t can hardly be said that he deliberately chose to do a
wrong; he is still in the process of learning how to do things
deliberately, just as you still are, for that matter. Consider whether
your training of the anti-jam habit has been really conscientious and
sufficient to establish the habit in any degree. It were wiser to ask
these things of yourself before putting the fateful question to him. It
would be better not to ask a small child that question. It demands too
much of him. Besides, you are losing a chance to establish a valuable
idea in his mind, namely, that acts usually carry evidences along with
them. Better say, "I see you've been in the pantry." That will help to
establish the habit of expecting our acts to be known. Then would follow
with the little child the careful endeavor to train him to recognize the
acts that are wrong because harmful, greedy, against the good of others,
and against his own good.

Just here parents, especially many religious parents, meet the
temptation thoughtlessly to use God as their ally by reminding the child
that, though they could not see him in the pantry, God was there
watching him. In the vivid memory of a childhood clouded by the thought
of a police-detective Deity, may one protest against this act of
irreverence and blasphemy? True, God was there; but not as a spy, a
reporter of all that is bad, anxious to detect, but cowardly and cruel
in silence at all other times! Let the child grow up with the happy
feeling that God is always with him, rejoicing in his play, his
well-aimed ball, his successes in school, his constant friend, helper,
and confidant. I like better the God to whom a little fellow in Montana
prayed the other day, "O God, I thank you for helping me to lick Billy
Johnson!" The child of the pantry needs to know the God who will help
him to do and know the right.

Sec. 3. OLDER CHILDREN

But protective lying presents a more serious problem with older
children. The school-teacher and parent meet it, just as the judge and
the employer meet it in adults. The cure lies early in life.
Truth-telling is as much a habit as lying is. Perhaps it is more easily
practiced; its drafts are on the powers of observation and memory rather
than on those of imagination. Along with the child's imaginative powers
there must be developed the powers of exact observation and description.
Exact observation and description or relation are but parts of the
larger general virtue of p