§ 22. Many thinkers before Froebel had seen the transcendent importance of action; but Froebel not only based everything upon it, but he based it upon God. “God creates and works productively in uninterrupted continuity. Each thought of God is a work, a deed” (_Ed. of M._, § 23). As Jesus has said: “My Father worketh hitherto and I work” (St. John v, 17). From this it follows that, since God created man in his own image, “man should create and bring forth like God” (_Ed. of M._, _ib._). “He who will early learn to recognise the Creator must early exercise his own power of action with the consciousness that he is bringing about what is good; for the doing good is the link between the creature and the Creator, and the conscious doing of it the conscious connexion, the true living union of the man with God, of the individual man as of the human race, and is therefore at once the starting point and the eternal aim of all education.” Elsewhere he says: “We become truly God-like in diligence and industry, in working and doing, which are accompanied by the clear perception or even by the vaguest feeling that thereby we represent the inner in the outer; that we give body to spirit, and form to thought; that we render visible the invisible; that we impart an outward, finite, transient being to life in the spirit. Through this God-likeness we rise more and more to a true knowledge of God, to insight into His Spirit; and thus, inwardly and outwardly, God comes ever nearer to us. Therefore Jesus says of the poor, ‘Theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’ if they could but see and know it and practice it in diligence and industry, in productive and creative work. Of children too is the kingdom of heaven; for unchecked by the presumption and conceit of adults they yield themselves in child-like trust and cheerfulness to their formative and creative instinct” (_Ed. of M._, § 23. P. 31).