Differences of feeling, as well as differences in the mode of
instruction and in intelligence, seem to reflect themselves in these
ideas of the divine dwelling-place. As we have seen, the childish
intelligence is apt to envisage God as a sort of grand lord with a house
or mansion. Two different tendencies show themselves in the thought
about this dwelling-place. On the one hand the feeling of childish
respect, which led a German girl of seven to address him in the polite
form, ‘Ich bitte Sie,’ leads to a beautifying of his house. According to
some of the Bostonian children he has birds, children, and Santa Claus
living with him. Others think of him as having a big park or pleasaunce
with trees, flowers, as well as birds. The children are perhaps our dead
people who in time will be sent back to earth. Whether the birds, that I
find come in again and again in the ideas of heaven, are dead birds, I
am not sure. While however there is this half-poetical adorning of God’s
palace, we see also a tendency to humanise it, to make it like our
familiar houses. This is quaintly illustrated in the following prayer of
a girl of seven whose grandfather had just died: “Please, God, grandpapa
has gone to you. Please take great care of him. Please always mind and
shut the door, because he can’t stand the draughts.” We see the same
leaning to homely conceptions in the question of a little girl of four:
‘Isn’t there a Mrs. God?’
While thus relegated to the sublime regions of the sky God is supposed
to be doing things, and of course doing them for us, sending down rain
and so forth. What seems to impress children most, especially boys, in
the traditional account of God is his power of making things. He is
emphatically the artificer, the demiurgos, who not only has made the
world, the stars, etc., but is still kept actively employed by human
needs. According to the Boston children he fabricates all sorts of
things from babies to money, and the angels work for him. The boy has a
great admiration for the maker, and our small zoologist when three years
and ten months old, on seeing a group of working men returning from
their work, asked his astonished mother: “Mamma, is these gods?” “God!”
retorted his mother, “why?” “Because,” he went on, “they makes houses,
and churches, mamma, same as God makes moons, and people, and ’ickle
dogs.” Another child watching a man repairing the telegraph wires that
rested on a high pole at the top of a lofty house, asked if he was God.
In this way the child is apt to think of God descending to earth in
order to make things. Indeed, in their prayers, children are wont to
summon God as a sort of good genius to do something difficult for them.
A boy of four and a half years was one day in the kitchen with his
mother, and would keep taking up the knives and using them. At last his
mother said: “L., you will cut your fingers, and if you do they won’t
grow again”. He thought for a minute and then said with a tone of deep
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