The American Child Part 14

"Oh," she replied, instantly, "I say, 'Our Father,' and 'Now I lay me,'

and 'G.o.d bless' all the different ones at home, and in other places, that I know. I say all that; and it takes all the beads. So I say, 'The Lord is my Shepherd' last, for the cross." She was silent for a moment, but I said nothing, and she went on. "I know 'In my Father's house are many mansions,' and 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels.'

I might say them sometimes instead, mightn't I?"

I told this to one of my friends who is a devout Roman Catholic. "It shows," she said, "what the rosary can do for religion!"

But it seemed to me that it showed rather what religion could do for the rosary. Had the child's mother, Scotch by birth, New England by breeding, not been a truly religious woman she would not have bade her little girl handle with reverence the emblem of a faith so unlike her own; she would not have said, "Don't play with it." As for the small girl, had she never learned to "say prayers," she would not have desired the rosary to say them "with." And it was not the silver cross hanging on her rosary that influenced her to "say last," for it, the best psalm and "spiritual song" she knew; it was the understanding she had been given by careful teaching of the meaning of that symbol. Above all, had the little girl, after being taught to pray, not been left free to pray as her childish heart inclined, that rosary would scarcely have found a place on the head-post of her small bed.

It may be for the very reason that the children are not compelled to think and to feel in the things of religion as their parents do that fathers and mothers in America so frankly tell their boys and girls exactly what they do think and just how they do feel. The children may not ever understand the religious experiences through which their parents are pa.s.sing, but they often know what those experiences are.

Moreover, they sometimes partake of them.

Among my child friends there is a little girl, an only child, whose father died not a great while ago. The little girl had always had a share in the joys of her parents. It surprised no one who knew the family that the mother in her grief turned to the child for comfort; and that together they bore their great bereavement. Indeed, so completely did this occur that the little girl for a time hardly saw any one excepting her mother and her governess. After a suitable interval, an old friend of the family approached the mother on the subject. "Your little girl is only eight years old," she said, gently. "Oughtn't she perhaps to go to see her playmates, and have them come to see her, again, now?"

The mother saw the wisdom of the suggestion. The child continued to spend much of her time with her mother, but she gradually resumed her former childish occupations. She had always been a gregarious little girl; once more her nursery was a merry, even an hilarious, place.

One Sat.u.r.day a short time ago she was among the six small guests invited to the birthday luncheon of another little girl friend of mine. Along with several other grown-ups I had been invited to come and lend a hand at this festivity. I arrived just as the children were going into the dining-room, where the table set forth for their especial use, and bright with the light of the seven candles on the cake, safely placed in the centre, awaited them. They climbed into their chairs, and then all seven of them paused. "Mother," said the little girl of the house, "who shall say grace?"

"_I_ can!"

"Let _me_!"

"I _always_ do at home!"

These and other exclamations were made before the mother could reply.

When she was able to get a hearing, she suggested, "I think each one of you might, since you all can and would like to."

"You say it first," said one of the children to her little hostess, "because it is your birthday."

At a nod from her mother, the little girl said the Selkirk grace:--

"Some hae meat and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit."

Then another small girl said her grace, which was Herrick's:--

"Here a little child I stand, Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be, Here I lift them up to Thee, For a benison to fall On our meat and on us all Amen."

The next little girl said Stevenson's:--

"It is very nice to think The world is full of meat and drink, And little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place."

The succeeding little guests said the dear and familiar "blessing" of so many children:--

"For what we are about to receive, O Lord, make us truly thankful."

My little friend into whose life so grievous a sorrow had come was the last to say her grace. It was the poem of Miss Josephine Preston Peabody ent.i.tled "Before Meat:--

"Hunger of the world.

When we ask a grace Be remembered here with us, By the vacant place.

"Thirst with nought to drink, Sorrow more than mine, May G.o.d some day make you laugh, With water turned to wine!"

There was a silence when she finished, among the children as well as among the grown persons present. "I don't _quite_ understand what your grace means," the little girl of the house said at last to her small guest.

