I told this to one of my friends who is a devout Roman Catholic. "It shows," she said, "what the rosary can do for religion!"
But it seemed to me that it showed rather what religion could do for the rosary. Had the child's mother, Scotch by birth, New England by breeding, not been a truly religious woman she would not have bade her little girl handle with reverence the emblem of a faith so unlike her own; she would not have said, "Don't play with it." As for the small girl, had she never learned to "say prayers," she would not have desired the rosary to say them "with." And it was not the silver cross hanging on her rosary that influenced her to "say last," for it, the best psalm and "spiritual song" she knew; it was the understanding she had been given by careful teaching of the meaning of that symbol. Above all, had the little girl, after being taught to pray, not been left free to pray as her childish heart inclined, that rosary would scarcely have found a place on the head-post of her small bed.
It may be for the very reason that the children are not compelled to think and to feel in the things of religion as their parents do that fathers and mothers in America so frankly tell their boys and girls exactly what they do think and just how they do feel. The children may not ever understand the religious experiences through which their parents are passing, but they often know what those experiences are. Moreover, they sometimes partake of them.
Among my child friends there is a little girl, an only child, whose father died not a great while ago. The little girl had always had a share in the joys of her parents. It surprised no one who knew the family that the mother in her grief turned to the child for comfort; and that together they bore their great bereavement. Indeed, so completely did this occur that the little girl for a time hardly saw any one excepting her mother and her governess. After a suitable interval, an old friend of the family approached the mother on the subject. "Your little girl is only eight years old," she said, gently. "Oughtn't she perhaps to go to see her playmates, and have them come to see her, again, now?"
The mother saw the wisdom of the suggestion. The child continued to spend much of her time with her mother, but she gradually resumed her former childish occupations. She had always been a gregarious little girl; once more her nursery was a merry, even an hilarious, place.
One Saturday a short time ago she was among the six small guests invited to the birthday luncheon of another little girl friend of mine. Along with several other grown-ups I had been invited to come and lend a hand at this festivity. I arrived just as the children were going into the dining-room, where the table set forth for their especial use, and bright with the light of the seven candles on the cake, safely placed in the centre, awaited them. They climbed into their chairs, and then all seven of them paused. "Mother," said the little girl of the house, "who shall say grace?"
"I can!"
"Let me!"
"I always do at home!"
These and other exclamations were made before the mother could reply. When she was able to get a hearing, she suggested, "I think each one of you might, since you all can and would like to."