Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/374

360 power of making things. He is emphatically the artificer, the Demiurgos who not only has made the world, the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by human needs. According to the Boston children, he fabricates all sorts of things from babies to money, and the angels work for him. The boy has a great admiration for the maker, and our small zoölogist when three years and ten months old, on seeing a group of workingmen returning from their work, asked his astonished mother, "Mamma, is these gods?" "God," retorted his mother, "why?" "Because," he went on, "they make houses and churches, mamma, same as God makes moons and people and ickle dogs." Another child, watch-, ing a man repairing the telegraph wires that rested on a high pole at the top of a lofty house, asked if he was God. In this way the child is apt to think of God descending to earth in order to make things. Indeed, in their prayers children are wont to summon God as a sort of good genius to do something difficult for them. A boy of four years and a half was one day in the kitchen with his mother, and would keep taking up the knives and using them. At last his mother said, "L, you will cut your fingers, and if you do they won't grow again." He thought for a minute and then said, with a tone of deep conviction: "But God would make them grow. He made me, so he could mend my fingers, and if I were to cut the ends off I should say, 'God, God, come to your work,' and he would say, 'All right.'"

While this way of recognizing God as the busy artificer is common, it is not universal. The child's deity, like the man's (as Feuerbach showed), is a projection of himself; and as there are lazy children, so there is a child's God who is a luxurious person, sitting in a lovely armchair all day, and at most putting out (from heaven) the moon and stars at night.

With this admiration of the doer there goes naturally that of skill and practical intelligence. A little boy once said to his mother he would like to go to heaven to see Jesus. Asked why, he replied: "Oh! he's a great conjurer." The child had shortly before seen some human conjuring, and used this experience in a thoroughly childish fashion by envisaging in a new light the New Testament miracle-worker.

The idea of God's omniscience seems to come naturally to children. They are in the way of looking up to older folks as possessing boundless information. C's belief in the all-knowingness of the preacher, and his sister's belief in the all-knowingness of the policeman, show how readily the child-mind falls in with the notion.

On the other hand I have heard of the dogma of God's infinite knowledge provoking a skeptical attitude in the child-mind. Our astute little zoölogist, when five years and seven months old, in a