pretentious culture won in later years is really 
 half so wonderful as the almost unconscious education carried on in the 
 period of infancy. Dame Nature is busy with her babes and has them 
 at incessant schooling. From the first dawn of intelligence they are 
 under an unceasing series of lessons, in form and color, in weight and 
 resistance, in numbers and relations, in sound and speech. Every sense 
 is being called into exercise, cultivated, refined. The perceptions are 
 ever at work observing, comparing, contrasting. Mastery is being won 
 over every physical power ; the eye, the ear, the hand, the feet being 
 trained into supple, subtle skill. The bewildering fingering of Buben- 
 stein or Von Bulow is not a finer discipline than the games of the active 
 boy. 
 
 The sentiments, the imagination, the reason, the conscience are under- 
 going a corresponding development in this period we think of as all 
 idleness. Here and there we get hints of the reach of infant mind in 
 its beautiful thoughts, its fine feelings, its ethical distinctions, its
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 709 
 
 religious musings. The vail lifts from the greatest of wonder lands, in 
 which we all lived once and out from which we have passed through 
 the waters of the river Lethe. We think liglitly of the inner life of 
 infancy because we know so little of it. We fancy that we are to teach 
 our little ones religion. At the best we can only formulate the mystery 
 which lies all round them, vague and nebulous but profoundly real. 
 Below the best we succeed in botching and marring the divine growth 
 going on within their souls, unseen by our dim eyes ; in imposing our 
 adult conceptions injuriously on souls unprepared for them; and so 
 make the windows through which our sin-seared souls see light, the 
 shutters closing the light off from those holy innocents whose inner 
 beings, angel-wise, do always behold the face of their Father in heaven. 
 Wordsworth's ode is the very truth of the spirit world. The garden of 
 the Lord, where God himself walks amid the trees in # the cool of the 
 day, is behind us all ; and our best Lope is to climb round to it in the 
 " lang last," as the seer visions in the far future of the race and of the 
 individual ; when having been converted and become as little children 
 we enter once more the kingdom of heaven. For, as these words 
 remind us, it is no less an authority than that of the Lord Christ that 
 teaches us to view in childhood the spiritual ideal. 
 
 Infancy then, (the first seven years), is the most vital period for the 
 formative work of a true education, whether we have regard to physi- 
 cal, mental or moral and spiritual development. Plato saw this long 
 centuries ago. " The most important part of education is right train- 
 ing in the nursery." [Laws 1 : 643.] 
 
 As late as our greatest American theologian — the noblest of English 
 theologians himself being the judge — this view reiterates itself with 
 especial reference to the task of moral and religious culture the 
 churches have in hand. Dr. BushnelPs " Christian Nurture " insists 
 upon the prime importance of infancy. 
 
 4. Educative Function of Play. 
 If then the only period of childhood not foreclosed by the State be 
 precisely that which is most hopeful for the true education, the educa- 
 tion which aims for something like an integral culture, a fashioning of 
 the whole manhood into health, intelligence and virtue buoyant with 
 the love of God, the question becomes one of technique. How are we 
 to utilize this most plastic but most delicate of periods ? How teach 
 and train the tender lives which seem unready for anything but play ? 
 All high and serious labor upon this period seems ruled out by the 
 fractible nature of the material upon which we are to work. These 
 fragile bodies can bear little fatigue, these tender minds can bear little 
 strain, these delicate souls can bear little public handling without 
 spoiling. " O, slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have 
 written ! " — must we not hear the Spirit of Truth still sadly whisper- 
 ing ? Centuries since did not the teacher sent from God to the Greeks,
 
 710 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH , \YORK. 
 
 the wisest mind of the wisest people of antiquity, tell the world — if, 
 having ears to hear, they would hear — the riddle of this Sphinx ? 
 
 " Our youth should be educated in a stricter rule from the first, for 
 if education becomes lawless and the youths themselves become lawless, 
 they can never grow up into well conducted and meritorious citizens. 
 And the education must begin with their plays. The spirit of law must be 
 imparted to them in music, and the spirit of order attending them in 
 all their actions will make them grow; and if there be any part of the 
 state which has fallen down will raise it up again." [Republic 4 : 425.] 
 
 " According to my view, he who would be good at any thing must 
 practice that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, 
 in the particular manner which the work requires; for example, he 
 who is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses ; 
 and he who is to be a good husbandman, at tilling the ground; those 
 who have the care of their education should provide them when young 
 with mimic tools. And they should learn beforehand the knowledge 
 which they will afterwards require for their art. For example, the 
 future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play; and 
 the future warrior should learn riding, or some other exercise for 
 amusement, and the teacher should endeavor to direct the children's 
 inclinations and pleasures by the help of amusements, to their final 
 aim in life. . . . The soul of the child in his play should be trained 
 to that sort of excellence in which when he grows up to manhood he 
 will have to be perfected." [Laws 1 : 643]. 
 
 Plainly the natural activity of infancy is play, and as plainly the only 
 possible education in this period must be through play. This is pre- 
 cisely the method of Mother Nature. She teaches her little ones all the 
 marvellous knowledge they master in infancy through pure play of 
 body and of mind. 
 
 So far from play being at all inconsistent with learning, the best 
 work in education does in fact take on the character 6f play. A critic 
 as unsentimental as Mr. Herbert Spencer lays down the law that all 
 education, in so far as it is true, tends to become play. He tests all 
 methods by this criterion — is it task work or is it to the child as good as 
 play ? It is our ignorance of child nature, our poverty of invention, our 
 mechanicalness of method which leave learning mere work. All learn- 
 ing ought to be spontaneous, joyous. Calisthenics is turning into a 
 semi-dancing, to the music of the piano; natural sciences are coming 
 to be taught through excursions in the field and wood, and by experi- 
 ments in the Jaboratory ; the dry drill of languages is brightening into 
 the cheery conversation class ; the catechism in the Sunday school is 
 yielding room for the music of hymns and carols. There is nothing 
 incompatible between the merry play of the nursery and the school into 
 which we would turn it, if only we can be cunning enough to devise a 
 subtle illusion wherein as the children think they are only playing we 
 shall see that they are also learning. Leaving them their free, sponta-
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. Vll 
 
 neous, natural impulses of playfulness, we may then lead these impulses 
 up into a system which shall, with benign subtility, unwittingly to the 
 children, school them in the most important of knowledges, train them 
 in the most valuable of powers, fashion them into the most precious of 
 habits, open within them the deepest springs of eternal life. Only for 
 this finest and divinest of pedagogies we must, as the greatest of teach- 
 ers has taught us, get low down to the plane of the little ones, and our- 
 selves become as children, that we may enter the kingdom of heaven. 
 For as Sir William Hamilton, and long before him Lord Bacon, pointed 
 out, childlike docility of soul is the condition of entering into that 
 province of the kingdom of heaven which is truth, as well as into that 
 which is goodness, the secret of philosophies and sciences as of theologies 
 and life. To construct the true system of child-schooling we must be 
 humble enough and wise enough to go to Mother Nature's Dame 
 Schools and learn her science and art of infantile pedagogy. If some 
 genius, child-hearted, should seriously set himself to study sly old 
 Mother Nature in her most trivial actions, patiently watching her 
 most cunningly concealed processes, he might steal upon her thus and 
 catch the secret of the Sphinx's nurturing by play, and might open for us 
 the ideal education for the early years of childhood. And this is just 
 what Frohel did. With unwearied patience and in the very spirit of this 
 childlike teachableness he studied the plays and songs of mothers and 
 nurses and children left to their own sweet will, till divining at last the 
 principles underlying these natural methods he slowly perfected the 
 kindergarten; verifying it by faithful personal experiment and be- 
 queathing to the generations that should come after, the child-garden, 
 the sunny shelter wherein in happy play the bodies, minds and souls of 
 the little ones should beautifully grow out into health, intelligence and 
 goodness. 
 
 5. Purifying Influences of Happy Play. 
 
 Visitors in a kindergarten watch its occupations and leave it with 
 the somewhat contemptuous criticism — oh ! its all very nice and pleas- 
 ant, a very pretty play. 
 
 We--; this all, the Kindergarten might enter a strong plea on its own 
 behalf, In the foul tenements and the dirty streets and alleys of our 
 great cities the tainted air is sapping the vitality of the children, 
 poisoning their blood, sowing their bodies with the seeds of disease, 
 and educating the helpless hosts who crowd every market place of labor, 
 unfit physically to contend in the struggle for existence. In these dull 
 and depressing surroundings a gradual stupefaction is stealing over 
 their minds, preparing that unintelligent action wherein those whom 
 Carlyle called " The Drudges " are taking their place in society as the 
 human tenders of our super-human machines. Tn the sad and somber 
 atmosphere of these homes, whose joylessness they feel unconsciously, as 
 the cellar plant misses the light and shrivels and pales, the inner spring 
 of energy and its strength of character, the virtus or virtue of the
 
 712 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 human being relaxes, and their souls become flabby and feeble. Lack- 
 ing the sunny warmth of happiness in childhood they lack through life 
 the stored up latencies of spiritual heat which feed the noblest forces 
 of the being. " We live by admiration, joy and love," Wordsworth 
 says ; which implies that we may die by joylessness. 
 
 True, the child nature will not wholly be crushed out, and in the most 
 squalid so-called " homes " in the saddest streets it will play in some-wise, 
 though it is literally true that not a few have their playfulness smoth- 
 ered within them. But what play ! How dull and dreary, how coarse 
 and low, — imitation, as the great Greek said of many of the stage-plays 
 of children of a larger growth, " of the evil rather than of the good that 
 is in them." A veritable mis-education in play, as all who are familiar 
 with the street plays of our poor quarters too sadly know, copying the 
 vile words and brutal manners which are the fashion of these sections, 
 feeding the prurient fancies -which Mr. Ruskin says are the mental 
 putresence gendered of physical filth in the over-crowding together of 
 human beings. The play not as of the children of the Father in 
 Heaven but as of the abducted little ones of the Heavenly Father, 
 reared in the purlieus of their false father the Devil. So that there is a 
 vast deal of philosophy in the remark contained in a Report of a cer- 
 tain Children's Asylum in London, to the effect that the first thing the 
 matron found it necessary to do with many of the waifs brought into 
 the Home was to teach them to play ! 
 
 If only the little ones in their most susceptive years are gathered in 
 from harmful surroundings, are shielded from scorching heats and 
 chilling winds, are warded from the wild beasts that lurk around the 
 valleys where the tender lambs lie, though in pastures dry and by 
 turbid waters ; if only, fenced in thus from the hearing of harsh, foul 
 words, and from the seeing of brutalizing and polluting actions, they 
 are left for the best hours of each day to disport themselves in innocent 
 and uncontaminating happiness amid these " pretty plays," it would be 
 an inestimable gain for humanity. For thus, in its native surround- 
 ings, the better nature of each child would have a chance to grow, and 
 the angel be beforehand with the beast, when, not for an hour on Sun- 
 days, but always, their angels do behold the face of the Father in 
 Heaven. 
 
