"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days
come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no
pleasure in them."
[Illustration: IN THE INFANT CLASS]
The little girl read it aloud. "It sounds as though you wouldn't be
happy if you _didn't_ remember, mother," she said, dubiously.
"Well, darling," her mother replied, "and so you wouldn't."
The child took her own Bible and read aloud the verse her father had
written. "But, mother, this sounds as though you _would_ be happy if you
_did_ remember."
"And so you will, dear," her mother made reply. "It is the same thing,"
she added.
"Is it?" the little girl exclaimed in some surprise. "It doesn't _seem_
quite the same."
The child did not press the question. She left us, to return her
mother's Bible to its wonted place. When she came back, she resumed the
exhibiting of her birthday gifts where it had been interrupted. But
after she had gone out to play I said to her mother, "Are they _quite_
the same--the text in your Bible and the lines in hers?"
"It _is_ rather a long way from Solomon to William Blake, isn't it?" she
exclaimed.
"But I really don't see much difference. The same thing is said, only in
the one case it is a command and in the other it is an impelling
suggestion."
"Isn't that rather a great deal of difference?" I ventured.
"No, I think not," she said, meditatively. "Of course, I admit," she
supplemented, "that the idea of an impelling suggestion appeals to the
imagination more than the idea of a command. But that's the _only_
difference."
It seems to me that this "only" difference is at the very foundation of
the religious training of the children of the present day in our
country. We do our best to awaken their imaginations, to put to them
suggestions that will impel, to say to them the "same thing" that was
said to the children of more austere times about remembering their
Creator; but so to say it that they feel, not that they will be unhappy
if they do not remember, but that they will be happy if they do. It is
the love of God rather than the fear of God that we would have them
know.
Is it not, indeed, just because we do so earnestly desire that they
should learn this that we leave them so free with regard to what we call
their spiritual life? "Read a chapter in your Bible every day, darling,"
I recently heard a mother say to her little girl on the eve of her first
visit away from home without her parents. "In Auntie's house they don't
have family prayers, as we do, so you won't hear a chapter read every
day as you do at home."
"What chapters shall I read, mamma?" the child asked.
"Any you choose, dear," the mother replied.
"And when in the day?" was the next question. "Morning or night?"
"Just as you like, dearest," the mother answered.
But there is a religious liberty beyond this. To no one in America is it
so readily, so sympathetically, given as to a child. We are all familiar
with the difficulties which attend a grown person, even in America,
whose convictions necessitate a change of religious denomination. Such a
situation almost invariably means distress to the family, and to the
relinquished church of the person the form of whose faith has altered.
In few other matters is so small a measure of liberty understandingly
granted a grown person, even in America. But when a child would turn
from one form of belief to another, how differently the circumstance is
regarded!
One Sunday, not long ago, visiting an Episcopal Sunday-school, I saw in
one of the primary classes a little girl whose parents, as I was aware,
were members of the Baptist Church.
"Is she a guest?" I asked her teacher.
"Oh, no," she replied; "she is a regular member of the Sunday-school;
she comes every Sunday. She was christened at Easter; I am her
godmother."
"But don't her father and mother belong to the Baptist Church?" I
questioned.
"Yes," said the child's Sunday-school teacher. "But she came to church
one Sunday with some new playmates of hers, whose parents are
Episcopalians, to see a baby christened. Then her little friends told
her how they had all been christened, as babies; and when she found that
she hadn't been, she wanted to be. So her father and mother let her, and
she comes to Sunday-school here."
"Where does she go to church?" I found myself inquiring.
"To the Baptist Church, with her father and mother," was the reply. "She
asked them to let her come to Sunday-school here; but it never occurred
to her to think of going to church excepting with them."
Somewhat later I chanced to meet the child's mother. It was not long
before she spoke to me concerning her little girl's membership in the
Episcopal Sunday-school. "What were her father and I to do?" the mother
said. "We didn't feel justified in standing in her way. She wanted to be
christened; it seemed to mean something real to her--" she broke off.
"What _were_ we to do?" she repeated. "It would be a dreadful thing to
check a child's aspiration toward God! Of course she is only a little
girl, and she wanted to be like the others. Her father and I thought of
that, naturally. But--" Again she stopped. "One can never tell," she
went on, "what is in the mind of a child, nor what may be happening to
its spirit. Samuel was a very little child when God spoke to him," she
concluded, simply.
Quite as far as that mother, has another mother of my acquaintance let
her little girl go along the way of religious freedom. One day I went
with her and the child to an Italian jewelry shop. Among the things
there was a rosary of coral and silver. The little girl, attracted by
its glitter and color, seized it and slipped it over her head. "Look,
mother," she said, "see this lovely necklace!"
