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.
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