 The Lord God made a garden, and there he placed the man. So the 
 sacred story runs, deep-weighted with its parable of life. A garden for 
 the soul, bright and warm in soft, rich happiness, sunning the young 
 life with " the vital feelings of delight " — this is the ideal state, or as we 
 now phrase it the normal environment, for child growth. As much of 
 the conditions of such a child-garden as can be secured in " this naughty 
 world " is the first desideratum for that education which looks on towards 
 the second Adam, the perfect manhood, the measure of the stature of the 
 fullness of Christ. To open such Child Gardens and to place therein 
 loving, sympathetic women to mother their plays and keep them sweet
 
 TUE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 713' 
 
 and clean and gentle, this were to do for the growth of the Christ 
 Child a work worthy of the Christian churches. 
 
 But this is far from all the good of the Child Garden. It is indeed 
 only its outer and superficial aspect, in which, even before its 
 carping critics, who know not what they say and so are forgiven, 
 'Wisdom is justified of her children. Underneath these " pretty plays " 
 there is a masterly guidance of the play instinct in the direction of 
 the wisest and noblest culture. They are faithful reproductions of 
 Mother Nature's schooling in play, and every part of the carefully 
 elaborated system has a direct educative value in one of the three lines 
 in which, as already indicated, our State system seems most defective ; 
 all three of which, in differing degrees bear upon that culture of char- 
 acter with which the Church has need to busy herself, in disciplining 
 men into the perfect manhood of Christ. 
 
 6. Physical Training of the Kindergarten and its Bearing on Character. 
 
 The kindergarten plays form a beautiful system of calisthenics, 
 adapted for tender years, and filled out with the buoyancy of pure 
 sportiveness. The marching, the light gymnastic exercises, the imita- 
 tive games, with the vocal music accompanying them, occupy a consid- 
 erable portion of the daily session in an admirable physical culture. If 
 ordinary attention is paid to ventilation, and the room be, as it ought 
 to be, a sunny room, guarded against sewer gas and other " modern 
 conveniences," this physical culture ought to have a most positive and 
 beneficent influence on the health of the children. If a good substan- 
 tial dinner is pi-ovided for them, one " square meal " a day added to 
 the pure air and judicious exercise ought to lay well the first founda- 
 tion, not alone of material, but of moral success in life. Health is 
 the basis of character as of fortune. There is a imysiology of morality. 
 Some of the grossest vices are largely fed from an impure, diseased 
 and enfeebled physique. Drunkenness, especially among the poor, is 
 to a large extent the craving for stimulation that grows out of their 
 ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, over-worked, unsunned, sewer-poisoned 
 condition. Lust is intensified and inflamed by the tainted blood and 
 the over-tasked nervous system. Purity of mind grows naturally out 
 of purity of body. Physiologists understand these facts far better 
 than ethicists. Then, too, lesser vices are in their measure, equally 
 grounded in abnormal physical conditions. Faults of temper, irrita- 
 bility, sullenness and anger are intimately connected with low health, 
 the under vitalized state which characterizes the city poor. 
 
 Perfection of character implies a happy physical organization, or 
 that masterfulness of soul which is the rarest of gifts. Moderate appe- 
 tites, a serene disposition, generous feelings, with their fellow excel- 
 lences, may be the victory of the exceptional saints ; but they may also 
 be the natural endowment of the healthy common people. A harmo- 
 nious body will sublimate the finer qualities of the soul. In man, as
 
 *7l4 THE FREE KINDEKGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 in the animals, when we see such physical organizations we look to find 
 such moral natures. Axiomatic as this is, it none the less needs to be 
 reiterated in the ears of moral and religious teachers. To claim this 
 is to raise no question concerning the relative priority, in genesis or in 
 importance, of body or mind. Even if the body be, as I certainly 
 hold, the material envelope drawn around the spirit, molded and 
 fashioned by the quality of the soul ; and the prime concern be there- 
 fore with the vital energy and purity of the spirit ; still according to 
 the materials supplied in food and air, will the body thus organized be 
 determined, and its reflex influence tell imperiously upon the inner 
 being. In striving to grow healthful souls we must, to this very end, 
 grow healthful bodies. While feeding assiduously the forces of con- 
 science and affection and will, we must largely feed them indirectly, 
 by filling the physical reservoirs on which these virtues need must draw 
 with sweet, clean, pure, full tides of life. The Church must learn a 
 lesson from its Master, and be at once Good Physician and Merciful 
 Savior; restoring health as well as remitting sin. And the beginning 
 of this dual work seems to me to lie in some such system of infantile 
 physical nurture, carried on under the name and in the spirit of the 
 Lord Jesus Christ. Our churches are all more or less busied with feed- 
 ing the hungry, and otherwise caring for the bodies of the poor. Will 
 it not tell more on the work of saving men out of sin to put the money 
 spent in alms to adults — largely misapplied and nearly always harmful 
 to the moral fiber — into a culture of health for the children ? 
 
 7. Industrial Training of the Kindergarten and its Bearing on Character. 
 
 The kindergarten plays form a most wise system for culturing the 
 powers and dispositions which lay the foundation for successful indus- 
 trial skill ; and this also bears directly upon the supreme end of the 
 Church's work — the turning out of good men and women. 
 
 The fundamental position of the kindergarten in a system of indus- 
 trial education is recognized in Germany, and must soon be perceived 
 here. The natural instinct of childhood to busy itself with doing 
 something, its spontaneous impulse to be making something, is in the 
 kindergarten discerned as the striving of that creative power which is 
 mediately in man as the child of God. It is utilized for the purposes 
 of education. Pricking forms of geometrical figures and of familiar 
 objects on paper, weaving wooden strips into varied designs, folding 
 paper into pretty toys and ornaments, plaiting variegated strips of paper 
 into ingenious and attractive shapes, modeling in clay — these, with other 
 kindred exercises, " pretty play " as it all seems, constitute a most real 
 education by and for work. By means of these occupations the eye is 
 trained to quickness of perception and accuracy of observation, the hand 
 to deftness of touch and skill of workmanship, such as a child may win, 
 the sense of the beautiful is roused and cultivated, the fancy fed and the 
 imagination inspired, the judgment exercised and strengthened, original-
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 715 
 
 » 
 
 ity stimulated by often leaving the children to fashion their own designs, 
 while habits of industry are inwrought upon the most plastic period of 
 life, and the child accustomed to find his interest and delight in work, 
 and to feel its dignity and nobleness. How directly all this bears 
 upon the Labor Problem, the vexed question of philanthropy, is patent 
 to all thoughtful persons. Every market place is crowded with the 
 hungry host bitterly crying "no man hath hired us," utterly uncon- 
 scious that no man can hire them save as a charity. For skilled work- 
 men and work-women there is always room in every line. Employers 
 are importing trained work people in most industries, while all around 
 lies this vast mass of people who never were taught to find the pride 
 and pleasure of life in doing thoroughly their bit of daily work. 
 
 Simply as a question of the prevention of suffering, the immediate 
 step to be taken by those who would wisely help their poorer brothers 
 is the provision of schools for technical training in the handicrafts, such 
 as exist notably in Paris and in parts of Germany. And as the place to 
 begin is at the beginning, any attempt to construct such a system of 
 industrial education should start with the training of early childhood in 
 the powers, the habits and the love of work, as in the Kindergarten. 
 Miss Peabody's open letter to Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson arguing for the 
 Kindergarten as a potent factor in the solution of the Labor Problem 
 was thoroughly wise. In so far as education solves the problem, the 
 Kindergarten is the first word of the answer yet spelled out. 
 
 But the Labor Problem is not only the dark puzzle of want, it is, in 
 large measure also, the darker puzzle of wickedness. Want leads to 
 very much of the wickedness with which our courts deal. The preven- 
 tion of suffering will be found to be the prevention of a great deal of 
 sinning. How much of the vice of our great cities grows directly out 
 of poverty, and the lot poverty finds for itself. Drunkenness among 
 the poor is fed not only from the physical conditions above referred to, 
 but from the craving for social cheer left unsupplied in the round of 
 long, hard work by day, and dull, depressing surroundings by evening. 
 Who that knows anything of the most pitiable class our communities 
 show does not know whence and how their ranks are chiefly recruited. 
 Of old the fabled city, to save its homes from being devoured, chose its 
 fairest, noblest and best to offer up in propitiatory sacrifice, and 
 bound Andromeda to the rocks a victim for the monster of the sea. 
 Our cities send press-gangs through the humbler quarters, entrap 
 their hungry daughters with baits of food, their struggling work girls, 
 mis-educated to the ambition of becoming ladies, with seductive snares 
 of ease and luxury and gentility, and bind their poor maidens to the 
 rocks of pitiless publicity with chains forged from poverty, welded in 
 famine, and riveted with sham pride ; and thus, so say our wise men, 
 preserve our homes intact. To eke out the insufficient wages of 
 unskilled work there is one resource for working girls. To realize the 
 day-dream of the fine lady there is the whispered temptation of the
 
 716 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 Spirit of Evil. If the church would preserve the virtue so earnestly 
 inculcated upon its Sunday-school children, it must not rest with inspir- 
 ing the right spirit, it must impart the power to fashion the right condi- 
 tions for virtuous life. It must not only teach the children to pray 
 " Lead us not into temptation ; " it must train them so as to lead them 
 out of temptation. 
 
 Nor is it only a negative good thus won for character in laying the 
 foundations of industrial education. The more manly a boy is made, 
 the stronger he becomes for all good aims, the larger the store of 
 reserved forces on which he can draw if he really seeks to win a noble 
 character. The more of " faculty," as our New England mothers 
 called efficiency, a girl is endowed with, the robuster is her strength- 
 fulness of soul ; every added power of being garrisoning her spirit with 
 a larger force for the resistance of evil. The mastery of the body, the 
 culture of mental and moral qualities earned on in the process of develop- 
 ing a skilled worker, finding delight and pride in doing the daily work 
 well, help mightily towards the supreme end of life. Patience, perse- 
 verance, strength of will, sound judgment, the habit of going through 
 with a thing— these all tell on the great job the soul takes in hand. 
 A number of years since Cardinal Wiseman's lecture on The Artist 
 and The Artisan called the attention of the public to the necessity, 
 not only on economic but on ethical grounds, of investing labor with 
 dignity and clothing it with delight; of filling out the common tasks of 
 the artisan with the spirit of the artist, and thus transfiguring manual 
 labor into a spiritual education. Mr. Ruskin has been for years preach- 
 ing sternly this new gospel. He finds in it a clue to the discontent and 
 consequent demoralization of the mass of our unintelligent and thus 
 uninterested labor, which turns from its ordained springs of daily joy, 
 finding them empty, to drink of the turbid streams which flow too near 
 to every man. 
 
