h distinctions do not exist. He may, if he so pleases, adopt the
names or such characteristics as he chooses, of the beings he is told
about, but he puts them into his own world, on a footing of more or less
equality, and he decides himself what their fate is to be. The adult's
supreme beings by no means always survive in the struggle for existence
which takes place in the child's imaginative world. It was found among
many thousand children entering the city schools of Berlin that Red
Riding Hood was better known than God, and Cinderella than Christ. That
is the result of the child's freedom from the burden of tradition.

Yet at the same time the opposite though allied peculiarity of
childhood--the absence of the emotional developments of puberty which
deepen and often cloud the mind a few years later--is also making itself
felt. Extravagant as his beliefs may appear, the child is an
uncompromising rationalist and realist. His supposed imaginativeness is
indeed merely the result of his logical insistence that all the new
phenomena presented to him shall be thought of in terms of himself and
his own environment. His wildest notions are based on precise, concrete,
and personal facts of his own experience. That is why he is so keen a
questioner of grown-up people's ideas, and a critic who may sometimes be
as dangerous and destructive as Bishop Colenso's Zulus. Most children
before the age of thirteen, as Earl Barnes states, are inquirers, if not
sceptics.

If we clearly realize these characteristics of the childish mind, we
cannot fail to understand the impression made on it by religious
instruction. The statements and stories that are repeated to him are
easily accepted by the child in so far, and in so far only, as they
answer to his needs; and when accepted they are assimilated, which means
that they are compelled to obey the laws of his own mental world. In so
far as the statements and stories presented to him are not acceptable or
cannot be assimilated, it happens either that they pass by him
unnoticed, or else that he subjects them to a cold and matter-of-fact
logic which exerts a dissolving influence upon them.

Now a few of the ideas of religion are assimilable by the child, and
notably the idea of a God as the direct agent in cosmic phenomena; some
of the childish notions I have quoted illustrate the facility with which
the child adopts this idea. He adopts, that is, what may be called the
hard precise skeleton