“We drive into Truro once a week to market, and Edward goes in on messages, and for some mathematical training to the clergyman there.  I should like to find some aequalis to make a companion for him.  He is English enough for anything, but I am afraid of his not keeping his appropriate boyishness if he is always hanging about with an old and serious valetudinarian like myself.  But I don’t like any of the families hereabouts, and can’t get to know the ones I do like well enough to find some one to my mind.  I am very fastidious about my selection.”

And again: 

“Our Sundays are very peaceful days in this lazy land of the West.  We go to church—­a very necessary part of an Englishman’s education—­lunch immediately, and then loaf on the downs over the creek, and I read to him till he yawns or goes to sleep; then we both play with Flora among the heather—­or botanize—­and go to church again.”

This letter led me, knowing as I did how pronounced Arthur’s views were, to ask him why he took Edward to church, and the line that he intended to take with him generally with regard to religious matters.

“I have given the question,” he writes, “a great deal of thought, and feel my way fairly clear now.  Ideally, as an experiment, I should like to tell a boy nothing about religion—­teach him merely his moral duty—­till he is of age; then put the Bible into his hands.  There would be, of course, a great deal—­the ’purely mythological or Herodotean element,’ as Strauss calls it—­and the miraculous element generally, that he would probably at first reject; but if he was of an appreciative nature—­and I am presupposing that, because I don’t think the theory of education is for the apathetic and unsensitive—­he would see, I believe, not only the extraordinary sublimity of language and expression, but the unparalleled audacity and magnificence of thought and aspiration.  That he would realize the points in which these conceptions were wild, deficient, or childish, would not blind him, I think, to the grandeur of the other side.

“As a matter of fact, we mix up moral duty with intellectual and spiritual so clumsily, and force it so inopportunely and immaturely upon our children, that if in later years questionings begin to arise, or complications in any part of life, the smash that follows is terrific:  the whole thing goes by the board.

“For instance:  many a man who undergoes a moral conversion will reject his whole intellectual growth angrily and contemptuously as savoring of the times of vanity.  In my scheme such a waste would be impossible; the two would be on different planes and not inextricably intertwined.

“Besides, I think that young men suffer terribly from the shock inflicted on their affection and traditional sentiment.

“They grow up with certain stereotyped conceptions on religious subjects, certain dogmas imperfectly understood but crudely imagined and gradually crystallized into some uncouth shape.