And kiss me through the rose-leaf rain;
We’ll build one castle more in Spain
And dream one more dream there.
“Now I Lay Me”
The Mothers’ Club, which is revolutionizing the training of children, wants a revision of the child’s evening prayer which is in universal use. A grandmother relates a newly-awakened experience upon the occasion of a visit to her daughter. On the night after her arrival, the little five-year-old grandson insisted that his grandmother should put him to bed. When he was ready to be tucked in, he repeated the Lord’s Prayer, but when asked to follow it with “Now I lay me down to sleep,” she found that he had never learned it. On asking her daughter why, the child’s mother replied: “Why, mother dear, that belongs to the past, like teaching children to kneel, and many other things. Do we want our children to kneel when they ask us for anything? The Mothers’ Club has taught us that ‘Now I lay me’ is highly objectionable, with the suggestion in the line, ‘if I should die before I wake.’ How cruel to implant such a thought in the child’s mind! I remember too well the long hours I have lain awake lest I should die in my sleep. The model parent of to-day has advanced beyond the convictions of the model parent of yesterday, when to impress upon a child a fear of death and to keep in his remembrance that he must surely die was the duty of every good father and mother.
“Think of the funerals children were made to attend when you were a child—the funeral selections of the old-school readers, the horrible gloom that fell upon a home whenever death crossed the threshold, the clocks stopped, the pictures covered, or turned to the wall, and all the rest. Perhaps the fulfilment of the promise ‘There shall be no more death,’ is nearer than many suppose; for what is death when robbed of the fear of it—that fear which has been a positive cult for centuries? I, for one, believe that the blessed day is coming when to die will be simply passing on, and, outside of the circle of the dear ones of the departed, it will be almost ‘without observation.’ Certainly there will be a welcome absence of funeral pageants, the complete annihilation of the ashes after cremation, doing away in time with sepulchral urns and chapels for their preservation. Memorial monuments will then be in some form contributing to the world’s betterment. The wearing of mourning will be a thing of the past, and that blemish on many a fair rural landscape, the neglected old graveyard, will have disappeared. Funeral processions will no more go about the streets.”
When the old-fashioned grandmother recovered somewhat from her amazement at such a line of argument, she ventured to suggest a revision to avoid the condemnation of the Mothers’ Club. So now the little fellow is saying:
Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep;
When in the morning light I wake,