To be near unto God - pagina 597

He is not conscious of it, and therefore can not explain it. But it is evident even from his fear in the dark, or at strange sights and sounds. This fear shows that the child knows and perceives the existence of another world from that which he sees with his eyes. Hence his faith in the reality of the phantoms that create his fear. This sense of the existence of a mysterious world, and the perception that this mysterious world can unveil itself, immediately governs the mind of the child. His delight in fables and fairy tales is directly connected with this, and imparts to the soul of the child that intensity and depth which addresses you so alluringly from his eye. And by this same trait the child instinctively opens his heart to religion. It is an unseen working that goes out from the unseen world upon the heart of the child. It is God himself who plaj's the tender harp in the child heart. This natural religiousness of the child is more closely related with the life of the blessed than the religion of us who are full grown. With us a whole world of thought, of reasoning and consequent doubt enters in between, which is only lifted out again at our death. Hence the word of Jesus, that "to become as a little child" is regeneration of our person which alone admits us into the kingdom of heaven. Nothing therefore is more cruel and painful than to see a child abandoned to leading and training which has no understanding of this, and which treats the child as a small adult. This kills and destroys the childtype in the childheart. Cruel and painful is the artificiality which teaches the child to pray, but with a voice without tenderness, as a something that must be done, without 593

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