From the classes in Bible history and catechism, there are innumerable examples of children reading the words incorrectly, and misunderstanding the ideas they stand for. A boy, warned to keep the lamps burning, answered contentedly, "We have petroleum gratis." Another, asked whether he would like to be born again, said, "No, I might be turned into a girl." These are typical examples. There is an anecdote of a child, who, on being consoled with the statement that God was in the dark near her, asked her mother to put God out and light the lamp. Another child, seeing the pictures of the Christian martyrs in the arena, cried out sympathetically, "Look at that poor tiger; he hasn't got a Christian." These are a few out of a mass of examples, typical of the explanation given by children to the religious ideas they receive, notions forcing them into a world of ideas which they either accept in a material sense, or by which they are absolutely nonplussed. The childish circle of ideas is revealed by anecdotes of this kind, or by the comment of a small girl who asked when she heard that she had been born about eleven o'clock at night, "How could I have remained out so late?" These examples show that such conceptions as original sin, the fall of man, regeneration and salvation, are first necessarily meaningless words, and afterwards terribly difficult words. In my whole life fear of hell never absorbed my attention for five minutes, but I know children and grown people who are martyrs to this terror. I know children too who, when belief in hell was presented to them in school as absolutely necessary, bewailed that their mother had said she did not believe in hell, and therefore thought she must be very wicked. We are certainly a long way off from those times when, to use the picturesque expression of an historian of civilisation, "The fear of the devil constantly darkened the life of men, as the shadow of the sails of a windmill darkens the windows of the miller"; far from the times, too, when divine persons constantly revealed themselves to the believer, and when miracles belonged just as really to the daily habits of thought as to-day they are disregarded even by the believer. But so long as belief in the devil, providence and miracles is upheld in religious instruction, it will be impossible for the sunshine of the civilised view, which is the scientific as opposed to the superstitious view, to penetrate the darkness where the bacilli of cruelty and insanity are nurtured.