talk with his mother, impiously sought to tone down the doctrine of omniscience this way: "I know a ickle more than Kitty, and you know a ickle more than me; and God knows a ickle more than you, I s'pose; then he can't know so very much after all."
Another of the divine attributes does undoubtedly shock the childish intelligence—I mean God's omnipresence. It seems indeed amazing that the so-called instructor of the child should talk to him almost in the same breath about God's inhabiting heaven and his being everywhere present. Here, I think, we see most plainly the superiority of the child's mind to the adult's, in that it does not let contradictory ideas lie peacefully side by side, but makes them face one another. To the child, as we have seen, God lives in the sky, though he is quite capable of coming down to earth when he wishes, or when he is politely asked to do so. Hence he rejects the idea of a diffused ubiquitous existence. The idea apt to be introduced early as a moral instrument, that God can always see the child, is especially resented by that small, sensitive, proud creature, to whom the ever-following eyes of the portrait on the wall seem a persecution. Miss Shinn, a careful American observer of children, has written strongly, yet not too strongly, on the repugnance of the child-mind to this idea of an ever-spying eye.[1] My observations fully confirm her conclusions here. Miss Shinn speaks of a little girl who, on learning that she was under this constant surveillance, declared that she "would not be so tagged." A little English boy of three, on being informed by his older sister that God can see and watch us, while we can not see him, thought awhile, and then in an apologetic tone remarked, "I'm very sorry, dear, I can't (b) elieve you." What the sister aged fifteen thought of this is not recorded.
When the idea is accepted odd ideas are excogitated for the purpose of making it intelligible. Thus one child thought of God as a very small person who could easily pass through the keyhole. The idea of God's huge framework illustrated above is probably the result of an attempt to figure the conception of omnipresence. Curious conclusions, too, are sometimes drawn from the supposition. Thus a little girl, of three years and nine months, one day said to her mother in the abrupt childish manner: "Mr. C" (a gentleman she had known who had just died) "is in this room." Her mother, naturally a good deal startled, answered, "Oh, no!" Whereupon the child resumed: "Yes, he is. You told me he is with God, and you told me God was everywhere; so, as Mr. C is with God, he must be in this room." With such trenchant logic does the child's intelligence cut through the tangle of incongruous ideas which we try to pass off as methodical instruction.
- ↑ Overland Monthly, January, 1894, p. 12.
