Growth From Within By The Law Of Love
All that does not grow out of one’s inner being, all that is not one’s own original feeling and thought, or that at least does not awaken that, oppresses and defaces the individuality of man instead of calling it forth, and nature becomes thereby a caricature. Shall we never cease to stamp human nature, even in childhood, like coins? to overlay it with foreign images and foreign superscriptions, instead of letting it develop itself and grow into form according to the law of life planted in it by God, the Father, so that it may be able to bear the stamp of the Divine, and become an image of God?
This theory of love is to serve as the highest goal and pole-star of human education, and must be attended to in the germ of humanity, the child, and truly in his very first impulses. The conquest of self-seeking egoism is the most important task of education; for selfishness isolates the individual from all communion, and kills the life-giving principle of love. Therefore the first object of education is to teach to love, to break up the egoism of the individual, and to lead him from the first stage of communion in the family through all the following stages of social life to the love of humanity, or to the highest self-conquest by which man rises to Divine unity.
—Friedrich Froebel.
Set Your Mind On Things Above
In moral and spiritual culture we must seek not only for reverence and readiness, but also for loftiness of mind. Set your mind on things above. Contemplate lofty themes. Let your thoughts move among the august and sublime. Don’t let them grovel among the mire. It is a heartening truth that the Mind can be trained to feel so much at home among things that are pure as to feel orphaned and lonely when the pure is absent.
—J. H. Jowett.
Alternate Reading: II Corinthians 10:1-6.