Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/373

Rh with still greater reason satirize the mixing up of fairy story and Bible story in the instruction of a child of five. Who can wonder that the little brain should throw together all these wondrous invisible forms, and picture God as an angry or amiable old giant, the angels as fairies, and so forth? In George Sand's child-romance of Corambé we see how far this blending of the ideas of the two domains of the invisible world can be carried.

For the rest, the child in his almost pathetic effort to catch the drift of this religious instruction proceeds in his characteristic matter-of-fact way by reducing the abstruse symbols to terms of familiar everyday experience. He has to understand, and he can only understand by assimilating these exalted conceptions to homely, terrestrial facts.

Hence, as we all know, the frank, undisguised materialism of the child's theology. God is imaged as a man preternaturally big—as a big blue man, according to one child; as a huge being with limbs spread all over the sky, according to another; as so immensely tall that he could stand with one foot on the ground and touch the clouds, to another; strong like the giant his prototype. He dwells in heaven—that is, just the other side of the blue and white floor, the sky. He is so near the clouds that, according to one small boy (our little friend the zoölogist), the clouds are a sort of pleasance, made up of hills and trees which God has made to saunter in. To other children he seems still lower down; one little girl of five being in the habit of climbing an old apple tree to visit him and tell him what she wanted. With some others, on the contrary, God's abode is put farther away in one of the stars.

As we have seen, the childish intelligence is apt to envisage God as a citizen properly housed and leading the life of a sort of great lord in a big house or palace. He gets hungry like mortals, and has his regular meals. He has, according to some of the Boston children, birds, children, and Santa Claus living with him; curious company which clearly illustrates how religious instruction is aided by observation and by mythology. By one imaginative boy (our zoölogist) he was said prettily to receive visits from the birds, and to have the nightingales and the other birds to sing to him. The Californian children spoken of by Prof. Earl Barnes appear to beautify heaven spontaneously by making it a kind of park or pleasance with trees, flowers, and birds.

While thus relegated to the sublime regions of the sky God is supposed to be doing things, and of course doing them for us, sending down rain and so forth. What seems to impress children most, especially boys, in the traditional account of God, is his