The child has a right to
learn the best that it can know of God, since the happiness of its
life, not only in eternity but even in time, is bound up in that
knowledge. Most grievous wrong has been done, and is still done,
to children by well-meaning but misguided efforts to "make them
good" by dwelling on the vengeance taken by God upon the wicked, on
the possibilities of wickedness in the youngest child. Their
impressionable minds are quite ready to take alarm, they are so small,
and every experience is so new; there are so many great forces at work
which can be dimly guessed at, and to their vivid imaginations who can
say what may happen next? If the first impressions of God conveyed to
them are gloomy and terrible, a shadow may be cast over the mind so
far-reaching that perhaps a whole lifetime may not carry them beyond
it. They hear of a sleepless Bye that ever watches, to see them doing
wrong, an Bye from which they cannot escape. There is the Judge of
awful severity who admits no excuse, who pursues with relentless
perseverance to the very end and whose resources for punishment are
inexhaustible. What wonder if a daring and defiant spirit turns at
last and stands at bay against the resistless Avenger, and if in later
years the practical result is--"if we may not escape, let us try to
forget," or the drifting of a whole life into indifference, languor of
will, and pessimism that border on despair.
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