The true God, our modern minds insist upon believing, can have no appetite for unnatural praise and adoration.  He does not clamour for the attention of children.  He is not like one of those senile uncles who dream of glory in the nursery, who love to hear it said, “The children adore him.”  If children are loved and trained to truth, justice, and mutual forbearance, they will be ready for the true God as their needs bring them within his scope.  They should be left to their innocence, and to their trust in the innocence of the world, as long as they can be.  They should be told only of God as a Great Friend whom some day they will need more and understand and know better.  That is as much as most children need.  The phrases of religion put too early into their mouths may become a cant, something worse than blasphemy.

Yet children are sometimes very near to God.  Creative passion stirs in their play.  At times they display a divine simplicity.  But it does not follow that therefore they should be afflicted with theological formulae or inducted into ceremonies and rites that they may dislike or misinterpret.  If by any accident, by the death of a friend or a distressing story, the thought of death afflicts a child, then he may begin to hear of God, who takes those that serve him out of their slain bodies into his shining immortality.  Or if by some menial treachery, through some prowling priest, the whisper of Old Bogey reaches our children, then we may set their minds at ease by the assurance of his limitless charity. . . .

With adolescence comes the desire for God and to know more of God, and that is the most suitable time for religious talk and teaching.

9.  God is not sexual

In the last two or three hundred years there has been a very considerable disentanglement of the idea of God from the complex of sexual thought and feeling.  But in the early days of religion the two things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew prophets, for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary “wrath” of their God at this or that little dirtiness or irregularity or breach of the sexual tabus.  The ceremony of circumcision is clearly indicative of the original nature of the Semitic deity who developed into the Trinitarian God.  So far as Christianity dropped this rite, so far Christianity disavowed the old associations.  But to this day the representative Christian churches still make marriage into a mystical sacrament, and, with some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts the sacrifice of celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the mischievousness and maliciousness that so often ensue.  Nearly every Christian church inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can contrive upon the illegitimate child.  They do not treat illegitimate children as unfortunate children, but as children with a mystical and an incurable taint of sin.  Kindly easy-going Christians may resent this statement because it does not tally with their own attitudes, but let them consult their orthodox authorities.