362 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



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 zoologist 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 intelli- 

 gence 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, un- 

 changing 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 be- 

 fore 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. 



