also the Edinburg Review, Oct.-Jan., 1836-7.] The power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity.  But if you want to see with your own eyes and close at hand what timely inoculation will accomplish, look at the English.  Here is a nation favored before all others by nature; endowed, more than all others, with discernment, intelligence, power of judgment, strength of character; look at them, abased and made ridiculous, beyond all others, by their stupid ecclesiastical superstition, which appears amongst their other abilities like a fixed idea or monomania.  For this they have to thank the circumstance that education is in the hands of the clergy, whose endeavor it is to impress all the articles of belief, at the earliest age, in a way that amounts to a kind of paralysis of the brain; this in its turn expresses itself all their life in an idiotic bigotry, which makes otherwise most sensible and intelligent people amongst them degrade themselves so that one can’t make head or tail of them.  If you consider how essential to such a masterpiece is inoculation in the tender age of childhood, the missionary system appears no longer only as the acme of human importunity, arrogance and impertinence, but also as an absurdity, if it doesn’t confine itself to nations which are still in their infancy, like Caffirs, Hottentots, South Sea Islanders, etc.  Amongst these races it is successful; but in India, the Brahmans treat the discourses of the missionaries with contemptuous smiles of approbation, or simply shrug their shoulders.  And one may say generally that the proselytizing efforts of the missionaries in India, in spite of the most advantageous facilities, are, as a rule, a failure.  An authentic report in the Vol.  XXI. of the Asiatic Journal (1826) states that after so many years of missionary activity not more than three hundred living converts were to be found in the whole of India, where the population of the English possessions alone comes to one hundred and fifteen millions; and at the same time it is admitted that the Christian converts are distinguished for their extreme immorality.  Three hundred venal and bribed souls out of so many millions!  There is no evidence that things have gone better with Christianity in India since then, in spite of the fact that the missionaries are now trying, contrary to stipulation and in schools exclusively designed for secular English instruction, to work upon the children’s minds as they please, in order to smuggle in Christianity; against which the Hindoos are most jealously on their guard.  As I have said, childhood is the time to sow the seeds of belief, and not manhood; more especially where an earlier faith has taken root.  An acquired conviction such as is feigned by adults is, as a rule, only the mask for some kind of personal interest.  And it is the feeling that this is almost bound to be the case which makes a man who has changed his religion in