"You say it first," said one of the children to her little hostess, "because it is your birthday."

At a nod from her mother, the little girl said the Selkirk grace:—

"Some hae meat and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit."

Then another small girl said her grace, which was Herrick's:—

"Here a little child I stand, Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be, Here I lift them up to Thee, For a benison to fall On our meat and on us all Amen."

The next little girl said Stevenson's:—

"It is very nice to think The world is full of meat and drink, And little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place."

The succeeding little guests said the dear and familiar "blessing" of so many children:—

"For what we are about to receive, O Lord, make us truly thankful."

My little friend into whose life so grievous a sorrow had come was the last to say her grace. It was the poem of Miss Josephine Preston Peabody entitled "Before Meat:—

"Hunger of the world. When we ask a grace Be remembered here with us, By the vacant place.

"Thirst with nought to drink, Sorrow more than mine, May God some day make you laugh, With water turned to wine!"

There was a silence when she finished, among the children as well as among the grown persons present. "I don't quite understand what your grace means," the little girl of the house said at last to her small guest.

"It means that I still have my mamma, and she still has me," replied the child. "Some people haven't anybody. It means that; and it means we ask God to let them have Him. My mamma told me, when she taught it to me to say instead of the grace I used to say when we had my papa."

The little girl explained with the simple seriousness and sweetness so characteristic of the answers children make to questions asked them regarding things in any degree mystical. The other small girls listened as sweetly and as seriously. Then, with one accord, they returned to the gay delights of the occasion. They were a laughing, prattling, eagerly happy little party, and of them all not one was more blithe than the little girl who had said grace last.

The child's intimate companionship with her mother in the sorrow which was her sorrow too had not taken from her the ability for participation in childish happiness, also hers by right. Was not this because the companionship was of so deep a nature? The mother, in letting her little girl share her grief, let her share too the knowledge of the source to which she looked for consolation. Above all, she not only told her of heavier sorrows; she told her how those greater griefs might be lightened. Children in America enter into so many of the things of their parents' lives, is it not good that they are given their parts even in those spiritual things that are most near and sacred?

I have among my friends a little boy whose father finds God most surely in the operation of natural law. Indeed, he has often both shocked and distressed certain of his neighbors by declaring it to be his belief that nowhere else could God be found. "His poor wife!" they were wont to exclaim; "what must she think of such opinions?" And later, when the little boy was born, "That unfortunate baby!" they sighed; "how will his mother teach him religion when his father has these strange ideas?" That the wife seemed untroubled by the views of her husband, and that the baby, as he grew into little-boyhood, appeared very similar to other children as far as prayers and Bible stories and even attendance at church were concerned, did not reassure the disturbed neighbors. For the child's father continued to express—if possible, more decidedly—his disquieting convictions. "Evidently, though," said one neighbor, "he doesn't put such thoughts into the head of his child."

Apparently he did not. I knew the small boy rather intimately, and I was aware that his father, after the custom of most American parents, took the child into his confidence with regard to many other matters. The little boy was well acquainted with his father's political belief, for example. I had had early evidence of this. But it was not until a much later time, and then indirectly, that I saw that the little boy was possessed too of a knowledge of his father's religious faith.



I was ill in a hospital a year or two ago, and the little boy came with his mother to see me. A clergyman happened to call at the same time. It was Sunday, and the clergyman suggested to my small friend that he say a psalm or a hymn for me.

"My new one, that daddy has just taught me?" the child inquired, turning to his mother.

She smiled at him. "Yes, dearest," she said gently.

The little boy came and stood beside my bed, and, in a voice that betokened a love and understanding of every line, repeated Mrs. Browning's lovely poem:—

"They say that God lives very high! But if you look above the pines, You cannot see our God. And why?

"And if you dig down in the mines, You never see Him in the gold, Though from Him all that's glory shines.

"God is so good, He wears a fold Of heaven and earth across His face— Like secrets kept, for love, untold.

"But still I feel that His embrace Slides down, by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place:

"As if my tender mother laid On my shut lids, her kisses' pressure, Half-waking me at night; and said, 'Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?'"

Beyond question the clergyman had expected a less unusual selection than this; but he smiled very kindly at the little boy as he said the beautiful words. At the conclusion he merely said, "You have a good father, my boy."

"Do you like my new hymn?" the child asked me.

"Yes," I replied. "Did your father tell you what it means?" I added, suddenly curious.