 Again the ancient parable speaks unto us. In the garden the Lord 
 God placed the man to dress it and to keep it. The divine education of 
 man is through some true work given him to do. While he does that 
 well, finding his delight in it, all goes well. Sin enters when, discon- 
 tented with the fruit that springs up beneath his toil, he covets that 
 which grows without his toil. The use of the world as abusing it, in 
 drunkenness and lust and every prostitution of natural appetite, is found 
 in the classes whose joy is not in their work, either as having no work 
 to do, or as despising that which is necessarily done. 
 
 One of the finest and healthiest creations of the lamented George 
 Eliot was Adam Bede, the carpenter whose work-bench was his lesson- 
 book, whose daily tasks were his culture of character, and whose com- 
 mon labor of the saw and chisel fashioned thus a noble manhood. Is 
 not this the inner meaning of the fact that the world's Savior came not 
 as the princely heir of the throne of the Sakya-Munis, in the splendid 
 palace of the royal city of Kapilavastu, but as the carpenter's son in
 
 THE FKEE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. Tl7 
 
 the cottage of Nazareth? So that again we see the need that the 
 churches should make a Child Garden, and place the infant Adams 
 therein to dress it and to keep it. 
 
 8. Moral Culture through the Social Laws of the Kindergarten. 
 
 And thus we come at last to the crux of the case. The Kindergarten 
 is a system of child occupation, a curriculum of play, looking straight 
 on to the supreme end of all culture — character ; a child-garden whose 
 fruitage is in the spirit-flowering induced therein, beautiful with the 
 warm, rich colors of morality, fragrant with the aromatic incense of 
 religion. It is essentially a soul-school, reproducing on a smaller scale 
 God's plans of education drawn large in human society. 
 
 The little ones just out of their mother's arms are gathered into a 
 miniature society, with the proper occupations for such tender years, but 
 with the same drawing out of affection, the same awakening of kindly 
 feeling, the same exercise of conscience in ethical discriminations, the 
 same development of will, the same formation of habits, the same 
 calling away from self into others, into the larger life of the community, 
 which, in so far as civilization presents a true society, constitutes the 
 education of morality in ' Man writ large.' Morality is essentially, 
 what Maurice called it in his Cambridge Lectures, " Social Morality." 
 
 An order is established round about the little ones, environing them 
 with its ubiquitous presence, constraining their daily habits, impress- 
 ing itself upon their natures and moulding them while plastic into 
 orderliness. Certain laws are at once recognized. They are expected 
 to be punctual to the hour, regular in coming day by day, to come with 
 washed hands and faces and brushed hair, to be obedient to the Kin- 
 dergartner etc. A sense of law thus arises within their minds. It 
 steals upon them through the apparent desultoriness of the occupations, 
 and envelopes their imaginations in that mystery of order wherein, 
 either in nature or in man, is the world-wide, world-old beginning of 
 religion ; while moulding their emotions and impulses into the habi- 
 tudes of law wherein is the universal beginning of morality. 
 
 All of the special habitudes thus induced tell directly and weightily 
 upon the formation of character ; so much so that it is unnecessary to 
 emphasize the fact, except perhaps in the case of the habit of cleanli- 
 ness and the care of the person in general. " Cleanliness is next to 
 godliness " ran the old saw, with a wisdom beyond the thought of most 
 of those who glibly quote it in their missions of charity to the homes (?) 
 of poverty, wherein to bring any true cleanliness needs nothing less 
 than a new education. Cleanliness is essential to health, the lack of 
 which saw, as already hinted, has so much to do with the temptations 
 of the poor. It is equally essential to that self respect wherein ambition 
 and enterprise root, and out of which is fed that sense of honor which 
 so mightily supports conscience in the cultured classes. It is also, 
 under the all-pervading law of correspondences which Swedenborg has
 
 718 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 done most to open, inseparably inter-linked with purity, the cleanli- 
 ness of the soul. Physiology and psychology run into each other 
 undistinguishably in a being at once body and spirit, so that the state 
 of the soul is expressed in the condition of the body, and is in turn 
 largely determined by it. To care for the purity and decency of the 
 temple used to be priestly service. To care for the temple of the Holy 
 Ghost still should be viewed not only as tlie task of the sanitarian sex- 
 ton but as the charge of the spiritual priesthood ; not a policing of 
 the building but a religious service in the building, an instruction in 
 purity, a worship of the Lord and Giver of Life. 
 
 9. Moral Culture through the Social Manners of the Kindergarten. 
 In this miniature society there is a school of manners. One smiles 
 in reading the account of the back-woods log school-house where the 
 gawky lad Abraham Lincoln was taught manners. But indeed is not 
 this bound up with any good training of character? The noblest 
 schools of manhood have always laid great stress upon manners; 
 whether it has been the Spartan discipline of youth in respect to their 
 elders, through every attitude, as the expression of that reverence 
 which they felt to be the bond of society ; or the training of noble lads 
 in the days of Chivalry to all high bred courtesy and gentle-manliness, 
 as the soul of the true knight whose motto should be noblesse oblige. 
 Goethe in his dream of the ideal education, in ' Wilhelm Meister,' made 
 the training of youth in symbolic manners a conspicuous feature. 
 So great a legislator as Moses was not above ordering concerning the 
 manners of the people in his all embracing scheme of State education ; 
 " Ye shall not walk in the manners of the nations whom I cast out 
 from before you." So scientific a critic as Herbert Spencer finds in 
 manners the outcome of a people's social state, i. e. of its moral state. 
 True, the manners may be the superficial crust, the hardened conven- 
 tionalities which neither express nor cherish the inner spirit, but so 
 may ritual religion, the manners of the soul with God, become wholly 
 formal and dead. Nevertheless we do not decry the ritual of religion, 
 nor should we any more depreciate the ritual of morality, manners. 
 The aim of the true educator should be to find the best ritual of mor- 
 ality and spiritualize it ; present it always lighted up with the ethical 
 feeling of which it is the symbolic expression. The homes of really 
 cultured and refined people carry on this work, among the other 
 educational processes which Emerson says are the most important as 
 being the most unconscious. For the children of the very poor, whose 
 homes are rough and rude, unsoftened by grace, unlighted by beauty, 
 uninspired by an atmosphere of gentleness, unadorned by living pat- 
 terns of cultured courtesy, the need is supplied in the Kindergarten, the 
 society of the petite monde. Herein the little ones have before them 
 daily, in the persons of the Kindergartner and her assistants, a higher 
 order of cultivation, all whose ways take on something of the refine- 

 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CIILT.CII WORK. 7l9 
 
 ment that naturally clothes the lady ; and, seen through the atmosphere 
 of affection and admiration which surround them, are idealized before 
 the little ones into models of manners, which instinctively waken their 
 imitativeness and unconsciously refine them and render them gentle, 
 a very different thing from genteel. To the Kindergartner is drawn the 
 respect and deference which accustom the children to that spirit which 
 a certain venerable catechism describes as the duty of every cliild ; an 
 ideal we may pray not yet wholly antiquated in these days of democ- 
 racy, where every man thinks himself as good as his neighbor and a 
 little better too, if the hierarchy we find in nature is still any type of 
 the divine ordinations or orderings of society : " My duty towards 
 my neighbor is ... to love, honor and succor my father and 
 mother, to honor and obey the civil authority, to submit myself to all 
 my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters, to order myself 
 lowly and reverently to all my betters." 
 
 Among themselves in the daily relations of the Kindergarten, in its 
 plays and games, the children are taught and trained to speak gently, 
 to act politely, to show courtesy, to allow no rudeness or roughness in 
 speech or action. The very singing is ordered with especial reference 
 to this refining influence, and its soft, sweet tones contrast with the 
 noisy and boisterous singing of the same class of children in the Sun- 
 day-school not only aesthetically but ethically. 
 
 The importance given to music in the Kindergarten, where every- 
 thing that can be so taught is set to notes and sung into the children, 
 is the carrying out of the hints given by the greatest thinkers, from 
 Plato to Goethe, as to the formative power of music. One who knows 
 nothing of these hints of the wise, and who had never reflected upon 
 the subject, in watching a well ordered Kindergarten would feel 
 instinctively the subtle influence of sweet music in softening the 
 natures of the little ones, in filling them with buoyant gladness, in 
 leading them into the sense of law, in harmonizing their whole 
 natures. I remember a late occasion when I was profoundly im- 
 pressed with this and felt the words of the masters, long familiar to 
 me, open with unsuspected depth. 
 
 10. Moral Culture in the Nurture of Unselfishness. 
 In this miniature society there is a schooling in all the altruistic 
 dispositions, — to use the rather pretentious phraseology of our later 
 ethical philosophers, in lieu of any better expression — an education of 
 the individual out of egoism, self-ism and the selfishness into which it 
 rapidly runs; an instruction in the principles, and a training in the 
 habits of those duties each one owes his neighbor, which constitute 
 morality. As in the association which civilization begins, and in whose 
 increase civilization develops, so in this miniature society, individuali- 
 ties are brought together from their separate homes in a common life, 
 a community whose occupations, aims and interests are one ; where the
 
 "720 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 pleasures of each one are bound up with the pleasures of his fellows, 
 his own desires limited by the desires of his playmates, his self-regard 
 continually brought into conflict with the resistance offered by the self- 
 regard of others, and he is taught to exercise himself in thinking of 
 his companions aud to find a higher delight than the gratification of his 
 own whims in the gratification of others' wishes. The law of this lit- 
 tle society is the Golden Rule. This law is made to seem no mere hard 
 imposition of a Power outside of them which they are painfully to 
 obey, but the pleasant exposition of the Good Man within them, the law 
 written in their hearts, which they can happily obey, finding that 
 indeed " It is more blessed to give than to receive." The little ones are 
 accustomed in their plays to consult each other's wishes and to subor- 
 dinate their individual likings to the liking of some friend. " What 
 shall we play now?" says the Kindergartner ; and up goes the hand of 
 some quick moving child — " Let us play the farmer." " Yes, that would 
 be nice, but don't you think it would be still nicer if we were to ask 
 Fanny to choose ? She has been away you know, and looks as though 
 she had a little wish in her mind. I see it in her eyes. Wouldn't it 
 be the happiest thing for us all if we let our dear little sick Fanny 
 choose?" And this appeal to the generosity and kindliness instinct 
 in all children, but repressed in all from the start by the barbarism 
 into which the neglected nursery runs and unto which the competitive 
 school system aspires, draws forth the ready response, " Oh ! yes, let 
 Fanny choose." Thus the little ones have their daily lesson, changing 
 form with each day, but recurrent in some form on every day, in the 
 meaning of the Master's word and the spirit of his life. 
 
