power lost. Froebel went so far as to say, This also is the starting point of the "new education," as it was the core of the educational mode of Jesus. He developed his disciples by setting them in certain surroundings, giving them special opportunities, speaking pictorially, and leaving them to work out their salvation by discovering truth for themselves. The idea of nurture was his ideal as it was Paul's. Nurture then is a view of education to which we can always refer as a basal principle with which we have had a life intimacy. All our days we have extolled the virtues of atmosphere, light, food, and exercise as essential to bodily health and growth. Whatever else we may need in life we cannot expect to flourish without these at their best. True, we need heat, but this is a matter of sunshine and of the oxygenating power of the atmosphere. Drink, we may reckon with food. For our physical edification we need ask no other ministrants. This is universal experience. It is no tissue of teasing technicalities but simple, every-day fact. As a working basis for the growth or development of the soul, all we have to do is to carry these four means or modes of nurture, by symbolic correspondence, over into the mental or spiritual-call it soul-realm and we are equipped at once with true educational methods, standards, and tests with which the least proficient of us is on familiar working terms. What kind of an atmosphere is the child breathing-one of filthy odors and poisonous gasesone of disorder, cynicism, jealousy, strife, hatred, impurity, suspicion? It is unwholesome. Why these pale, pinched faces and scrawny hands? They live in a dark cellar; and these shrivelled morals-they are bred where there is no Gospel light, no pictures of life in the beauty of holiness. Here is an anæmic, dyspeptic sufferer; he needs good food such as he can assimilate; and here too, is a starved soul, fed on the husks of hard words and empty forms. There is another, a case of arrested development, a weakling in will, a failure. He needs moral as well as physical and mental exercise, he needs to express himself. Give him his right of choice and set him freemake a self-determined personality of him by giving him his own powers. All these work together to nurture a whole individuality, a healthy personality. Cheat the man out of his due of air, light, food or exercise and he suffers loss. The possibilities of his nature are never realized. His life is uneconomical. He needs saving. This is what Coe has called "Salvation by education." In our terms we might call it salvation by nurture, and as true nurture is possible only in Christ so is Christ our nurturer into the abundant life. He makes us whole and is therefore our Saviour. In particular, there is no true, healthful atmosphere but that which emanates from the Divine Man; no perfect light but the Light of the World; no substance of food but His Truth; no safe exercise of the will but in the will of God. All these are closely related, so that as agencies of development there are no sharp dividing lines among them. They are interdependent and nurture is a thing of them all. And now for the modes in particular. III NURTURE BY ATMOSPHERE Indirect Education of the Feelings. T was in one of the smaller and quieter New I tered without while I sat musing before the blazing grate fire in a snug little parlor. A strange feeling came over me as I heard a man in the hall say, "White Star Line," followed, after a short interval, by the same voice spelling the name "G-e-r-m-a-n-i-c." The feeling that moved me was intensified. Perhaps I wished that that were my trunk. I had crossed the sea in that vessel. Reminiscences, coupled with longings, too complex and too vague to formulate themselves in words or even definite thoughts, took possession of me. The next morning two men sat near me in the café at breakfast. I overheard one say to the other, "I have nothing to carry but a stick and an umbrella. I have taken that old stick with me for thirteen years, and have lost it several times, and it has cost me shillings and shillings to get it back again." The speaker's voice betrayed him as the one who gave his orders to the porter the night before. Apparently he was going back to his dear old England. Confused sentiments about lovely England, historic England, stole through my organism with a pleasant affection-"Sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart." But the old stick,-what a nuisance it must be! That is, it would be such to me. But I could not help thinking that he had a feeling for it, as I have for some other old things. And then it came to me how children cling to their old broken toys, sometimes even in the presence of the new invoices of Santa Claus. Affections for inanimate things may be unreasonable, but they are feelings deeply and healthily rooted in living hearts, and must be reckoned with and respected. Here come Now let us move down the street. two men in earnest conversation over a business venture. The earnestness is a matter of feeling. There sits a crippled woman trying to earn a living by selling newspapers. Her condition appeals to us through our sympathies, and we buy a paper of her in preference to yonder ablebodied crier. She did not have the Times or the Sun, and we were compelled to take a paper of the more sensational sort. We have a feeling of disgust for the prominence given in glaring headlines to matters of social scandal and revolting crime. Now look at that man gazing into showcase. Evidently it is his own picture, What sort of feelings have possession of him now? And there is a woman who has just escaped being run over by a swift and stealthy automobile. She is blanched with fright, while her friend shows indignation and anger at the driver. |