XVIII

THE LOVE OF GOD

How strange it is that what is often the latest reward of the toiler after holiness, the extreme solace of the outwearied saint, should be too often made the first irksome article of a childish creed!  To tell a child that it is a duty to love God better than father or mother, sisters and brothers, better than play, or stories, or food, or toys, what a monstrous thing is that!  It is one of the things that make religion into a dreary and darkling shadow, that haunts the path of the innocent.  The child’s love is all for tangible, audible, and visible things.  Love for him means kind words and smiling looks, ready comfort and lavished kisses; the child does not even love things for being beautiful, but for being what they are—­curious, characteristic, interesting.  He loves the odd frowsy smell of the shut-up attic, the bright ugly ornaments of the chimney-piece, the dirt of the street.  He has no sense of critical taste.  Besides, words mean so little to him, or even bear quaint, fantastic associations, which no one can divine, and which he himself is unable to express; he has no notion of an abstract, essential, spiritual thing, apart from what is actual to his senses.  And then into this little concrete mind, so full of small definite images, so faltering and frail, is thrust this vast, remote notion—­that he is bound to love something hidden and terrible, something that looks at him from the blank sky when he is alone among the garden beds, something which haunts empty rooms and the dark brake of the woodland.  Moreover, a child, with its preternatural sensitiveness to pain, its bewildered terror of punishment, learns, side by side with this, that the God Whom he is to love thus tenderly is the God Who lays about Him so fiercely in the Old Testament, slaying the innocent with the guilty, merciless, harsh, inflicting the irreparable stroke of death, where a man would be concerned with desiring amendment more than vengeance.  The simple questions with which the man Friday poses Robinson Crusoe, and to which he receives so ponderous an answer, are the questions which naturally arise in the mind of any thoughtful child.  Why, if God be so kind and loving, does He not make an end of evil at once?  Yet, because such questions are unanswerable by the wisest, the child is, for the convenience of his education, made to feel that he is wicked if he questions what he is taught.  How many children will persevere in the innocent scepticism which is so natural and so desirable, under a sense of disapproval?  One of my own earliest experiences in the ugly path of religious gloom was that I recognised quite clearly to myself that I did not love God at all.  I did not know Him, I had no reason to think Him kind; He was angry with me, I gathered, if I was ill-tempered or untruthful.  I was well enough aware by childish instinct that my mother did not cease