dom in truth in later years instead of becoming
ours in childhood and so determining the habit and attitude of our
lives? The finest, the ideal person is, to the child, the father. God in
terms of fatherhood is the sum and source of all that is ideal in
personality.

The child's keen interest in the world of nature is our opportunity to
lead him to love the gracious source of all beauty and goodness. How
keen is the child's enjoyment of the beauty of the world! Can we forever
fix the general concept of all this beauty as the thought of God in the
words of flower and leaf, mountain and stream? And might we not also
connect the idea of God with the affairs of daily life? That depends on
the parent's attitude of mind; if we think of the universal life that is
behind all battles and business and affairs, there will be a difference
in our answers to the thousand curious inquiries that rise in the
child's mind.

Nor must we leave the child to think of God as a separate, far-off
person, on a throne somewhere in the skies. The child is finding his way
into a universe. The God who is a minute fraction of that universe makes
possible the religion that is no more than a negligible fraction of
life. The child asks concerning clouds, the sea, the trees, the birds,
and all the world about him; he tends to interpret it causally and
ideally. Childhood affords the great opportunity for giving the color,
the beauty and glory, the life of the divine to all this universe, to
instil the feeling that God is everywhere, in all and through all, and
that in him we live and move and have our being. The child's joy in this
world can thus be given a religious meaning. He sings

My God, I thank thee thou hast made
This earth so bright....,

and so beauty and joy become part of his religion. His faith becomes a
gladsome thing; he knows that the trees of the forest clap their hands,
the mountains and the hills sing, and the morning stars chant together
in the gladness of the divine life.

Such a view of the world comes not by prearranged and indoor interviews.
One must walk out into the good outdoor world for the opportunity and
the inspiration. The garden plot, the park, and, best of all, the open
fields and woods speak to a child and furnish us an open book from which
we may teach him to read. Recalling religious impressions, the writer
would testify to feeling nothing deeper, as a result of church
attendance in childhood, than the sh