After a hasty mental review of what has been studied in earlier chapters regarding the home life and training of little children in non-Christian lands, it is surely a mild statement to make that the Christian kindergarten is an _absolute necessity_ if these little ones, so cunning and capable and helpless, are to have any chance at all for proper development. The words “Christian kindergarten” are used advisedly, and agree with utterances of experts such as Elizabeth Harrison, who says,-- “The foundation of the kindergarten is based upon the psychological revelation that, if man is the child of God, he must possess infinite possibilities, and that these possibilities can only develop as he, man, makes use of them--that in other words, man is a self-making being, that his likeness to the Divine Father consists in this power within him to unfold and develop his divine nature.”[61] [Sidenote: Children of backward races respond to early training.] Students of primitive and backward races tell us that the small children show as much promise and as many signs of undeveloped capability as do children of civilized lands, but before many years a cloud seems to overcast their minds, while selfishness and sin and passion take possession of their moral natures. Never again is there the same chance to make them _what they might have been_, as there was during those first early days when the kindergarten should have opened wide her doors to receive them. This argument would in itself seem sufficient to urge missionary Boards to speedy, thorough action in this matter, but there is another far-reaching argument to be considered. All through the East, wherever there are missionary kindergartens, mothers come to them to learn how to train their children, and countless homes have caught and passed on a reflection of the Christ life because of what the mothers have heard and observed and what the children have taken home with them. Make a flying trip to the Fuchow Kindergarten and watch “the irrepressible John.” “This little lad’s father died, after a period of faithful service in Miss Wiley’s kitchen, and when the widowed mother came back to Miss Wiley from her country home to earn a living for herself and John and baby Joseph, John was already master of the situation and of his mother, and enforced his will on that by no means weak-minded woman by kicking, biting, pulling her ears, and similar methods. Now Miss Wiley is a famous trainer of boys, and she soon taught the young mother that the masculine will is not necessarily law at the age of two plus; the kindergarten carried out the same idea, and now John devotes vast energy and determination to the shaping of inanimate clay into pigs and other fascinating things, and treats animate nature as a well-mannered and kindly little gentleman should.”[62] [Sidenote: Kindergartners must be inventive and adaptable.]