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 and unwholesome child; if he prefers praying for the conversion of his play-fellows to joining them in their games he is not so much an example of piety as a pathological case whose future must be viewed with anxiety; and to preach religious duties to children is exactly the same, it has been well said, as to exhort them to imagine themselves married people and to inculcate on them the duties of that relation. Fortunately the normal child is usually able to resist these influences. It is the healthy child's impulse either to let them fall with indifference or to apply to them the instrument of his unmerciful logic.
Naturally, the adult, in self-defence, is compelled to react against this indifferent or aggressive attitude of the child. He may be no match for the child in logic, and even unspeakably shocked by his daring inquiries, like an amiable old clergyman I knew when a Public School teacher in Australia; he went to a school to give Bible lessons, and was one day explaining how King David was a man after God's own heart, when a small voice was heard making inquiries about Uriah's wife; the small boy was hushed down by the shocked clergyman, and the cause of religion was not furthered in that school.