Though the German translation does not come near the powerful majesty of the original, yet such was the effect produced on me that I saw the bleeding head before my eyes, and cried and cried until my mother had to comfort me by assuring me that the sufferer was now in Heaven and that it was only a song to be sung in church. How deeply such scenes seem engraved on the memory; how vividly they return when the rubbish of many years is swept away and all is again as it was then, and the _caput cruentatum_ looks down on us once more, as it did then, with the human eyes full of divine love, so truly human that one could say with St. Bernard, “Tuum caput huc inclina, in meis pausa brachiis.” But willingly as I listened to these readings at home, and full as my heart was of love to Christ, I suffered intensely when I was taken to church as a young boy. It was a very large church, and in winter bitterly cold. Even though I liked the singing, the long sermon was real torture to me. I could not understand a word of it, and being thinly clad my teeth would have chattered if I had not been told that it was wrong “to make a noise in church.” Oh! what misery is inflicted on childhood by this enforced attendance at church. When a church can be warmed the suffering is less intense, but a huge whitewashed church that feels like an ice-cellar is about the worst torture that human ingenuity could have invented to make children hate the very name of church. These early impressions often remain for life, and the worst of it is that the idea remains in the minds of children, and of grown-up people too, that by going to church and repeating the same prayers over and over again, and listening to long and often dreary sermons, they are actually doing a service to God (_Gottesdienst_). Why does no new prophet arise and say in the name of God, as David did in the name of Jehovah, “Sermons and long prayers ‘thou didst not desire’”?