But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what effect I had produced.  First, she was a little stunned at having her argument knocked over.  Secondly, she was a little shocked at the tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.  Thirdly.——­ I don’t like to say what I thought.  Something seemed to have pleased her fancy.  Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the luxury of saying, “No!” is more than I can tell you.  I may as well mention that B.F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet for “a lady,”—­one of the boarders, he said,—­looking as if he had a secret he wished to be relieved of.

——­I continued.—­If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the end of all reason.  If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of our inheriting it.  Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair chance to become a convert to a better religion.

The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in the mind by changing the word which stands for it.——­I don’t know what you mean by “depolarizing” an idea,—­said the divinity-student.

I will tell you,—­I said.—­When a given symbol which represents a thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives to iron.  It becomes magnetic in its relations,—­it is traversed by strange forces which did not belong to it.  The word, and consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.

The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in print, consists entirely of polarized words.  Borrow one of these from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all its magnetism behind it.  Take that famous word, O’m, of the Hindoo mythology.  Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud.  What do you care for O’m?  If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words for him.  The argument for and against new translations of the Bible really turns on this.  Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a new translation.  I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,—­which we do not and cannot now, any more than a Hindoo can read the “Gayatri” as a fair man and lover of truth should do.  When society has once fairly dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.