Nor here, more than elsewhere in this chapter, are we trying to turn the family into a field of ceaseless polemic.  No one who knows the stuff of which life is made, the pressure of material cares, the play of passion, the busy energising of the affections, the anxieties of health, and all the other solicitudes, generous or ignoble, which naturally absorb the days of the common multitude of men—­is likely to think such an ideal either desirable or attainable.  Least of all is it desirable to give character a strong set in this polemical direction in its most plastic days.  The controversial and denying humour is a different thing from the habit of being careful to know what we mean by the words we use, and what evidence there is for the beliefs we hold.  It is possible to foster the latter habit without creating the former.  And it is possible to bring up the young in dissent from the common beliefs around them, or in indifference to them, without engendering any of that pride in eccentricity for its own sake, which is so little likeable a quality in either young or old.  There is, however, little risk of an excess in this direction.  The young tremble even more than the old at the penalties of nonconformity.  There is more excuse for them in this.  Such penalties in their case usually come closer and in more stringent forms.  Neither have they had time to find out, as their elders have or ought to have found out, what a very moderate degree of fortitude enables us to bear up against social disapproval, when we know that it is nothing more than the common form of convention.

The great object is to keep the minds of the young as open as possible in the matter of religion; to breed in them a certain simplicity and freedom from self-consciousness, in finding themselves without the religious beliefs and customs of those around them; to make them regard differences in these respects as very natural and ordinary matters, susceptible of an easy explanation.  It is of course inevitable, unless they are brought up in cloistered seclusion, that they should hear much of the various articles of belief which we are anxious that they should not share.  They will ask you whether the story of the creation of the universe is true; whether such and such miracles really happened; whether this person or that actually lived, and actually did all that he is said to have done.  Plainly the right course is to tell them, without any agitation or excess or vehemence or too much elaboration, the simple truth in such matters exactly as it appears to one’s own mind.  There is no reason why they should not know the best parts of the Bible as well as they know the Iliad or Herodotus.  There are many reasons why they should know them better.  But one most important condition of this is constantly overlooked by people, who like to satisfy their intellectual vanity by scepticism, and at the same time to make their comfort safe by external conformity.  If the Bible is to be taught only because it is a noble