In those days education will be a vast, humane, scientific scheme for guiding the growth of human embryos into industrious and orderly citizens, and enabling the adult citizen pleasurably to cultivate his mind and taste. The development of each child will be followed as the development of a pupil is followed in the Jesuit Society, but with a care to develop its individuality fully, in harmony with the individualities of others. The child will not pass from the sphere of the educator at puberty, with unformed mind and character, to swell the great army of the intellectually listless. Ruskin's noble ideal of "as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures" will replace the narrow standards of our Education Department, with which the child can have no sympathy. From the first dawn of intelligence it will feel that a well-wishing parent, the community, is training it to derive all the joy it can from life, consistently with the joy of others and the day's duties, when its turn comes to don the _toga virilis_. It will have learned by that time that a development of its characteristic human powers is the richest possession it can have, and, coming to adolescence, will not at once cast aside the work of the teacher and dissipate its energy in the crude indulgence of elementary passions and futile imaginings. Neither child nor adult will shrink from work which stimulates the intelligence or refines the taste, and a fine alert race, impatient of untruth, injustice, and suffering, will set itself to develop fully the resources of this planet. CHAPTER X. THE CLERICAL SHAM THROUGHOUT the preceding chapters there have been resentful or disdainful references to the Churches, and it may be suspected that, in assailing other people's prejudices, I have cherished and proceeded upon the anti-clerical prejudice. A very cursory examination will, however, suffice to show that these criticisms were sound and pertinent, and are not due to some mysterious antipathy to the profession to which I once belonged. Few of those ugly or mischievous traditions which form what I have called the smothering ash in the intellectual activity of the nation have not the general support of the clergy. Few of the reforms here suggested do not meet their hostility. They constitute one of the most injurious conservative forces in modern life. Their bodies are strewn over the whole battlefield of the nineteenth century, and not one in a thousand of them fought on the side of progress. The esteem in which they are still widely held and the pretexts by which they guard this esteem are the last, and by no means the least, of those shams which hamper our advance and distract our energy. A full and detailed indictment of the clergy would fill several columns, and I must confine myself here to two or three considerations which are at once sufficiently drastic and easily demonstrable. I will therefore be content to show: