What a proof it is that God is _Love_, that the very embrace that symbolizes to the baby's heart the sense of human companionship, gives its mind that impression of objective nature which is the first momentum of the human understanding! The gentle pressure of one sensitive body upon another produces counter-pressure, a resistance that is positively pleasurable, whereby the impenetrability of matter becomes a delightful instead of a frightful revelation to the mind of the Immutable Reality of the loving Creator, as the complement of our own changeful individuality! It is the first syllable of that word (or speech of God) made intelligible by the various qualities and forms of matter, the Truth which He is forever addressing to man. How gracious it is, that He should so inextricably mingle the first impression of matter with that perception of the _otherness_ of person that makes Love possible! Thus love and the sense of individuality are correlative creations and twin births. Later, the sense of individuality becomes a positive self-love (which in its healthy degree is innocent), and the perception of _otherness of person_, with whom it is delightful to be in free union, becomes the basis of the self-forgetting generosity of mankind. These opposite principles are at first mere and perhaps equal sources of satisfaction, having no moral character whatever. Afterwards, they become respectively hard selfishness or a weak and base servility, or they may rise into a majestic self-respect, and that sublimest love which is to make the human race, as a whole, the _image of God_, not only king over material nature, but one with the perfect Son of Man, also Son of God, who, with a humility and dignity equally venerable, is able to say, "I and my Father are One!"
But you will say that I am getting quite beyond the nursery.
In the earlier years, the growth of the religious life is merely germinal. And as it is involved within the mothers at the beginning, it must be cherished _sympathetically_ by her removing all occasion for self-care and self-defence, and thus prevent the sense of individuality from degenerating through fear into inordinate self-will and self-love. The child should be treated with unvarying tenderness and consideration, without having his senses pampered into morbid excess by over-indulgence, but above all things, never wounding nor frightening his heart, nor repressing the simple and healthy expression of his feelings and thoughts. For enforced repression tends to produce ugly temper, baseness, or subtlety, according to the child's temperament, which is also in imperfect social harmony, if not absolutely quarrelsome. It must be her work, therefore, not only to complete the child's organic education, but to take him, as it were, into her own affectionate spirit by using the methods which Frœbel has suggested to the mother for the discipline of her infants. (I use this word _discipline_ in its true sense of teaching; not in the sense of _punishment_. That the word _discipline_ should ever have come to mean punishment is a severe commentary on the ideas and modes of education that have hitherto prevailed in Christendom.)