and lamentable.  They are made to retain the phrase; no explanation is offered, and, if sought for, shirked.  And so it resolves itself into a wonder, dimly conscious of profanity, as to whether Tim Jones the carpenter with the wooden leg, will have a new one; and whether papa will have the wart on his cheek or not, and how he will look without it.  Of course these are elementary speculations; but they are true ones, for they were literally my own at an early age.  Such speculations are certainly better avoided; and, indeed, all early speculation on dogmatic questions at all is better not suggested.

“The Holy Spirit.  When I was a child, the dogma of the Trinity caused me the most terrible perplexity, which was all the more distressing because it was shrouded in a kind of awful remoteness, by the reticence, the bewildered and serious reticence, with which my elders approached the subject; but besides the identification with and the appearance as a dove, the term Comforter—­and Paraclete, as some of the hymn-books had it—­the expression, ’proceeding from the Father and the Son,’ mystified me completely.  The three aspects of the central Unity—­God as Creator, as the Ideal of Humanity, as the Inspirer of it—­is a very subtle and advanced idea; yet it is maintained that symbols should be taught first, before they are understood, so that gradually the growing mind should come to realize and appropriate what it already knows.

“This is a very sophistical and ingenious defence.  But it seems to break down in practice.  How many people reject the idea when realized, simply, as I hold, on account of the grotesque and fantastic conceptions that the immature and overstrained mind collected about it—­conceptions which no amount of reason is later able to overcome!  And how many never grow to realize it at all!  Besides, even of those who do, it is admitted that almost all need a reconstruction some time, a breaking-up of what would otherwise be crystallized formulae, a conversion, in fact.  Have you ever seen a high nature grow up from boyhood to manhood in undisturbed possession of a vital faith?  I confess that I never have!

“I can not help feeling a dismal possibility, that future students of religion, looking over a nineteenth century ‘child’s catechism,’ will laugh, or rather drop their hands in blind amazement—­for in truth it is no laughing matter—­at the metaphysical conglomerate of dogma, driven like a nail into the heads of careless and innocent children (such, at least, as have had, like myself, the advantage of a religious bringing-up), just as we turn over with regretful amusement and pathetic wonder the doctrinal farrago of a Buddhist or a Hindu.

“And all this because people can’t wait.  He must have a ’dogmatic basis,’ they say, the sinew and bone of religion, when the poor child’s head can not even take in their ideas, let alone his emotion appreciate them.