Studies of Childhood

Theological Ideas

We may now pass to another group of children’s ideas, a group already alluded to, those which have to do with the invisible world, with death and what follows this—God and heaven. Here we find an odd patchwork of thought, the patchwork-look being due to the heterogeneous sources of the child’s information, his own observations of the visible world on the one hand, and the ideas supplied him by what is called religious instruction on the other. The characteristic activity of the child-mind, so far as we can disengage it, is seen in the attempt to co-ordinate the disparate and seemingly contradictory ideas into something like a coherent system.

Like the beginning of life, its termination, death, is one of the recurring puzzles of childhood. This might be illustrated from almost any autobiographical reminiscences of childhood. Here indeed the mystery, as may be seen in C.’s case, is made the more impressive and recurrent to consciousness by the element of dread. A little girl of three and a half years asked her mother to put a great stone on her head, because she did not want to die. She was asked how a stone would prevent it, and answered with perfect childish logic: “Because I shall not grow tall if you put a great stone on my head; and people who grow tall get old and then die”.

Death seems to be thought of by the unsophisticated child as the body reduced to a motionless state, devoid of breath and unable any longer to feel or think. This is the idea suggested by the sight of dead animals, which but few children, however closely shielded, can escape.

The first way of envisaging death seems to be as a temporary state like sleep, which it so closely resembles. A little boy of two and a half years, on hearing from his mother of the death of a lady friend, at once asked: “Will Mrs. P. still be dead when we go back to London?”

The knowledge of burial gives a new and terrible turn to his idea of death. He now begins to speculate much about the grave. The instinctive tendency to carry over the idea of life and sentience to the buried body is illustrated in C.’s fear lest the earth should be put over his eyes. The following observation from the Worcester Collection illustrates the same tendency. “A few days ago H. (aged four years four months) came to me and said: ‘Did you know they’d taken Deacon W. to Grafton?’ I. ‘Yes.’ H. ‘Well, I s’pose it’s the best thing. His folks (meaning his children) are buried there, and they wouldn’t know he was dead if he was buried here.’” This reversion to savage notions of the dead in speaking of a Christian deacon has a certain grim humour. All thoughts of heaven were here forgotten in the absorbing interest in the fate of the body.

Do children when left to themselves work out a theory of another life, that of the soul away from the dead deserted body? It is of course difficult to say, all children receiving some instruction at least of a religious character respecting the future. One of the clearest approaches to spontaneous child-thought that I have met with here is supplied by the account of the Boston children. “Many children (writes Professor Stanley Hall) locate all that is good and imperfectly known in the country, and nearly a dozen volunteered the statement that good people when they die go to the country—even here from Boston.” The reference to good people shows that the children are here trying to give concrete definiteness to something that has been said by another. These children had not, one suspects, received much systematic religious instruction. They had perhaps gathered in a casual way the information that good people when they die are to go to a nice place. Children pick up much from the talk of their better-instructed companions which they only half understand. In any case it is interesting to note that they placed their heaven in the country, the unknown beautiful region, where all sorts of luxuries grow. One is reminded of the idea of the happy hunting grounds to which the American Indian consigns his dead chief. It would have been interesting to examine these Boston children as to how they combined this belief in going to the country with the burial of the body in the city.

In the case of children who pick up something of the orthodox religious creed the idea of going to heaven has somehow to be grasped and put side by side with that of burial. How the child-mind behaves here it is hard to say. It is probable that there are many comfortable and stupid children who are not troubled by any appearance of contradiction. As we saw in the remark of the American child about the deacon, the child-mind may oscillate between the native idea that the man lives on in a sense underground, and the alien idea that he has passed into heaven. Yet undoubtedly the more thoughtful kind of child does try to bring the two ideas into agreement. The boy C. attempted to do this first of all by supposing that the people who went to heaven (the good) were not buried at all; and later by postponing the going to heaven, the true entrance being that of the body by way of the tomb. Other ways of getting a consistent view of things are also hit upon. Thus a little girl of five years thought that the head only passed to heaven. This was no doubt a way of understanding the communication from others that the ‘body’ is buried. This inference is borne out by another story of a boy of four and a half who asked how much of his legs would have to be cut off when he was buried. The legs were not the ‘body’. But the idea of the head passing to heaven meant more than this. It pretty certainly involved a localisation of the soul in the crown of the body, and it may possibly have been helped by pictures of cherub heads. Sometimes this process of child-thought reflects that of early human thought, as when a little boy of six said that God took the breath to heaven (cf. the ideas underlying spiritus and πνεῦμα).