 By the side of Johnny, who is bright and quick and is finishing his 
 clay modeling easily, sits Eddie, who is slow of mind and dull of 
 vision and awkward of hand and can't get his bird's nest done. The 
 Kindergartner can of course help him, but a whisper to Johnny sets his 
 fingers at work with Eddie's in the pleasure of kindly helpfulness, and 
 the dull child is helped to hopeful action, while the bright child is 
 helped to feel his ability a power to use for his brother's good. If any 
 joy or sorrow comes to one of the little company it is made the occa- 
 sion of calling out the friendly and fraternal sympathy of all the 
 child community. "Have you heard the good news, children ? Mary 
 has a dear little baby brother, ever so sweet, too ! Are n't we all 
 glad? " And every face brightens and all eyes sparkle with the quick 
 thrill of a common joy. " Poor dear little Maggie ! Is n't it too bad ! 
 Her papa is very sick and she can't come to Kindergarten to-day. 
 She is sitting at home, so sad, because her papa suffers so much and 
 her mamma is so anxious. Don't we all feel sorry for her? And 
 sha' n't wo send word to her by Bessie, who lives right near her, that 
 we all feel so sorry, and that we hope her papa will soon be well?" 
 
 Scarcely a day passes without some such occasion of calling out the 
 sympathies of the individual children into the feeling of a larger life 
 in common, in which they are members one of another and share each
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 721 
 
 other's joys and sorrows. " Bear ye one another's burdens and so fulfill 
 the law of Christ," may not be written upon the walls of the Kinder- 
 garten, but is written, day by day, in living lines upon the inner walls 
 of those temples of the Holy Ghost, whore it is read by the Spirit. 
 
 11. Moral Culture through a Life, Corporate and Individual. 
 
 In manifold ways each day also brings opportunities of impressing 
 upon the little ones the mutually limiting rights of the members of a 
 community, the reciprocal duties each one owes to every other one 
 with whom he has relations, and to enforce the lesson, " No man liveth 
 unto himself." A sense of corporate life grows up within this minia- 
 ture community, which floats each life out upon the currents of a 
 larger and nobler life. Each action shows its consequences upon 
 others, and thus rebukes selfishness. Each little being is bound up 
 with other beings, with the whole society, and his conduct affects the 
 rest, changes the atmosphere of the whole company. Injustice is thus 
 made to stalk forth in its own ugliness, falsehood to look its native dis- 
 honor, meanness to stand ashamed of itself in the condemning looks 
 of the little community. Justice rises into nobleness, truth into sacred- 
 ness, generosity into beauty, kindness into charming grace as their 
 forms are mirrored in the radiant eyes of the approving company. 
 That very deep word of the Apostle, " Let him that stole steal no 
 more ; for we are members one of another," grows in such a child 
 community, a living truth, a principle of loftiest ethics; and in the 
 sense of solidarity, the feeling of organic oneness, the highest joy of 
 goodness and the deepest pain of badness becomes the perception of 
 the influence, mysterious and omnipotent, which each atom exerts on 
 the whole body, for weal or for woe, in the present and in the future. 
 
 And into this topmost reach of social morality the little community 
 of the kindergarten begins to enter, blessing the individuals and pre- 
 paring the soil for a higher social state, that life in common of the 
 good time coming. 
 
 This social morality is cultured at no cost of the individuality. The 
 sense of a life in common is not made to drive out the sense of a life 
 in separateness, in which each soul stands face to face with the august 
 Form of Ideal Goodness, to answer all alone to the Face which searches 
 him out in his innermost being, and wins him to seek Him early and 
 to find Him. The true Kindei'gartner is very scrupulous about lifting 
 the responsibility in any way from the conscience of the child. In 
 these appeals to the better nature of all, it is that better nature of 
 some child which is left to decide the question, only helped by the way 
 she puts the case. Even in a case of disobedience to her command 
 she is careful not so much to be obeyed as to be obeyed by the self-won 
 victory of the little rebel, who is given time to get over his sulk and to 
 come to himself, and so to arise and say, in his own way, " I have 
 sinned." Nothing in the whole system is more beautiful than this 
 effort to have the child conquer himself. 
 
 46
 
 722 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 The appeal is always through the sympathies, the affections, the 
 imagination to the sense of right in each child, to the veiled throne 
 where silent and alone Conscience sits in judgment. Only it is an 
 appeal carried up to this final tribunal by the persuasive powers of 
 social sympathy, the approbation of one's fellows, the judgment in its 
 favor already pronounced by speaking faces and glowing eyes. As 
 society affords the sphere for the development of conscience, so it fur- 
 nishes the most subtle and powerful motives to conscience, aud the 
 individual life is perfected in the life in common. 
 
 12. JMoral Culture through an Atmosphere of Love. 
 
 An atmosphere of love is thus breathed through the little society of 
 the Kindergarten under which all the sweetness and graciousness of 
 the true human nature, the nature of the Christ in us, opens and ripens 
 in beauty and fragrance. All morality sums itself up into one word — 
 Love. "Owe no man anything but to love one another: for he that 
 loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit 
 adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear 
 false witness, Thou shalt not covet ; and if there be any other com- 
 mandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou 
 shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neigh- 
 bor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law." 
 
 To teach children to really love one another, to feel kindly, gener- 
 ous, unselfish dispositions towards each other, and to act upon those 
 dispositions, is to write the whole code of conduct in the heart. And 
 plainly this is not a matter for mere precept. It is not to be effected 
 by the most eloquent exhortations of Sunday-school teachers or of 
 pastors. It is a spirit to be breathed within the very souls of the little 
 ones in their tenderest years, from an atmosphere charged with loving- 
 ness. This is what makes a loving mother in the home the true 
 teacher of character in the true school, vastly more influential than the 
 most perfect Sunday-school or the most wonderful church. And the 
 Kindergarten is only a vicarious mothering for those whose homes 
 lack this divine nurturing, a brooding over the void of unformed man- 
 hood and womanhood by a loving woman, bringing order out of the 
 chaos and smiling to see it "very good." Nothing that can help this 
 quickening of love is neglected in the Kindergarten. The daily work 
 is wrought with some special aim in view, some thought of affection in 
 the heart. It is to be a gift for father or mother, brother or sister, aunt 
 or uncle, perhaps, unknown to them, for Kindergartner or for pastor. 
 
 As I write I lift my eyes to look at a horse pricked out on white 
 paper and framed with pink paper strips, wrought, with what patient 
 toil of loving fingers, by the cutest of little darkies, the baby of our 
 Kindergarten, for his pastor; and duly presented — not without being 
 lifted high in air and kissed most smackingly — to me on our last 
 Christmas celebration. Tims the daily toil weaves subtle fibres of 
 affection around the heart, models the soul into shape uf gracious low.
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 723 
 
 All this beautiful moral culture is wrought through the happy play 
 of the Child-Garden, with a minimum of talk about (lie duty of these 
 simple virtues and with a maximum of influences surrounding the chil- 
 dren to make them feel the happiness and blessedness of being good. 
 The atmosphere is sunny with joy. The constant aim of the Kinder- 
 garten is to fill all with happiness. Cross looks and hard words are 
 banished. The law of kindness rules, the touch of love conquers. Mo 
 work is allowed to become a task. It is all kept play, and play whose 
 buoyancy each child is made to feel inheres in the spirit of kindness 
 and affection and goodness which breathes through the Kindergarten. 
 They are all trying to do right, to speak truth, to show kindness, to feel 
 love, and therefore all are happy. Now to be thoroughly happy, over- 
 flowingly happy, happy with a warmth and cheeriness that Lights up 
 life as the spring sun lights up the earth, tins is itself a culture of good- 
 ness. It is to fill these tender beings with stores of mellow feeling, of 
 rich, ripe affection which must bud and blossom into the flowers of the 
 goodness which are briefly comprehended under the one name of Love. 
 
 " Virtue kindles at the touch of joy," 
 wrote Mrs. Browning, knowing well whereof she wrote. Joyousness 
 pure and innocent and unselfish, overflowing all around like the rich 
 gladness of the light, is the very life of the children of God. " Thou 
 meetest him that rcjoiceth and worketh righteousness." The " vital 
 feelings of delight," of which Wordsworth spake, feed the vital actions 
 of righteousness, in working which God is met. The happiness the 
 little ones have, whose angels stand ever before the face of their Father 
 in Heaven, to become like whom is to enter even here the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, must be something like the pleasures which are at God's right 
 hand for evermore, a joy which expresses and which feeds the purity 
 and the goodness of the children of the Heaven-Father. 
 
 Is not an institution which provides for the cultivation of such social 
 morality, under such an atmosphere of sunny joy, a true Child Garden, 
 for the growth of the soul and its blossoming in beauty? 
 
 13. Religious Culture in Ote Kindergarten. 
 
 What is thus true of the Kindergarten as a school of morality is 
 equally true of it as a school of religion. In carrying on such a culture 
 of character as that described above, the Kindergarten would be doing 
 a religious work even though no formal word were spoken concerning 
 religion. It would be culturing the spirit out of which religion grows. 
 
 Love is the essence of religion. All forms of religion in their high- 
 est reach express this. Christianity positively affirms it. The very 
 being of the Source and Fount of all spiritual life is essential love; 
 " God is Love." He who manifested God to man summed the whole 
 law in two commandments, the dual sphered forms of this life of love 
 in man — " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and 
 with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great 
 commandment. And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy
 
 724 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN EN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 neighbor as thyself." In the order of nature, love to our neighbor pre- 
 cedes and prepares for love to God. Mother and father, brother and 
 sister awaken love in us, drawing it out toward themselves, and thus 
 educating the soul to flow up in love unto the life of which these earthly 
 affections are seen to be but the shadows. Human affections are the 
 syllables which when put together spell out the love of God. They are 
 the strands which twine together into the " bands of a man, the cords 
 of love " wherewith, 
 " The u>7iole round earth is every way bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 
 
 They are pulse beats in the earthly members of the Eternal Life 
 
 which 
 
 " Throbs at the centre, heart-heaving alway ; " 
 
 the Life 
 
 " Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are songs." 
 
