the further belief that their instrumentality was involved in the creation of man, an idea thus expressed in a Gnostic apocryphon, the Codex Nasaræus, Arise, O Adam, shake off thy foul body, house of clay, which the seven star-angels made for thee' (p. 141). 6 Further parallels to the Heavenly Council of the Hebrews and the collaborating angels might be adduced from the Ethnic religions if space allowed. We might refer to the associate deities in a mythological text who assist the Egyptian sun-god Tmu in creating the body of man; 53 the seven stellar spirits Taasu, who aid Thoth in his calculations as to the universe.54 'None other in the assembly of the gods resembleth him' [Ra, the sun-god] says an Egyptian hymn.55 The Homeric Boule, or court, of Zeus, meeting on Olympos, and the concilium deorum which Jupiter convened in the palace of the skies at critical junctures,56 will occur to everyone. In the Teutonic Völuspa similarly the most high gods take counsel together' when they arrange the movements of the heavenly bodies (De la Saussaye, Teut. Rel., 343). A. SMYTHE PALMER. 52 See Malan, Book of Adam and Eve, p. 226. The influence of the stars was due to the divinities or angels (Elohim), who resided in them. The Heavens appeared in seven circles and gods in their stellar forms, and the constellations were severally enumerated with the gods in them.'-Hermes Trismegistus, Poemandres, iii. (27, ed. Chambers). According to Maimonides, the universe was developed by the influence of the spheres, which are intellects (Guide to Perplexed, ed. Friedländer, i. lxvii.). 53 Proc. Soc. Bib. Arch. xxiii. 174. 54 Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch. viii. 210. 55 Brugsch, Oase el Khargeh, 53. 56 Ovid, Met. i. 167-76. It is noticeable that Plato sets forth clearly the essential difference between the One, eternal, true God and the subordinate deities, intermediate between Himself and men, who are His assistants in the work of creation (Timæus, 28, 34, etc.; Akerman, The Christian Element in Plato, 48). With the heavenly archetypes of Plato, of which earthly things are copies (Gompertz, Greek Thinkers, iii. 1), an idea found also among uncivilised races (Tylor, Prim. Culture, ii. 243), we may compare the Babylonian conception that a Divine image is the counterpart of something heavenly: In heaven he is made, on earth he is made, This symbol among the hosts of heaven and earth is made. -C. J. Ball, Proc. Soc. Bib. Arch. xiv. 160. What time the World's great Workmaister did cast He fashiond them as comely as He could. -Spenser, Hymn in Honour of Beautie. At his birth the heavenly council paused -Fielding, Works (1841), 874 RELIGION AND THE CHILD It is a fact as strange as it is unfortunate that the much-debated question of the religious education of children is usually considered almost exclusively from the points of view of the sectarian and the secularist. In a discussion of this question we are almost certain to be invited to take part in an unedifying wrangle between Church and Chapel, or between religion and secularism. That is the strange part of it, that it should seem impossible to get away from this sectarian dispute as to the abstract claims of varying religious bodies. The unfortunate part of it is that in this quarrel the interests of the child, which ought to be of the very first importance in the question, and even the interests of religion-which may or may not be of importance, according to the point of view-are alike disregarded. If we really desire to reach a sound conclusion on a matter which is unquestionably of great moment, both for the child and for the community of which he will one day become a citizen, we must resolutely put into the background, as of secondary importance, the cries of contending sects, religious or irreligious. The first place here belongs to the psychologist who is building up the already extensive edifice of knowledge concerning the real nature of the child and the contents and growth of the youthful mind, and to the practical teacher who is in touch with that knowledge and can bring it to the test of actual experience. The mind of the child is at once logical and extravagant, matter of fact and poetic or rather myth-making. This combination of apparent opposites, though it often seems to be almost incomprehensible to the adult, is the inevitable outcome of the fact that the child's dawning intelligence is working, as it were, in a vacuum. In other words, the child has not acquired the two endowments which chiefly give character to the whole body of the adult's beliefs and feelings. He is without the pubertal expansion which fills out the mind with new personal and altruistic impulses, and transforms it with emotion that is often dazzling and sometimes distorting; and he has not yet