"It means that I still have my mamma, and she still has me," replied the child. "Some people haven't anybody. It means that; and it means we ask G.o.d to let them have Him. My mamma told me, when she taught it to me to say instead of the grace I used to say when we had my papa."

The little girl explained with the simple seriousness and sweetness so characteristic of the answers children make to questions asked them regarding things in any degree mystical. The other small girls listened as sweetly and as seriously. Then, with one accord, they returned to the gay delights of the occasion. They were a laughing, prattling, eagerly happy little party, and of them all not one was more blithe than the little girl who had said grace last.

The child's intimate companionship with her mother in the sorrow which was her sorrow too had not taken from her the ability for partic.i.p.ation in childish happiness, also hers by right. Was not this because the companionship was of so deep a nature? The mother, in letting her little girl share her grief, let her share too the knowledge of the source to which she looked for consolation. Above all, she not only told her of heavier sorrows; she told her how those greater griefs might be lightened. Children in America enter into so many of the things of their parents' lives, is it not good that they are given their parts even in those spiritual things that are most near and sacred?

I have among my friends a little boy whose father finds G.o.d most surely in the operation of natural law. Indeed, he has often both shocked and distressed certain of his neighbors by declaring it to be his belief that nowhere else could G.o.d be found. "His poor wife!" they were wont to exclaim; "what must she think of such opinions?" And later, when the little boy was born, "That unfortunate baby!" they sighed; "how will his mother teach him religion when his father has these strange ideas?" That the wife seemed untroubled by the views of her husband, and that the baby, as he grew into little-boyhood, appeared very similar to other children as far as prayers and Bible stories and even attendance at church were concerned, did not rea.s.sure the disturbed neighbors. For the child's father continued to express--if possible, more decidedly--his disquieting convictions. "Evidently, though," said one neighbor, "he doesn't put such thoughts into the head of his child."

Apparently he did not. I knew the small boy rather intimately, and I was aware that his father, after the custom of most American parents, took the child into his confidence with regard to many other matters. The little boy was well acquainted with his father's political belief, for example. I had had early evidence of this. But it was not until a much later time, and then indirectly, that I saw that the little boy was possessed too of a knowledge of his father's religious faith.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "DO YOU LIKE MY NEW HYMN?"]

I was ill in a hospital a year or two ago, and the little boy came with his mother to see me. A clergyman happened to call at the same time. It was Sunday, and the clergyman suggested to my small friend that he say a psalm or a hymn for me.

"My new one, that daddy has just taught me?" the child inquired, turning to his mother.

She smiled at him. "Yes, dearest," she said gently.

The little boy came and stood beside my bed, and, in a voice that betokened a love and understanding of every line, repeated Mrs.

Browning's lovely poem:--

"They say that G.o.d lives very high!

But if you look above the pines, You cannot see our G.o.d. And why?

"And if you dig down in the mines, You never see Him in the gold, Though from Him all that's glory shines.

"G.o.d is so good, He wears a fold Of heaven and earth across His face-- Like secrets kept, for love, untold.

"But still I feel that His embrace Slides down, by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place:

"As if my tender mother laid On my shut lids, her kisses' pressure, Half-waking me at night; and said, 'Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?'"

Beyond question the clergyman had expected a less unusual selection than this; but he smiled very kindly at the little boy as he said the beautiful words. At the conclusion he merely said, "You have a good father, my boy."

"Do you like my new hymn?" the child asked me.

"Yes," I replied. "Did your father tell you what it means?" I added, suddenly curious.

"No," said my small friend; "I didn't ask him. You see," he supplemented, "it tells _itself_ what it means!"

The things of religion so often to the children tell themselves what they mean! Only the other day I heard a little girl recounting to her young uncle, learned in the higher criticism, the story of the Creation.

"Just only _six days_ it took G.o.d to make _everything_" she said; "think of that!"

"My dear child," remonstrated her uncle, "_that_ isn't the point at all --the _amount_ of time it required! As a matter of fact, it took thousands of years to make the world. The word 'day' in that connection means a certain period of time, not twenty-four hours."