A Treatise on Parents and Children

And now the voices of our Moral Instruction Leagues will be lifted, / asking whether there is any reason why the appetite for perfection / should not be cultivated in rationally scientific terms instead of being / associated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and the thousand / other tales that grow up round religions. Yes: there are many reasons; / and one of them is that children all like the story of Jonah and the / whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite of demonstrations by / Bible smashers without any sense of humor that Jonah would not have / fitted into a whale's gullet -- as if the story would be credible of a / whale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on earth can stand / moral instruction books or catechisms or any other statement of the case / for religion in abstract terms. The object of a moral instruction book / is not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof against controversy, nor / even credible: its object is to make children good; and if it makes them / sick instead its place is the waste-paper basket.

Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears. To the / authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degree / reprehensible. It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and the / picture it gives us of the temper of God (which is what interests an / adult reader) is shocking and blasphemous. But it is a capital story for / a child. It interests a child because it is about bears; and it leaves / the child with an impression that children who poke fun at old gentlemen / and make rude remarks about bald heads are not nice children, which is / a highly desirable impression, and just as much as a child is capable / of receiving from the story. When a story is about God and a child, / children take God for granted and criticize the child. Adults do the / opposite, and are thereby led to talk great nonsense about the bad / effect of Bible stories on infants.