“From every point, from every object of nature and life there is a way to God....  The things of nature form a more beautiful ladder between heaven and earth than that seen by Jacob....  It is decked with flowers, and angels with children’s eyes beckon us toward it.”  This is true, but it does not mean that we are always to be trying to make things sacred, but that we are to realise that all beauty and all knowledge and all sympathy are already sacred, and that to love such things is to love something whereby the Creator makes Himself known to us, that to enjoy them is to enjoy God.

Religion is not always explained as implying the idea of being bound, but sometimes as being set free from the bonds of the lower or animal nature.  In this sense Mr. Clutton Brock may well call it “a sacred experience” for the child, when he forgets himself in the beauty of the world.  If we could all rise to a wider conception of the meaning of the word religion, we should know that it comes into all the work of the day, that it does not depend alone upon that special Scripture lesson which may become mere routine.

The greatest Teacher of all taught by stories, and when any story deepens our feelings for human nature and our recognition of the heights to which it can rise, when it makes us long for faith, courage, and love to go and do likewise, who shall say that this is not religious teaching, teaching which helps to deliver us from the bonds that hamper spiritual ascent.

Many of us will feel with Froebel that the fairy-tale, with its slumbering premonition of being surrounded by that which is higher and more “conscious than ourselves,"[25] has its place, and an important place, in religious development.

[Footnote 25:  P. 85.]

The “fairy sense,” says Dr. Greville Macdonald, “is innate as the religious sense itself ... the fairy stories best beloved are those steeped in meaning—­the unfathomable meaning of life ... such stories teach—­even though no lesson was intended—­the wisdom of the Book of Job:  wisdom that by this time surely should have made religious teaching saner, and therefore more acceptable."[26]

[Footnote 26:  “The Fairy-Tale in Education,” by Greville Macdonald, M.D., Child Life, Dec. 1918.]

Fairies, like angels, may be God’s messengers.  A child who had heard of St. Cuthbert as a shepherd boy being carried home from the hillside when hurt, by a man on a white horse, repeated the story in her own words, “and he thought it was a fairy of God’s sent to help him.”

There is, however, nothing the children love more than the Bible story, the story which shows, so simply, humanity struggling as the children struggle, failing as the children fail, and believing and trusting as the children believe, and as we at least strive to do, in the ultimate victory of Right over Wrong, of Good over Evil.  But just because the stories are often so beautiful and so inspiring, the teacher should have freedom to deal with them as the spirit moves her.