360 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



power of making tilings. 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 ad- 

 miration for the maker, and our small zoologist 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 sum- 

 mon 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 com- 

 mon, 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 chil- 

 dren. They are in the way of looking up to older folks as possess- 

 ing 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 zoologist, when five years and seven months old, in a 



