The questions, so familiar to every mother, "Can God see me?" "Where is God?" can only be met with the simple assertion that God sees all, and is everywhere. For there are many childish questions which it is wisest to meet with statements which are above the grasp of the childish mind. These statements may be simply given to the child as statements which it is too young either to question or to understand. Nothing is gained by trying to smooth down spiritual subjects to the level of a child's capacity; the time will come later when the child must meet and answer for itself all great spiritual questions; the parent's care should be to remove all hindrances from the child's path of inquiry, but not to give it cut-and-dried answers to every possible question; religion, to be worth anything, must be a personal matter, and each must find it out for himself; the wise parent will endeavour to save the child from the pain of unlearning, by giving but little formal religious teaching; he cannot fight the battle for his child, but he can prevent his being crippled by a fancied armour which will stifle rather than protect him; he can give a few wide principles to direct him, without weighing him down with guide-books. But even the most general ideas of God should not be forced on a childish mind; they should come, so to speak, by chance; they should be presented in answer to some demand of the child's heart; they should be inculcated by stray words and passing remarks; they should form the atmosphere surrounding the child habitually, and not be a sudden "wind of doctrine." Of course all this is far more troublesome than to teach a child a catechism or a creed, but it is a far higher training. Dogma, _i e_., conviction petrified by authority, should be utterly excluded from the religious education of children; a few great axiomatic truths may be laid down, but even in these primary truths dogmatism should be avoided. The parent should always take care to make it apparent that he is stating his own convictions, but is not enforcing them on the child by his authority. So far as the child is capable of appreciating them, the reasons for the religious conviction should be presented along with the conviction itself. Thus the child will see, as he grows older, that religion cannot be learned by rote, that it is not shut up in a book, or contained in creeds; he will appreciate the all-important fact that free inquiry is the only air in which truth can breathe; that one man's faith cannot justly be imposed on another, and that every individual soul has the privilege and the responsibility of forming his own religion, and must either hear God with his own ears, or else not hear Him at all.