It is my deepest conviction that man, without religion in the emotional element of his nature, can pursue no ideal ends, cannot see beyond his own personal interest, cannot realise great purposes, cannot be ready to sacrifice himself. Religious enthusiasm broadens our soul, binds us to the acts we hold as ideals. But because Christianity weighs upon the soul and can no longer be the connecting link of all factors in our conduct, earnest men are abandoning it more and more, influenced by purely religious reasons. Such men should not have their children brought up as Christians, under the excuse that the child requires Christianity. Here, as in other cases, in which adults are not agreed about what the child needs, we should try to get, not from adults but from children themselves, some information about their real needs. In this way we can learn that the child himself begins at a very early period to be concerned with the eternal riddles of mankind, to be troubled with the questions of whence and whither. At the same time one discovers that the sincere and honest childish nature is opposed to the Christian explanation of the world, until the child's sincerity is dulled and he either takes without question what is taught, or in his own soul denies what his lips must repeat, or finally allows his heart to be possessed by the only nourishment offered to his religious needs. My own recollections of childhood caused me to make observations of the religious ideas of children at an early period. I have now before me comprehensive accounts of this investigation, going back twenty-five years. I recollect my own fierce hate against God, when I, at the age of six years, heard of the death of Jesus being caused by God's demand for an atonement, and at ten years I recall my denial of God's providence, when a young workman died far away from his wife and his five children, to whom his existence was so necessary. My brooding about the existence of God took on this occasion the form of a challenge. I wrote in the sand, "God is dead." In doing so I thought, If there is a God, he will kill me now with a thunderbolt. But since the sun continued to shine, the question was answered for the time being; but it soon turned up again. I had no other religious instruction than reading the Bible on Sunday, preaching on Sunday, and reading from the catechism, which, by the way, was never explained. Yet the New Testament belonged to my play books; I learnt in it to love Jesus as profoundly as other great personalities of whom I read. But during the confirmation period, I received explanations of the Bible; in them every point, every name in the Gospel was explained, every sentence made the basis of hair-splitting distinctions, to show the fulfilment of prophecies and the edifying hidden meaning of every word, that formerly seemed so simple. The dogma of the Trinity for example was shown to be contained in the second verse of Genesis. This was a terribly sad discovery for