STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 359 



witli still greater reason satirize tlie 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 Coramb(^ 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 character- 

 istic 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 con- 

 ceptions 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 proto- 

 type. 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, accord- 

 ing to one small boy (our little friend the zoologist), 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 Bos- 

 ton children, birds, children, and Santa Glaus living with him ; 

 curious company which clearly illustrates how religious instruc- 

 tion is aided by observation and by mythology. By one imagi- 

 native boy (our zoologist) he was said prettily to receive visits 

 from the birds, and to have the nightingales and the other birds 

 to sing to him. The Calif ornian 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 



* I am here quoting largely from the material collected by Prof. Stanley Hall. 