In what precise manner children imagine the entrance into heaven to take place I do not feel certain. The legend of being borne by angels through the air probably assists here. As we have seen, children tend to think of people when they die as shrinking back to baby-dimensions so as to be carried in the angels’ arms.

The idea of people going to heaven is, as we know, pushed by the little brain to its logical consequences. Animals when they die pass to another place also. A boy three years and nine months asked whether birds, insects, and so forth go to heaven where people go when they die. Yet a materialistic tendency shows itself here, especially in connexion with the observation that animals are eaten. A little American boy in his fifth year was playing with a tadpole till it died. Immediately the other tadpoles ate it up, and the child burst out crying. His elder sister with the best of intentions tried to comfort him by saying: ‘Don’t cry, William, he’s gone to a better place’. To which rather ill-timed assurance he retorted sceptically: ‘Are his brothers and sisters’ stomachs a better place?’

Coming now to ideas of supernatural beings, it is to be noted that children do not wholly depend for their conceptions of these on religious or other instruction. The liveliness of their imagination and their impulses of dread and trust push them on to a spontaneous creation of invisible beings. In C.’s haunting belief in the wolf we see a sort of survival of the tendency of the savage to people the unseen world with monsters in the shape of demons. Another little boy of rather more than two years who had received no religious instruction acquired a similar haunting dread of ‘cocky,’ the name he had given to the cocks and hens when in the country. He localised this evil thing in the bathroom of the house, and he attributed pains in the stomach to the malign influence of ‘cocky’.55 Fear created the gods according to Lucretius, and in this invention of evil beings bent on injuring him the child of a modern civilised community may reproduce the process by which man’s thoughts were first troubled by the apprehension of invisible and supernatural agents.

On the other hand we find that the childish impulse to seek aid leads to a belief in a more benign sort of being. C.’s staunch belief in his fairies who could do the most wonderful things for him, and more especially his invention of the rain-god (the “Rainer”), are a clear illustration of the working of this impulse.

Even here, of course, while we can detect the play of a spontaneous impulse, we have to recognise the influence of instruction. C.’s tutelary deities, the fairies, were no doubt suggested by his fairy stories; even though, as in the myth of the Rainer, we see how his active little mind proceeded to work out the hints given him into quite original shapes. This original adaptation shows itself on a large scale where something like systematic religious instruction is supplied. An intelligent child of four or five will in the laboratory of his mind turn the ideas of God and the devil to strange account. It would be interesting, if we could only get it, to have a collection of all the hideous eerie forms by which the young imagination has endeavoured to interpret the notion of the devil. His renderings of the idea of God appear to show hardly less of picturesque diversity.56

It is to be noted at the outset that for the child’s intelligence the ideas introduced by religious instruction at once graft themselves on to those of fairy-lore. Mr. Spencer has somewhere ridiculed our university type of education with its juxtaposition of classical polytheism and Hebrew monotheism. One might, perhaps, with still greater reason, satirise the mixing up of fairy-story and Bible-story in the instruction of a child of five. Who can wonder that the little brain should throw together all these wondrous invisible forms, and picture God as an angry or amiable old giant, the angels as fairies and so forth? In George Sand’s child-romance of Corambé we see how far this blending of the ideas of the two domains of the invisible world can be carried.

For the rest, the child in his almost pathetic effort to catch the meaning of this religious instruction proceeds in his characteristic matter-of-fact way by reducing the abstruse symbols to terms of familiar every-day experience. He has to understand and he can only understand by assimilating to homely terrestrial facts. Hence the undisguised materialism of the child’s theology. According to Stanley Hall’s collection of observations, God was imaged by one child as a man preternaturally big—a big blue man; by another as a huge being with limbs spread all over the sky; by another as so immensely tall that he could stand with one foot on the ground, and touch the clouds,—strong like the giant, his prototype. He is commonly, in conformity with what is told, supposed to dwell in heaven, that is just the other side of the blue and white floor, the sky. He is so near the clouds that according to one small boy (our little friend the zoologist) these are a sort of pleasaunce, composed of hills and trees, which he has made to saunter in. But some children are inventive even in respect of God’s whereabouts. He has been regarded as inhabiting one of the stars. One of Mr. Kratz’s children localised him ‘up in the moon,’ an idea which probably owes something to observation of the man in the moon. We note, too, a tendency to approximate heaven and earth, possibly in order to account for God’s frequent presence and activity here. Thus one of Mr. Kratz’s children said that God was “up on the hill,” and one little girl of five was in the habit of climbing an old apple tree to visit him and tell him what she wanted.

