Beckonings from Little Hands Author:Patterson Du Bois Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. Would you know how to lead the child in this matter ? Observe the child ; he will teach you what to do. Froebel. There is an exquisite poetry in th... more »e spontaneous promptings of the unsophisticated spirit of the child. So far removed at times from our one-sided prejudiced views, so high above our low conventional standards, are the little one's intuitions of his new world. James Sully. A PROBLEM SOLVED. a few of our most perplexing problems would cease to exist as problems if we were more willing to bide our time and follow God's leadings — oftentimes through a little child. As it is, we are looking in the wrong place for their solution. We are looking at one thing, when we ought to be looking at another. At what age should a child do this or that ? Should I send him to day-school, to Sunday-school, to church, at three, four, five, six, nine, eleven,—at what age ? At no age. The problem is not one of years, but of circumstance, of state, of condition.Each child is his own answer. You cannot solve the problem merely by an appeal to the calendar. But the child will solve it for you when you least expect it, if you will help him by understanding him. Let us see. May days were passing and June days were coming. My boy was nearly five and a half years old,—old enough to go to Sunday-school, it seemed to me. Why not send him ? Well, he was rather a strange mixture of shyness and sociableness, of reticence and talkativeness, like a true child, "A party-colored show of grave and gay, Solid and light, short-sighted and profound." So long as he sat in the family pew he was happy; but could he endure beingleft suddenly in the primary department among a little host of strangers ? Hardly he,—no, not he! And then, again, we should be away all summer, so it ...« less