Still, we can be agreed over some points; we can make one or two rules, and keep them before us. It is a good rule, surely, that we should prepare ourselves and arm ourselves against the shock of a sudden question. We must have our answers ready. We must rehearse, we must learn almost word for word, as it were by heart, what we will say, when the inevitable demand for facts is sprung on us. That is our bounden duty, to make up our phrases beforehand, so that we shall not be caught unawares. It is not fair to the children that we should give them stupid floundering answers, or snub them, or shut them up. They have a perfect right to a well thought out answer. That is the meaning of what Horace says, that the utmost reverence is due to them. We cannot better reverence them than by deciding, long before the question comes, how we will handle it. Think for a moment what silly things are said to children, all for want of careful self-preparation. To this good rule we might add another――that we must never tell them a lie. We ought not to be liars, not even to small children. Take, for instance, one of the best of all opportunities for telling the truth; take the arrival of a baby brother or sister. Where did it come from? I have no patience with people who say that the angels, or the doctor, brought it. There is enough nonsense already talked about my profession without that. What business have they to lie to an honest child? Or take a more heart-searching instance. Imagine a child at Christmas-time playing with that most beautiful of all Christmas toys, a little _crêche_, with little figures of Mary and Joseph and the Babe lying in a manger; and the child turns round and asks you where Baby Jesus came from. What answer will you give? What harm can it do to a child, to know that children are born of their mothers? What does harm the minds of children is not our plain speaking; it is their own secret reading, gossiping, and imagining. Now let me venture a bit further. In the kingdom of a child’s mind, it is not one set of thoughts, but two, which gradually rise to power, as the child grows to adult life. Right away from the nursery age, these two ideas are important above all others; important alike to the child and to us. One is the child’s notions about sex; the other is the child’s notions about God. Everything else wavers and shifts; we see the children change every scrap of their minds over and over again: their likes and their dislikes, their plans and their decisions, flourish and perish, and are no more than stages or phases. But these two purposes of their curiosity――the desire to know what sex is, and the desire to know what God is――these endure, and are more imperative with every added year of life.