 The love of the dear ones in the home is not something other than the 
 love of God, to be contrasted or even compared with the love we cherish 
 towards the Father in Heaven ; it is part of that love, its lower forms, 
 through which alone we climb up to a St. Augustine's passionate 
 " What do I love when I love Thee, O my God?" "He that loveth 
 not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he 
 hath not seen." Every true love is the respiration from the soul of 
 man of the inspiration of God Himself, the Essential and Eternal Love. 
 Could the Church succeed in making its members so live that it should 
 again be said — " See how the Christians love one another " — the world 
 would own a new inspiration of religious life, a new revelation of 
 religious truth. If the Kindergarten succeeds in making a child- 
 society, filled with gentle, kindly affection, pervaded with the spirit of 
 love, we should rest persuaded that herein it was working the "prepara- 
 tion of the heart " for the higher love, to open duly in the Temple con- 
 sciousness — " Wist ye not that I must be in my Father's ; " because in 
 the flowing up of these springs of human love we should recognize, 
 deep down below consciousness, the tiding of the Eternal Love, the well 
 of water springing up within them unto everlasting life. 
 
 But indeed there need be no lack of direct words of the Heavenly 
 Father and to Him, such as make up what we ordinarily think of as 
 religious education. The Kindergarten provides for a natural child 
 religion, in its talks and songs and simple prayers. In the games 
 wherein the little ones are familiarized with the processes by which 
 man's wants are supplied, their minds are led up to see the Fatherly 
 Love which thus cares for the children of earth. Awe, reverence, 
 worship, gratitude, affection are suggested and inspired, and the child 
 soul is gently opened towards the Face of Holy Love shining down 
 over it, casting its bright beams deep within the innocent mind in 
 thoughts and feelings we dimly trace. Of this speech about God there 
 is a sparing use, according to the wisdom of the truest teachers. 
 
 George McDonald tells how Ranald Bannerman's father never 
 named GOD, till one rare, high moment, when nature spread her spell
 
 THE FJREE KINDERGARTEN IN CIIUKCir WORK. 725 
 
 of gladsome awe, and invited the utterance of the ineffable name 
 and the revelation the marriage of word and work should make. 
 
 Glib garrulity about God is the vice of most religious teaching, 
 "falsely so called," the bungling job-work of spiritual tyros who never 
 should be set upon so fine a task as the culture of the soul. The 
 simple child-songs, full of the spirit of religion, with so little about it, 
 delicately uplifting the thought of the little ones to the Fatherly Good- 
 ness ; the sacred word of child-hearted prayer in its one perfect form, 
 " Our Father who art in heaven, — " as the old rubric would have ordered 
 it, " said or sung " in the opening of the daily session ; envelop the 
 Kindergarten in a gracious sense of God, subtle as the atmosphere, and 
 like it pervasive and all inspiring. Frbbel was profoundly religious 
 himself, and sought to make his new education above all a true religious 
 culture. If it had stopped short of this it would have been to him 
 maimed and mutilated. But he was too humbly true to Nature's 
 mothering to spoil, in trying to improve, her gentle, quiet, unobtrusive 
 ways of opening the child soul to God. He knew that the crowning 
 consciousness of God in the child soul must bide its time, and cannot 
 be forced without deadly injury. He knew that the twelve years in 
 the home go before the hour in the temple ; are the roofings for that 
 beautiful flowering. 
 
 To create such an atmosphere around the tender buds of being, and 
 enswathe them ere they consciously open to know God with the felt 
 presence of a Fatherly Gooduess ; to teach the little ones their duties 
 one to another as brothers, in such wise that they shall come to recog- 
 nize them as the mutual obligations of the common children of this 
 Fatherly Love ; to guide their inquiring minds to see through all the 
 law and wisdom and beneficence of nature the care of this Fatherly 
 Providence ; to lift their tiny hands in simple, daily prayer to this 
 Fatherly Worshipfulness — is not this a beautiful culture of essential 
 veligion in its child stage ? 
 
 14. This Complete Child Culture the Foundation of Church Work. 
 
 Combining this physical, intellectual, industrial, moral and religious 
 culture, does not the Kindergarten become a veritable Child-Garden, 
 where the tender saplings of the Heavenly Father are well started 
 towards symmetric, rhythmically rounded wholeness, or holiness ? Is it 
 not the cradle for the Christ Child, the infancy of the Coming Man, in 
 whose unspoiled childhood growing normally towards perfection " The 
 White Christ," as the Norsemen call him, the pure, clean, holy Image 
 of the Father in the Son, is to be " formed in " men, to be " born in " 
 them, till " we all come to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature 
 of the fullness of Christ ? " 
 
 I make no exaggerated plea for the Kindergarten. To its defects 
 and limitations I am not wholly blind. Its imperfections, however, 
 are not serious, its limitations are no valid objection to it. It is con- 
 fessedly only a stage in education, not a complete system. But that
 
 726 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IX CHURCH WORK. 
 
 stage is the all important one of the foundation. True — "and pity 
 'tis, 'tis true " — we have no series of such Child-Gardens, transplanting 
 the children, stage by stage, after Nature's plans, on into manhood and 
 womanhood. After this fair beginning we have to transfer them to 
 schools wholly uncongenial, not only to the best life of body and 
 mind, but alas! of the soul also; where competition and rivalry, selfish 
 ambition for priority of place, hard law and a stern spirit, chill and 
 deaden the life so graciously begun, and prepare the children for the 
 false society of strife and selfishness, " the world " which " if any man 
 love, the love of the Father is not in him." Nevertheless, the founda- 
 tion of the true education must be laid, in the assurance that it well 
 laid the life will plumb somewhat squarer, and that upon it, shaped 
 and ordered by its better form, string by string, the layers of the nobler 
 education must rise, lifting humanity towards that blessed society yet 
 to be upon the new earth over which the new heavens arch. Its mech- 
 anique, however wonderfully wise, truly carries within it no such re- 
 generating power unless a living soul vitalizes it. As a mechanism, it 
 seems to me the most perfect the world has known. But the finest 
 thing about it is the imperious demand it makes for a true personality 
 at the centre of its curious coil. No other system of education is so 
 insistent upon the necessity of a soul within the system, depends so 
 absolutely upon the personal influence of the teacher, and recognizes 
 this subordination of method to spirit so frankly. It claims for itself 
 that its mechanism provides a true means for the exercise of personal 
 influence upon the lives of the little ones, prevents the waste of mis- 
 directed effort, and the worse than waste such labor always leaves. It 
 then seeks out and trains the true mothering woman, sympathizing 
 with children, drawing out their confidence and affection, apt to 
 teach, quick to inspire, an over-brooding presence of love, creative of 
 order in the infantile chaos. The machinery can be worked in a 
 woodenish way by any fairly intelligent woman. It can be success- 
 fully worked to accomplish its grand aims only by a noble woman, a 
 vitalizing personality. The Kindergarten is the wonderful body of 
 culture whose animating soul is the Kindergartner. Its power is that 
 on which Christ always relied, that on which the Church still leans — 
 personal influence upon individuals; and its sphere for that influence 
 is the most plastic period of all life. The women whom the Kinder- 
 garten seeks to win to its cause are those who come to its work in this 
 spirit; women who want not only an avocation, a means of winning 
 bread and butter, but a vocation, a calling from God for man. 
 
 .Mv claim for the Kindergarten is that it is a wonderfully wise sys- 
 tem for utilizing the most valuable years of childhood, hitherto left to 
 run to waste, in a beautiful provision for turning the play instinct of 
 childhood into a genuine education of body, mind and soul ; that it 
 lavs the foundation for a really integral culture, a culture of the whole 
 man, i. e. of holiness ; that it specially supplements the State system 
 of education in the points where it is most lacking, the nurture of
 
 TIIK FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 727 
 
 health and industrial training ; that in so far as it does all this it com- 
 mends itself most strongly to the churches as a branch of their work, 
 which is on every hand tending towards education, as the only means 
 of preventing those unfavorable conditions for character which the 
 poor find surrounding them, in their low health and their incompe- 
 tency for skilled work ; and that above all this it avowedly seeks, and 
 is admirably adapted to secure, an initial culture of morality and re- 
 ligion patterned upon nature's own methods, i. e. God's own plans, 
 whose fruition, if ever carried on through successive stages into adult 
 life, would be that society of the Brotherhood of Man, in the Family 
 of the Heavenly Father, which is the ideal unto which the Church 
 slowly works, the Kingdom of God upon earth. 
 
 If the Church be sent to heal all manner of diseases, physical, men- 
 tal and moral, in the spirit and power of its Lord, by disciplining men 
 into the name — the truth, the life — of that Head of the new Humanity, 
 then is Church Work the education of men and women towards that 
 ideal of St. Paul — " Till we all come in the unity of the faith and of 
 the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of 
 the stature of the fullness of Christ." 
 
 And for this task of Christian Education, wherein lies Church Work, 
 the foundation must be laid — next above the lowest string in the 
 building, the Family, and in its place where it does not truly exist — in 
 some system of Child Culture, under the laws of Nature and in the 
 Spirit of Christ. The only approach to such a system the world holds 
 to-day is the Kindergarten. Therefore I claim it as the fundamental 
 Church Work ; the Infant School of the Future ; the Child Garden 
 wherein the little ones of the poor shall grow day by day in body, 
 mind and soul, towards the pattern of all human life. 
 
 The day is not far off when our present pretense of Christian Edu- 
 cation in the Sunday School will be viewed as the mere makeshift 
 of a time of zeal without knowledge, a provisional agency await- 
 ing the coming of a real soul-school ; always perhaps to be continued 
 for certain fine influences inherent in it, but at best only a supplement 
 to the true culture of character ; needing to be molded upon that 
 wiser system. The day is not far off when every church aiming to 
 carry on any real mission work will have, as the foundation for what- 
 ever system of schools it may be trying to build up, a Free Kinder- 
 garten. Meanwhile every church founding one becomes a pioneer of 
 the true Church Work. 
 
 The thoroughly religious tone of this work can be secured, if any 
 churches distrust the general supply of Kindergartners, by the pastor's 
 selecting one of those blessed women whom almost every congregation 
 develops — apt to teach, full of love to children and to God — and per- 
 suading her to train as a Kindergartner, and then take charge of the 
 Parochial Kindergarten. 
 
 True, this work will be costly in comparison with the poor work now 
 done so cheaply and with such apparently large results. But as the
 
 728 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 real spirit of love to God and man inspires the activity of the churches, 
 and a true discernment of what is needing to be done grows upon them, 
 the cackling and crowing of congregations over their everto-be-so- 
 much-admired works, will give place to a quieter and humbler feeling; 
 and churches will be glad to do some smaller work, as men judge, if so 
 it may only be true work for man well done in the Spirit of Christ ; 
 aud will rest content to sink a thousand dollars a year in nurturing fifty 
 01 a hundred little ones. Only poor work is cheap. And church work 
 must needs first be sound, and only then be cheap as may be. 
 
