The Altar Steps | Page 7

the personal Devil;
you can't expect a little boy of Mark's sensitiveness not to be impressed
by your picture."
"He has nothing to fear from the Devil, if he behaves himself. Haven't I
made that clear?"
Mrs. Lidderdale sighed.
"But, James dear, a child's mind is so literal, and though I know you
insist just as much on the reality of the Saints and Angels, a child's
mind is always most impressed by the things that have power to
frighten it."

"I want him to be frightened by Evil," declared James. "But go your
own way. Soften down everything in our Holy Religion that is ugly and
difficult. Sentimentalize the whole business. That's our modern method
in everything."
This was one of many arguments between husband and wife about the
religious education of their son.
Luckily for Mark his father had too many children, real children and
grown up children, in the Mission to be able to spend much time with
his son; and the teaching of Sunday morning, the clear-cut
uncompromising statement of hard religious facts in which the
Missioner delighted, was considerably toned down by his wife's gentle
commentary.
Mark's mother taught him that the desire of a bad boy to be a good boy
is a better thing than the goodness of a Jack Horner. She taught him
that God was not merely a crotchety old gentleman reclining in a blue
dressing-gown on a mattress of cumulus, but that He was an Eye, an
all-seeing Eye, an Eye capable indeed of flashing with rage, yet so
rarely that whenever her little boy should imagine that Eye he might
behold it wet with tears.
"But can God cry?" asked Mark incredulously.
"Oh, darling. God can do everything."
"But fancy crying! If I could do everything I shouldn't cry."
Mrs. Lidderdale perceived that her picture of the wise and
compassionate Eye would require elaboration.
"But do you only cry, Mark dear, when you can't do what you want?
Those are not nice tears. Don't you ever cry because you're sorry you've
been disobedient?"
"I don't think so, Mother," Mark decided after a pause. "No, I don't
think I cry because I'm sorry except when you're sorry, and that

sometimes makes me cry. Not always, though. Sometimes I'm glad
you're sorry. I feel so angry that I like to see you sad."
"But you don't often feel like that?"
"No, not often," he admitted.
"But suppose you saw somebody being ill-treated, some poor dog or cat
being teased, wouldn't you feel inclined to cry?"
"Oh, no," Mark declared. "I get quite red inside of me, and I want to
kick the people who is doing it."
"Well, now you can understand why God sometimes gets angry. But
even if He gets angry," Mrs. Lidderdale went on, for she was rather
afraid of her son's capacity for logic, "God never lets His anger get the
better of Him. He is not only sorry for the poor dog, but He is also
sorry for the poor person who is ill-treating the dog. He knows that the
poor person has perhaps never been taught better, and then the Eye fills
with tears again."
"I think I like Jesus better than God," said Mark, going off at a tangent.
He felt that there were too many points of resemblance between his
own father and God to make it prudent to persevere with the discussion.
On the subject of his father he always found his mother strangely
uncomprehending, and the only times she was really angry with him
was when he refused out of his basic honesty to admit that he loved his
father.
"But Our Lord is God," Mrs. Lidderdale protested.
Mark wrinkled his face in an effort to confront once more this eternal
puzzle.
"Don't you remember, darling, three Persons and one God?"
Mark sighed.
"You haven't forgotten that clover-leaf we picked one day in

Kensington Gardens?"
"When we fed the ducks on the Round Pond?"
"Yes, darling, but don't think about ducks just now. I want you to think
about the Holy Trinity."
"But I can't understand the Holy Trinity, Mother," he protested.
"Nobody can understand the Holy Trinity. It is a great mystery."
"Mystery," echoed Mark, taking pleasure in the word. It always thrilled
him, that word, ever since he first heard it used by Dora the servant
when she could not find her rolling-pin.
"Well, where that rolling-pin's got to is a mystery," she had declared.
Then he had seen the word in print. The Coram Street Mystery. All
about a dead body. He had pronounced it "micetery" at first, until he
had been corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by
Dora about her rolling-pin. History stood for the hard dull fact, and
mystery stood for all