which the child is capable during this by no means brief stage of its development
consists of those sentiments—gratitude, trust, dependence, love, etc., now felt
only for her—which are later directed toward God. The less these are now
cultivated toward the mother, who is now their only fitting if not their only
possible object, the more feebly they will later be felt toward God. This, too,
adds greatly to the sacredness and the responsibilities of motherhood. Froebel
perhaps is right that thus fundamental religious sentiments can be cultivated in
the earliest months of infancy. It is of course impossible not to seem, perhaps
even not to be, sentimental upon this theme, for the infant soul has no other
content than sentiments, and because upon these rests the whole superstructure
of religion in child or adult. The mother's emotions, and physical and mental
states, indeed, imparted and reproduced in the infant so immediately,
unconsciously, and through so many avenues, that it is no wonder that these
relations see mystic. Whether the mother is habitually under the influence of
calm and tranquil emotions, or her temper is fluctuating or violent, or her
movements are habitually energetic or soft and caressing, or she be regular or
irregular in her ministrations to the infant in her arms, all these characteristics
and habits are registered in the primeval language of touch upon the nervous
system of the child. From this point of view, poise and calmness, the absence of
all intense annuli and of sensations or transitions which are abrupt or sudden,
and an atmosphere of quieting influences, like everything which retards by
broadening, is in the general line of religious culture. The soul of an infant is
well compared to a seed planted in a garden. It is not pressed or moved by the
breezes which rustle the leaves overhead. The sunlight does not fall upon it, and
even dew and evening coolness scarcely reach it; but yet there is not a breath of
air or a ray of sunshine, nor a drop of moisture to which it is responsive, and
which does not stir all its germinant forces. The child is a plant, must live out of
doors in proper season, and there must be no forcing. Religion, then, at this
important stage, at least, is naturalism pure and simple, and religious training is
the supreme art of standing out of nature's way. So implicit is the unity of soul
and body at this formative age that care of the body is the most effective ethico-
religious culture.
Next to be considered are the sentiments which unfold under the influence of
that fresh and naive curiosity which attends the first impressions of natural
objects from which both religion and science spring as from one common root.
The awe and sublimity of a thunderstorm, the sights and sounds of a spring
morning, objects which lead the child's thoughts to what is remote in time and
space, old trees, ruins, the rocks, and, above all, the heavenly bodies—the