The elder one replied very earnestly, "O yes! God can see everybody, everywhere."
"But I don't see how He can see me when I am all wrapped up in this shawl. It is dark," persisted the little three-year-old. There was a pause, when Eliza, in a very anxious voice, said:—
"Amelia, can you see mama in your eye?" (She meant imagination.)
Amelia replied after a moment, "Yes, I can see mama in my eye, just how she looks."
"Well," said Eliza, "I suppose that is the way God sees everything, because He knows everything."
I cannot conceive a more perfect proof that the soul of a child is a "sparkle of God," and its mind the intuition of the eternal reason—its image, than was given by this original illustration of the truth of truths made by a child of five years old. The mother made an exclamation of wonder, and said:—
"I am sure I never could have given so profound an answer as that," and I continue to think it the most wonderful thing I ever heard of so young a child's saying, and had I not heard it myself, I doubt if I could have believed it was said. But it has given me courage to think that children might have very early a definite conception of the invisible God without materializing it.
The omnipresence and invisibility of God were mysteries that attracted my little pupil's mind and taxed it, but did not distress nor perplex it. Of the reality of God's being, the intimacy of his own relations with Him, he never seemed to have a doubt; his delight in the thought of Him was boundless. At the end of the first day he said a thing which struck his parents with astonishment. The evening of the day on which I arrived, his father had made tea for me in the parlor, and as the child did not want to leave me a moment, he was set up at the table in his high-chair opposite me, to eat his bread and milk with us. While the father talked of one thing and another, the child's eye and mine occasionally met, and he would immediately make some gesture of lovingness and an inarticulate sound, ee ee ee! At last his father checked him with the words "Don't make those silly noises, Foster!" I interposed, and playfully said:—
"Now please don't come between me and Foster. I understand his silly noises and just what he means to say to me. How can you expect he will talk any sense when you have never given him any help to think?" The father laughed at my "transcendentalism," as he called it. But the second night, when we were all again in the same relative position, the demeanor of the child was wholly changed; he sat silently eating as if wrapped in thought. By and by he said in a very decided tone, "Some things live, and some things only keep."
With a look of astonishment his father exclaimed, "What an extraordinary generalization!" "The consequence," said I, "of being talked to as if he were a rational being one day!"