I have known one or two “solid men” and one or two predestinate spinsters who said that they didn’t believe children could accomplish anything in the kindergarten, because they had too good a time.  There is something uniquely vicious about people who care nothing for children’s happiness.  That sense of the solemnity of mortal conditions which has been indelibly impressed upon us by our Puritan ancestors comes soon enough, Heaven knows!  Meanwhile, a happy childhood is an unspeakably precious memory.  We look back upon it and refresh our tired hearts with the vision when experience has cast a shadow over the full joy of living.

The sunshiny atmosphere of a good kindergarten gives the young human plants an impulse toward eager, vigorous growth.  Love’s warmth surrounds them on every side, wooing their sweetest possibilities into life.  Roots take a firmer grasp, buds form, and flowers bloom where, under more unfriendly conditions, bare stalks or pale leaves would greet the eye,—­pathetic, unfulfilled promises,—­souls no happier for having lived in the world, the world no happier because of their living.  “Virtue kindles at the touch of joy.”  The kindergarten takes this for one of its texts, and does not breed that dismal fungus of the mind “which disposes one to believe that the pursuit of knowledge must necessarily be disagreeable.”

The social phase of the kindergarten is most interesting to the student of social economics.  Cooeperative work is strongly emphasized; and the child is inspired both to live his own full life, and yet to feel that his life touches other lives at every point,—­“for we are members one of another.”  It is not the unity of the “little birds,” in the couplet, who “agree” in their “little nests,” because “they’d fall out if they didn’t,” but a realization, in embryo, of the divine principle that no man liveth to himself.

As to specifically religious culture, everything fosters the spirit out of which true religion grows.

In the morning talks, when the children are most susceptible and ready to “be good,” as they say, their thoughts are led to the beauty of the world about them, the pleasure of right doing, the sweetness of kind thoughts and actions, the loveliness of truth, patience, and helpfulness, and the goodness of the Creator to all created things.  No parent, of whatever creed or lack of creed, whether a bigot or unbeliever, could object to the kind of religious instruction given in the kindergarten; and yet in every possible way the child-soul and the child-heart are directed towards everything that is pure and holy, true and steadfast.

If the child love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?  “Love worketh no ill to his neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”  There is a vast deal of practical religion to be breathed into these little children of the street before the abstractions of beliefs can be comprehended.  They cannot live on words and prayers and texts, the thought and feeling must come before the expression.  As Mrs. Whitney says, “The world is determined to vaccinate children with religion for fear they should take it in the natural way.”