rance, and that is better than weak materialistic explanations,
which after all explain nothing. To tell a child that the Great Father
is always grieved when we are unkind or cowardly, always ready to help
us and to put kindness and bravery into our hearts, that we know He has
power to do that if we will let Him, but that His power is beyond our
understanding: to say that He is able to keep us in all danger, and that
even if we are killed we are safe in His keeping, surely that is enough.
He who blessed the children uttered strong words against him who caused
the little ones to stumble.

"From every point, from every object of nature and life there is a way
to God.... The things of nature form a more beautiful ladder between
heaven and earth than that seen by Jacob.... It is decked with flowers,
and angels with children's eyes beckon us toward it." This is true, but
it does not mean that we are always to be trying to make things sacred,
but that we are to realise that all beauty and all knowledge and all
sympathy are already sacred, and that to love such things is to love
something whereby the Creator makes Himself known to us, that to enjoy
them is to enjoy God.

Religion is not always explained as implying the idea of being bound,
but sometimes as being set free from the bonds of the lower or animal
nature. In this sense Mr. Clutton Brock may well call it "a sacred
experience" for the child, when he forgets himself in the beauty of the
world. If we could all rise to a wider conception of the meaning of the
word religion, we should know that it comes into all the work of the
day, that it does not depend alone upon that special Scripture lesson
which may become mere routine.

The greatest Teacher of all taught by stories, and when any story
deepens our feelings for human nature and our recognition of the heights
to which it can rise, when it makes us long for faith, courage, and love
to go and do likewise, who shall say that this is not religious
teaching, teaching which helps to deliver us from the bonds that hamper
spiritual ascent.

Many of us will feel with Froebel that the fairy-tale, with its
slumbering premonition of being surrounded by that which is higher and
more "conscious than ourselves,"[25] has its place, and an important
place, in religious development.

[Footnote 25: P. 85.]

The "fairy sense," says Dr. Greville Macdonald, "is innate as the
religious sense itself ... the fairy stories best beloved