Enfants et fous sont devins [Children and fools are soothsayers].
—French Proverb.
Children pick up words as chickens peas,
And utter them again as God shall please.—English Proverb.
The fresh face of a child is richer in significance than the
forecasting of the most indubitable seer.—Novalis.
Child-Oracles.
"Children and fools speak the truth," says an old and wide-spread proverb, and another version includes him who is drunken, making a trinity of truth-tellers. In like manner have the frenzy of wine and the madness of the gods been associated in every age with oracle and sign, and into this oracular trinity enters also the child. Said De Quincey: "God speaks to children also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk in darkness," and the poet Stoddard has clothed in exquisite language a similar thought:—
"Nearer the gate of Paradise than we,
Our children breathe its air, its angels see;
And when they pray, God hears their simple prayer,
Yea, even sheathes his sword in judgment bare."
The passage in Joel ii. 28, "Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions," might stand for not a few primitive peoples, with whom, once in childhood (or youth) and once again in old age, man communes with the spirits and the gods, and interprets the events of life to his fellows. The Darien Indians, we are told, "used the seeds of the Datura sanguinea to bring on in children prophetic delirium in which they revealed hidden treasures" (545. II. 417).
One of the most curious of the many strange practices which the conservatism of the Established Church of England has continued down to the present is one in vogue at the parish church of St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire. A certain Dr. Eobert Wilde, who died in 1678, "bequeathed £50, the yearly interest of which was to be expended in the purchase of six Bibles, not exceeding the price of 7_s_. 6_d_ each, which should be 'cast for by dice' on the communion table every year by six boys and six girls of the town." The vicar was also to be paid 10_s_. a year for preaching an appropriate sermon on the Holy Scriptures. Public opinion has within recent years caused the erection of a table on the chancel steps, where the dice-throwing now takes place, instead of on the communion table as of old. Every May 26th the ceremony is performed, and in 1888 we are told: "The highest throw this year (three times with three dice) was 37, by a little girl. The vicar (the Rev. E. Tottenham) preached a sermon from the words, 'From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures'" (390 (1888). 113).
The Child as Vision-Seer.
In the history of the Catholic Church one cannot fail to be struck by the part played by children in the seeing of visions, especially of the Virgin. To St. Agnes of Monte Pulciano (A.D. 1274-1317), when fourteen years of age, the Virgin appeared and told her she should build a monastery before she died (191. 24); Jeanne de Maille (1332-1414) was but eleven when the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus came before her in a vision; Catherine of Racconigi (1486-1547) was visited by the Virgin when only five years of age (191. 108); in 1075, Hermann of Cologne, while still a boy, saw in a vision the Virgin, who kissed him, and made a secret deposit of food on a certain stone for his benefit. In 1858 a vision of the Immaculate Conception appeared to Bernadetta Soubirous, a sickly child of fourteen, at Lourdes, in the Hautes Pyrenees. No one else saw this vision, said to have occurred on Shrove Tuesday (Feb. 11), four years after Pius IX. had proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The vision lasted for fourteen successive days (191. 484). On Jan. 17, 1871, the Virgin is alleged to have appeared at Pontmain to several children, and a detailed account of the vision has been given by Mgr. Guérin, chamberlain of Pius IX., in his Vie des Saints, and this is digested in Brewer. The children who saw the apparition are described as follows: "Eugène Barbedette was the second son of a small farmer living in the village of Pontmain, in the diocese of Laval. He was twelve years old, and his brother Joseph was ten. The other two [Françoise Richer, Jeanne Marie Lebossé] were children from neighbouring cottages, called in to witness the sight. The parents of the children, the pastor of the village, Sister Vitaline, the abbot Guérin, all present, could see nothing, nor could any of the neighbours of outlying villages, who flocked to the place. Only the children mentioned, a sick child, and a babe in the arms of its grandmother, saw the apparition." The description of the Virgin, as seen by Eugène Barbedette that starlight winter night, is quaint and naïve in the extreme: "She was very tall, robed in blue, and her robe studded with stars. Her shoes were also blue, but had red rosettes. Her face was covered with a black veil, which floated to her shoulders. A crown of gold was on her head, but a red line was observed to run round the crown, symbolic of the blood shed by Christ for the sins of the world. Beneath her feet was a scroll, on which were written these words: 'Mais priez, mes enfants, Dieu vous exaucera, en peu de temps mon fils se laisse toucher' (Pray, my children, God will hear you, before long my son will be moved)." Mgr. Guérin thus comments upon the miracle: "In order to make herself manifest to men, the Holy Virgin has chosen rather the simple eyes of childhood; for, like troubled waters, sinful souls would have but ill reflected her celestial image" (191. 26).