intense way, which speaks of many tears exhausted:

"I dare not look into the first-grade rooms. We have done so differently
by them through the first year. When the little ones leave us, they are
wide open and helpless. They are taken from a warm bath to a cold blast.
Their little faces change in a few days. Do you know the ones that stand
the change best? The commoner children, the clever and hard-headed
children. The little dreamers--the sensitive ones--are hurt and altered
for the worse. Their manner changes to me, when I see them outside. You
do not know how we have suffered."

Some of the greatest teachers in America to-day are the kindergarten
teachers; not that they are especially chosen for quality, but because
they have touched reality in teaching. They have seen, even in the very
little ones, that response which is deeper than brain. If the great
ideal that is carried out through their first year were continued
through seven years, the generation thus directed would meet life with
serenity and without greed. They would make over the world into a finer
place to be.

* * * * *

I wonder if I may dare to say it once more?... It came this way in
Chapel just a few days ago. There was a pencil in my hand, and something
of man's ideal performance here below appeared more than ever clearly. I
am putting down the picture, much as it came then, for the straightest
way to write anything is as you would tell it:

"... This pencil is a man, any man. Above is spirit; below matter. The
world of spirit is finished. The plan is already thought out there, to
the utmost detail. This above is the Breath, the Conception, the
Emanation, the Dream, the Universal Energy--philosophers have called it
by many names, but they mean the God-Idea wrought of necessity in
Spirit, since God is spirit.

"The world of matter below is not finished. Certain parts are completed,
but not all, and the assembly of parts is just begun. The material world
is lost in the making of parts, forgetting that the plan is one--that
the parts of matter must be assembled into a whole--that a replica must
be made in matter of the one great spiritual Conception. So long as men
are identified with parts, there is dissonance from the shops of earth,
a pulling apart instead of together.

"The many are almost ready to grasp the great unifying conception. This
is the next step for the human family as a whole; this the present
plan