To discourse or description, may be added the sight of pictures, which represent sacred subjects. Prints will be sufficient, which may be preserved for ordinary use—but when an opportunity offers of shewing a child good paintings, it must not be neglected: for the force of colouring, and the grandeur of composition, will strike the imagination with greater effect.
[4.] I have omitted the remark which here follows—because it alludes to the catechism of the Council of Trent, with which we have nothing to do in this country.
[5.] I may be permitted to add, that if children do not discover any propensity to these studies, we should neither neglect nor despise them; provided their dispositions and conduct be good and regular in other matters. Besides, nothing conclusive can, at first, be drawn from their inattention to these subjects; for a child at twelve years of age may evince as great a regard for them, as she did indifference, at ten. There is little consistency in the human intellect at such a volatile period: the girl of gaity and dissipation at eighteen, may become the devotee at five and twenty.
T.
CHAPTER VII.
Of Inculcating Principles of Religion in
the Minds of Children.
It has been before observed that the first years of childhood are not calculated for reasoning: not that children are divested of those ideas and general principles of reason which hereafter become manifest, but that they are ignorant of many facts, which hinders the application of their reason; and, moreover, leaves that agitation of the brain, which prevents them from connecting their ideas.
We should, however, without pressing them, gently direct the use of their reason towards a knowledge of God. Persuade them of Christian truths, without giving them subjects of doubt. They observe some one to be dead: they know that burial afterwards follows: say to them—"Is this dead person in the tomb?" "Yes." "He is not then in paradise?" "Pardon me, he is." "How can he be in the grave and in paradise at the same time?" "It is his soul which is in paradise—his body only in the grave." His soul and body then are not the same thing?" "No." "The soul, therefore, is not dead?" "No—It will live for ever in heaven." Add: "And you, do you wish to be saved?" "Yes." "But what is being saved?" "It is the soul's going into paradise." "And what is death?" "It is the mouldering of the body into dust, when the soul has left it."