The Child and Religion; Eleven Essays (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1905. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... THE CHILD AND SIN The child furnishes the only actual type of innocence. With its personality incompletely formed, its experience narrowly circumscribed, and its intellect undeveloped, it is necessarily prevented from temptation to many of the forms of wrong-doing or wrong-thinking which so easily beset maturer age. The relative ignorance of evil, the consequent trustfulness and absence of suspicion, the receptiveness and docility, the simplicity and sincerity which belong to childhood in an especial degree, enable us to refer to the child as in some particulars the standard of perfection to which manhood must strive to attain. "Of such is the kingdom of heaven"; "Unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Of course, these words of Jesus Christ cannot be so interpreted as to imply that childhood is morally perfect, in any sense of the word "perfect." Some men, however, have been led to attribute to the child, or rather to the infant, a unique moral excellence. Rousseau, for example, regarded children as coming perfect from their Creator's hand. And we are familiar with Wordsworth's lines: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy On the other hand, the child nature is always characterised by what, in older persons, would be described as faults and vices. Young children are invariably very impatient of godly restraint and discipline; they exhibit a passionateness of temper, a wilfulness, a greed, an unconscious cruelty, and a capacity for unrestr...