The eyes of children are here and in similar cases, clear-sighted in their simplicity. At a tender age they are able to observe whether their surroundings are in living accord with Christian teaching. From a four-year-old child, with whom I was talking about Jesus' commandment to love one another, I received the reply, "If Jesus really said so, Papa is no Christian." Before long the child gets into conflict with his instructors and with the commands of Christianity. A small child in a Swedish city took the word of Jesus about charity to heart. Not only his playthings, but his clothes he gave to the poor; his parents cured, by corporal punishment, this practical type of Christianity. A teacher who was impressing on a small girl in a Finnish city the commandment to love one's enemies, received as an answer that this was impossible, for no one in Finland could love Bobrikoff. I know the sophism used in both cases to overcome the invulnerable logic of the child; but I also know how these sophisms make hypocrisy so natural among Christians, that it is now unconscious. It would take a new Kirkegaard to shake up our consciences. Everywhere Rousseau's words hold true, "The child gets high principles to direct him, but he is forced by his surroundings to act according to petty principles, every time he wishes to put the high ones into practice." He goes on to say people have innumerable "ifs" and "buts," by which the child has to learn that great principles are only words, that the reality of life is something quite different. The dangerous thing is not that the ideal of Christianity is high; it comes from the fact that every ideal in its essence is unattainable. The nearer we get to it the more lofty it is. This is the characteristic of every ideal. But the demoralising feature in Christianity as an ideal is, that it is presented as absolute, while man as a social being is obliged to transgress it every day. Besides he is taught in his religious instruction, that as a fallen being he cannot in any case attain the ideal, although the only possibility of his living righteously in temporal things, and happily in the world to come, depends on his capacity for realising it.