 True also the State may be appealed to for this pre-primary school- 
 ing, and may engraft the Kindergarten upon the Common School Sys- 
 tem, as has been done in some places, and thus relieve the Church of 
 this charge. But if what has been here said commends itself to the 
 minds of the clergy, and of those interested in Church Work, it will 
 suggest to them strong reasons why the Church should not seek to be 
 thus relieved, should be even positively unwilling to be thus relieved, 
 should hasten to occupy the ground with Church Kindergartens. So 
 fine and delicate a work, on the most plastic of all material, by the 
 most personal of powers, seems greatly jeopardized by being made part 
 of a cumbrous official system. It may hold its subtle spirit within this 
 sphere, but there is great risk of an unconscious lowering of tone, an 
 insensible evaporation of the spirit of the Kindergarten in the routine- 
 working of its mechanism. Above all other branches of education it 
 needs to be fed from the deepest springs of motive power, to be tided 
 with a holy enthusiasm, to be made a real religious ministry. And 
 because, with all its defects in other respects, the Church best supplies 
 this spirit which is the vital essence of the Kindergarten, I hope to see 
 it taken up by the churches. The nurture of early childhood is so pre- 
 eminently the very task of the Church that I am persuaded she needs only 
 to understand this blessed institution to claim it, as the development of 
 that Spirit of Truth who is ever revealing to men, as they are able to 
 bear them, the things needing to be done for the health of humanity, 
 for the perfecting of the body of Christ. 
 
 15. Providential Preparation of the Churches for Welcoming this Work. 
 As I thus urge upon the careful consideration of my brethren of the 
 clergy, of all branches of the Church of Christ, the claims to a promi- 
 nent position in their Church Work of an institution that is only begin- 
 ning to be seriously considered in this country, an institution which 
 has upon its surface so little of that wherein many have been accus- 
 tomed to find all Church Work, I am encouraged by the signs on every 
 hand of the dawning of a day of reconciliation, wherein those who 
 have stood apart in their opinions about Church Work are to find them- 
 selves face to face. Protestantism has separated along two lines of 
 work, drawn by two schools of thought. Some branches of Protestant- 
 ism have based their work in the culture of Christian character upon 
 the child experience of formation, having a strong sense of the organic
 
 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 729 
 
 life of a holy humanity. Others have based their work in the culture 
 of Christian character upon the adult experience of re-formation, hav- 
 ing a strong sense of the organic life of a sinful humanity. 
 
 Lutheranism, the Church of England and its American daughter the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church have held to the idea of nurture, and have 
 sought to grow normally from infancy the sons and daughters of The 
 Almighty. They are learning, however, that with the best nurture 
 there will be lapses, deep and wide; that the children of the Heavenly 
 Father may turn out prodigals, needing in the far-off land to say to 
 themselves, "I will arise and go to my Father and will say unto him, 
 Father, I have sinned." They are developing thus, alike in the Evan- 
 gelical and Ritualistic wings, the revivalistic spirit and methods, so that 
 a genuine Methodist or Baptist would feel quite at home in the " Gospel 
 Meeting " or " The Mission." While thus drawing nigh to their sister 
 churches in the after work of conversion, the churches of nurture 
 ought to be ready to receive this system of child culture. 
 
 Most of the branches of Protestant Christianity have centered their 
 work upon conversion, seeking to recreate the children of Adam into 
 the sons and daughters of the Lord. Presbyterians, Congregational- 
 ists, Methodists and Baptists are now remembering that under and 
 back of the old Adam there was in every man, as man, the older Christ ; 
 a spiritual nature, even though dormant, which could open, and should 
 open, in every child into the sonship of God. They are thus feeling 
 their way to sub-soil their needful work of conversion with the basic 
 work of nurture ; and are seeking to grow the divine nature in child- 
 hood before the devilish nature develops a mastery of the being. The 
 Sunday School receives most attention in these denominations, and 
 shows thus the conscious need of education as the first of church 
 works. The dissatisfaction felt with it indicates the felt need of 
 something more truly nurturing. They are more or less consciously 
 groping, under the leadings of The Spirit of Truth, who is guiding men 
 into all truth, in search of a system which will prove, what Dr. Bush- 
 nell craved as the need of the churches, a true " Christian Nurture." 
 
 And thus all branches of Protestantism ought to be able now to re- 
 ceive this gospel of God's servant, Frederick Frdbel, in their own tongue, 
 and welcome it, and together walk in the steps of the true education 
 towards that new earth into which, as written of old, " a little child 
 
 shall, lead them." 
 
 16. Tins Theory Tested by Experience. 
 
 It only remains to be added that this theory of the Kindergarten in 
 Church Work has been submitted to the test of experiment, by the 
 Church I have the privilege of serving, and that the result is a satisfac- 
 tory verification of the theory. Three years ago the Anthon Memorial 
 Church in New York opened its Free Kindergarten. A meeting of 
 ladies was called and an address made by Miss Peabody, the venerable 
 apostle of the Kindergarten in the United States, whose long life of 
 noble service in the cause of education crowns its honored years with 

 
 730 THE FREE KINDERGARTEN IN CHURCH WORK. 
 
 the fine enthusiasm in which, at the age when most are content with 
 rest, she has consecrated herself to this gospel of the Christ Child. A 
 simple organization was effected from among the ladies interested in 
 the idea, under an energetic management. A subscription list was 
 soon filled out warranting a year's experiment. Thanks to the counsel 
 of the best authority, that of Mad. Kraus-Boelte, we were led, to a most, 
 fortunate choice for our Kindergartner. Miss Mary L. Van Wagenen 
 had cherished the idea of a Free Kindergartner for the poor, and 
 brought to this venture that combination of qualities described above 
 as essential to the true Kindergartner, which in her person has made 
 this experiment so satisfactory a success. A number of young ladies 
 volunteered to act as unpaid assistants. The Sunday-school room 
 of the church was placed at the use of the Kindergarten Associa- 
 tion, and so in due time the Kindergarten was opened. Since then it 
 has been in session for eight months of each year, on five days of the 
 week, from 9£ a. m. to 1 p. m. About seventy children have been kept 
 on the roll, as many as can be well cared for by our force of assistants. 
 
 The plan of volunteer assistants has not proven thoroughly success- 
 ful, though we still have a few in attendance. It was only designed as 
 a provisional supply. After the first year a training class for Kinder- 
 gartners was opened, through which several of her amateur helpers 
 have passed, some into the charge of new Kindergartens, and others 
 into the position of qualified assistants in our own Kindergarten. It 
 is our intention to salary such assistants, as we are able, and thus secure 
 regular and skilled service. 
 
 To further the physical culture of the Kindergarten a substantial 
 dinner has been provided daily for the children, and out of door excur- 
 sions made in suitable seasons. 
 
 The mental influence on the children has been very marked. The 
 brightness of their faces is an expression of the intellectual quickening 
 that has taken place. Soms of the little ones have developed wonder- 
 fully. Their moral growth has been no less marked. Some of the 
 children seem literally re-made. And generally, in the charming spir- 
 itual atmosphere of this Child Garden, there seem to be budding those 
 " fruits of the spirit " which are " love, joy, peace, gentleness, good- 
 ness." The children are not saints by any means ; but they are grow- 
 ing happily, joyously, and on the whole beautifully, and as fast as we 
 dare expect. The best testimony to the influence of the work is the 
 appreciation the poor mothers show of its effects. The children have 
 even become missionaries of cleanliness, order and love, and a little 
 child is leading many a household towards some better life. No start- 
 ling results are sought. We are satisfied to trust the future with the 
 harvest of this well used spring time. 
 
 It has cost us about $ 1,000 a year, and we feel that it is a good in- 
 vestment for Christ. Any church with this amount can plant the infant 
 school of the future, and the American Frbbel Union will help it to a 
 good Kindergartner.
 
 FROEBEL, KINDERGARTEN, AND CHILD CULTURE PAPERS. 
 
 Republished from Barnard's American Journal of Education in a Volume of 720 pages, in 
 furtherance of the objects of the American Froebel Uuion. 
 
 Introduction — Development of the Kindergarten I— xvl 
 
 1. Letter op Editor op American Journal op Education iii 
 
 2. Letter op Miss E. P. Peabodt v 
 
 Progress made in Europe vii 
 
 Beginnings made in the United States xi 
 
 I. FROEBEL. AND HIS EDUCATIONAL WORK. 
 M«moir of TTTederich August Froebel 9-128 
 
 1. Principal, Events in his Personal History 11 
 
 2. Principal Events in the Froebelian Circle 15 
 
 Aids to the Understanding of* Froebel 17 
 
 L Autobiographical Sketch op Home and School Training 21^48 
 
 Letter to Duke of M einingen 21 
 
 Early Childhood— Loss of Mother— Local Influences 22 
 
 Family Life— First Entrance into School— Key to Inner Life 23 
 
 Joy and Strength in Self-Activity— Discordants — Harmony of Nature 24 
 
 Reconcilement of Differences— Life away from Home 20 
 
 Physical Growth and Play— Religious and Social Culture 29 
 
 Influence of Manner on Pupils— Choice of Vocation SO 
 
 Passion for Theatricals— Studies at Jena— Botany— Zoology 33 
 
 Death of Father — Land Surveying — Shelling'* Bruno 34 
 
 Philosophy and Art — Influence of Nature— Architect 35 
 
 Choice of Teaching for Life Work— Model School— Private Tutor 37 
 
 Life as an Educator— Play, Activity, and Gifts 41 
 
 Residence with Pestalozzi 1808-1810— Study of Pestalozzianism 42 
 
 Studies of Language and Natural History in Gottingen 43 
 
 Lectures in Berlin University — Experiences of Soldier's Life. 45 
 
 Acquaintance with Middendorff and Langethal— Museum of Mineralogy 46 
 
 Supplement by Dr. W. Lange 47 
 
 2. Fboebel's Studies in Pestalozzianism — Basis or His Own System 40-68 
 
 Letter to the Princess Sophia of Schwarzburg Rudoldstadt, 1820 49 
 
 Aim and Subject of Pestalozzi's Pedagogy— Man in his Totality 40 
 
 The Child as a Sentient Being— The Book for Mothers 50 
 
 Development by the conscious inspection of Nature— Senses 52 
 
 The Book for Mothers never completed — Language 51 
 
 Law of Contrasts and their Reconcilement 55 
 
 Exaltation into a Culture of Intelligence and Sympathy 56 
 
 Discrimination— Imitation— Power of Rythm 57 
 
 Computability— Ideas of Number— Method with Objects . . . . , 58 
 
 Form— Elementary Ideas— Educative Influences of Play 69 
 
 Manner of handling Subjects of School Instruction 61 
 
 Not by Books, but by Real Objects and Intuitions 63 
 
 Teachers must be penetrated with the true spirit and trained GJ 

 
 FROEBEL'S EDUCATIONAL WORK. 
 