"No," said my small friend; "I didn't ask him. You see," he supplemented, "it tells itself what it means!"

The things of religion so often to the children tell themselves what they mean! Only the other day I heard a little girl recounting to her young uncle, learned in the higher criticism, the story of the Creation.

"Just only six days it took God to make everything" she said; "think of that!"

"My dear child," remonstrated her uncle, "that isn't the point at all —the amount of time it required! As a matter of fact, it took thousands of years to make the world. The word 'day' in that connection means a certain period of time, not twenty-four hours."

"Oh!" cried the little girl, in disappointment; "that takes the wonderfulness out of it!"

"Not at all," protested her young uncle. "And, supposing it did, can you not see that the world could not have been made in six of our days?"

"Why," said the child, in surprise, "I should think it could have been!"

"For what reason?" her uncle asked, in equal amazement.

"Because God was doing it!" the child exclaimed.

Her uncle did not at once reply. When he did, it was to say, "You are right about that, my dear."

Sometimes it happens that a child finds in our careful explanation of the meaning of a religious belief or practice a different or a further significance than we have indicated. I once had an especially striking experience of this kind.

I was visiting a family in which there were several children, cared for by a nurse of the old-fashioned, old-world type. She was a woman well beyond middle age, and of a frank and simple piety. There was hardly a circumstance of daily life for which she was not ready with an accustomed ejaculatory prayer or thanksgiving. One day I chanced to speak to her of a mutual friend, long dead. "God rest her soul!" said the old nurse, in a low tone.

"Why did she say that?" the little four-year-old girl of the house asked me. "I never heard her say that before!"

"It is a prayer that some persons always say when speaking of any one who is dead; especially any one they knew and loved," I explained.

Later in the day, turning over a portfolio of photographs with the little girl, I took up a picture of a fine, faithful-eyed dog. "Whose dog is this?" I asked. "What a good one he is!"

"He was ours," replied the child, "and he was very good; we liked him. But he is dead now—" She paused as if struck by a sudden remembrance. Then, "God rest his soul!" she sighed, softly.

Most of the answers I read in response to the question, "Should churchgoing on the part of children be compulsory or voluntary?" did not end with the brief statement that it should be voluntary, and the reason why; a considerable number of them went on to say: "The children should of course be inspired and encouraged to go. They should be taught that it is a privilege. Their Sunday-school teachers and their minister, as well as their parents, can help to make them wish to go."

Certainly their Sunday-school teachers and ministers can, and do. The answers I have quoted took for granted the attendance of children at Sunday-school. Not one of them suggested that this was a matter admitting of free choice on the part of the children. "But it isn't," declared an experienced Sunday-school teacher who is a friend of mine when I said this to her. "Going to Sunday-school isn't worship; it is learning whom to worship and how. Naturally, children go, just as they go to week-day school, whether they like to or not; I must grant," she added by way of amendment, "that they usually do like to go!"

Our Sunday-schools have become more and more like our week-day schools. The boys and girls are taught in them whom to worship and how, but they are taught very much after the manner that, in the week-day schools, they are instructed concerning secular things. That custom, belonging to a time not so far in the past but that many of us remember it, of consigning the "infant class" of the Sunday-school to any amiable young girl in the parish who could promise to be reasonably regular in meeting it does not obtain at the present day. Sunday-school teachers are trained, and trained with increasing care and thoroughness, for their task.



Readiness to teach is no longer a sufficient credential. The amiable young girl must now not only be willing to teach, she must also be willing to learn how to teach. In the earlier time practically any well- disposed young man of the congregation who would consent to take charge of a class of boys was eagerly allotted that class without further parley. This, too, is not now the case. The young man, before beginning to teach the boys, is obliged to prepare himself somewhat specifically for such work. In my own parish the boys' classes of the Sunday-school are taught by young men who are students in the Theological School of which my parish church is the chapel. In an adjacent parish the "infant class" is in charge of an accomplished kindergartner. Surely such persons are well qualified to help to inspire and to encourage the children to regard churchgoing as a privilege, and to make them wish to go!

And the minister! I am inclined to think that the minister helps more than any one else, except the father and mother, to give the children this inspiration, this encouragement. Children go to church now, when churchgoing is voluntary, quite as much as they went when it was compulsory. They learn very early to wish to go; they see with small difficulty that it is a privilege. Their Sunday-school teachers might help them, even their parents might help them, but, unless the minister helped them, would this be so?

