The Development of the Child (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI The Place Of Religion In The Development Of A Child There is so much in a child's life that rests on belief, and by necessity he must be so accustomed to taking things on faith, that he of all beings seems naturally prepared to accept the religious idea and be governed by it. Moreover, he has the great forces of custom and habit, of imitation, of the weight of authority, working upon him, to the end of inducing a participation in devotional forms and a varyingly blind loyalty to certain received articles of faith. Wisely enough Maudesley has remarked: " To say that the great majority of men reason in the true sense of the word is the greatest nonsense in the world; they get their beliefs as they do their instincts and their habits, as a part of their inherited constitution, of their education, and the routine of their lives." That this is true in a large measure should not be doubted, for the evidence of it, wherever we turn, is before our eyes. A child who is brought up in a Protestant familylooks upon the doctrine of Papal infallibility as unreasonable, while the offspring of Roman Catholic parents sees in it all necessary sanity of truth. Among the Persians, children are soothed or frightened by wondrous tales of jins and devs, which to those of occidental training seem no better than stories of fairies and gnomes. Even in the limits of a single, homogeneous people, one may find equally radical differences according to changes which lapse of time brings; among the ancient Jews before the Babylonian captivity the children grew up to believe that there were angels, but never did they have faith in the existence of devils. Even in Job, Satan was not so much of a malevolent spirit, as a fault-finding, a critical one. But after the captivity the belief in which ...