me, that the living book of my childish heart and my childish imagination could be so stone dead. That religious indifference is a frequent result of religious instruction, that spiritual maladies come from the desire to convert the souls of children, numerous proofs can be given. I have heard children of six years speak with holy horror of their four-year-old brother who dug with a spade on Sunday. On the other hand I have heard a six-year-old child who was dragged in one day to three church services ask after reflection whether it was not more tolerable to go to hell immediately. The Judaic Christian conception of a creative and sustaining providence, which gives the fullest perfection to all things, is so absolutely opposed to all that experience and evolution teaches us about existence, that one cannot even conceive of the possibility of holding both ideas theoretically at the same time. Much less can one practically unite them by the paste of compromise. The child with sharp-sighted simplicity does not allow himself to be deceived. If we do not wish to speak the truth then let us not speak to children about life at all--life in its unity and diversity, its manifold creative acts, its process of continuous creation, its eternal divine subjection to law. But this means that it is impossible to save the Christian God for children, after the child begins to think about this God, in whom he is taught blind confidence. Nor can the child be prepared in this way for the new conception of God with its religious, its uniting and elevating power, I mean for the conception of a God whose revealed book is the starry heavens, and whose prophetic sight is in the unfathomable sea, and in the deeps of man's heart, the God who is in life and is life. Nothing shows better how imperfect is the real belief of modern thinkers, than the fact that they always teach their children a system which they do not wish to live by spiritually themselves, but which they hold as indispensable for the moral and social future of the child. When we pass from the conception of providence to the conception of sin, we find in children the same natural logic. A small girl, an only child, asked: "How could God allow his only child to be killed? You could not have done it to me!" And a small boy said, "It is a very good thing for us that the Jews crucified Christ, so that nothing happened to us." These are both poles of an emotional and a practical way of looking at the Atonement. Within them all similar circumferences are drawn. To a more comic and naïve sphere of ideas belongs the proposal of a small girl to call the Virgin Mary God's wife. Also there is the story of a boy who spoke in school of Our Lord and the two other Lords, meaning the Trinity.