The sincerity of this cautiousness is not to be questioned. For we are apprehensive not only that social classes other than our own, and other individuals (as, the young) will fail to “make a wise use of freedom,” but that we ourselves shall fail to do so. We are on guard against our own enjoyment of powers and prerogatives that nevertheless we highly esteem. Father and mother, instead of being eager to confer freedom upon their child as rapidly as possible, make it their policy to shield him as long as possible from the dangers of freedom; and in accord with this policy they measure the correctness of their own conduct in the presence of children by its restraints, not by its resistance of restraints. Teachers, likewise, from the elementary school to the college, are as a rule engaged in putting upon young spirits a yoke made by others instead of assisting pupils to make harnesses of their own. It is regarded as an achievement of good teaching when pupils are kept happy and active in the process of being yoked to precedents. And teachers themselves are an ensample to their flock. If there is anybody in the world who, under a régime of freedom, should be characterized by constant unfixing of precedents, it is the teacher, but it is safe to guess that not one person in a thousand could name an instance of it in any school. If we were to judge religion by its great creative periods, we should perhaps say that the religious leader, even more than the teacher, should be a dyed-in-the-wool user of freedom. But, obviously, the fear of a flexible faith is greater, except at crisis-points in religious history, than the fear that faith may become stereotyped, mechanical, and dead. In nearly all ecclesiastical folds, if not in all of them, it is assumed that no clergyman “of good judgment” will use all the liberty that the constitution and the laws of his denomination permit. There is an unwritten law of repression within the written guarantees of liberty. Many years ago a Catholic professor was asked whether the advice of the Pope upon a certain point in education was an _ex cathedra_, officially authoritative, pronouncement. “No,” said the professor, “but we obey it just as if it were.” A passage from John Wesley concerning the Virgin Birth was submitted to a Methodist Episcopal bishop with the question whether this--the source not being named--was a view of the matter fit for a Methodist. The bishop’s reply was an emphatic negative. Upton Sinclair trapped a ministers’ meeting by reading a fresh translation of the denunciation of rich men in the Epistle of James and attributing the words to Emma Goldman. Most of the ministers thought that such utterances justified putting her into prison.