Such examples of remorse are evidence of a child’s capability of knowingly stating what is false. This is strikingly shown in Miss Wiltshire’s two reminiscences; for she distinctly tells us that in the case of her confident assertion about the imaginary snake with ring and bell, she felt no remorse as she was not conscious of uttering a lie.[189] But these sufferings of conscience point to something else, a sense of awful wickedness, of having done violence to all that is right and holy. How, it may be asked, does it happen that children feel thus morally crushed after telling a lie? ----- Footnote 189: _Cf._ what Mrs. Fry says, _Uninitiated_ (‘A Discovery in Morals’). ----- Here is a question that can only be answered when we have more material. We know that among all childish offences lying is the one which is apt to be specially branded by theological sanctions. The physical torments with which the ‘lying tongue’ is threatened, may well beget terror in a timid child’s heart. I think it likely, too, that the awfulness of lying is thought of by children in its relation to the all-seeing God who, though he cannot be lied to, knows when we lie. The inaudible palliative words added to the lie may be an awkward child-device for putting the speaker straight with the all-hearing God. Further inquiry is, however, needed here. Do children contract a horror of a lie when no religious terrors are introduced? Is there anything in the workings of a child’s own mind which would lead him to feel after his first lie as if the stable world were tumbling about his ears? Let parents supply us with facts here. Meanwhile I will venture to put forth a conjecture, and will gladly withdraw it as soon as it is disproved. So far as my inquiries have gone I do not find that children brought up at home and kept from the contagion of bad example do uniformly develop a lying propensity. Several mothers assure me that their children have never seriously propounded an untruth. I can say the same about two children who have been especially observed for the purpose.[190] ----- Footnote 190: Stanley Hall, when he speaks of certain forms of lying as prevalent among children, is, as he expressly explains, speaking of children _at school_, where the forces of contagion are in full swing. ----- This being so, I distinctly challenge the assertion that lying is instinctive in the sense that a child, even when brought up among habitual truth tellers, shows an unlearned aptitude to say what he knows to be false. A child’s quick imitativeness will, of course, lead him to copy grown-up people’s untruths at a very early age.[191] ----- Footnote 191: I seem to detect possible openings for the play of imitation in many of the indisputably conscious falsehoods reported by Perez, P. Lombroso, and others. -----