In an Epilogue on Ijain “Saladin” (W. Stewart Ross) writes:—

“The breezy freshness of Ijain’s character is replete with simple but insinuating charm. Her spirit, genial and generous, was never meant for a cage. Hardly emerged from her cradle, her unsophisticated commonsense, on its own initiative, anticipated the propositions of ‘the Higher Criticism.’ She looked upon the dogmas of the popular faith, not through conventionally-coloured spectacles, but with the vision of her own clear, honest, fearless eyes; and the Father of Mercy have mercy upon Dogma when it is thus surveyed!

“When Ijain first threw down her play-things and began to regard the world on her own account, with her new, not second-hand, type of mind, she found, to her distress, that, before she had come into the world at all, everything had been cut and dried for her. The thinking had all been done for her by heads in the grave; and, to question the findings of those heads in the grave meant obloquy here, and hell elsewhere.

“Ijain laid down these play-things that she might, without undue distraction, think this finality over—and it did not meet with her endorsement. There was nothing in her of the rebel for rebellion’s sake; but there was much in her of the mettle of the martyr for Truth’s sake. She adopted the more than Golden Rule, ‘To thine own self be true.’ She took it for granted that it is with our own individual faculties we must work out our own salvation, and that not with fear and trembling, but with modest self-reliance and simple sincerity. She precociously grasped the principle of Human Brotherhood, involving a repudiation of all racial and credal prejudice. In the whole composition of the little heroine there is no vestige of the braggart. There is the mortification of finding herself in an environment in which all the vital questions of existence had been finally settled thousands of years before she had been born, and that by credulous hierophants thousands of years behind the highest tide-mark of the intelligence of the present hour.

“The record of Ijain, with inimitable directness and simplicity, exemplifies what everyone who really knows and sympathizes with children knows, that the mind of the child is, naturally, in revolt against our popular dogmas, ay, and in revolt against theism itself as held by the orthodox. The affirmation that it was not Jesus, but Nigel, that, in a certain crisis, saved Ijain from drowning, is an argument as forceful as it is simple; and the mind, till, by the Nans and Miss O’Learies, it has been warped and sophisticated, does not in an anthropomorphic deity find the Œdipus to read the riddle of the cosmos. The child instinctively knows what the philosopher, after his mind has been subjected to theologic distortion, requires all his mental faculties to rediscover, and all his moral courage to avow. Ijain, susceptibly intuitive child though she was, did not find the god-idea instinctive. She anticipated Darwin, which at the time, she had not read.

‘The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between men and the lower animals. It is, however, impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive to man. On the other hand, a belief in all pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in man’s reason, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wondre. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity.’

“Moreover, in the immaculate simplicity of her soul, Ijain anticipated an admission in one of the sermons of John Wesley which probably she has not read even up to the present hour.

‘After all that has been so plausibly written concerning “the innate idea of God”; after all that has been said of its being common to all men, in all ages and nations, it does not appear that man has naturally any more idea of God than any of the beasts of the field; he has no knowledge of God at all; no fear of God at all; neither is God in all his thoughts. Whatever change may afterwards be wrought (whether by grace of God, or his own reflections, or by education), he is by nature a mere Atheist.’

“And, even were the orthodox deity taken for granted, with her girlish heart and tender sympathy with every living creature, Ijain’s whole nature rose in revolt against the savage truculence of the deity of the churches. She, instinctively, endorsed the sentiments of the philosopher of Ferney:—

‘Whoever dares to say “God has spoken to me,” is criminal before God and men; for would God, the common father of all men, have communicated himself to an individual? God to walk! God to talk! God to write upon a little mountain! God to become man! God-man to die upon the cross! Ideas worthy of a Punch! To invent all these things is the last degree of rascality; to believe them, the extreme of brutal stupidity!’

“Yes, Ijain, if, in the reading of the Riddle of the Universe, we must postulate deity, let us have God expressive of the ripest knowledge, the loftiest aspirations, the most transcendental spiritual vision of modern humanity, not the coarse and barbaric eidolon of credulous and unlettered savages. In respect of our intelligence, in mercy upon our feelings, give us God up to date.

“The lesson the ‘story’ teaches is that

that the world, in its noblest aspect, is an arena for generous and unselfish endeavour; that, in service to your brother man, you are offering the very service to God that any god born of a noble and spiritual ideal would most readily accept. Ijain’s lesson is, Help Man, and, if it so please you, call it worshiping God. The most divine of all the sayings attributed to the Nazarine is, in regard to a kindly, helpful deed, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’”

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