Her mother gently took it from her. "It isn't a necklace," she
explained; "it is called a rosary. You mustn't play with it; because it
is something some people use to say their prayers with."
The child's mother is of Scotch birth and New England upbringing. The
little girl has been accustomed to a form of religion and to an attitude
toward the things of religion that are beautiful, but austerely
beautiful. She is an imaginative child; and she caught eagerly at the
poetical element thus, for the first time, associated with prayer. "Tell
me how!" she begged.
When next I was in the little girl's bedroom, I saw the coral and silver
rosary hanging on one of the head-posts of her bed. "Yes, my dear," her
mother explained to me, "I got the rosary for her. She wanted it--'to
say my prayers with,' she said; so I got it. After all, the important
thing is that she says her prayers."
Among my treasures I have a rosary, brought to me from the Holy Land. I
have had it for a long time, and it has hung on the frame of a
photograph of Bellini's lovely Madonna. This little girl has always
liked that picture, and she has often spoken to me about it. But she had
never mentioned the rosary, which not only is made of dark wood, but is
darker still with its centuries of age. One day after the rosary of pink
coral and bright silver had been given her she came to see me. Passing
through the room where the Madonna is, she stopped to look at it. At
once she exclaimed, "_You_ have a rosary!"
"Yes," I said; "it came from the Holy Land." I took it down, and put it
into her hands. "It has been in Bethlehem," I went on, "and in
Jerusalem. It is very old; it belonged to a saint--like St. Francis, who
was such friends with the birds, you remember."
"I suppose the saint used it to say his prayers with?" the little girl
observed. Then, the question evidently occurring to her for the first
time, she asked, eagerly, "What prayers did he say, do you think?"
When I had in some part replied, I said, this question indeed occurring
to me for the first time, "What prayers do you say?"
"Oh," she replied, instantly, "I say, 'Our Father,' and 'Now I lay me,'
and 'God bless' all the different ones at home, and in other places,
that I know. I say all that; and it takes all the beads. So I say, 'The
Lord is my Shepherd' last, for the cross." She was silent for a moment,
but I said nothing, and she went on. "I know 'In my Father's house are
many mansions,' and 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels.'
I might say them sometimes instead, mightn't I?"
I told this to one of my friends who is a devout Roman Catholic. "It
shows," she said, "what the rosary can do for religion!"
But it seemed to me that it showed rather what religion could do for the
rosary. Had the child's mother, Scotch by birth, New England by
breeding, not been a truly religious woman she would not have bade her
little girl handle with reverence the emblem of a faith so unlike her
own; she would not have said, "Don't play with it." As for the small
girl, had she never learned to "say prayers," she would not have desired
the rosary to say them "with." And it was not the silver cross hanging
on her rosary that influenced her to "say last," for it, the best psalm
and "spiritual song" she knew; it was the understanding she had been
given by careful teaching of the meaning of that symbol. Above all, had
the little girl, after being taught to pray, not been left free to pray
as her childish heart inclined, that rosary would scarcely have found a
place on the head-post of her small bed.
It may be for the very reason that the children are not compelled to
think and to feel in the things of religion as their parents do that
fathers and mothers in America so frankly tell their boys and girls
exactly what they do think and just how they do feel. The children may
not ever understand the religious experiences through which their
parents are passing, but they often know what those experiences are.
Moreover, they sometimes partake of them.
Among my child friends there is a little girl, an only child, whose
father died not a great while ago. The little girl had always had a
share in the joys of her parents. It surprised no one who knew the
family that the mother in her grief turned to the child for comfort; and
that together they bore their great bereavement. Indeed, so completely
did this occur that the little girl for a time hardly saw any one
excepting her mother and her governess. After a suitable interval, an
old friend of the family approached the mother on the subject. "Your
little girl is only eight years old," she said, gently. "Oughtn't she
perhaps to go to see her playmates, and have them come to see her,
again, now?"
The mother saw the wisdom of the suggestion. The child continued to
spend much of her time with her mother, but she gradually resumed her
former childish occupations. She had always been a gregarious little
girl; once more her nursery was a merry, even an hilarious, place.
One Saturday a short time ago she was among the six small guests invited
to the birthday luncheon of another little girl friend of mine. Along
with several other grown-ups I had been invited to come and lend a hand
at this festivity. I arrived just as the children were going into the
dining-room, where the table set forth for their especial use, and
bright with the light of the seven candles on the cake, safely placed in
the centre, awaited them. They climbed into their chairs, and then all
seven of them paused. "Mother," said the little girl of the house, "who
shall say grace?"
"_I_ can!"
"Let _me_!"
"I _always_ do at home!"
These and other exclamations were made before the mother could reply.
When she was able to get a hearing, she suggested, "I think each one of
you might, since you all can and would like to."
"You say it first," said one of the children to her little hostess,
"because it is your birthday."