Does child mortality really shatter faith?

I've just walked the dog in a historic cemetery in inner Sheffield. The cemetery was built when the population Sheffield was rising dramtically during the industrial revolution and too many people were dying for the parish graveyards to cope with. It's impossible not to be moved by what you see written on the gravestones - epitaphs to children who never became adults - and adults who never became old. The conditions in which the first steel workers lived and worked were grim and deadly and many died early and painful deaths.

Many people will look at these gravestones and ask themselves how there can be a God when ten year old children die. Theologically it's hard work, there's certainly no glib answer to this and we must take people seriously when they make this objection.

But if child mortality is so deadly to faith then why is that in the days when so many more children did die so many more people believed in God? When virtually every working class family was touched by this sort of tragedy why did the people then not say en masse, there can be no God in heaven!

And in those parts of the world where many children still die before ever growing up faith is strong. It's only in those parts of the world that have made child mortality very rare that the idea of child mortality makes people doubt whether there can be a God. The idea of child mortality certainly makes us question our faith but the reality of child mortality doesn't seem to have any such effect.

Why can this be?