“Her real heart—the heart that beats like a clock ticking?”
“Yes, her real heart, just here.”
The mother should lay the child’s hand on her heart and let him feel it beating.
“And just inside, right underneath here, Mummy kept you while God was helping her to make you.”
The child who has been brought up in a home of love and tenderness and beauty will find this a thrilling and beautiful thought, like a little boy whom I know personally, and to whom this fact was told in this way. Solemnly, and without a word, he went away from his mother into the middle of the room and stood deep in thought for several minutes. Then he turned, looked round, and rushed across the room, threw himself into his mother’s lap, his arms round her neck and cried: “Oh, Mummy, Mummy, then I was right inside you.”
For days afterwards he was filled with a rapturous joy, and at times used to leave his play and come to his mother and put his arms round her neck, saying: “Oh, Mummy, that is why I love you so.”
Whatever form the child’s feeling may take, the opportunity should not be allowed to pass without a little addition to the conversation, and the mother should say:—
“And you see that is why you must never talk to any one but Daddy and Mummy, or God through your prayers, about such things. As God and Daddy and Mummy, and no one else made your little body, so every thing you want to know about it, all the questions you want to ask, you should ask of them and no one else. You see, you are different from any other child in the world, and as Daddy and Mummy helped to make you, only they know your works. So whatever it is you want to know, or whatever it is that goes wrong, it is Mummy and Daddy who can tell you about it.”
Once may be sufficient for a child to be told the greater truths it desires to know, but it is seldom that the child will leave so wonderful a subject entirely alone after first learning of it, and many portions of the beautiful facts will have to be repeated in a variety of forms, or in just the same words, as are repeated again and again the beloved fairy tales. The child, however, will be quick to know the difference between this story and fairy tales, for children have an instinct for truth at a much earlier age than grown-ups generally remember.