"Is it?" the little girl exclaimed in some surprise. "It doesn't seem quite the same."
The child did not press the question. She left us, to return her mother's Bible to its wonted place. When she came back, she resumed the exhibiting of her birthday gifts where it had been interrupted. But after she had gone out to play I said to her mother, "Are they quite the same—the text in your Bible and the lines in hers?"
"It is rather a long way from Solomon to William Blake, isn't it?" she exclaimed.
"But I really don't see much difference. The same thing is said, only in the one case it is a command and in the other it is an impelling suggestion."
"Isn't that rather a great deal of difference?" I ventured.
"No, I think not," she said, meditatively. "Of course, I admit," she supplemented, "that the idea of an impelling suggestion appeals to the imagination more than the idea of a command. But that's the only difference."
It seems to me that this "only" difference is at the very foundation of the religious training of the children of the present day in our country. We do our best to awaken their imaginations, to put to them suggestions that will impel, to say to them the "same thing" that was said to the children of more austere times about remembering their Creator; but so to say it that they feel, not that they will be unhappy if they do not remember, but that they will be happy if they do. It is the love of God rather than the fear of God that we would have them know.
Is it not, indeed, just because we do so earnestly desire that they should learn this that we leave them so free with regard to what we call their spiritual life? "Read a chapter in your Bible every day, darling," I recently heard a mother say to her little girl on the eve of her first visit away from home without her parents. "In Auntie's house they don't have family prayers, as we do, so you won't hear a chapter read every day as you do at home."
"What chapters shall I read, mamma?" the child asked.
"Any you choose, dear," the mother replied.