There are so many ways in which the minister does his part in this matter of the child's relation to the church, and to those things for which the church stands. They are happily familiar to us through our child friends: the "children's service" at Christmas and at Easter; the "talks to children" on certain Sundays of the year. These are some of them. And there are other, more individual, more intimate ways.

The other day a little girl who is a friend of mine asked me to make out a list of books likely to be found in the "children's room" of the near- by public library that I thought she would enjoy reading. On the list I put "The Little Lame Prince," the charming story by Dinah Mulock. Having completed the list, I read it aloud to the little girl. When I reached Miss Mulock's book, she interrupted me.

"'The Little Lame Prince,' did you say? Is that in the library? I thought it was in the Bible."

"The Bible!" I exclaimed.

"Yes," the child said, in some surprise; "don't you remember? He was Jonathan's little boy—Jonathan, that was David's friend—David, that killed the giant, you know."

I at once investigated. The little girl was quite correct. "Who told you about him?" I inquired.

"Our minister," she replied. "He read it to me and some of the other children."

This, too, a bit later, I investigated. I found that the minister had not read the story as it is written in the Bible, but a version of it written by himself especially for this purpose and entitled "The Little Lame Prince."

At church, as elsewhere, the children of our nation are quick to observe, and to make their own, opportunities for doing as the grown-ups do. When occasion arises, they slip with cheerful and confiding ease into the places of their elders.

One Sunday, last summer, I chanced to attend a church in a little seaside village. When the moment arrived for taking up the collection, no one went forward to attend to that duty. I was told afterward that the man who always did it was most unprecedentedly absent. There were a number of other men in the rather large congregation, but none of them stirred as the clergyman stood waiting after having read several offertory sentences. I understood afterward that they "felt bashful," not being used to taking up the collection. The clergyman hesitated for a moment, and then read another offertory sentence. As he finished, a little boy not more than nine years old stepped out of a back pew, where he was sitting with his mother, and, going up to the clergyman, held out his hand for the plate. The clergyman gravely gave it to him, and the child, without the slightest sign of shyness, went about the church collecting the offerings of the congregation. This being done, he, with equal un-self-consciousness, gave the plate again to the clergyman and returned to his seat beside his mother.

"Did you tell him to do it?" I inquired of the mother, later.

"Oh, no," she answered; "he asked me if he might. He said he knew how, he saw it done every Sunday, and he was sure the minister would let him."

American children of the present day are surer than the children of any other nation have ever been that their fathers and their mothers and their ministers will allow them liberty to do in church, as well as with respect to going to church, such things as they know how to do, and eagerly wish to do. In our national love and reverence for childhood we willingly give the children the great gift that we give reluctantly, or not at all, to grown people—the liberty to worship God as they choose.



CONCLUSION

We are a child-loving nation; and our love for the children is, for the most part, of the kind which Dr. Henry van Dyke describes as "true love, the love that desires to bestow and to bless." The best things that we can obtain, we bestow upon the children; with the goodliest blessings within our power, we bless them. This we do for them. And they,—is there not something that they do for us? It seems to me that there is; and that it is something incalculably greater than anything we do, or could possibly do, for them. More than any other force in our national life, the children help us to work together toward a common end. A child can unite us into a mutually trustful, mutually cordial, mutually active group when no one else conceivably could.

A few years ago, I was witness to a most striking example of this. I went to a "ladies' day" meeting of a large and important men's club that has for its object the study and the improvement of municipal conditions. The city of the club has a nourishing liquor trade. The club not infrequently gives over its meetings to discussions of the "liquor problem";—discussions which, I have been told, had, as a rule, resolved themselves into mere argumentations as to license and no-license, resulting in nothing. By some accident this "ladies' day" meeting had for its chief speaker a man who is an ardent believer in and supporter of no-license. For an hour he spoke on this subject, and spoke exceedingly well. When he had finished, there ensued that random play of question and answer that usually follows the presiding officer's, "We are now open to discussion." The chief speaker had devoted the best efforts of his mature life to bringing about no-license in his home city; the subject was to him something more than a topic for a discussion that should lead to no practical work in the direction of solving the "liquor problem" in other cities. He tried to make that club meeting something more vital than an exchange of views on license and no-license. With the utmost earnestness, he attempted to arouse a living interest in the "problem," and, of course, to make converts to his own belief as to the most effective solution of it.

