has grown crooked, or produce an orchard from a forest everywhere surrounded with briers and thorns. They ought themselves to know the methods of managing their children, according as they value them; to the end that, under their own hands, they may receive increases of wisdom and grace before God and man.[1]
4. And inasmuch as every one ought to be competent to serve God and be useful to men, we maintain that he ought to be instructed in piety, in morals, and sound learning, and that parents should lay the foundations of these three in the very earliest age of their children. How far these need to be extended in the first six years must be severally shown.
5. Piety, true and salutary, consists in these three things: 1. That our hearts, having always and everywhere respect towards God, should seek Him in all that we do and say and think. 2. Having discovered the steps of Divine Providence, our hearts should follow God always with reverence, love, and obedience. 3. And thus always and every where mindful of God, conversing with God, our heart joining itself to God, it realizes peace, consolation, and joy.
6. This is true piety, bringing a man to a paradise of divine pleasure, the foundations of which may be so impressed upon a boy within the space of six years, as that he may know, (1) that there is a God; (2) who, being everywhere present, He beholds us all; (3) that He bestows abundantly, food, drink, clothing, and all things upon such as obey Him; (4) but punishes with death the stubborn and
- ↑ Fröbel, in his Education of Man (New York, 1887), says: “It is highly important for man’s present and later life that at this stage he absorbs nothing morbid, low, mean. . . . For, alas! often the whole life of man is not sufficient to efface what he has absorbed in childhood, the impressions of early youth, simply because his whole being, like a large eye, was open to them and wholly given up to them.”
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