It is clear, then, that if Man is to be "saved" by a _regime_ of mechanical obedience, his education in his childhood must be based on the same general conception of life and duty. This means, in the first place, that the child must be brought up in an atmosphere of severity. The God of the Old Testament--the Deity whose _nimbus_ overshadows the life of the West--combines in his own person the functions of law-giver, governor, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. His subjects are a race of vile offenders, whose every impulse is bad, and whose nature turns towards evil as inevitably as a plant turns towards the light. As he cannot trust them to know good from evil, he has had to provide them with an elaborate code of law; and he has had to take for granted that, left to themselves, they will break his commandments, and find pleasure in doing so. From the very outset, then, his attitude towards them has been one of suspicion and rising anger. He is always on the look-out for disobedience, and he is ready to chastise the offender almost before he has had time to commit the offence. His pupils, brought up in an atmosphere of suspicion, and taught from their earliest days to disbelieve in and condemn themselves, can scarcely be blamed for living _down_ to the evil reputation which they have unfortunately gained. To persuade a man that he is a miserable sinner is to go some way towards leading him into the path of sin. Systematic distrust paralyses and demoralises those who live under it, and so tends to justify the cruelty into which it too readily develops. The penalties which God has attached to the sins which he may almost be said to have provoked Man to commit, are so terrible and unjust that if the fear of them has not robbed life of all its sunshine, the reason is that their very horror has numbed Man's imagination, and made it impossible for him even to begin to picture to himself their lurid gloom.