Finally, some one said, "Isn't any liquor sold in your city? Your law keeps it from being sold publicly, but privately,—how about that?"

"I cannot say," the chief speaker replied. "The law may occasionally be broken,—I suppose it is. But," he added, "I can tell you this,—we have no drunkards on our streets. I have a boy,—he is ten years old, and he has never seen a drunken man in his life. How about the boys of the people of this city, of this audience?"

The persons in that audience looked at the chief speaker; they looked at each other. There followed such a serious, earnest, frank discussion of the "liquor problem" as had never before been held either in that club, or, indeed, in any assembly in that city. Since that day, that club has not only held debates on the "liquor problem" of its city; it has tried to bring about no-license. The chief speaker of that meeting was far from being the first person who had addressed the organization on that subject; neither was he the first to mention its relation to childhood and youth; but he was the very first to bring his own child, and to bring the children of each and every member of the association who had a child into his argument. With the help of the children, he prevailed.

One of my friends who is a member of that club said to me recently, "It was the sincerity of the speaker of that 'ladies' day' meeting that won the audience. I really must protest against your thinking it was his chance reference to his boy!"

"But," I reminded him, "it was not until he made that 'chance reference' to his boy that any one was in the least moved. How do you explain that?"

"Oh," said my friend, "we were not sure until then that he was in dead earnest—"

"And then you were?" I queried.

"Why, yes," my friend replied. "A man doesn't make use of his child to give weight to what he is advocating unless he really does believe it is just as good as he is arguing that it is."

"So," I persisted, "it was, after all, his 'chance reference' to his boy—"

"If you mean that nothing practical would have come of his speech, otherwise,—yes, it was!" my friend allowed himself to admit.

Another friend who happened to be present came into the conversation at this point. "Suppose he had had no child!" she suggested. "Any number of perfectly sincere persons, who really believe that what they are advocating is just as good as they argue it is, have no children," she went on whimsically; "what about them? Haven't they any chance of winning their audiences when they speak on no-license,—or what not?"

Those of us who are in the habit of attending "welfare" meetings of one kind or another, from the occasional "hearings" before various committees of the legislature, to the periodic gatherings of the National Education Association, and the National Conference of Charities and Correction, know well that, when advocating solutions of social problems as grave as and even graver than the "liquor problem," the most potent plea employed by those speakers who are not fathers or mothers begins with the words, "You, who have children." My friend who had said that a man did not make use of his child to give weight to his arguments unless he had a genuine belief in that for which he was pleading might have gone further; he might have added that neither do men and women make such a use of other people's children excepting they be as completely sincere,—provided that those men and women love children. And we are a nation of child-lovers.

It is because we love the children that they do for us so great a good thing. It is for the reason that we know them and that they know us that we love them. We know them so intimately; and they know us so intimately; and we and they are such familiar friends! The grown people of other nations have sometimes, to quote the old phrase, "entered into the lives" of the children of the land; we in America have gone further;—we have permitted the children of our nation to enter into our lives. Indeed, we have invited them; and, once in, we have not deterred them from straying about as they would. The presence of the children in our lives,—so closely near, so intimately dear!—unites us in grave and serious concerns,—unites us to great and significant endeavors; and unites us even in smaller and lighter matters,—to a pleasant neighborliness one with another. However we may differ in other particulars, we are all alike in that we are tacitly pledged to the "cause" of children; it is the desire of all of us that the world be made a more fit place for them. And, as we labor toward the fulfillment of this desire, they are our most effectual helpers.

In our wider efforts after social betterment, they help us. Because of them, we organize ourselves into national, and state, and municipal associations for the furtherance of better living,—physical, mental, and moral. Through them, we test each other's sincerity, and measure each other's strength, as social servants. In our wider efforts this is true. Is it not the case also when the field of our endeavors is narrower?

Several years ago, I chanced to spend a week-end in a suburban town, the population of which is composed about equally of "old families," and of foreigners employed in the factory situated on the edge of the town. I was a guest in the home of a minister of the place. Both he and his wife believed that the most important work a church could do in that community was "settlement" work. "Home-making classes for the girls," the minister's wife reiterated again and again; and, "Classes in citizenship for the boys," her husband made frequent repetition, as we discussed the matter on the Saturday evening of my visit.

"Why don't you have them?" I inquired.

"We have no place to have them in," the minister replied. "Our parish has no parish-house, and cannot afford to build one."

"Then, why not use the church?" I ventured.

