I will say nothing of the heroes and heroines of the pious literature written for children, with their stories of conversion and holiness. Parents are able to protect their children from them. I speak here only of that way of looking at the world, which is forced on children with or against the will of their parents. This degrades their conceptions of God, of Jesus, of nature. These conceptions, the child if left to himself can develop simply or powerfully. It is this way of looking at the world that causes unnecessary suffering and dangerous prejudices. The inclination of the child to deep religious feeling, sound faith, and ardent zeal for holiness will be strengthened by an ability to draw the standards of life as freely from the Bible as from the world's literature. The same result will be produced by books on other religions, like Buddhism, from the great religious personalities who illustrate the struggle for an ideal, and from such children's books as show like efforts in a healthy form. No child has the slightest need of the catechism or theology for his religion or for his training; no other church history is needed than that connected with the general history of the world. In this last study the chief stress should be laid in teaching on the errors, in order to impress on the young the conviction, that all new truths are called by their contemporaries "errors." In other words these "errors" are the best negative material man has for discovering the truth. Working over and explaining the contradictions met with by the child in such religious instruction, as I am outlining here, belongs to the preparation for a true life, in which people have to put up with innumerable contradictions. But this personal work injures neither the piety nor the soundness of the child's soul. Such injuries come rather from irritating pietism or vain hypocrisy, from spiritual fanaticism, from deceits of the reason, barrenness of soul, or perverted feeling of right, all of which are the notorious results of Christian training and Christian instruction, given according to the usual methods of the present day. For the present as well as for the future, a child will be able to solve more easily these spiritual problems if his fine feeling for right and his quick logic have not been dulled by the dogmatic answers to those eternal problems, that place him in as much difficulty as the thinker.