On the other hand we find that the childish impulse to seek aid leads to a belief in a more benign sort of being. C.’s staunch belief in his fairies who could do the most wonderful things for him, and more especially his invention of the rain-god (the “Rainer”), are a clear illustration of the working of this impulse.
Even here, of course, while we can detect the play of a spontaneous impulse, we have to recognise the influence of instruction. C.’s tutelary deities, the fairies, were no doubt suggested by his fairy stories; even though, as in the myth of the Rainer, we see how his active little mind proceeded to work out the hints given him into quite original shapes. This original adaptation shows itself on a large scale where something like systematic religious instruction is supplied. An intelligent child of four or five will in the laboratory of his mind turn the ideas of God and the devil to strange account. It would be interesting, if we could only get it, to have a collection of all the hideous eerie forms by which the young imagination has endeavoured to interpret the notion of the devil. His renderings of the idea of God appear to show hardly less of picturesque diversity.[[56]]
It is to be noted at the outset that for the child’s intelligence the ideas introduced by religious instruction at once graft themselves on to those of fairy-lore. Mr. Spencer has somewhere ridiculed our university type of education with its juxtaposition of classical polytheism and Hebrew monotheism. One might, perhaps, with still greater reason, satirise the mixing up of fairy-story and Bible-story in the instruction of a child of five. Who can wonder that the little brain should throw together all these wondrous invisible forms, and picture God as an angry or amiable old giant, the angels as fairies and so forth? In George Sand’s child-romance of Corambé we see how far this blending of the ideas of the two domains of the invisible world can be carried.
For the rest, the child in his almost pathetic effort to catch the meaning of this religious instruction proceeds in his characteristic matter-of-fact way by reducing the abstruse symbols to terms of familiar every-day experience. He has to understand and he can only understand by assimilating to homely terrestrial facts. Hence the undisguised materialism of the child’s theology. According to Stanley Hall’s collection of observations, God was imaged by one child as a man preternaturally big—a big blue man; by another as a huge being with limbs spread all over the sky; by another as so immensely tall that he could stand with one foot on the ground, and touch the clouds,—strong like the giant, his prototype. He is commonly, in conformity with what is told, supposed to dwell in heaven, that is just the other side of the blue and white floor, the sky. He is so near the clouds that according to one small boy (our little friend the zoologist) these are a sort of pleasaunce, composed of hills and trees, which he has made to saunter in. But some children are inventive even in respect of God’s whereabouts. He has been regarded as inhabiting one of the stars. One of Mr. Kratz’s children localised him ‘up in the moon,’ an idea which probably owes something to observation of the man in the moon. We note, too, a tendency to approximate heaven and earth, possibly in order to account for God’s frequent presence and activity here. Thus one of Mr. Kratz’s children said that God was “up on the hill,” and one little girl of five was in the habit of climbing an old apple tree to visit him and tell him what she wanted.
Differences of feeling, as well as differences in the mode of instruction and in intelligence, seem to reflect themselves in these ideas of the divine dwelling-place. As we have seen, the childish intelligence is apt to envisage God as a sort of grand lord with a house or mansion. Two different tendencies show themselves in the thought about this dwelling-place. On the one hand the feeling of childish respect, which led a German girl of seven to address him in the polite form, ‘Ich bitte Sie,’ leads to a beautifying of his house. According to some of the Bostonian children he has birds, children, and Santa Claus living with him. Others think of him as having a big park or pleasaunce with trees, flowers, as well as birds. The children are perhaps our dead people who in time will be sent back to earth. Whether the birds, that I find come in again and again in the ideas of heaven, are dead birds, I am not sure. While however there is this half-poetical adorning of God’s palace, we see also a tendency to humanise it, to make it like our familiar houses. This is quaintly illustrated in the following prayer of a girl of seven whose grandfather had just died: “Please, God, grandpapa has gone to you. Please take great care of him. Please always mind and shut the door, because he can’t stand the draughts.” We see the same leaning to homely conceptions in the question of a little girl of four: ‘Isn’t there a Mrs. God?’
While thus relegated to the sublime regions of the sky God is supposed to be doing things, and of course doing them for us, sending down rain and so forth. What seems to impress children most, especially boys, in the traditional account of God is his power of making things. He is emphatically the artificer, the demiurgos, who not only has made the world, the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by human needs. According to the Boston children he fabricates all sorts of things from babies to money, and the angels work for him. The boy has a great admiration for the maker, and our small zoologist when three years and ten months old, on seeing a group of working men returning from their work, asked his astonished mother: “Mamma, is these gods?” “God!” retorted his mother, “why?” “Because,” he went on, “they makes houses, and churches, mamma, same as God makes moons, and people, and ’ickle dogs.” Another child watching a man repairing the telegraph wires that rested on a high pole at the top of a lofty house, asked if he was God. In this way the child is apt to think of God descending to earth in order to make things. Indeed, in their prayers, children are wont to summon God as a sort of good genius to do something difficult for them. A boy of four and a half years was one day in the kitchen with his mother, and would keep taking up the knives and using them. At last his mother said: “L., you will cut your fingers, and if you do they won’t grow again”. He thought for a minute and then said with a tone of deep conviction: “But God would make them grow. He made me, so he could mend my fingers, and if I were to cut the ends off I should say, ‘God, God, come to your work,’ and he would say, ‘All right’.”[[57]]
While this way of recognising God as the busy artificer is common, it is not universal. The child’s deity, like the man’s (as Feuerbach showed), is a projection of himself, and as there are lazy children, so there is a child’s God who is a luxurious person sitting in a lovely arm-chair all day, and at most putting out from heaven the moon and stars at night.
This admiration of God’s creative power is naturally accompanied by that of his skill. A little boy once said to his mother he would like to go to heaven to see Jesus. Asked why, he replied: “Oh! he’s a great conjurer”. The child had shortly before seen some human conjuring and used this experience in a thoroughly childish fashion by envisaging in a new light the New Testament miracle-worker.
The idea of God’s omniscience seems to come naturally to children. They are in the way of looking up to older folks as possessing boundless information. C.’s belief in the all-knowingness of the preacher, and his sister’s belief in the all-knowingness of the policeman, show how readily the child-mind falls in with the notion.
On the other hand I have heard of the dogma of God’s infinite knowledge provoking a sceptical attitude in the child-mind. This seems to be suggested in a rather rude remark of a boy of four, bored by the long Sunday discourse of his mother: “Mother, does God know when you are going to stop?” Our astute little zoologist, when five years and seven months old, in a talk with his mother, impiously sought to tone down the doctrine of omniscience in this way: “I know a ’ickle more than Kitty, and you know a ’ickle more than me; and God knows a ’ickle more than you, I s’pose; then he can’t know so very much after all”.