absorbed, or even gained the power of absorbing, all those beliefs, opinions and mental attitudes which the race has slowly acquired and transmitted as the outcome of its experiences. The intellectual processes of children, the attitude and contents of the child's mind, have been explored during recent years with a care and detail that have never been brought to that study before. This is not a matter of which the adult can be said to possess any instinctive or matter-of-course knowledge. Adults usually have a strange aptitude to forget entirely the facts of their lives as children, and children are usually, like peoples of primitive race, very cautious in the deliberate communication of their mental operations, their emotions, and their ideas. Thus we forget that the child is equally without the internally acquired complex emotional nature which has its kernel in the sexual impulse, and without the externally acquired mental equipment which may be summed up in the word tradition. But he possesses the vivid activities founded on the exercise of his senses and appetites, and he is able to reason with a relentless severity from which the traditionalised and complexly emotional adult shrinks back with horror. The child creates the world for himself, and he creates it in his own image and the images of the persons he is familiar with. Nothing is sacred to him, and he pushes to the most daring extremities-as it seems to the adult— the arguments derived from his own personal experiences. He is unable to see any distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and he is justified in this conviction because, as a matter of fact, he himself lives in what for most adults would be a supernatural atmosphere; most children see visions with closed, and sometimes with open eyes, they are not unfrequently subject to colour-hearing and other synæsthetic sensations, and they occasionally hear hallucinatory voices; it is possible, indeed, that this is the case with nearly all children in some slight degree, although the faculty dies out early, and is easily forgotten because its extraordinary character was never recognised. Of forty-eight children, says Stanley Hall, twenty believed the sun, moon, and stars to live, sixteen thought flowers could feel, and fifteen that dolls would feel pain if burnt. The sky was found the chief field in which the children exercised their philosophic minds. About three quarters of them thought the world a plain with the sky like a bowl turned over it, sometimes believing that it was of such thin texture that one could easily break through, though so large that much floor-sweeping was necessary in Heaven. The sun may enter the ground when it sets, but half the children thought that at night it rolls or flies away, or is blown, or walks, or God pulls it higher up out of sight, taking it up into Heaven, according to some, putting it to bed, and even taking off its clothes and putting them on again in the morning, or again, it is believed to lie under the trees at night and the angels mind it. God, of whom children always hear so much, plays a very large part in these conceptions, and is made directly responsible for all cosmic phenomena. Thus thunder to these American VOL. LXI-No. 363 3 D 9 2769 2 1 children was God groaning or kicking, or rolling barrels about, or turning a big handle, or grinding snow, or breaking something, or rattling a big hammer, while the lightning is due to God his putting finger out, or turning the gas on quick, or striking matches, or setting paper on fire. According to Boston children, God is a big, perhaps a blue man, to be seen in the sky, on the clouds, in church, or even in the streets. They declare that God comes to see them sometimes, and they have seen him enter the gate."" the gate. He makes lamps, babies, makes dogs, trees, money, &c., and the angels work for him. He looks like a priest, or a teacher, or papa, and the children like to look at him; a few would themselves like to be God. His house in the sky may be made of stone or brick, birds, children, and Santa Claus live "with God. obunot 2sitivitɑ Biziv sat aversezon of tud noitiban Birds and beasts, their food and their furniture, as Burnham points out, all talk to children; when the dew is on the grass the grass is crying," the stars are candles or lamps, perhaps cinders from God's stove, butterflies are flying pansies, icicles are Christmas candy. Childr have imaginary play-brothers and sisters and friends, with whom they talk. Sometimes God talks with them." Even the prosiest things are vivified; the tracks of dirty feet on the floor are flowers; a ereaking chair talks; the shoemaker's nails are children whom he is driving to school. $990 Hoitor7409 aidt ni boititanj ai od bns [810780 [Miss Miriam Levy once investigated