 Assistants— Pupils in training for teaching 63 
 
 Organization of a School of Eighty Pupils— Two Divisions 63 
 
 First Division composed of Children under Eight Years— Nurture 63 
 
 Second Division— Lower and Upper Class 63 
 
 Upper Class— Study and Productive Industries— Technology 64 
 
 Every Subject treated in Organic Unity of the Child and Pupil 65 
 
 Every Member of the School must be regular and punctual 65 
 
 Special Educational Aims— Order and Progressive Growth 65 
 
 Possibility of Introducing Pestalozzi's method into Families 66 
 
 Connection of Elementary Instruction with higher Scientific Culture 67 
 
 3. Lanoe's Remininiscenses op Froebel 69-80 
 
 Froebel at Hamburg in 1849— Address to Women's Union 69 
 
 What is New in Froebel's Aim and Method 71 
 
 Fundamental Ideas of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel 72 
 
 Diesterweg's Adaptation of Pestalozzi's Views to Popular Schools 73 
 
 Personal Relations of Froebel — Experience in Teaching 74 
 
 Development of Individual Men and the Race — Macrocosm and Microcosm.. 76 
 
 Family School at Griesheim— Institution at Keilhau— Marriage 77 
 
 Publication 1819— 1826— Institute at Wattensee—F. Froebel and Barop 79 
 
 Girls School at Willisau — Official Report of Berne Cantonal Commission.... 80 
 
 Educational Institute for Orphans, and Teacher's Class at Burgdorf 80 
 
 Genesis of the Kindergarten at Blankenberg in 1837 81 
 
 Come let us live with our Children— Kindergarten in Dresden in 1839 81 
 
 4. The Kindergarten— Genesis, Name, and Objects 82-96 
 
 (1) Winthur— Froebel's First Announcement to Barop in 1829 82 
 
 Letter from Burgdorf in 1830 to the Froebelian Circle 82 
 
 Inauguration of plan at Blankenberg in 1837— Sonntagsblat 83 
 
 Appeal to the Women of Germany at Guttenberg Festival 1840 83 
 
 Foundation of the Universal German Institution at Keilhau 84 
 
 Publication of Die Mutter und Koselieder— Pictures, Play and Songs 84 
 
 Explanation of Gifts for Play— Movement, Plays, and Songs 85 
 
 Intercourse with Nature and Social Phenomena 87 
 
 Domestic Education improved by Kindergarten Pupils 88 
 
 Women to be trained as Mothers and Nurses 89 
 
 Organic Connection between the Kindergarten and School 90 
 
 (2) Payne — Froebel's Interpretation of the Activity of Children 91 
 
 Play the Natural Occupation of the Child in its normal state 92 
 
 Theory in Practice— Gifts for the Culture of Observation 93 
 
 Objections to the System Considered 95 
 
 6. Barop— Critical Moments in Froebel's Institutions 97-104 
 
 Financial Difficulties in Keilhau 97 
 
 Froebel's Training Institute at Marienthal— Marriage. 97 
 
 Son of a Prince taken into the Institution— Visit to Switzerland «... 100 
 
 Difficulties from Priestly Opposition— Interposition of Pfyffer. 101 
 
 Meeting of the Cantonal Teachers for three months at Burgdorf 103 
 
 Origin of the name Kindergarten 104 
 
 6. Zeh— Official Inspection and Commendation of Keilhau 105-110 
 
 Disturbance in Government Circles about Burchenschaften 105-110 
 
 Suspicions of Barop in 1821— Withdrawal of Children 105 
 
 Froebel's Faith in God in the Darkest Hour— Idea of Kindergarten 106 
 
 Teachers reported in 1824— Testimony to their Fidelity 108 
 
 Unity of Life in Teachers and Pupils— Institutional Teaching 109 
 
 7. Unity of Life— Ideal and Actual 111-115 
 
 8 Prussian Interdict of the Kindergarten 116 
 
 9. Last Days— Marenholtz, and Middendorff 117-124 
 
 Teacher's Convention at Gotha— Last Illness— Funeral 117 
 
 10. Collected Writings, by Dr. W. Lange 125-126 
 
 Preface and Contents 125 
 
 11. Publications relating! to Froebel and his System 127-128
 
 FROEBEL'S EDUCATIONAL WORK. 5 
 
 II. FROEBEL'S EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 
 
 Educational Views as Expounded l>y Friends 120-100 
 
 I. William Sflddendorff. 130 1 If 
 
 Memoir and Educational Work ISO 
 
 Thoughts on the Kindergarten— Devotion of a Life 149 
 
 II. Freidrieli Adoipli Wilhelm Diesterweg II". [00 
 
 Acceptance and Advocacy of Froebel's Child-Culture 151 
 
 III. Bertha V. Marenlioltz— ltiiliiw 1 l.i 288 
 
 1. Memorial of a Wonderful Educational Mission 1-45 
 
 2. Publications in Elucidation of Froebel's Theories ISO 
 
 The Child— Nature, and Nurture According to Froebei Hi'.) 
 
 1. The Child in its Helplessnkss and Infinite Capacities 101-100 
 
 (1) Relations to Nature— Suhjcct to her Laws 102 
 
 (2) Relations to Humanity— The Individual shares the Destiny of the Race. . 103 
 
 (3) Relations to God— Lives and Progress for a Higher Development 160 
 
 Woman— The Educator ol Mankind— Develops the Child in all its Relations 109 
 
 2. Earliest Developments of the Child 170-179 
 
 Physical Movements— Prompted by Necessities of its Being 170 
 
 Exercises of the Limbs— Sense of Touch— The Hand 171 
 
 Shaping and Producing — Constructions in Sand and Clay : 172 
 
 Sense of Sound— Cradle Songs— Rythm— Awakening of Feeling 174 
 
 Material Needs— Gardening— Its Pleasures 175 
 
 Desire to know why, whence, and wherefore — Comparison 176 
 
 Social Impulse— The Basis of Moral Cultivation 177 
 
 Religious Instinct— Follows Social Development 177 
 
 God through Nature— Natural Phenomena Symbolic 178 
 
 8. Froebel's Theory of Education or Development 181-189 
 
 Education is Emancipation — Setting free bound up Forces 181 
 
 Natural Order, or Progress according to Law — Race 18 1 
 
 Pestalozzi's endeavor to discover and apply the principle 1S3 
 
 Froebel claims to have completed the method , 18! 
 
 Chief Aim of Education is Moral Culture 183 
 
 All Instruction and Developing Exercises should perfect the Soul 184 
 
 Law of Opposites and their Reconciliation 1 87 
 
 Theory requires Freedom, Assistance, and Unity 189 
 
 4. Errors in Existing Education of Early Childhood 190 200 
 
 Physical— Bad Nursing, and Insufficient Food and Exercise 1!',) 
 
 Moral — Improper Surroundings and Treatment 191 
 
 Intellectual — Want of Direction and over Stimulant 193 
 
 Requisites for Healthy Growth in well directed Activity 194 
 
 Educative Uses of Playthings and Play — Evolution of Ideal 196 
 
 Necessary Force exists in Mother's Love if properly trained 200 
 
 5. Froebel's Method of Development 101-218 
 
 Meaning of Method— Both General and Special 209 
 
 Object of Thought — Perception, Observation, Comparison, Judgment 204 
 
 Comparison or Reconciliation of Opposites 204 
 
 Pestalozzi's Fundamental Law— A. B. C, Form, Number, Language 205 
 
 Differences between Education and Instruction 200 
 
 Feeling and Willing— Good and Beautiful— Self and Others 206 
 
 Insufficiency of Pestalozzi's Doctrine of Form 207 
 
 Law of Balance, universal and beneficial 211 
 
 Mystic Bide of Froebel's Principles 212 
 
 6. The Kindergarten 219 226 
 
 The Child World as it appears to an outsider 219 
 
 Movement Games with explanatory Songs t 219 
 
 Occupations— in playful work and workful play 220 
 
 Ideal and useful Art— Cabinet of Collections and Products 221 
 
 Choral melody— affectionate and reverential 22$ 
 
 Kindergarten work begins in the Mother's Lap 2-»:i 
 
 Should be continued in all girl schools and education 223
 
 6 
 
 FROEBEL'S EDUCATIONAL WORK. 
 
 Freedom of Development— Suitable Condition 228 
 
 Work or Activity for Development 223 
 
 Unity or Progression— Continuity of Development 224 
 
 Hindrances to the Realization of the Kindergarten 2?5 
 
 7. Tin: Mother Pi. ay and Nursery Songs 221 
 
 Book for Mothers the basis of Froebel's System 227 
 
 Its Philosophy best felt by Children and Mothers 238 
 
 First Development goes on in play, which must be assisted 2-!) 
 
 Examples given based on the instincts of infancy 230 
 
 8. Earliest Development or the Limbs 231-232 
 
 Popular Nursery Games originate in the Motherly Instinct S .1 
 
 Exercises of the Hand, Fingers, and Wrist 233 
 
 9. Child's First Relation to Nature 239 
 
 Games should deal with Natural Phenomena 2S3 
 
 The Weather Cock— The Sun-Bird— The Child aud the Moon.. 234 
 
 Farm Yard Gate— Little Fishes— Bird Song 337 
 
 10. The Child's First Relations to Mankind 200 
 
 Mother— Family Circle and Life— Neighborhood 2'10 
 
 Froebel's Introduction to their Relationships 241 
 
 Finger Games— Physical, Mental, and Moral Uses 212 
 
 First Impressions in Critical Moments most lasting 2 !3 
 
 First Walk, Fall, Fright, Pain— Game of Bopeep— Confidence '244 
 
 Cuckoo game — Conditions for Indulgence — Habits 245 
 
 First step to moral development— High expels the low 247 
 
 Sense of Taste— Germs of aesthetic Culture— Moral Freedom 24!) 
 