"If you knew the leading spirits in my congregation, you would not ask that!" the minister exclaimed.

"Have you suggested it to them?" I asked.

"Suggested!" the minister and his wife cried in chorus. "Suggested!"

"I have besought them, I have begged them, I have implored them!" the minister continued. "It was no use. They are conservatives of the strictest type; and they cannot bring themselves even to consider seriously a plan that would necessitate using the church for the meeting of a boys' political debating club, or a girls' class in marketing."

"Churches are so used, in these days!" I remarked.

"Yes," the minister agreed; "but not without the sympathy and cooeperation of the leading members of the congregation!"

That suburban town is not one to which I am a frequent visitor. More than a year passed before I found myself again in the pleasant home of the minister. "I must go to my Three-Meals-a-Day Club," my hostess said shortly after my arrival on Saturday afternoon. "Wouldn't you like to go with me?"

"What is it, and where does it meet?" I asked.

"It is a girls' housekeeping class," answered the minister's wife; "and it meets in the church."

"The church?" I exclaimed. "So the 'leading spirits' have agreed to having it used for 'settlement' work! How did you win them over?"

"We didn't," she replied; "they won themselves over,—or rather the little children of one of them did it."

When I urged her to tell me how, she said, "We are invited to that 'leading spirit's' house to dinner to-morrow; and you can find out for yourself, then."

It proved to bean easy thing to discover. "I am glad to see that, since you have no parish-house, you are using your church for parish-house activities," I made an early occasion to say to our hostess, after dinner, on the Sunday. "You were not using it in that way when I was here last; it is something very new, isn't it?"

"It is, my dear," said our hostess,—one of those of his flock whom the minister had described as "conservatives of the strictest type"; "'very new' are the exact words with which to speak of it!"

"How did it happen?" I asked.

She smiled. "Our minister and his wife declare that my small son and daughter are mainly responsible for it!" she said. "They began to attend the public school this autumn,—they had, up to that time, been taught at home. You know what the population of this town is,—half foreign. Even in the school in this district, there are a considerable number of foreigners. I don't know why it is, when they have so many playmates in their own set, that my children should have made friends, and such close friends, with some of those foreign children! But they did. And not content with bringing them here, they wanted to go to their homes! Of course, I couldn't allow that. I explained to my boy and girl as well as I was able; I told them those people did not know how to live properly; that they might keep their children clean, because they wouldn't be permitted to send them to school unless they did; but their houses were dirty, and their food bad. And what do you think my children said to me? They said, 'Mother, have they got to have their houses dirty? Have they got to have bad food? Couldn't they have things nice, as we have?' It quite startled me to hear my own children ask me such things; it made me think. I told my husband about it; it made him think, too. You know, we are always hearing that, if we are going to try to improve the living conditions of the poor, we must 'begin with the children,'—begin by teaching them better ways of living. Our minister and his wife have all along been eager to teach these foreign children. We have no place to teach them in, except our church. It was rather a wrench for my husband and me,—giving our approval to using a church for a club-house. But we did it. And we secured the consent of the rest of the congregation,—we told them what our children had said. We were not the only ones who thought the children had, to use an old-fashioned theological term, 'been directed' in what they had said!" she concluded.

The children had said nothing that the minister had not said. Was it not less what they had said than the fact of their saying it that changed the whole course of feeling and action in that parish?

On the days when it is our lot to share in doing large tasks, the children help us. What of the days which bring with them only a "petty round of irritating concerns and duties?" Do they not help us then, too?

In a house on my square, there lives a little girl, three years old, who, every morning at about eight o'clock, when the front doors of the square open, and the workers come hurrying down their steps, appears at her nursery window,—open except in very stormy weather. "Good-bye!" she calls to each one, smiling, and waving her small hand, "good-bye!"

"Good-bye!" we all call back, "good-bye!" We smile, too, and wave a hand to the little girl. Then, almost invariably, we glance at each other, and smile again, together. Thus our day begins.

We are familiar with the thought of our devotion to children. As individuals, and as a nation, our services to the children of our land are conspicuously great. "You do so much for children, in America!" It is no new thing to us to hear this exclamation. We have heard, we hear it so often! All of us know that it is true. We are coming to see that the converse is equally true; that the children do much for us, do more than we do for them; do the best thing in the world,—make us who are so many, one; keep us, who are so diverse, united; help us, whether our tasks be great or small, to "go to our labor, smiling."

THE END