God Bogey is a great convenience to the nursery-maid who wants to leave Fear to mind her charges and enforce her disciplines, while she goes off upon her own aims.  But indeed, the teaching of God Bogey is an outrage upon the soul of a child scarcely less dreadful than an indecent assault.  The reason rebels and is crushed under this horrible and pursuing suggestion.  Many minds never rise again from their injury.  They remain for the rest of life spiritually crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.

I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered.  He and his Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still believed in him, and who could help but hate?  I thought of him as a fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening, perpetually waiting to condemn and to “strike me dead”; his flames as ready as a grill-room fire.  He was over me and about my feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic.  When I was still only a child of thirteen, by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this Lie out of my mind, and for many years, until I came to see that God himself had done this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to me but the hideous scar in my heart where a fearful demon had been.

I see about me to-day many dreadful moral and mental cripples with this bogey God of the nursery-maid, with his black, insane revenges, still living like a horrible parasite in their hearts in the place where God should be.  They are afraid, afraid, afraid; they dare not be kindly to formal sinners, they dare not abandon a hundred foolish observances; they dare not look at the causes of things.  They are afraid of sunshine, of nakedness, of health, of adventure, of science, lest that old watching spider take offence.  The voice of the true God whispers in their hearts, echoes in speech and writing, but they avert themselves, fear-driven.  For the true God has no lash of fear.  And how the foul-minded bigot, with his ill-shaven face, his greasy skin, his thick, gesticulating hands, his bellowings and threatenings, loves to reap this harvest of fear the ignorant cunning of the nursery girl has sown for him!  How he loves the importance of denunciation, and, himself a malignant cripple, to rally the company of these crippled souls to persecute and destroy the happy children of God! . . .

Christian priestcraft turns a dreadful face to children.  There is a real wickedness of the priest that is different from other wickedness, and that affects a reasonable mind just as cruelty and strange perversions of instinct affect it.  Let a former Archbishop of Canterbury speak for me.  This that follows is the account given by Archbishop Tait in a debate in the Upper House of Convocation (July 3rd, 1877) of one of the publications of a certain society of the holy cross: