Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/376

362 It might easily be supposed that the child's readiness to pray to God is inconsistent with what has just been said. Yet I think there is no real inconsistency. The child's idea of prayer appears to be that of sending a message to some one at a distance. The epistolary manner noticeable in C 's prayers seems to illustrate this. The mysterious whispering is, I suspect, supposed in some inscrutable fashion, known only to the child, to transmit itself to the divine ear.

Of the child's belief in God's goodness it is needless to say more. For these little worshipers he is emphatically the friend in need who can help them out of their difficulties in a hundred ways. Our small zoölogist thanked God for making "the sea, the holes with crabs in them, and the trees, the fields, and the flowers," and regretted that he did not follow up the making of the animals we eat by doing the cooking also. As their prayers show, he is ever ready to make nice presents, from a fine day to a toy gun, and will do them any kindness if only they ask prettily. Happy the reign of this untroubled optimism! For many children, alas! it is all too short, the color of their life making them lose faith in all kindness and think of God as cross and even as cruel.

One of the real difficulties of theology for the child's intelligence is the doctrine of God's eternity. Puzzled at first with the fact of his own beginning, he comes soon to be troubled with the idea of God's having had no beginning. C showed a common trend of childish thought in asking what God was like in his younger days. The question "Who made God?" seems to be one to which all inquiring young minds are led at a certain stage of child-thought. The metaphysical impulse of the child to follow back the chain of events ad infinitum finds the ever-existent, unchanging God very much in the way. He wants to get behind this "always was" of God's existence, just as, at an earlier stage of his development, he wanted to get behind the barrier of the blue hills. This is quaintly illustrated in the reasoning of a child observed by M. Egger. Having learned from his mother that before the world there was only God the Creator, he asked, "And before God?" The mother having replied, "Nothing," he at once interpreted her answer by saying, "No, there must have been the place (i. e., the empty space) where God is." So determined is the little mind to get back to the "before," and to find something, if only a prepared place.

Other mysteries of which the child comes to hear find their characteristic solution in the busy little brain. A friend tells me that when a child he was much puzzled by the doctrine of the Trinity. He happened to be an only child, and so he was led to put a meaning into it by assimilating it to the family group, in which the Holy Ghost became the mother.