But the best way to cultivate a sense of the presence of God is to draw the attention to the conscience, which is very active in children, and which seems to them (as we all can testify from our own remembrance) another than themselves, and yet themselves.  We have heard a person say, that in her childhood she was puzzled to know which was herself, the voice of her inclination or of her conscience, for they were palpably two, and what a joyous thing it was when she was first convinced that one was the Spirit of God, whom unlucky teaching had previously embodied in a form of terror on a distant judgment-seat.  Children are consecrated as soon as they get the spiritual idea, and it may be so presented that it shall make them happy as well as true.  But the adult who enters into such conversation with a child must be careful not to shock and profane, instead of nurturing the soul.  It is possible to avoid both discouraging and flattering views, and to give the most tender and elevating associations.

But children require not only an alternation of physical and mental amusements, but some instruction to be passively received.  They delight in stories, and a wise teacher can make this subservient to the highest uses by reading beautiful creations of the imagination.  Not only such household-stories as “Sanford and Merton,” Mrs. Farrar’s “Robinson Crusoe,” and Salzmann’s “Elements of Morality,” but symbolization like the heroes of Asgard, the legends of the Middle Ages, classic and chivalric tales, the legend of Saint George, and “Pilgrim’s Progress,” can in the mouth of a skilful reader be made subservient to moral culture.  The reading sessions should not exceed ten or fifteen minutes.

Anything of the nature of scientific teaching should be done by presenting objects for examination and investigation.[C] Flowers and insects, shells, etc., are easily handled.  The observations should be drawn out of the children, not made to them, except as corrections of their mistakes.  Experiments with the prism, and in crystallization and transformation, are useful and desirable to awaken taste for the sciences of Nature.  In short, the Kindergarten should give the beginnings of everything.  “What is well begun is half done.”

[Footnote C:  Calkin’s Object Lessons will give hints.]

We must say a word about the locality and circumstances of a Kindergarten.  There is published in Lausanne, France, a newspaper devoted to the interests of this mode of education, in whose early numbers is described a Kindergarten; which seems to be of the nature of a boarding-school, or, at least, the children are there all day.  Each child has a garden, and there is one besides where they work in common.  There are accommodations for keeping animals, and miniature tools to do mechanical labor of various kinds.  In short, it is a child’s world.  But in this country, especially in New England, parents would not consent to be so much separated from their children, and a few hours of Kindergarten in the early part of the day will serve an excellent purpose,—­using up the effervescent activity of children, who may healthily be left to themselves the rest of the time, to play or rest, comparatively unwatched.