Page 339 - The Story of My Lif

Bible? Please tell your little pupil many things when you have much time.”

Can any one doubt after reading these questions that the child who was capable
of asking them was also capable of understanding at least their elementary
answers? She could not, of course, have grasped such abstractions as a complete
answer to her questions would involve; but one’s whole life is nothing more than
a continual advance in the comprehension of the meaning and scope of such

ideas.

Throughout Helen’s education I have invariably assumed that she can understand
whatever it is desirable for her to know. Unless there had been in Helen’s mind
some such intellectual process as the questions indicate, any explanation of them
would have been unintelligible to her. Without that degree of mental

development and activity which perceives the necessity of superhuman creative
power, no explanation of natural phenomena is possible.

After she had succeeded in formulating the ideas which had been slowly
growing in her mind, they seemed suddenly to absorb all her thoughts, and she
became impatient to have everything explained. As we were passing a large

globe a short time after she had written the questions, she stopped before it and
asked, “Who made the REAL world?” I replied, “No one knows how the earth,
the sun, and all the worlds which we call stars came to be; but I will tell you how
wise men have tried to account for their origin, and to interpret the great and
mysterious forces of nature.”

She knew that the Greeks had many gods to whom they ascribed various powers,
because they believed that the sun, the lightning, and a hundred other natural
forces, were independent and superhuman powers. But after a great deal of
thought and study, I told her, men came to believe that all forces were
manifestations of one power, and to that power they gave the name GOD.