aker, I say, Place appears almost as a
Providence. Not that it is possible to live with children any more than
with grown-up people without imposing rules of conduct on them. There
is a point at which every person with human nerves has to say to a child
"Stop that noise." But suppose the child asks why! There are various
answers in use. The simplest: "Because it irritates me," may fail; for
it may strike the child as being rather amusing to irritate you; also
the child, having comparatively no nerves, may be unable to conceive
your meaning vividly enough. In any case it may want to make a noise
more than to spare your feelings. You may therefore have to explain
that the effect of the irritation will be that you will do something
unpleasant if the noise continues. The something unpleasant may be only
a look of suffering to rouse the child's affectionate sympathy (if it
has any), or it may run to forcible expulsion from the room with plenty
of unnecessary violence; but the principle is the same: there are no
false pretences involved: the child learns in a straightforward way that
it does not pay to be inconsiderate. Also, perhaps, that Mamma, who made
the child learn the Sermon on the Mount, is not really a Christian.

The Sin of Nadab and Abihu

But there is another sort of answer in wide use which is neither
straightforward, instructive, nor harmless. In its simplest form it
substitutes for "Stop that noise," "Dont be naughty," which means that
the child, instead of annoying you by a perfectly healthy and natural
infantile procedure, is offending God. This is a blasphemous lie; and
the fact that it is on the lips of every nurserymaid does not excuse it
in the least. Dickens tells us of a nurserymaid who elaborated it into
"If you do that, angels wont never love you." I remember a servant who
used to tell me that if I were not good, by which she meant if I did
not behave with a single eye to her personal convenience, the cock would
come down the chimney. Less imaginative but equally dishonest people
told me I should go to hell if I did not make myself agreeable to them.
Bodily violence, provided it be the hasty expression of normal provoked
resentment and not vicious cruelty, cannot harm a child as this sort of
pious fraud harms it. There is a legal limit to physical cruelty; and
there are also human limits to it. There is an active Society which
brings to book a good many parents who starve and torture and overwor