The American Child Part 15

"Oh!" cried the little girl, in disappointment; "that takes the wonderfulness out of it!"

"Not at all," protested her young uncle. "And, supposing it did, can you not see that the world could not have been made in six of _our_ days?"

"Why," said the child, in surprise, "I should think it could have been!"

"For what reason?" her uncle asked, in equal amazement.

"Because G.o.d was doing it!" the child exclaimed.

Her uncle did not at once reply. When he did, it was to say, "You are right about _that_, my dear."

Sometimes it happens that a child finds in our careful explanation of the meaning of a religious belief or practice a different or a further significance than we have indicated. I once had an especially striking experience of this kind.

I was visiting a family in which there were several children, cared for by a nurse of the old-fas.h.i.+oned, old-world type. She was a woman well beyond middle age, and of a frank and simple piety. There was hardly a circ.u.mstance of daily life for which she was not ready with an accustomed ejaculatory prayer or thanksgiving. One day I chanced to speak to her of a mutual friend, long dead. "G.o.d rest her soul!" said the old nurse, in a low tone.

"Why did she say that?" the little four-year-old girl of the house asked me. "I never heard her say that before!"

"It is a prayer that some persons always say when speaking of any one who is dead; especially any one they knew and loved," I explained.

Later in the day, turning over a portfolio of photographs with the little girl, I took up a picture of a fine, faithful-eyed dog. "Whose dog is this?" I asked. "What a good one he is!"

"He was ours," replied the child, "and he was very good; we liked him.

But he is dead now--" She paused as if struck by a sudden remembrance.

Then, "G.o.d rest his soul!" she sighed, softly.

Most of the answers I read in response to the question, "Should churchgoing on the part of children be compulsory or voluntary?" did not end with the brief statement that it should be voluntary, and the reason why; a considerable number of them went on to say: "The children should of course be inspired and encouraged to go. They should be taught that it is a privilege. Their Sunday-school teachers and their minister, as well as their parents, can help to make them wish to go."

Certainly their Sunday-school teachers and ministers can, and do. The answers I have quoted took for granted the attendance of children at Sunday-school. Not one of them suggested that this was a matter admitting of free choice on the part of the children. "But it isn't,"

declared an experienced Sunday-school teacher who is a friend of mine when I said this to her. "Going to Sunday-school isn't wors.h.i.+p; it is learning whom to wors.h.i.+p and how. Naturally, children go, just as they go to week-day school, whether they like to or not; I must grant," she added by way of amendment, "that they usually do like to go!"

Our Sunday-schools have become more and more like our week-day schools.

The boys and girls are taught in them whom to wors.h.i.+p and how, but they are taught very much after the manner that, in the week-day schools, they are instructed concerning secular things. That custom, belonging to a time not so far in the past but that many of us remember it, of consigning the "infant cla.s.s" of the Sunday-school to any amiable young girl in the parish who could promise to be reasonably regular in meeting it does not obtain at the present day. Sunday-school teachers are trained, and trained with increasing care and thoroughness, for their task.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHILDREN GO TO CHURCH]

Readiness to teach is no longer a sufficient credential. The amiable young girl must now not only be willing to teach, she must also be willing to learn how to teach. In the earlier time practically any well- disposed young man of the congregation who would consent to take charge of a cla.s.s of boys was eagerly allotted that cla.s.s without further parley. This, too, is not now the case. The young man, before beginning to teach the boys, is obliged to prepare himself somewhat specifically for such work. In my own parish the boys' cla.s.ses of the Sunday-school are taught by young men who are students in the Theological School of which my parish church is the chapel. In an adjacent parish the "infant cla.s.s" is in charge of an accomplished kindergartner. Surely such persons are well qualified to help to inspire and to encourage the children to regard churchgoing as a privilege, and to make them wish to go!

And the minister! I am inclined to think that the minister helps more than any one else, except the father and mother, to give the children this inspiration, this encouragement. Children go to church now, when churchgoing is voluntary, quite as much as they went when it was compulsory. They learn very early to wish to go; they see with small difficulty that it is a privilege. Their Sunday-school teachers might help them, even their parents might help them, but, unless the minister helped them, would this be so?

There are so many ways in which the minister does his part in this matter of the child's relation to the church, and to those things for which the church stands. They are happily familiar to us through our child friends: the "children's service" at Christmas and at Easter; the "talks to children" on certain Sundays of the year. These are some of them. And there are other, more individual, more intimate ways.

The other day a little girl who is a friend of mine asked me to make out a list of books likely to be found in the "children's room" of the near- by public library that I thought she would enjoy reading. On the list I put "The Little Lame Prince," the charming story by Dinah Mulock. Having completed the list, I read it aloud to the little girl. When I reached Miss Mulock's book, she interrupted me.

"'The Little Lame Prince,' did you say? Is that in the library? I thought it was in the Bible."

"The Bible!" I exclaimed.

"Yes," the child said, in some surprise; "don't you remember? He was Jonathan's little boy--Jonathan, that was David's friend--David, that killed the giant, you know."

I at once investigated. The little girl was quite correct. "Who told you about him?" I inquired.

"Our minister," she replied. "He read it to me and some of the other children."

This, too, a bit later, I investigated. I found that the minister had not read the story as it is written in the Bible, but a version of it written by himself especially for this purpose and ent.i.tled "The Little Lame Prince."

At church, as elsewhere, the children of our nation are quick to observe, and to make their own, opportunities for doing as the grown-ups do. When occasion arises, they slip with cheerful and confiding ease into the places of their elders.

