Yes, my friends, let us teach these things to our children, to all children.  Let us tell them to go to the Light, and see their Heavenly Father’s works manifested, and know that they are, as He is, Light.  I say, let us teach our children freely and boldly to know these things, and grow up in the light of them.  Let us leave those to sneer at the triumphs of modern science, who trade upon the ignorance and the cowardice of mankind, and who say, ’Provided you make a child religious, what matter if he does fancy the sun goes round the earth?  Why occupy his head, perhaps disturb his simple faith, by giving him a smattering of secular science?’

Specious enough is that argument:  but shortsighted more than enough.  It is of a piece with the wisdom which shrinks from telling children that God is love, lest they should not be sufficiently afraid of Him; which forbids their young hearts to expand freely towards their fellow-creatures:  which puts into their mouths the watchwords of sects and parties, and thinks to keep them purer Christians by making them Pharisees from the cradle.

My friends, we may try to train up children as Pharisees:  but we shall discover, after twenty years of mistaken labour, that we have only made them Sadducees.  The path to infidelity in manhood is superstition in youth.  You may tell the child never to mind whether the sun moves round the earth or not:  but the day will come when he will mind in spite of you; and if he then finds that you have deceived him, that you have even left him in wilful ignorance, all your moral influence over him is gone, and all your religious lessons probably gone also.  So true is it, that lies are by their very nature self-destructive.  For all truth is of God; and no lie is of the truth, and therefore no lie can possibly help God or God’s work in any human soul.  For as the child ceases to respect his teachers he ceases to respect what they believe.  His innate instinct of truth and honour, his innate longing to believe, to look up to some one better than himself, have been shocked and shaken once and for all; and it may require long years, and sad years, to bring him back to the faith of his childhood.  Again I say it, we must not fear to tell the children the whole truth; in these days above all others which the world has yet seen.  You cannot prevent their finding out the truth:  then for our own sake, let us, their authorized teachers, be the first to tell it them.  Let them in after life connect the thought of their clergyman, their schoolmaster, their church, with their first lessons in the free and right use of their God-given faculties, with their first glimpses into the boundless mysteries of art and science.  Let them learn from us to regard all their powers as their Heavenly Father’s gift; all art, all science, all discoveries, as their Heavenly Father’s revelation to men.  Let them learn from us not to shrink from the light, not to peep at it by stealth, but to claim it as their birthright; to welcome it, to live and grow in it to the full stature of men—­rational, free, Christian English men.  This, I believe, must be the method of a truly Protestant education.