Lastly, if the story is to make the children feel, let us see that the feeling is on the right side, that they shrink from all that is mean, selfish, cruel and cowardly, and sympathise with whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report.

CHAPTER IX

IN GRASSY PLACES

     My heart leaps up when I behold
       A rainbow in the sky,
     So was it when my life began
     So be it when I shall grow old,
       Or let me die.

What is the real aim of what we call Nature-lessons, Nature-teaching, Nature-work?  It is surely to foster delight in beauty, so that our hearts shall leap up at sight of the rainbow until we die.  For, indeed, if we lose that uplift of the heart, some part of us has died already.  Yet even Wordsworth mourns that nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower!

In its answer to the question “What is the chief end of man?” the old Shorter Catechism has a grand beginning:  “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.”  Do we lose the vision because we are not bold enough to take that enjoyment as our chief end?  To enjoy good is to enjoy God.

Our ends or aims are our desires, and Mr. Clutton Brock, in his Ultimate Belief, urges teachers to recognise that the spirit of man has three desires, three ends, and that it cannot be satisfied till it attains all three.  Man desires to do right, so far as he sees it, for the sake of doing right; he desires to gain knowledge or to know for the sake of knowing, for the sake of truth; and he desires beauty.

“We do not value that which we call beautiful because it is true, or because it is good, but because it is beautiful.  There is a glory of the universe which we call truth which we discover and apprehend, and a glory of the universe which we call beauty and which we discover or apprehend.”

Froebel begins his Education of Man by an inquiry into the reason for our existence and his answer is that all things exist to make manifest the spirit, the elan vital, which brought them into being. “Sursum corda,” says Stevenson,

  Lift up your hearts
  Art and Blue Heaven
  April and God’s Larks
  Green reeds and sky scattering river
  A Stately Music
      Enter God.

And Browning?  “If you get simple beauty and nought else, you get about the best thing God invents.”

To let children get that beauty should be our aim, and they must get it in their own way.  “Life in and with Nature and with the fair silent things of Nature, should be fostered by parents and others,” Froebel tells us, “as a chief fulcrum of child-life, and this is accomplished chiefly in play, which is at first simply natural life.”

Let us surmount the ruts of our teaching experience and climb high enough to look back upon our own childhood, to see where beauty called to us, where we attained to beauty.