In all these books, the lesson of self-esteem and self-confidence is taught on every page. Childish faults and childish virtues are over-emphasized until they appear the only important things on earth. Captain Raymond, a son-in-law of the grown-up Elsie, hearing that his daughter Lulu has had trouble with her music-teacher, decides immediately that it is his duty to leave the navy, and devote himself to the training and discipline of his young family; a notion which, if generally accepted, would soon leave our country without defenders. On one occasion, Lulu, who is an unlucky girl, kicks—under sore provocation—what she thinks is the dog, but what turns out, awkwardly enough, to be the baby. The incident is considered sufficiently tragic to fill most of the volume, and this is the way it is discussed by the other children,—children who belong to an order of beings as extinct, I believe and hope, as the dodo:—
“‘If Lu had only controlled her temper yesterday,’ said Max, ‘what a happy family we would be.’
“‘Yes,’ sighed Grace. ‘Papa is punishing her very hard and very long; but of course he knows best, and he loves her.’
“‘Yes, I am sure he does,’ assented Max. ‘So he won’t give her any more punishment than he thinks she needs. It will be a fine thing for her, and all the rest of us, too, if this hard lesson teaches her never to get into a passion again.’”
Better surely to kick a wilderness of babies than to wallow in self-righteousness like this!
One more serious charge must be brought against these popular Sunday-school stories. They are controversial, and, like most controversial tales, they exhibit an abundance of ignorance and a lack of charity that are equally hurtful to a child. It is curious to see women handle theology as if it were knitting, and one no longer wonders at Ruskin’s passionate protest against such temerity. “Strange and miserably strange,” he cries, “that while they are modest enough to doubt their powers and pause at the threshold of sciences, where every step is demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong and without one thought of incompetency into that science at which the greatest men have trembled, and in which the wisest have erred.” But then Ruskin, as we all know, was equally impatient of “converted children who teach their parents, and converted convicts who teach honest men,” and these two classes form valuable ingredients in Sunday-school literature. The theological arguments of the “Elsie” books would be infinitely diverting if they were not so infinitely acrimonious. One of them, however, is such a masterpiece of feminine pleading that its absurdity must win forgiveness for its unkindness. A young girl, having entered the church of Rome, is told with confidence that her hierarchy is spoken of in the seventeenth chapter of Revelations as “Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” “But how do you know,” she asks, not unnaturally, “that my church is meant by these lines?”
“‘Because,’ is the triumphant and unassailable reply, ‘she and she alone answers to the description.’”
This I consider the finest piece of reasoning that even Sunday-school books have ever yielded me. It is simply perfect; but there are other passages equally objectionable, and a little less amusing. In one of the stories, Captain Raymond undertakes to convert a Scotch female Mormon, which he does with astonishing facility, a single conversation being sufficient to bring her to a proper frame of mind. His most powerful argument is that Mormonism must be a false religion because it so closely resembles Popery, which, he tolerantly adds, “has been well called Satan’s masterpiece.” The Scotch woman who, unlike most of her race, is extremely vague in her theology, hazards the assertion that Popery “forbids men to marry,” while Mormonism commands it.
“‘The difference in regard to that,’ said Captain Raymond, ‘is not so great as may appear at first sight. Both pander to men’s lusts; both train children to forsake their parents; both teach lying and murder, when by such crimes they are expected to advance the cause of their church.’”
“Alas for the rarity