To most children, presumably, religious instruction comes—at first at least—with a commanding, authoritative force. The story of the supernatural, of the Divine Father, of Heaven, and the rest, cannot be scrutinised by the child—save, indeed, in respect of its inner consistency—for it tells of things unobservable by sense, and so having no direct contact with childish experience. Their natural tendency is to believe, in a submissive, childish way, not troubling about the proof of the mystery.
But even in this submissive acceptance there lies the germ of a subsequent transformation. If the child is to believe, he must believe in his own fashion; he must give body and reality to the ideas of Divine majesty and goodness, and of spiritual approach and worship. Hence the way in which children are apt to startle the reverent and amuse the profane by divulging their crude material fancies about things spiritual.
Such materialisation of spiritual conceptions is apt to bring trouble to the young mind. It is all so confusing—this exalted Personage, who nevertheless is quite unlike earthly dignitaries, this all-encompassing and never-failing Presence, which all the time refuses to reveal itself to eye or ear. How much real suffering this may entail in the case of children at once serious and imaginative we shall never know. The description of the boy Waldo, in that strangely fascinating book, The Story of an African Farm, kneeling bare-headed in the blazing sun and offering his dinner on an altar to God, may look exaggerated to some; but it is essentially true to some of the deepest instincts of childhood. The child that believes at all, believes intensely, and his belief grows all-commanding and prolific of action.
While, however, it is the common tendency of children passively to adopt their elders’ religious beliefs, merely inventing their own modes of giving effect to them, there is a certain amount of originality exercised in the formation of the beliefs themselves. Stories of independent creations of a religious cult by children are no doubt rare; and this for the very good reason that it needs the greatest force of self-assertion to resist the pressure of the traditional faith on the childish mind. The early recollections of George Sand furnish what is probably the most remarkable instance of childish daring in fashioning a new religion, with its creed and ritual all complete.
Poor little Aurore’s religious difficulties and experiments at solution can only be understood in the light of her confusing surroundings. From her mother—ardent, imaginative, and of a ‘simple and confiding faith’—she had caught some of the glow of a fervent piety. Then she suddenly passed into the chilling air of Nohant, where the grandmother equalled her master Voltaire in cynical contempt of the revered mysteries. The effect of this sudden change of temperature on the warm young heart was, as might have been anticipated, extremely painful. Madame Dupin at once recognised the girl’s temperament, and saw with dismay the leaning to ‘superstition,’ a trait which she disliked none the less for recognising in it a bequest from the despised grisette mother. So she applied herself with all the energy of her strong character to counteract the child’s religious tendencies. Now this might have proved neither a difficult nor lengthy process if she had consistently set her face against all religious observances. But though a disciple of Voltaire, she was also a lady with a conspicuous social position, and had to make her account with the polite world and the ‘bienséances’. So Aurore was not only allowed but encouraged to attend Mass and to prepare for the ‘First Communion’ like other young ladies of her station. Madame Dupin well knew the risk she was running with so inflammable a material, but she counted on her own sufficiency as a prompt extinguisher of any inconveniently attaching spark of devotion. In this way the young girl underwent the uncommon if not unique experience of a regular religious instruction, and, concurrently with this and from the very hand that had imposed it, a severe training in rational scepticism and contempt for the faith of the vulgar.
Even if Aurore had not been in her inmost heart something of a dévote, this parallel discipline in outward conformity and inward ridicule would have been hurtful enough. As it was, it brought into her young life all the pain of contradiction, all the bitterness of enforced rebellion.
The attendance on Mass could hardly have seemed dangerous to Madame Dupin. The old curé of Nohant was not troubled with an excess of reverence. When ordering a procession, in deference to the mandate of his archbishop, he would seize the occasion for expressing his contempt for such mummeries. In his congregation there was a queer old lady, who used to utter her disapproval of the ceremony with a frankness that would have seemed brutal even in a theatre, by exclaiming, ‘Quelle diable de Messe!’ And the object of this criticism, on turning to the congregation to wind up with the familiar Dominus vobiscum, would reply in an under-tone, yet loudly enough for Aurore’s ear, ‘Allez au diable!’ That the child attached little solemnity to the ritual is evident from her account to the grandmother of her first visit to the Mass: ‘I saw the curé who took his breakfast standing up before a big table, and turned round on us now and then to call us names’.
The preparation for the ‘First Communion’ was a more serious matter. The girl had now to study the life of Christ, and her heart was touched by the story. ‘The Gospel (she writes) and the divine drama of the life and death of Jesus drew from me in secret torrents of tears.’ Her grandmother, by making now and again ‘a short, dry appeal to her reason,’ succeeded in getting her to reject the notion of miracles and of the divinity of Jesus. But though she was thus unable to reach ‘full faith,’ she resolved en revanche to deny nothing internally. Accordingly she learnt her catechism ‘like a parrot, without seeking to understand it, and without thinking of making fun of its mysteries’. For the rest, she felt a special repugnance towards the confessional. She was able to recall a few small childish faults, such as telling a lie to her mother in order to screen the maid Rose, but feared the list would not satisfy the confessor. Happily, however, he proved to be more lenient than she had anticipated, and dismissed his young penitent with a nominal penance.
The day that makes an epoch in the Catholic girl’s life at length arrived, and Aurore was decked out like the rest of the candidates. The grandmother, having given a finishing touch to her instructions by bidding Aurore, while going through the act of decorum with the utmost decency, ‘not to outrage Divine wisdom and human reason to such an extent as to believe that she was going to eat her Creator,’ accompanied her to the church. It was a hard ordeal. The incongruous appearance of the deistic grandmamma in the place sufficed in itself to throw the girl’s thoughts into disorder. She felt the hollowness of the whole thing, and asked herself whether she and her grandmother were not committing an act of hypocrisy. More than once her repugnance reached such a pitch that she thought of getting up and saying to her grandmother, ‘Enough of this: let us go away’. But relief came in another shape. Going over the scene of the ‘Last Supper’ in her thoughts, she all at once recognised that the words of Jesus, ‘This is my body and my blood,’ were nothing but a metaphor. He was too holy and too great to have wished to deceive his disciples. This discovery of the symbolism of the rite calmed her by removing all feeling of its grotesqueness. She left the Communion table quite at peace. Her contentment gave a new expression to her face, which did not escape the anxious eyes of Madame Dupin: ‘Softened and terrified, divided between the fear of having made me devout and that of having caused me to lie to myself, she pressed me gently to her heart and dropped some tears on my veil’.
It was out of this conflicting and agitating experience, the full sense of the beauty of the Christian faith and the equally full comprehension of the sceptic’s destructive logic, that there was born in Aurore’s imagination the idea of a new private religion with which nobody else should meddle. She gives us the origin of this strange conception clearly enough:—