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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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