of the idea, and imagines a colossal magician, of
anthropomorphic (if not paidomorphic) nature, whose operations are
curious, though they altogether fail to arouse any mysterious reverence
or awe for the agent. Even this is not very satisfactory, and Stanley
Hall, in the spirit of Froebel, considers that the best result is
attained when the child knows no God but his own mother.[165] But for the
most part the ideas of religion cannot be accepted or assimilated by
children at all; they were not made by children or for children, but
represent the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of men, and sometimes
even of very exceptional and abnormal men. "The child," it has been
said, "no doubt has the psychical elements out of which the religious
experience is evolved, just as the seed has the promise of the fruit
which will come in the fullness of time. But to say, therefore, that the
average child is religious, or capable of receiving the usual advanced
religious instruction, is equivalent to saying that the seed is the
fruit or capable of being converted into fruit before the fullness of
time."[166] The child who grows devout and becomes anxious about the state
of his soul is a morbid and unwholesome child; if he prefers praying for
the conversion of his play-fellows to joining them in their games he is
not so much an example of piety as a pathological case whose future must
be viewed with anxiety; and to preach religious duties to children is
exactly the same, it has been well said, as to exhort them to imagine
themselves married people and to inculcate on them the duties of that
relation. Fortunately the normal child is usually able to resist these
influences. It is the healthy child's impulse either to let them fall
with indifference or to apply to them the instrument of his unmerciful
logic.

Naturally, the adult, in self-defence, is compelled to react against
this indifferent or aggressive attitude of the child. He may be no match
for the child in logic, and even unspeakably shocked by his daring
inquiries, like an amiable old clergyman I knew when a Public School
teacher in Australia; he went to a school to give Bible lessons, and was
one day explaining how King David was a man after God's own heart, when
a small voice was heard making inquiries about Uriah's wife; the small
boy was hushed down by the shocked clergyman, and the cause of religion
was not furthered in that school. But the adult knows that he has on his
sid