Her uncle did not at once reply. When he did, it was to say, "You are right about that, my dear."
Sometimes it happens that a child finds in our careful explanation of the meaning of a religious belief or practice a different or a further significance than we have indicated. I once had an especially striking experience of this kind.
I was visiting a family in which there were several children, cared for by a nurse of the old-fashioned, old-world type. She was a woman well beyond middle age, and of a frank and simple piety. There was hardly a circumstance of daily life for which she was not ready with an accustomed ejaculatory prayer or thanksgiving. One day I chanced to speak to her of a mutual friend, long dead. "God rest her soul!" said the old nurse, in a low tone.
"Why did she say that?" the little four-year-old girl of the house asked me. "I never heard her say that before!"
"It is a prayer that some persons always say when speaking of any one who is dead; especially any one they knew and loved," I explained.
Later in the day, turning over a portfolio of photographs with the little girl, I took up a picture of a fine, faithful-eyed dog. "Whose dog is this?" I asked. "What a good one he is!"
"He was ours," replied the child, "and he was very good; we liked him.
But he is dead now—" She paused as if struck by a sudden remembrance.
Then, "God rest his soul!" she sighed, softly.
Most of the answers I read in response to the question, "Should churchgoing on the part of children be compulsory or voluntary?" did not end with the brief statement that it should be voluntary, and the reason why; a considerable number of them went on to say: "The children should of course be inspired and encouraged to go. They should be taught that it is a privilege. Their Sunday-school teachers and their minister, as well as their parents, can help to make them wish to go."
Certainly their Sunday-school teachers and ministers can, and do. The answers I have quoted took for granted the attendance of children at Sunday-school. Not one of them suggested that this was a matter admitting of free choice on the part of the children. "But it isn't," declared an experienced Sunday-school teacher who is a friend of mine when I said this to her. "Going to Sunday-school isn't worship; it is learning whom to worship and how. Naturally, children go, just as they go to week-day school, whether they like to or not; I must grant," she added by way of amendment, "that they usually do like to go!"
Our Sunday-schools have become more and more like our week-day schools. The boys and girls are taught in them whom to worship and how, but they are taught very much after the manner that, in the week-day schools, they are instructed concerning secular things. That custom, belonging to a time not so far in the past but that many of us remember it, of consigning the "infant class" of the Sunday-school to any amiable young girl in the parish who could promise to be reasonably regular in meeting it does not obtain at the present day. Sunday-school teachers are trained, and trained with increasing care and thoroughness, for their task.