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302 The Century of the Child
amples. There is an anecdote of a child, who,
on being consoled with the statement that
God was in the dark near her, asked her mother
to put God out and light the lamp. Another
child, seeing the pictures of the Christian
martyrs in the arena, cried out sympathetically,
"Look at that poor tiger; he hasn’t got a
Christian." These are a few out of a mass of
examples, typical of the explanation given by
children to the religious ideas they receive,
notions forcing them into a world of ideas
which they either accept in a material sense, or
by which they are absolutely nonplussed.
The childish circle of ideas is revealed by
anecdotes of this kind, or by the comment of a
small girl who asked when she heard that she
had been born about eleven o’clock at night,
"How could I have remained out so late?"
These examples show that such conceptions
as original sin, the fall of man, regeneration
and salvation, are first necessarily meaningless
words, and afterwards terribly difficult words.
In my whole life fear of hell never absorbed
my attention for five minutes, but I know child-
ren and grown people who are martyrs to this
terror. I know children too who, when belief
in hell was presented to them in school as ab-
solutely necessary, bewailed that their mother
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