It is clear that with this wrong understanding of God's relation to him
the child's attitude and the response of his heart toward God could not
be right. The lesson hour which left so false an impression of God in
the child's mind did him lasting injury instead of good.

How wrong concepts may arise.--Pierre Loti tells in his reminiscences
of his own child-life how he went out into the back yard and threw
stones at God because it had rained and spoiled the picnic day. In his
teaching, God had been made responsible for the weather, and the boy had
come to look upon prayer as a means of getting what he wanted from God.
It took many years of experience to rid the child's mind of the last
vestiges of these false ideas. The writer recalls a troublesome idea of
God that inadvertently secured lodgment in his own mind through the
medium of a picture in his first geography. In the section on China was
the representation of a horrid, malignant looking idol underneath which
was printed the words, "A God." For many years the image of this picture
was associated with the thought of God, and made it hard to respond to
the concept of God's beauty, goodness, and kindness.

Wrong concepts of God may leave positive antagonisms which require years
to overcome. A little girl of nearly four years had just lost her
father. She did not understand the funeral and the flowers and the
burial. She came to her mother in the evening and asked where her papa
was. The stricken mother replied that "God had taken him."

"But when is he coming back?" asked the child.

The mother answered that he could not come back.