Differences of feeling, as well as differences in the mode of instruction and in intelligence, seem to reflect themselves in these ideas of the divine dwelling-place. As we have seen, the childish intelligence is apt to envisage God as a sort of grand lord with a house or mansion. Two different tendencies show themselves in the thought about this dwelling-place. On the one hand the feeling of childish respect, which led a German girl of seven to address him in the polite form, ‘Ich bitte Sie,’ leads to a beautifying of his house. According to some of the Bostonian children he has birds, children, and Santa Claus living with him. Others think of him as having a big park or pleasaunce with trees, flowers, as well as birds. The children are perhaps our dead people who in time will be sent back to earth. Whether the birds, that I find come in again and again in the ideas of heaven, are dead birds, I am not sure. While however there is this half-poetical adorning of God’s palace, we see also a tendency to humanise it, to make it like our familiar houses. This is quaintly illustrated in the following prayer of a girl of seven whose grandfather had just died: “Please, God, grandpapa has gone to you. Please take great care of him. Please always mind and shut the door, because he can’t stand the draughts.” We see the same leaning to homely conceptions in the question of a little girl of four: ‘Isn’t there a Mrs. God?’

While thus relegated to the sublime regions of the sky God is supposed to be doing things, and of course doing them for us, sending down rain and so forth. What seems to impress children most, especially boys, in the traditional account of God is his power of making things. He is emphatically the artificer, the demiurgos, who not only has made the world, the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by human needs. According to the Boston children he fabricates all sorts of things from babies to money, and the angels work for him. The boy has a great admiration for the maker, and our small zoologist when three years and ten months old, on seeing a group of working men returning from their work, asked his astonished mother: “Mamma, is these gods?” “God!” retorted his mother, “why?” “Because,” he went on, “they makes houses, and churches, mamma, same as God makes moons, and people, and ’ickle dogs.” Another child watching a man repairing the telegraph wires that rested on a high pole at the top of a lofty house, asked if he was God. In this way the child is apt to think of God descending to earth in order to make things. Indeed, in their prayers, children are wont to summon God as a sort of good genius to do something difficult for them. A boy of four and a half years was one day in the kitchen with his mother, and would keep taking up the knives and using them. At last his mother said: “L., you will cut your fingers, and if you do they won’t grow again”. He thought for a minute and then said with a tone of deep conviction: “But God would make them grow. He made me, so he could mend my fingers, and if I were to cut the ends off I should say, ‘God, God, come to your work,’ and he would say, ‘All right’.”57

While this way of recognising God as the busy artificer is common, it is not universal. The child’s deity, like the man’s (as Feuerbach showed), is a projection of himself, and as there are lazy children, so there is a child’s God who is a luxurious person sitting in a lovely arm-chair all day, and at most putting out from heaven the moon and stars at night.

This admiration of God’s creative power is naturally accompanied by that of his skill. A little boy once said to his mother he would like to go to heaven to see Jesus. Asked why, he replied: “Oh! he’s a great conjurer”. The child had shortly before seen some human conjuring and used this experience in a thoroughly childish fashion by envisaging in a new light the New Testament miracle-worker.

The idea of God’s omniscience seems to come naturally to children. They are in the way of looking up to older folks as possessing boundless information. C.’s belief in the all-knowingness of the preacher, and his sister’s belief in the all-knowingness of the policeman, show how readily the child-mind falls in with the notion.

On the other hand I have heard of the dogma of God’s infinite knowledge provoking a sceptical attitude in the child-mind. This seems to be suggested in a rather rude remark of a boy of four, bored by the long Sunday discourse of his mother: “Mother, does God know when you are going to stop?” Our astute little zoologist, when five years and seven months old, in a talk with his mother, impiously sought to tone down the doctrine of omniscience in 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 about 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 which is 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.58 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 cannot see him, thought awhile, and then in an apologetic tone said: “I’m very sorry, dear, I can’t (b)elieve you”. What the sister, aged fifteen, thought of this is not recorded. An American boy of five, learning that God was in the room and could see even if the shutters were closed, said: “I know, it’s jugglery”.

When the idea is accepted odd devices 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.

It might easily be supposed that the child’s readiness to pray to God is inconsistent with what has just been said. Yet I think there is no real inconsistency. Children’s idea of prayer is, probably, that of sending a message to some one at a distance. The epistolary manner noticeable in many prayers seems to illustrate this.59 The mysterious whispering is, I suspect, supposed in some inscrutable fashion known only to the child to transmit itself to the divine ear.

