"That, my child, is something which you had better ask your
mother," one replies; or if one is the mother, "You must wait till
you are grown-up, dear." Nor did I see any mention of the most
difficult question of all, the question of the little girl who had
just been assured that God could do anything. "Then, if He can do
anything, can He make a stone so heavy that He can't lift it?"
Perhaps the editor is waiting for his second edition before he answers
that one. But upon such matters as "Why does a stone sink?" or
"Where does the wind come from?" or "What makes thunder?" he is
delightfully informing.
But I felt all the time that in this part of his book he really had
his eye on me and my generation rather than on the children. No child
wants to know why a stone sinks; it knows the answer already--"What
else could it do?" Even Sir Isaac Newton was a grown-up before he
asked why an apple fell, and there had been men in the world fifty
thousand years before that (yes I have been reading _The Outline of
History_, too), none of whom bothered his head about gravitation.
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