ows
toward it. That is the test of the child's religion: Is he growing
Godward in life, action, character?

Sec. 5. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF GOD

Sixthly, deal most carefully with the child's consciousness of God. The
truth is that the child in the average home has a consciousness of God.
It grows out of formal references in social rites and customs, informal
allusions in conversation, and direct statements and instruction. But
frequently the resultant mental picture is a misleading one, sometimes
even vicious in its moral effect. Where superstitious servants take more
interest in the child's religious ideas than do his parents, we have the
child whose life is darkened by the fear of an omnipotent ogre.
Nursemaids will slothfully scare small children into silence by threats
of the awful presence of a bogey god. The life of the spirit cannot be
trusted to the hireling. Parents must be sure of the character as well
as the superficial competency of those who come closest to childhood. A
child's ideas are formed before he goes to school. The family cannot
delegate the formation of dominant ideas to persons trained only for
nursery tasks.

But frequently the mother is a misleading teacher. To her the child goes
with all the big questions outside the immediate world of things. Is she
prepared to answer the questions? Few dilemmas of our life today are
more pathetic than this: the mother has outgrown the theology of her
childhood; she remembers keenly the suffering and superstition, the
struggle that followed the darkened pictures she received as a little
one, but she has nothing better to offer the child. No one has taught
her how to put the later, more spiritual concepts into language for the
child of our day. Weakly she falls back on the forms of words she once
abhorred.

There are certainly two approaches of reality for the child-mind to the
idea of God. Two immediate experiences are rich in meaning; they are the
life of the family and the wonder of the everyday world, the life and
variety of nature and human activities. The first is a very simple and
rich approach. By every possible means help children in the family to
think of God as the great and good Father of us all. Do this in the
phrasing of prayers and graces, in the answers to their questions, in
the casual word. Why should we assume that the Fatherhood of God is for
the adult alone? And why should it be that this rich concept dawns on us
like a new day of free