Of the child’s belief in God’s goodness it is needless to say much. For these little worshippers he is emphatically the friend in need who can help them out of their difficulties in a hundred ways. Our small zoologist thanked God for making “the sea, the holes with crabs in them, and the trees, the fields, and the flowers,” and regretted that he did not follow up the making of the animals we eat by doing the cooking also. As their prayers show he is ever ready to make nice presents, from a fine day to a toy-gun, and will do them any kindness if only they ask prettily. Happy the reign of this untroubled optimism. For many children, alas, it is all too short, the colour of their life making them lose faith in all kindness, and think of God as cross and even as cruel.

One of the real difficulties of theology for the child’s intelligence is the doctrine of God’s eternity. Puzzled at first with the fact of his own beginning, he comes soon to be troubled with the idea of God’s having had no beginning. C. showed a common trend of childish thought in asking what God was like in his younger days. The question, “Who made God?” seems to be one to which all inquiring young minds are led at a certain stage of child-thought. The metaphysical impulse of the child to follow back the chain of events ad infinitum finds the ever-existent unchanging God very much in the way. He wants to get behind this “always was” of God’s existence, just as at an earlier stage of his development he wanted to get behind the barrier of the blue hills. This is quaintly illustrated in the reasoning of a child observed by M. Egger. Having learnt from his mother that before the world there was only God the Creator, he asked: “And before God?” The mother having replied, “Nothing,” he at once interpreted her answer by saying: “No; there must have been the place (i.e., the empty space) where God is”. So determined is the little mind to get back to the ‘before,’ and to find something, if only a prepared place.

Other mysteries of which the child comes to hear find their characteristic solution in the busy little brain. A friend tells me that when a child he was much puzzled by the doctrine of the Trinity. He happened to be an only child, and so he was led to put a meaning into it by assimilating it to the family group, in which the Holy Ghost became the mother.

I have tried to show that children seek to bring meaning, and a consistent meaning, into the jumble of communications about the unseen world to which they are apt to be treated. I agree with Miss Shinn that children about three and four are not disposed to theologise, and are for the most part simply confused by the accounts of God which they receive. Many of the less bright of these small minds may remain untroubled by the incongruities lurking in the mixture of ideas, half mythological or poetical, half theological, which is thus introduced. Such children are no worse than many adults, who have a wonderful power of entertaining contradictory ideas by keeping them safely apart in separate chambers of their brain. The intelligent thoughtful child on the other hand tries at least to reconcile and to combine in an intelligible whole. His mind has not, like that of so many adults, become habituated to the water-tight compartment arrangement, in which there is no possibility of a leakage of ideas from one group into another. Hence his puzzlings, his questionings, his brave attempts to reduce the chaos to order. I think it is about time to ask whether parents are doing wisely in thus adding to the perplexing problems of early days.

Notes

45. Compare R. L. Stevenson’s lines to the wind:
“I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all”.
          A Child’s Garden of Verse, xxv.

46. See P. Lombroso, op. cit., p. 26 ff.

47. See the article on “The Contents of Children’s Minds” already referred to.

48. The Invisible Playmate, pp. 27, 28.

49. That this is not the complete explanation is suggested by a story told by Perez. His nephew, over four years, on meeting a little old man said to his uncle: “When I shall be a little old man, will you be young?” (L’Enfant de trois à sept ans, p. 219).

50. Perhaps, too, our way of playfully calling children little old men and women favours the supposition that they are old people turned young again.

51. Egger quotes a remark of a little girl: “I shall carry Emile (her older brother) when he gets little”. This may, as Egger suggests, have been merely a confusion of the conditional and the future. But the idea about old people’s shrinking cannot be dismissed in this summary way (see Perez, First Three Years of Childhood, p. 224).

52. For the facts see Preyer, op. cit., cap. xxii.; Tracy, The Psychology of Childhood, p. 47.

53. See the very full account of the mirror experiment in Preyer’s book, p. 459 seq.

54. A child quoted by P. Lombroso thought of a year as a round thing having the different festivals on it, and bringing these round in due order by its rotation (op. cit., p. 49).

55. See Mind, vol. xi., p. 149.

56. According to Professor Earl Barnes, the Californian children seem to occupy themselves but little with the devil and hell. See his interesting paper, “Theological Life of a Californian Child,” Pedagogical Seminary, ii., 3, p. 442 seq.

57. To judge from a story for the truth of which I will not vouch children will turn the devil to the same useful account. A little girl was observed to write a letter and to bury it in the ground. The contents ran something like this: “Dear Devil, please come and take aunt—soon, I cannot stand her much longer”. The burying is significant of the devil’s dwelling-place.

58. Overland Monthly, Jan., 1894, p. 12.

59. Cf. the story of writing a letter to the devil given above.