[Footnote 24:  The reader remembers how Wolmar, the atheistic husband of Julie in Rousseau’s New Heloisa, is distressed by the chagrin which his unbelief inflicts on the piety of his wife.  ’He told me that he had been frequently tempted to make a feint of yielding to her arguments, and to pretend, for the sake of calming her sentiments that he did not really hold.  But such baseness of soul is too far from him.  Without for a moment imposing on Julie, such dissimulation would only have been a new torment to her.  The good faith, the frankness, the union of heart, that console for so many troubles, would have been eclipsed between them.  Was it by lessening his wife’s esteem for him that he could reassure her?  Instead of using any disguise, he tells her sincerely what he thinks, but he says it in so simple a tone, etc.—­V. v. 126.]

[Footnote 25:  The common reason alleged by freethinkers for having their children brought up in the orthodox ways is that, if they were not so brought up, they would be looked on as contaminating agents whom other parents would take care to keep away from the companionship of their children.  This excuse may have had some force at another time.  At the present day, when belief is so weak, we doubt whether the young would be excluded from the companionship of their equals in age, merely because they had not been trained in some of the conventional shibboleths.  Even if it were so, there are certainly some ways of compensating for the disadvantages of exclusion from orthodox circles.

I have heard of a more interesting reason; namely, that the historic position of the young, relatively to the time in which they are placed, is in some sort falsified, unless they have gone through a training in the current beliefs of their age:  unless they have undergone that, they miss, as it were, some of the normal antecedents.  I do not think this plea will hold good.  However desirable it may be that the young should know all sorts of erroneous beliefs and opinions as products of the past, it can hardly be in any degree desirable that they should take them for truths.  If there were no other objection, there would be this, that the disturbance and waste of force involved in shaking off in their riper years the erroneous opinions which had been instilled into them in childhood, would more than counter-balance any advantages, whatever their precise nature may be, to be derived from having shared in their own proper persons the ungrounded notions of others.]

[Footnote 26:  Miss Martineau has an excellent protest against ’the dereliction of principle shown in supposing that any “Cause” can be of so much importance as fidelity to truth, or can be important at all otherwise than in its relation to truth which wants vindicating.  It reminds me of an incident which happened when I was in America, at the time of the severest trials of the Abolitionists.  A pastor from the southern States lamented to a brother