The skater tumbles because he is heedless; the child falls from his sledge because his eye is not sure, his hand not strong; the boy and girl drop goblet and plate because they are overanxious. In inattention, untrained powers, and anxiety mated with weakness, lie the sources of inability to rule oneself. The tie between these several defects is obvious. Strength implies training, training implies attention, and whoso lacks strength must alternate between presumption and over-anxiety. Not only for the children, but for ourselves there is a mine of wisdom in these suggestions. Why are so many mothers and so many kindergartners wavering and inconsistent in conduct? Is it not because they are doubtful what they ought to do? Why are they thus doubtful? Because they lack insight? Why do they lack insight? Evidently because they have undertaken the most solemn and responsible duties with insufficient preparation.

One word more. Harold can not develop without trust in you, but neither can he develop as he ought unless you trust him. I do not mean that you should ignore his faults or exaggerate his merits, for this would only destroy his confidence

in

you. But I do mean that you should be alert to

recognize the utmost limit of his power and attainment, that you should let no cowardly fear deter you from granting him freedom to do and dare, and when you are forced to reprove and punish him you should never fail to appeal from his actual to his ideal self. "Could there be," asks Thoreau, “an accident so sad as to be respected for something better than we are?" As applied to the actual self this question admits of only one answer, but it needs the supplementary question, "Could there be a greater incentive to effort than the generous faith which expects of us to become better than we are?" This kind of trust the heavenly Father has in all his erring children; this kind of trust you must never fail to feel in your boy.

When we understand that faith is the thrill of fellowship we are ready to pass from the aim of Froebel's first play to its method, and to observe by what process the mother wakens the slumbering feeling of trust. Remember we are studying a Falling Game. Notice in Froebel's Commentary the twice repeated statement that the child shall fall with sufficient force to experience a slight shock. He must feel his fall and have some vague instinct that he is slipping away from his mother's

care. Out of the fear born of this sense of withdrawn protection rises his joy in the assurance that a loving power watches over his fall and makes it safe.

Life is a series of falls, and if it be regenerate life a series of rises out of falls. First come the physical tumbles which must be suffered by each child as he learns to walk, run, climb, swim. Next in order are emotional falls into anger, greediness, and other sins of childish incontinence. With youth begin the intellectual falls into doubt of inherited creeds and defiance of traditional customs. Last of all come the dangerous falls of will, consciously and deliberately denying in act the truths accepted by thought. Beneath each height of attainment yawns a deeper and blacker chasm. Upon each loftier summit man is exposed to the danger of a more fatal fall.

"The true glory of life," writes Goldsmith, "consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” “Jump up," you say to Harold when he has had a tumble, and laughingly kissing the spot that hurts, you divert him from the impulse to cry. When excessive excitement has betrayed him into bad temper, you help the little victim who is not able to help himself by attracting his attention

to some object-a flower, a star, a flying bird. When your boy reaches the age of arrogant selfassertion you will, if you are wise, be patient and forbear to meet challenge with authority. "Who never doubted never half believed," and just because man is born to be self-limiting he must break down all made limits. By interpreting to Harold in childhood the falls of weakness, incontinence, and inattention, and in youth the falls born of presumption and of doubt, you will have done what lay in your power to save him from the final and fatal fall of those who refuse obedience to acknowledged obligation. And if at last (which God forbid) there come to you that bitterest of mortal pangs-the pang of knowing that one you have borne and nurtured is deliberately false to the truth he can not deny then in your own need recall the words with which you reassured your falling baby, and sit still in the inmost stronghold of the soul-the stronghold of confidence in that Infinite Power and Love which

To fall and to rise from his fall, such is in brief the history of man, and, since man must learn to

know himself, such is the ever-recurrent theme of literature. What is the one story repeated in myriad forms in those mythic tales which are the first fruits of man's literary activity? Is it not the story of a princess carried off by a dragon, imprisoned, disfigured, despairing, but rescued at last by the all-conquering hero? What is the Iliad but the fall and rise of Achilles? What is the Odyssey but the fall and rise of Ulysses? What creates the Inferno and Purgatorio but the fall of Lucifer? Who fill the pit but sinners that have made all kinds of falls? Who climb the mountain but sinners rising out of all kinds of falls? What is portrayed in the dramas of Eschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, but the circular sweep of the deed? What is the new word of the last world-poet in his Faust? Is it not once again the fall and the rise, the deepest of all falls, that of the conscious spirit from itself, the closest of all reunions, the reunion of spirit with itself? "I know," says thought-weary Faust in bitterness of soul, “I know that nothing can be known." What, then, is left but the pact with Mephistopheles? But denial must in the end deny itself, and a pact with the denying spirit can end only in its own undoing. Hence the last world-poem must perforce repeat the