One Sunday, last summer, I chanced to attend a church in a little seaside village. When the moment arrived for taking up the collection, no one went forward to attend to that duty. I was told afterward that the man who always did it was most unprecedentedly absent. There were a number of other men in the rather large congregation, but none of them stirred as the clergyman stood waiting after having read several offertory sentences. I understood afterward that they "felt bashful,"

not being used to taking up the collection. The clergyman hesitated for a moment, and then read another offertory sentence. As he finished, a little boy not more than nine years old stepped out of a back pew, where he was sitting with his mother, and, going up to the clergyman, held out his hand for the plate. The clergyman gravely gave it to him, and the child, without the slightest sign of shyness, went about the church collecting the offerings of the congregation. This being done, he, with equal un-self-consciousness, gave the plate again to the clergyman and returned to his seat beside his mother.

"Did you tell him to do it?" I inquired of the mother, later.

"Oh, no," she answered; "he asked me if he might. He said he knew how, he saw it done every Sunday, and he was sure the minister would let him."

American children of the present day are surer than the children of any other nation have ever been that their fathers and their mothers and their ministers will allow them liberty to do in church, as well as with respect to going to church, such things as they know how to do, and eagerly wish to do. In our national love and reverence for childhood we willingly give the children the great gift that we give reluctantly, or not at all, to grown people--the liberty to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d as they choose.

CONCLUSION

We are a child-loving nation; and our love for the children is, for the most part, of the kind which Dr. Henry van d.y.k.e describes as "true love, the love that desires to bestow and to bless." The best things that we can obtain, we bestow upon the children; with the goodliest blessings within our power, we bless them. This we do for them. And they,--is there not something that they do for us? It seems to me that there is; and that it is something incalculably greater than anything we do, or could possibly do, for them. More than any other force in our national life, the children help us to work together toward a common end. A child can unite us into a mutually trustful, mutually cordial, mutually active group when no one else conceivably could.

A few years ago, I was witness to a most striking example of this. I went to a "ladies' day" meeting of a large and important men's club that has for its object the study and the improvement of munic.i.p.al conditions. The city of the club has a nouris.h.i.+ng liquor trade. The club not infrequently gives over its meetings to discussions of the "liquor problem";--discussions which, I have been told, had, as a rule, resolved themselves into mere argumentations as to license and no-license, resulting in nothing. By some accident this "ladies' day" meeting had for its chief speaker a man who is an ardent believer in and supporter of no-license. For an hour he spoke on this subject, and spoke exceedingly well. When he had finished, there ensued that random play of question and answer that usually follows the presiding officer's, "We are now open to discussion." The chief speaker had devoted the best efforts of his mature life to bringing about no-license in his home city; the subject was to him something more than a topic for a discussion that should lead to no practical work in the direction of solving the "liquor problem" in other cities. He tried to make that club meeting something more vital than an exchange of views on license and no-license. With the utmost earnestness, he attempted to arouse a living interest in the "problem," and, of course, to make converts to his own belief as to the most effective solution of it.

Finally, some one said, "Isn't _any_ liquor sold in your city? Your law keeps it from being sold publicly, but privately,--how about that?"

"I cannot say," the chief speaker replied. "The law may occasionally be broken,--I suppose it is. But," he added, "I can tell you this,--we have no drunkards on our streets. I have a boy,--he is ten years old, and he has never seen a drunken man in his life. How about the boys of the people of this city, of this audience?"

The persons in that audience looked at the chief speaker; they looked at each other. There followed such a serious, earnest, frank discussion of the "liquor problem" as had never before been held either in that club, or, indeed, in any a.s.sembly in that city. Since that day, that club has not only held debates on the "liquor problem" of its city; it has tried to bring about no-license. The chief speaker of that meeting was far from being the first person who had addressed the organization on that subject; neither was he the first to mention its relation to childhood and youth; but he was the very first to bring his own child, and to bring the children of each and every member of the a.s.sociation who had a child into his argument. With the help of the children, he prevailed.

One of my friends who is a member of that club said to me recently, "It was the sincerity of the speaker of that 'ladies' day' meeting that won the audience. I really must protest against your thinking it was his chance reference to his boy!"

"But," I reminded him, "it was not until he made that 'chance reference'

to his boy that any one was in the least moved. How do you explain that?"

"Oh," said my friend, "we were not sure until then that he was in dead earnest--"

"And then you were?" I queried.

"Why, yes," my friend replied. "A man doesn't make use of his child to give weight to what he is advocating unless he really does believe it is just as good as he is arguing that it is."

"So," I persisted, "it _was_, after all, his 'chance reference' to his boy--"

"If you mean that nothing practical would have come of his speech, otherwise,--yes, it was!" my friend allowed himself to admit.

Another friend who happened to be present came into the conversation at this point. "Suppose he had had no child!" she suggested. "Any number of perfectly sincere persons, who really believe that what they are advocating is just as good as they argue it is, have no children," she went on whimsically; "what about them? Haven't they any chance of winning their audiences when they speak on no-license,--or what not?"

Those of us who are in the habit of attending "welfare" meetings of one kind or another, from the occasional "hearings" before various committees of the legislature, to the periodic gatherings of the National Education a.s.sociation, and the National Conference of Charities and Correction, know well that, when advocating solutions of social problems as grave as and even graver than the "liquor problem," the most potent plea employed by those speakers who are not fathers or mothers begins with the words, "You, who have children." My friend who had said that a man did not make use of his child to give weight to his arguments unless he had a genuine belief in that for which he was pleading might have gone further; he might have added that neither do men and women make such a use of other people's children excepting they be as completely sincere,--provided that those men and women love children.