[2] God the Invisible King, p. 44.

The harm done a child by false and disturbing concepts of God is hard to estimate.  A small boy recently came home from Sunday school and confided to his mother that he “didn’t think it was fair for God to spy on a fellow!” A sympathetic inquiry by the mother revealed the fact that the impression brought from the lesson hour was of God keeping a lookout for our wrongdoings and sins, and constantly making a record of them against us, as an unsympathetic teacher might in school.  The beneficent and watchful oversight and care of God had not entered into the concept.

It is clear that with this wrong understanding of God’s relation to him the child’s attitude and the response of his heart toward God could not be right.  The lesson hour which left so false an impression of God in the child’s mind did him lasting injury instead of good.

How wrong concepts may arise.—­Pierre Loti tells in his reminiscences of his own child-life how he went out into the back yard and threw stones at God because it had rained and spoiled the picnic day.  In his teaching, God had been made responsible for the weather, and the boy had come to look upon prayer as a means of getting what he wanted from God.  It took many years of experience to rid the child’s mind of the last vestiges of these false ideas.  The writer recalls a troublesome idea of God that inadvertently secured lodgment in his own mind through the medium of a picture in his first geography.  In the section on China was the representation of a horrid, malignant looking idol underneath which was printed the words, “A God.”  For many years the image of this picture was associated with the thought of God, and made it hard to respond to the concept of God’s beauty, goodness, and kindness.

Wrong concepts of God may leave positive antagonisms which require years to overcome.  A little girl of nearly four years had just lost her father.  She did not understand the funeral and the flowers and the burial.  She came to her mother in the evening and asked where her papa was.  The stricken mother replied that “God had taken him.”

“But when is he coming back?” asked the child.

The mother answered that he could not come back.

“Not ever?” persisted the child.

“Not ever,” whispered the mother.

“Won’t God let him?” asked the relentless questioner.

The heart-broken mother hesitated for a word of wisdom, but finally answered, “No, God will not let him come back to us.”

Care and wisdom needed.—­And in that moment the harm was done.  The child had formed a wrong concept of God as one who would willfully take away her father and not let him return.  She burst out in a fit of passion:  “I don’t like God!  He takes my papa and keeps him away.”

That night she refused to say her prayer, and for weeks remained rebellious and unforgiving toward the God whom she accused of having robbed her of her father.  How should the mother have answered her child’s question?  I cannot tell in just what words, but the words in which we answer the child’s questions must be chosen with such infinite care and wisdom that bitterness shall not take the place which love toward God should occupy in the heart.