 Handicrafts and other Industries— Movement Games 251 
 
 Habitation— Instinct for— Constructive Tastes and Habits 252 
 
 Value of Manual Labor— Respect for the Laborer 253 
 
 Sense of hearing and vocal organs — Voices of Nature . 254 
 
 Drawing, ideal and productive— Froebel's Occupations 257 
 
 Foundations laid for social development in family and life 259 
 
 11. The Child's First Relations to God 361-278 
 
 Belief in God, inborn, intuitive, and can be developed 201 
 
 First step through the love and trust in its Mother 201 
 
 Choral Melodies— Gestures, and words of reverence— Prayer 202 
 
 Personal Activity and Experiences— Symbolic Interpretations of Nature 203 
 
 Froebel's Mother Book— Child's own Story and History Book 209 
 
 Inner conscious life not possible with children 275 
 
 Pictorial Representations deepen Impressions 271 
 
 Christ as a Divine Child— God manifest in Man 275 
 
 Church services for Children — Analogies in Nature 277 
 
 Early Education must be based on religion 278 
 
 12. Summary View op Froebel's Principles 379-380 
 
 Education begins and ends with Life 279 
 
 Follows natural laws, and must be guided by intelligence and love 279 
 
 Mothers and Kindergartners must be trained 280 
 
 Supplement to Child's Relations to God 2S1 288 
 
 Child Life in Christ. By Rev. Stopford Brooke 881 
 
 IV. Congress of Philosophers at Frankfort, in 1869 289-336 
 
 Problem of Popular Education in Pedagogical Section, 389 
 
 Report op Prop. J. W. Fichte, Embodying Conclusions 291 
 
 1. Education the Problem of the Age 391 
 
 2. Philosophical Systems in the Educational Problem 295 
 
 Fundamental Principles of Herbart and Beueke examined 295 
 
 8. Pschological Hasis of Modern Pedagogy 305 
 
 4. Axioms of All Christian Pedagogy 312 
 
 6. Pestalozzlanism the basis of National Systems 318 
 
 C. Froebel's additions to Pestalozzi solve the Problem 322 
 
 7. Education of Childhood according to Froebel 327 
 
 8. Day Nurseries for Neglected Children 332
 
 FROEBEL'S EDUCATIONAL WORK. 7 
 
 V. International Congress of Education at Brussels, in 1 880 337-400 
 
 Papersonthe Value, and Further Extension of Fbobbkl'b Views .t>i 
 
 1. Fischer — President op Fboebel Society in Vienna : 
 
 Grounds on wliich Froebel's system la assailed, examined 89U 
 
 Kindergarten should prepare for school 849 
 
 Kindergartners should have a special training 317 
 
 3. Guiixiaume— Member of Belgian Educational League : 
 
 Froebel's system extends beyond the Kindergarten age and culture 858 
 
 Cardinal idea of his Education of Man — Force in Nature 865 
 
 Extension of the Gifts and Occupations into the School period necessary 358 
 
 Letters to Era raa Bothnian in 1852 Kindergarten and School 863 
 
 Language — How Lina learns to write and read— Excursions 304 
 
 Number— Form and Dimension— Material for Intermediate Class 305 
 
 III. THE KINDERGARTEN AND CHILD CULTURE. 
 
 Progressive Improvement of Manuals and Met hods.. 300-450 
 
 1. ABC Books and Primeks : 
 
 Persian— Chinese— Greek— Latin A-B-C 309 
 
 Primer— Catholic and Protestant 373 
 
 English Primer of Henry VIII— Horn Book illustrated 373 
 
 2. A Guide for the Child and Youth 375 
 
 Rules for the Behavior 
 
 Part One— Alphabet, Prayers, Graces and Instructions 375 
 
 Symbolic Alphabet. In Adam's Fall, &c 37ti 
 
 Rules for Behavior at Home, School and Church 378 
 
 Modifications in New England Primer enlarged 379 
 
 3. The New England Primer with Shorter Catechism 379-100 
 
 Historical Data— Webster's Reprint in 1844 of Edition of 1777 37!) 
 
 Illustrations — John Hancock — Adam's Fall— Mr. John Rogers at the Stake... 381 
 Infant Songs and Prayers — Letters. large and small — Syllables, short and long.. 3*2 
 
 Who was the first Man ? — Lessons for Youth — Commandments— Creed 386 
 
 Mr. John Rogers' Advice to his Children 388 
 
 Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly of Diviues 300 
 
 Mr. John Cotton— Spiritual Milk for American Babes 390 
 
 Dialogue between Christ, Youth, and the Devil 398 
 
 4. The Petty Schoole. Bt C. H., 1059 401-113 
 
 How to teach little children to say their letters, to spell, and to read 402 
 
 How children who don't study Latin may be employed 408 
 
 Hints for providing a Petty School, and its daily and weekly routine 410 
 
 6. The English Schoolmaster. By Edward Coote 41 1 
 
 Title Page— The Schoolmaster's Cautions 414 
 
 6. Orbis Sensualittm Pictus 415 
 
 Janua Linguarnm of W. Bateus in 1615 415 
 
 Janua Reserata of Comenius in 1631 415 
 
 English Edition by Charles Hoole in 105S 415 
 
 Encyclopedia of things subject to Senses 415 
 
 Woodward's Gate of Sciences, 1658 416 
 
 1. The German Teacher's Path Finder— By Diestebweg 417 160 
 
 Dr. Busse— Intuitional, or Object Teaching in 1873 417 
 
 (1) Aims and Methods— Teaching by Inspection or Intuition 417 
 
 Historical Development from Bacon to Diesterweg 421 
 
 Different kinds of Intuitions for Object Teaching 481 1 
 
 (2) The Method and its Rules 433 
 
 Actual Inspection of real material— and doing 488 
 
 Easy to diflicult— Simple to complex— Concrete to abstract 484 
 
 Instruction according to Material, and Individual Child 431 
 
 Use of Poetry and Conversation 436 
 
 (3) Best Guides and Aids for Observation, Thinking, and Language 435
 
 9 KINDERGARTEN AND CHILD CULTURE. 
 
 Kindergarten "Work in. Different Countries 451-736 
 
 L Madame Henbebtta Breymann Schrader 451 
 
 Frocbelian Institute in Berlin 453 
 
 II. Madame de Portugall— Geneva 473-180 
 
 Value and Extension of the Kindergarten Principle 473 
 
 III. TlIE CRECnE. AND CHILD CULTURE IN PRANCE 481-4S8 
 
 Day Nurseries— Infant Asylums— Training Institute 491 
 
 IV. Kindergarten and Child Cultube en Belgium 4S9-5J2 
 
 1. Public Kindergartens in Brussels 492 
 
 2. Intuitional Teaching in Model School — 497 
 
 V. Recent Kindergarten Publications in England 513-528 
 
 1. Hindrances and Encouragements in Kindergarten Work 513 
 
 2. Use op Natural and Household Phenomena 523 
 
 3. Relations or Kindergarten to Infant Schools 526 
 
 VI. Kindergarten Work in United States 529-730 
 
 A. Examples of Training Institutes and Kindergartens 535 
 
 1. Boston Training Class and Kindergarten" 535 
 
 2. Mrs. Maria Boelte-Kraus.— Reminiscences of Kindergarten Works.. .539 
 
 New York Training Institute and Kindergarten 537 
 
 3. Experience of New York Female College 557 
 
 B. Papers in Elucidation of Froebel's System 501-736 
 
 1. Froebel's Principles and Methods in the Nursery. Miss Pealody Ml-5"i 
 
 Helplessness of Infancy— Getting Possession of its Organization 501 
 
 Froebel's Use of the Natural Instincts— Uses of the Ball 506 
 
 2. The Mother Play and Nursery Songs. Miss Susan E. Blow 575-594 
 
 Unity of Human Life— Germs of all Faculties 578 
 
 8. Some Aspects of the Kindergarten. Miss Susan E. Blow 595-013 
 
 Froebel's Dealing with Natural Phenomena' 595 
 
 Daily Talks— Doing and Expressing— Occupations 601 
 
 Laws of Intuitional Teaching 607 
 
 4. Froebel's Principles in Public School System. Miss Peaoody 6i7-624 
 
 Quality of Education to be considered— Special Training 617 
 
 5. Kindergartens the First Grade in City System. W. T. Harris 025-042 
 
 Conditions Precedent— Ideal Kindergartens 625 
 
 General and Special Disciplines— Transition from Home to School 629 
 
 Relation to Trades— Moral Discipline— Education of Play 631 
 
 Practical Conditions Necessary to Succees 639 
 
 6. Kindergarten Methods in Primary Schools. Mrs. Louise Bollock. . .613-053 
 
 Lecture to the Public School Teachers of Washington 643 
 
 7. The Public and Charity Kindergarten. 3liss Peabody 651-053 
 
 Miss Quincy's Shaw in Boston— Miss Blow in St. Louis 051 
 
 S. Influence of Kindergarten Training on Homes. Mrs. H. Mann.. .654-664 
 Homes of the extreme Poor — New Element of Sweetness and Light 658 
 
 9. Kindergarten Work in California 005-072 
 
 Miss Marwedel— Young Women's Christian Association 005 
 
 Silver Street Kindergarten— Kindergarten Workers 608 
 
 10. Kindergarten Training for Artist and Artisan. Miss Peabody 073-078 
 
 A Primary Art-School— Play converted into Habits (173 
 
 Special Training in the Kindergarten 076 
 
 11. Clay Modeling for Home and Kindergarten. Edwin A. Spring 679-685 
 
 12. Free Kindergarten and Workingman's School. Felix Adler.. ..686-690 
 
 13. Use of Colors in Teaching Musical Notation. D. Batchelor 691-704 
 
 14. Fr.EE Kindergarten in Church Work, R.Ihber Newton 705-730 
 
 15. Kindergarten- for Neolected Children 731-736 
 
 Barnard's Kindergarten Papers, Hartford, Ct., 730 pages, will bo sent by mail on 
 
 receipt of $3.50
 
 tIRC 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below 
 
 N0V151956 
 
 AUG 1 2 1975 
 
 1EP1519JSS 
 
 INTERLIBRARji- LOANS 
 
 JUL 3 01975 
 
 JBUE IWO WEEKS FROM DATE OF RECEIPT 
 
 Form L-0 
 20m-l, '41(1122) 
 
 ^ 
 
 1. CfA.[/CI icutre 
 
 Right Beginnings with Neglected CuiLr ben 201-2(8 
 
 1. Free Kindergarten and WorkingmanV School in New York City— P. Adler, 201 
 
 2. Kindersartnera for Neglected Children in San Francisco— Mr*. S. B. Cooper, 20(i 
 Analogies op Toss and Color 200-221 
 
 Use of Colors in Teaching Musical Notation— D. Bachellor 
 
 Kindergarten and Infant Schools 222-221 
 
 Efforts lo Merge— London School Board 22? 
 
 Numbers for 1880 and 1881 : Two Volumes of at least 000 pages each. $0.00 
 
 Numbers for [881 as loaned ; a Volume of at least 800 pages 4.00 
 
 Number, postage prepaid 1-00 
 
 pecimeu Copy of Number for March .50 
 
 
 / to XXX iii $4.50 hi cloth, unit $5.50 in \ goat binding.
 
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