The conquest of evil, on the other hand, they represent, was in Jesus Christ's trusting _God's love_, in a lost world, amidst the physical agonies of his cross, and the moral anguish of a disappointment of the grandest aim that ever one born of woman had set to himself for his life-work. In faithfully trying to do the lesser good just at hand, he developed the power to _save all men from their sins; not merely his own people_.
To the training class of kindergartners I would say, _your_ special work is rather to _prevent_, than to conquer sin, in the objects of your care; therefore you should, in your own imagination, associate yourself with _God creating_, first leading children to realize that all He has made is _very good_ and must be kept so, which is giving the religious nurture.
That great word of Frœbel, _man is a creative_ being, has said in the world of education, whether religious, moral, or intellectual, "Let there be light," and is never to be forgotten in its uttermost meaning.
In this truth you will find an infinite resource of hope and successful energy. You may think that you apprehend and accept the scope of this pregnant word, because you do not reject it as a proposition; but partial knowledge is often deluding, and _not doubting_ is far from _efficient conviction_, which a comprehensive and penetrating understanding of a principle gives. Let me illustrate this illusion of thinking we comprehend when we do not, by some of Frœbel's gifts.
Think of the four last gifts of Frœbel in their wholeness of form, _as cubes_. When these cubes are uncovered and you recognize them as eight, or twenty-seven, or thirty-six wooden, solid, six-sided, eight-cornered, twelve-edged units, and see the relations of their properties in nature, it may seem to you as if you exhaustively knew the cube; but you do not if you have omitted to notice one property inherent in it, more important because pregnant with more consequences than any other property,--I mean its _divisibility_ by means of which its possible transformations are innumerable, every transformation presenting the symmetry of the original in a new variety of beauty, so that if you will give to a child one of these divisible cubes and suggest to him the clue of the law of connecting contrasts, which is the law of all production, he will never tire (except physically) of making the new combinations, and seeking through each and all, that sense of a _whole_ which was the first impression. It is by reason of its divisibility, that the cube can be transformed infinitely. Now you may conceive the nature of man as a whole, and observe a great many of his attributes, and yet not see the greatest,--_his creativeness_, whose consequences are infinite.