To be near unto God - pagina 427

Hence a young

child learns prayer to Jesus

more

than direct prayer to the Most High God. He does not express in his little prayer anything original. He only repeats something, and when he first weaves something into his prayer himself, it is not worship, but the request for something that employs his childish attention. It is all, however, a speaking into an unknown Holy sphere that is above or around his little bed. It is all along the line of a steady but slow development, and prayer from his own impulse to a God who is to be personally addressed, and who, at least in a limited way, is personally known, is little seen, as a rule, before the tenth year. There are exceptions with children of five, six or seven years of age, especially when they die young. Ordinarily, however, the fuller unfolding of the flower-bud into an own, personal and conscious prayer, does not come much before Such is more apt to be the the twelfth year. case, when back of the tenth and twelfth year there was a period of three or more unfavorable years, in which the child was obliged to sit still during long devotions, and when motherly tenderness of teaching prayer involuntarily turned into a purely formal compulsion of keeping eyes closed and hands folded. What God himself performed in the child's soul during those early years the holy angels know, but we do not. Only in the end the result quickly

becomes evident to

us.

And

this begins to

show

about the twelfth year. At that age it becomes evident whether a spiritual sense is awakened in the heart, or whether indifference, if not aversion to holy things has risen. If a spiritual

itself

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