Wonders chiefly at himself
     Who can tell him what he is
     Or how meet in human elf
     Coming and past eternities.

    EMERSON.

It is of set purpose that this short chapter, referring to what we specially call religion, is placed immediately after that on the child’s attitude to Nature.  The actual word religion, which, to him, expressed being bound, did not appeal to Froebel so much as one which expressed One-ness with God.

As a son can share the aspirations of his father, so man “a thought of God”

            can aspire
  From earth’s level where blindly creep
  Things perfected more or less
  To the heaven’s height far and steep.

But we begin at earth’s level, and a child’s religion must be largely a natural religion.

How to introduce a child to religion is a problem which must have many solutions.  In Froebel’s original training course, his Kindergarten teachers were to be “trained to the observation and care of the earliest germs of the religious instinct in man.”  These earliest beginnings he found in different sources.  First come the relations between the child and the family, beginning with the mother; fatherhood and motherhood must be realised before the child can reach up to the Father of all.  Then there is the atmosphere of the home, the real reverence for higher things, if it exists, affects even a little child more than is usually supposed, but children are quick to distinguish reality from mere conventionality though the distinction is only half conscious.  Reality impresses, while conventionality is apt to bore.  Even to quite young children Froebel’s ideal mother would begin to show God in nature.  Some one put into the flowers the scent and colour that delight the child—­some one whom he cannot see.  The sun, moon and stars give light and beauty, and “love is what they mean to show.”  This mother teaches her little one some sort of prayer, and the gesture of reverence, the folded hands, affects the child even if the words mean little or nothing.  Akin to the “feeling of community” between the child and his family is the joining in religious worship in church, “the entrance in a common life,” and the emotional effect of the deep tones of the organ.  Then there is the interdependence of the universe:  the baby is to thank Jenny for his bread and milk, Peter for mowing the grass for the cow, “until you come to the last ring of all, God’s father love for all.”  Next to this comes the child’s service; others work for him and he also must serve.  “Every age has its duties, and duties are not burdens,” and it is necessary that feeling should have expression, “for even a child’s love unfostered (by action in form of service) droops and dies away.”  There is also the desire for approbation.  The child “must be roused to good by inclination, love, and respect, through the opinion of others about him,” and this should be guided until he learns to care chiefly for the