the opinions of 560 children, boys and girls, between the ages of four and fourteen, as to how the man in the moon got there. Only five were unable to offer a serious Fly Bugiere uitat explanation; forty-eight thought there was no man there at all; fifty offered a scientific explanation of the phenomenon, but all the rest, the great majority, presented imaginative solutions which could be grouped into seventeen different classes od 19ogol Viens at Dis 1 Juod Such facts as these which can easily be multiplied and are indeed familiar to all though their significance is not usually realised indicate 97th of Fraiz, bsphere. He is the special tendencies of the child in the religious sphere. unable to follow the distinctions which the adult is pleased to make artram in big between real spir * spiritual," and ‘imaginary beings. To him such distinctions do not exist. He may, if he so pleases, adopt the names, or such characteristics as he chooses, of the beings he is told about, but he puts them into his own world, on a footing of more or less equality, and he decides himself what their fate is to be. The adult's supreme beings by no means always survive in the struggle for existence Hundw bouLOTO which takes place in the child's imaginative world. It was found among many thousand children entering the city schools of Berlin that Red Riding Hood was better known than God, and Cinderella than Christ. That is the result of the the burden hild's freedom from Ji bang als 91 bas of tradition. 75ws nothing more to boi ( Yet at the same time the opposite though allied peculiarity of childhood the absence of the emotional developments of puberty, developmellette او which deepen and often cloud the mind a few years later is also making itself felt. Extravagant as his beliefs may appear, the child is an uncompromising rationalist and realist. His supposed imaginativeness is indeed merely the result of his logical insistence that all the new phenomena presented to him shall be thought of in terms of himself and his own environment. His wildest notions are based on précise, concrete, and personal facts of his own experience. That is why he is so keen a questioner of grown-up people's ideas, and a critic who may sometimes be as dangerous and destructive as Bishop Colenso's Zulus. Most children, before the age of thirteen, as Earl Barnes states, are inquirers, if not sceptics. thon que silt yd und If we clearly realise these characteristics of the childish mind, we cannot fail to understand the impression made on it by religious instruction. The statements and stories that are repeated to him are easily accepted by the child in so far, and in so far only, as they answer to his needs, and when accepted they are assimilated, which means that they are compelled to obey the laws of his own mental world. In so far as the statements and stories presented to him are not acceptable or cannot be assimilated, it happens either that they pass by him unnoticed, or else that he subjects them to a cold and matter-of-fact logic which exerts a dissolving influence upon themis i det loods h lo Now a few of the ideas of religion are assimilable by the child, and notably the idea of a God as the direct agent in cosmic phenomena; some of the childish notions I have quoted illustrate the facility with which the child adopts this idea. He adopts, that is, what may be called the hard precise skeleton of the idea, and imagines a colossal magician, of anthropomorphic (if not paidomorphic) nature, whose operations are curious, though they usually fail to aroused dany mysterious reverence or awe for the agent. But for the most part the ideas of religion cannot be accepted or assimilated by children'; they were not made by children or for children, but represent the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of men, and sometimes even of very exceptional and abnormal men. The child who grows devout and becomes anxious about the state of his soul is a morbid and unwholesome child, if he prefers praying for the conversion of his play-fellows to joining them in their games, he is not so much an 3 example of piety as a pathological case whose future must be viewed with anxiety; and to preach religious duties to children is exactly the same, it has been well said, as to exhort them to imagine themselves married people, and to inculcate on them the duties of that relation. Fortunately the normal child is usually able to resist these influences. It is the healthy child's impulse either to let them fall with indifference or to apply to them the instrument of his unmerciful logic. de zolqioning oft i boborg vin69 ooted toimus qolt ; sonenpoɛ Naturally, the adult, in self-defence, is compelled to react against this indifferent or aggressive attitude of the child. He may be no 1 + |