‘All children have a world of their own, as distinct from that of the grown people who gravitate around them, as the dreams of girlhood from our prosaic life, or the ideas of the kitten that plays with the falling leaves, from those of her carnivorous mother that catches mice, and is sedulous in her domestic duties. But generally about this interior existence children are dumb. You have warlike ideas, but you cannot say to a sinewy relative, “My dear aunt, I wonder when the big bush in the garden will begin to walk about; I’m sure it’s a Crusader, and I was cutting it all the day with my steel sword. But what do you think, aunt? for I’m puzzled about its legs, because you see, aunt, it has only _one_ stalk—and besides, aunt, the leaves.” You cannot remark this in secular life, but you hack at the infelicitous bush till you do not wholly reject the idea that your small garden is Palestine, and yourself the most adventurous of knights.’[5] They have a tradition in the family that this is but a fragment from Bagehot’s own imaginative childhood, and certainly this visionary element in him was very vivid to the last. However, the transcendental or intellectual basis of religious belief was soon strengthened in him, as readers of his remarkable paper on Bishop Butler will easily see, by those moral and retributive instincts which warn us of the meaning and consequences of guilt:— ‘The moral principle,’ he wrote in that essay, ‘whatever may be said to the contrary by complacent thinkers, is really and to most men a principle of fear.... Conscience is the condemnation of ourselves; we expect a penalty. As the Greek proverb teaches, “Where there is shame, there is fear.”... How to be free from this is the question. How to get loose from this—how to be rid of the secret tie which binds the strong man and cramps his pride, and makes him angry at the beauty of the universe, which will not let him go forth like a great animal, like the king of the forest, in the glory of his might, but which restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased, if he do but set forth his own dignity he will offend ONE who will deprive him of it. This, as has often been pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites of heathendom.’[6] And then, after a powerful passage, in which he describes the sacrificial superstitions of men like Achilles, he returns, with a flash of his own peculiar humour, to Bishop Butler, thus:—