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Page 21
It is to be expected, then, that the child's earliest concepts of God
will be faulty and incomplete, and that in many points they will later
need correction. Probably most children first think of God as having
human form and attributes; the idea of spirit is beyond their grasp. God
is to them a kind of magnified and glorified Father after the type of
their earthly father. This need not concern us if we make sure that the
crude beginnings of the God-idea have no disturbing elements in them,
and that as the concept grows it moves in the right direction.
The harm from false concepts.--Mr. H.G. Wells[2] bitterly complains
against the wrong concept of God that was allowed to grow in his mind as
a child. These are his words: "He and his hell were the nightmare of my
childhood.... I thought of him as a fantastic monster perpetually
waiting to condemn and to strike me dead!... He was over me and about my
silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would be about a child
drowning in mid-Atlantic." It was only as the child grew into youth, and
was able to discard this false idea of God that he came to feel right
toward him.
[2] God the Invisible King, p. 44.
The harm done a child by false and disturbing concepts of God is hard to
estimate. A small boy recently came home from Sunday school and confided
to his mother that he "didn't think it was fair for God to spy on a
fellow!" A sympathetic inquiry by the mother revealed the fact that the
impression brought from the lesson hour was of God keeping a lookout for
our wrongdoings and sins, and constantly making a record of them against
us, as an unsympathetic teacher might in school. The beneficent and
watchful oversight and care of God had not entered into the concept.
It is clear that with this wrong understanding of God's relation to him
the child's attitude and the response of his heart toward God could not
be right. The lesson hour which left so false an impression of God in
the child's mind did him lasting injury instead of good.
How wrong concepts may arise.--Pierre Loti tells in his reminiscences
of his own child-life how he went out into the back yard and threw
stones at God because it had rained and spoiled the picnic day. In his
teaching, God had been made responsible for the weather, and the boy had
come to look upon prayer as a means of getting what he wanted from God.
It took many years of experience to rid the child's mind of the last
vestiges of these false ideas. The writer recalls a troublesome idea of
God that inadvertently secured lodgment in his own mind through the
medium of a picture in his first geography. In the section on China was
the representation of a horrid, malignant looking idol underneath which
was printed the words, "A God." For many years the image of this picture
was associated with the thought of God, and made it hard to respond to
the concept of God's beauty, goodness, and kindness.
Wrong concepts of God may leave positive antagonisms which require years
to overcome. A little girl of nearly four years had just lost her
father. She did not understand the funeral and the flowers and the
burial. She came to her mother in the evening and asked where her papa
was. The stricken mother replied that "God had taken him."
"But when is he coming back?" asked the child.
The mother answered that he could not come back.
"Not ever?" persisted the child.
"Not ever," whispered the mother.
"Won't God let him?" asked the relentless questioner.
The heart-broken mother hesitated for a word of wisdom, but finally
answered, "No, God will not let him come back to us."
Care and wisdom needed.--And in that moment the harm was done. The
child had formed a wrong concept of God as one who would willfully take
away her father and not let him return. She burst out in a fit of
passion: "I don't like God! He takes my papa and keeps him away."
That night she refused to say her prayer, and for weeks remained
rebellious and unforgiving toward the God whom she accused of having
robbed her of her father. How should the mother have answered her
child's question? I cannot tell in just what words, but the words in
which we answer the child's questions must be chosen with such infinite
care and wisdom that bitterness shall not take the place which love
toward God should occupy in the heart.
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