Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 7

About This Passage

The chapter's deepest sentence and one of the novel's quiet thesis statements: that knowledge of divine love depends on knowledge of human love. Three vocabulary words appear inside it. Montgomery uses Marilla's hesitation — and her aborted attempt at a stock prayer — to articulate the entire premise of the book in a single periodic sentence. The pivot ('and it suddenly occurred to her...') is a model of how a careful writer can change a paragraph's direction without losing its breath.

Narration Prompt

Recount the events of the chapter from Marilla's bedside instruction through the kitchen scene with Matthew, attending to the sequence by which Marilla revises her religious teaching plan in light of the actual child kneeling at her knee.

Discussion Questions

1. Anne can recite the catechism with fluency — 'God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable' — yet has 'never said a prayer' in her life. What does this gap between memorised doctrine and lived devotion reveal about the inadequacy of Anne's earlier religious instruction, and what implicit critique is Montgomery making of education that consists of recitation without relationship?
2. When asked to kneel, Anne describes wanting instead to pray outdoors — into a sky 'as if there was no end to its blueness' — where she would 'just feel a prayer.' How does this answer reveal a natural theology in Anne that is closer to the wonder of the Psalms than to the printed forms Marilla intends to teach her?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide