The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

When we pass from the conception of providence to the conception of sin, we find in children the same natural logic. A small girl, an only child, asked: "How could God allow his only child to be killed? You could not have done it to me!" And a small boy said, "It is a very good thing for us that the Jews crucified Christ, so that nothing happened to us." These are both poles of an emotional and a practical way of looking at the Atonement. Within them all similar circumferences are drawn. To a more comic and naïve sphere of ideas belongs the proposal of a small girl to call the Virgin Mary God's wife. Also there is the story of a boy who spoke in school of Our Lord and the two other Lords, meaning the Trinity.

From the classes in Bible history and catechism, there are innumerable examples of children reading the words incorrectly, and misunderstanding the ideas they stand for. A boy, warned to keep the lamps burning, answered contentedly, "We have petroleum gratis." Another, asked whether he would like to be born again, said, "No, I might be turned into a girl." These are typical examples. There is an anecdote of a child, who, on being consoled with the statement that God was in the dark near her, asked her mother to put God out and light the lamp. Another child, seeing the pictures of the Christian martyrs in the arena, cried out sympathetically, "Look at that poor tiger; he hasn't got a Christian." These are a few out of a mass of examples, typical of the explanation given by children to the religious ideas they receive, notions forcing them into a world of ideas which they either accept in a material sense, or by which they are absolutely nonplussed.

The childish circle of ideas is revealed by anecdotes of this kind, or by the comment of a small girl who asked when she heard that she had been born about eleven o'clock at night, "How could I have remained out so late?" These examples show that such conceptions as original sin, the fall of man, regeneration and salvation, are first necessarily meaningless words, and afterwards terribly difficult words. In my whole life fear of hell never absorbed my attention for five minutes, but I know children and grown people who are martyrs to this terror. I know children too who, when belief in hell was presented to them in school as absolutely necessary, bewailed that their mother had said she did not believe in hell, and therefore thought she must be very wicked.

We are certainly a long way off from those times when, to use the picturesque expression of an historian of civilisation, "The fear of the devil constantly darkened the life of men, as the shadow of the sails of a windmill darkens the windows of the miller"; far from the times, too, when divine persons constantly revealed themselves to the believer, and when miracles belonged just as really to the daily habits of thought as to-day they are disregarded even by the believer. But so long as belief in the devil, providence and miracles is upheld in religious instruction, it will be impossible for the sunshine of the civilised view, which is the scientific as opposed to the superstitious view, to penetrate the darkness where the bacilli of cruelty and insanity are nurtured.

The ideas children form of heaven are generally fine examples of childish realism. A child thought his brother could not be in heaven, because he would have to climb a ladder, and so would be disobedient, for he had been forbidden to climb one. A girl asked, when she heard that her grandmother was in heaven, whether God was sitting there and holding her from falling out. These are a few of the many proofs of the child's sense of reality, that leads to mistaken answers here, as in so many other instances. If it is said by way of protest that the childish imagination needs myths and symbolism, the answer is an easy one. We cannot and should not rob the child of the play of imagination, but play should not be taken in earnest. It is not to be wondered at that children construct for themselves realistic ideas about spiritual things. This practice is no more to be opposed, than any of the other expressions of the life of the child's soul. But when these false ideas are presented as the highest truth of life, they must disturb the sacred simplicity of the child.

I know children in whom the origin of unbelief is to be traced to the words of Jesus, that everything asked for by the believing heart will be received. A small child, locked up in a dark room, prayed that God might show people how badly he was being treated, by causing a lamp of precious stones to be lit in the dark. Another asked to have a sick mother saved; another prayed by the side of a dead companion that she might rise again. For all these three, the experience of having their most believing, most fervent prayer unanswered, was the great turning point in their spiritual life. I can authenticate from my own experience and the experiences of others the ethical revolt which the cases of injustice in the Old Testament—for example God's preference of Jacob over Esau—occasion in a healthy child. The explanations offered in this case and in others like it fill the child with silent contempt. When the child ends in finding that adults themselves do not believe the religion they teach, the childish instinct for belief and for reverence, that capacity which is the real ground for all religious feeling, is injured for life.

I will say nothing of the heroes and heroines of the pious literature written for children, with their stories of conversion and holiness. Parents are able to protect their children from them. I speak here only of that way of looking at the world, which is forced on children with or against the will of their parents. This degrades their conceptions of God, of Jesus, of nature. These conceptions, the child if left to himself can develop simply or powerfully. It is this way of looking at the world that causes unnecessary suffering and dangerous prejudices. The inclination of the child to deep religious feeling, sound faith, and ardent zeal for holiness will be strengthened by an ability to draw the standards of life as freely from the Bible as from the world's literature. The same result will be produced by books on other religions, like Buddhism, from the great religious personalities who illustrate the struggle for an ideal, and from such children's books as show like efforts in a healthy form. No child has the slightest need of the catechism or theology for his religion or for his training; no other church history is needed than that connected with the general history of the world. In this last study the chief stress should be laid in teaching on the errors, in order to impress on the young the conviction, that all new truths are called by their contemporaries "errors." In other words these "errors" are the best negative material man has for discovering the truth.

Working over and explaining the contradictions met with by the child in such religious instruction, as I am outlining here, belongs to the preparation for a true life, in which people have to put up with innumerable contradictions. But this personal work injures neither the piety nor the soundness of the child's soul. Such injuries come rather from irritating pietism or vain hypocrisy, from spiritual fanaticism, from deceits of the reason, barrenness of soul, or perverted feeling of right, all of which are the notorious results of Christian training and Christian instruction, given according to the usual methods of the present day. For the present as well as for the future, a child will be able to solve more easily these spiritual problems if his fine feeling for right and his quick logic have not been dulled by the dogmatic answers to those eternal problems, that place him in as much difficulty as the thinker.

Kant exposed long ago the most serious injuries of the kind of religious instruction which still prevails. He showed that by making the church's teaching the basis of morality, improper motives were assigned to action. A thing must be avoided, not because God has forbidden it, but because it is in and for itself wrong. Man must aim at good, not because heaven or hell awaits the good or the bad, but because good has a higher value than evil. To this point of view of Kant there must be added the truth, that a position is ethically weakening, when man is presented as incapable of doing good by his own power. So he is told in this as in all other cases, he must be humble and trust in God's help. Confidence in our strength and the feeling of our own responsibility have a strong moral influence. The belief that man is sin-laden, without chance of change, has led him to remain where he is.

If the future generation is to grow up with upright souls, the first condition of such growth is to obliterate from the existence of children and young people, by a mighty scratch of the pen, the catechism, Bible history, theology and church history.