The other matter for hopefulness lies in the fact that the very things that often present difficulties to grown-up people are specially attractive to children. Anything connected with the unseen world, anything quite impossible according to the laws of nature as we know them, interests and takes hold of children at once. This is plain from the often-repeated request, “Do tell us a fairy story.”
Impression made by Beauties of Nature.
When to this is added the impression made on a child’s mind by the vision of a gorgeous sunset, or of a great wide-spreading view, there seems to be a good deal upon which it is possible to work. A man friend of the writer has told him that his first real impressions of the greatness and goodness of God came to him as a child when contemplating beautiful scenery; and an aunt of the late Bishop Walsham How used to say that when he was a very little boy, and was looking from a window at the sunset, he was heard to say, “Oh! God!”
The Higher Criticism.
How easy it would be to kill these beginnings of faith! How easy for a teacher who had studied the Higher Criticism to wither the growth of a belief in the unseen and incomprehensible! Is it worth while to risk this by scrupulously teaching that Elijah’s chariot of fire and Jonah’s whale had better be taken as allegories? A teacher with great experience of little children has said, and said most truly, “Religion attracts greatly because of the mystery which surrounds the unseen. Besides this, the beauty and the wonderful fitness of all things in nature strengthen more than anything a child’s belief in a Divine Creator.”
Perhaps, as one last word, it may be said that that mother will succeed best in the religious training of her children who feels that it is the chief and highest work she has to do.
CHAPTER V
THE CHILD—ITS IMITATION
Selection of those about the Path of a Child.