deterministic theories have to be passed upon; even a mere professor of rhetoric is obliged, in treating of literature and of Voltaire and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to touch on questions which are burning. Similarly, a professor in the law school must find a thousand occasions for praising, or blaming, or criticising the laws of the State. And must one, because of dangers of this sort which are met with at every step, cease teaching history, philosophy, and law? No, and we do not believe that one should be debarred from teaching religious history. The whole question is one of fact rather than of principle; it should be the master’s business to avoid digressions beyond the limits of pure science, and to be on his guard against seeming to mean something more than he says, and masking a criticism of the existing order of things under a course on abstract theory.[87] [87] Works in religious criticism would naturally find their place in the school and college libraries. They might be supplemented by a more or less extensive museum of religious curiosities, beginning with the fetiches of savage tribes and extending down to the present day. To the mass of the French public the solid results already achieved by an independent criticism of the Bible constitute a _terra incognita_; they must be disseminated. M. Lenormant’s effort might serve as an example for other efforts of the same kind. In order to make it apparent at a glance how the Pentateuch has been formed, by the combination and fusion of the earlier sets of documents, M. Lenormant undertook to publish a translation from the Hebrew, in which he distinguishes the extracts from the respective sets of documents by different kinds of type. Thus one has before one the natural explanation of the way in which all the episodes in Genesis are presented in the two parallel versions, sometimes juxtaposed, sometimes mingled. [Sidenote: Legitimate object of religious instruction.] The aim of this impartial course of instruction should be to supply each religion with its proper historical setting, to show how it was born, developed, opposed to others; it should be described, not refuted. The bare introduction of historical continuity into the course of religious thought is itself a considerable step in advance; whatever is continuous ceases to be marvellous. Nobody is astonished at a brook which gradually becomes bigger; our ancestors adored great rivers of whose sources they were ignorant. _III. Education at Home._ It has often been asked, as a question of practical conduct, whether the head of a household ought not to have a religion, at least if not for himself, for his wife and children, and if his wife is religious ought he to abandon the education of his children to her? [Sidenote: Father’s duty in regard to religious instruction.]