Many of us will feel with Froebel that the fairy-tale, with its slumbering premonition of being surrounded by that which is higher and more "conscious than ourselves,"[25] has its place, and an important place, in religious development.
[Footnote 25: P. 85.]
The "fairy sense," says Dr. Greville Macdonald, "is innate as the religious sense itself … the fairy stories best beloved are those steeped in meaning—the unfathomable meaning of life … such stories teach—even though no lesson was intended—the wisdom of the Book of Job: wisdom that by this time surely should have made religious teaching saner, and therefore more acceptable."[26]
[Footnote 26: "The Fairy-Tale in Education," by Greville Macdonald, M.D., Child Life, Dec. 1918.]
Fairies, like angels, may be God's messengers. A child who had heard of St. Cuthbert as a shepherd boy being carried home from the hillside when hurt, by a man on a white horse, repeated the story in her own words, "and he thought it was a fairy of God's sent to help him."
There is, however, nothing the children love more than the Bible story, the story which shows, so simply, humanity struggling as the children struggle, failing as the children fail, and believing and trusting as the children believe, and as we at least strive to do, in the ultimate victory of Right over Wrong, of Good over Evil. But just because the stories are often so beautiful and so inspiring, the teacher should have freedom to deal with them as the spirit moves her.
What experience has taught me in this way has already been passed on to younger teachers in Education by Life, and there seems little more to add.
Wonders chiefly at himself
Who can tell him what he is.
It is for us to tell the child what he is, that he, too, like all the things he loves, is a manifestation of God. "I am a being alive and conscious upon this earth; a descendant of ancestors who rose by gradual processes from lower forms of animal life, and with struggle and suffering became man."[27]
[Footnote 27: The Substance of Faith Allied with Science, Sir Oliver
Lodge (Methuen).]