If we clearly realize these characteristics of the childish mind, we cannot fail to understand the impression made on it by religious instruction. The statements and stories that are repeated to him are easily accepted by the child in so far, and in so far only, as they answer to his needs; and when accepted they are assimilated, which means that they are compelled to obey the laws of his own mental world. In so far as the statements and stories presented to him are not acceptable or cannot be assimilated, it happens either that they pass by him unnoticed, or else that he subjects them to a cold and matter-of-fact logic which exerts a dissolving influence upon them.
Now a few of the ideas of religion are assimilable by the child, and notably the idea of a God as the direct agent in cosmic phenomena; some of the childish notions I have quoted illustrate the facility with which the child adopts this idea. He adopts, that is, what may be called the hard precise skeleton of the idea, and imagines a colossal magician, of anthropomorphic (if not paidomorphic) nature, whose operations are curious, though they altogether fail to arouse any mysterious reverence or awe for the agent. Even this is not very satisfactory, and Stanley Hall, in the spirit of Froebel, considers that the best result is attained when the child knows no God but his own mother.3 But for the most part the ideas of religion cannot be accepted or assimilated by children at all; they were not made by children or for children, but represent the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of men, and sometimes even of very exceptional and abnormal men. "The child," it has been said, "no doubt has the psychical elements out of which the religious experience is evolved, just as the seed has the promise of the fruit which will come in the fullness of time. But to say, therefore, that the average child is religious, or capable of receiving the usual advanced religious instruction, is equivalent to saying that the seed is the fruit or capable of being converted into fruit before the fullness of time."4 The child who grows devout and becomes anxious about the state of his soul is a morbid