preponderance of the will-element makes men distrust new insights, quick
methods, and short cuts, and trust chiefly to the genius of honest and sustained
work, in power of which perhaps lies the greatest intellectual difference between
men. When ideas are ripe for promulgation they have been condensed and
concentrated, thought traverses them quickly and easily—in a word, they have
become practical, and the will that waits over a new idea patiently and silently,
without anxiety, even though with a deepening sense of responsibility, till all
sides have been seen, all authorities consulted, all its latent mental reserves heard
from, is the man who "talks with the rifle and not with the water-hose," or, in a
rough farmer's phrase, "boils his words till he can give his hearers sugar and not
sap." Several of the more important discoveries of the present generation, which
cost many weary months of toil, have been enumerated in a score or two of lines,
so that every experimenter could set up his apparatus and get the results in a few
minutes. Let us not forget that, in most departments of mental work, the more we
revise and reconstruct our thought, the longer we inhibit its final expression,
while the oftener we return to it refreshed from other interests, the clearer and
more permeable for other minds it becomes, because the more it tends to express
itself in terms of willed action, which is "the language of complete men."
So closely bound together are moral and religious training that a discussion of
one without the other would be incomplete. In a word, religion is the most
generic kind of culture as opposed to all systems or departments which are one
sided. All education culminates in it because it is chief among human interests,
and because it gives inner unity to the mind, heart, and will. How now should
this common element of union be taught?
To be really effective and lasting, moral and religious training must begin in the
cradle. It was a profound remark of Froebel that the unconsciousness of a child
is rest in God. This need not be understood in guy pantheistic sense. From this
rest in God the childish soul should not be abruptly or prematurely aroused.
Even the primeval stages of psychic growth are rarely so all-sided, so purely
unsolicited, spontaneous, and unprecocious, as not to be in a sense a fall from
Froebel's unconsciousness or rest in God. The sense of touch, the mother of all
the other senses, is the only one which the child brings into the world already
experienced; but by the pats, caresses, hugs, etc., so instinctive with young
mothers, varied feelings and sentiments are communicated to the child long
before it recognizes its own body as distinct from things about it. The mother's
face and voice are the first conscious objects as the infant soul unfolds, and she
soon comes to stand in the very place of God to her child. All the religion of