I don’t deny that there was a pang in it,—­yes, a stab; but there was a prayer, too,—­the “Amen” belonged to that.—­Also, a vision of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished,—­I actually saw many specific articles,—­ curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the patterns of them at this moment,—­a brick house, I say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the window, looking on the water, two of us.—­“Male and female created He them.”—­These two were standing at the window, when a little boy that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look that I——­ ——­poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then continued.]

I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people commonly never tell, about my early recollections.  Should you like to hear them?

Should we like to hear them?—­said the schoolmistress;—­no, but we should love to.

[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very pleasant in its tone, just then.—­The four-story brick house, which had gone out like a transparency when the light behind it is quenched, glimmered again for a moment; parlor, books, busts, flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete,—­and the figures as before.]

We are waiting with eagerness, Sir,—­said the divinity-student.

[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had struck it.]

If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing—­I said—­is to know whether I can trust you with them.  It is only fair to say that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such things. I think they are fools, but perhaps you don’t all agree with me.

Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable of understanding Calvin’s “Institutes,” and nobody has honesty or sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches:  that they are as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable spiritual cowards—­that is, if they have any imagination—­that they will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal more which they teach themselves.

I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books and those who knew what was in books.  I was carefully instructed in things temporal and spiritual.  But up to a considerable maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michel Angelo to have been super-human beings.  The central doctrine of the prevalent religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper.—­ Why did I not ask? you will say.—­You don’t remember the rosy pudency of sensitive children.  The first instinctive movement of the little creatures is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and terrors.  I am uncovering one of these caches.  Do you think I was necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?