Even here, of course, while we can detect the play of a spontaneous impulse, we have to recognise the influence of instruction. C.’s tutelary deities, the fairies, were no doubt _suggested_ by his fairy stories; even though, as in the myth of the Rainer, we see how his active little mind proceeded to work out the hints given him into quite original shapes. This original adaptation shows itself on a large scale where something like systematic religious instruction is supplied. An intelligent child of four or five will in the laboratory of his mind turn the ideas of God and the devil to strange account. It would be interesting, if we could only get it, to have a collection of all the hideous eerie forms by which the young imagination has endeavoured to interpret the notion of the devil. His renderings of the idea of God appear to show hardly less of picturesque diversity.[56] ----- Footnote 56: According to Professor Earl Barnes, the Californian children seem to occupy themselves but little with the devil and hell. See his interesting paper, “Theological Life of a Californian Child,” _Pedagogical Seminary_, ii., 3, p. 442 _seq._ ----- It is to be noted at the outset that for the child’s intelligence the ideas introduced by religious instruction at once graft themselves on to those of fairy-lore. Mr. Spencer has somewhere ridiculed our university type of education with its juxtaposition of classical polytheism and Hebrew monotheism. One might, perhaps, with still greater reason, satirise the mixing up of fairy-story and Bible-story in the instruction of a child of five. Who can wonder that the little brain should throw together all these wondrous invisible forms, and picture God as an angry or amiable old giant, the angels as fairies and so forth? In George Sand’s child-romance of _Corambé_ we see how far this blending of the ideas of the two domains of the invisible world can be carried.