Of Christian charity
Under the sun!”
I would the pious women who so wantonly and wickedly assail the creeds in which their fellow creatures find help and hope, would learn at least to express themselves—especially when their words are intended for little children to read—with some approach to decency and propriety.
“Gin I thocht Papistry a fause thing, which I do,” says the sturdy, gentle Ettrick Shepherd, “I wadna scruple to say sae, in sic terms as were consistent wi’ gude manners, and wi’ charity and humility of heart. But I wad ca’ nae man a leear.” A simple lesson in Christianity and forbearance which might be advantageously studied to-day.
There is no reason why the literature of the Sunday-school, since it represents an important element in modern bookmaking, should be uniformly and consistently bad. There is no reason why all the children who figure in its pages should be such impossible little prigs; or why all parents should be either incredibly foolish and worldly minded, or so inflexibly serious that they never open their lips without preaching. There is no reason why people, because they are virtuous or repentant, should converse in stilted and unnatural language. A contrite burglar in one of these edifying stories confesses poetically, “My sins are more numerous than the hairs of my head or the sands of the seashore,”—which was probably true, but not precisely the way in which the Bill Sykeses of real life are wont to acknowledge the fact. In another tale, an English one this time, a little girl named Helen rashly asks her father for some trifling information. He gives it with the usual grandiloquence, and then adds, by way of commendation: “Many children are so foolish as to be ashamed to let those they converse with discover that they do not comprehend everything that is said to them, by which means they often imbibe erroneous ideas, and perhaps remain in ignorance on many essential subjects, when, by questioning their friends, they might easily have obtained correct and useful knowledge.” If Helen ever ventured on another query after that, she deserved her fate.
Above all, there is no reason why books intended for the pleasure as well as for the profit of young children should be so melancholy and dismal in their character. Nothing is more unwholesome than dejection, nothing more pernicious for any of us than to fix our considerations stedfastly upon the seamy side of life. Crippled lads, consumptive mothers, angelic little girls with spinal complaint, infidel fathers, lingering death-beds, famished families, innocent convicts, persecuted schoolboys, and friendless children wrongfully accused of theft, have held their own mournfully for many years. It is time we admitted, even into religious fiction, some of the conscious joys of a not altogether miserable world. I had recently in my service a pretty little house-maid barely nineteen years old, neat, capable, and good-tempered, but so perpetually down-cast that she threw a cloud over our unreasonably cheerful household. I grew melancholy watching her at work. One day, going into the kitchen, I saw lying open on her chair a book she had just been reading. It purported to be the experience of a missionary in one of our large cities, and was divided into nine separate stories. These were their titles, copied verbatim on the spot:—
The Infidel.
The Dying Banker.
The Drunkard’s Death.
The Miser’s Death.