But consider what a gulf there still is between the idea of two substances and that of the divine nature, between the incomprehensible idea of the influence of our soul upon our body and the idea of the influence of God upon every living creature.  The ideas of creation, destruction, ubiquity, eternity, almighty power, those of the divine attributes—­these are all ideas so confused and obscure that few men succeed in grasping them; yet there is nothing obscure about them to the common people, because they do not understand them in the least; how then should they present themselves in full force, that is to say in all their obscurity, to the young mind which is still occupied with the first working of the senses, and fails to realise anything but what it handles?  In vain do the abysses of the Infinite open around us, a child does not know the meaning of fear; his weak eyes cannot gauge their depths.  To children everything is infinite, they cannot assign limits to anything; not that their measure is so large, but because their understanding is so small.  I have even noticed that they place the infinite rather below than above the dimensions known to them.  They judge a distance to be immense rather by their feet than by their eyes; infinity is bounded for them, not so much by what they can see, but how far they can go.  If you talk to them of the power of God, they will think he is nearly as strong as their father.  As their own knowledge is in everything the standard by which they judge of what is possible, they always picture what is described to them as rather smaller than what they know.  Such are the natural reasonings of an ignorant and feeble mind.  Ajax was afraid to measure his strength against Achilles, yet he challenged Jupiter to combat, for he knew Achilles and did not know Jupiter.  A Swiss peasant thought himself the richest man alive; when they tried to explain to him what a king was, he asked with pride, “Has the king got a hundred cows on the high pastures?”

I am aware that many of my readers will be surprised to find me tracing the course of my scholar through his early years without speaking to him of religion.  At fifteen he will not even know that he has a soul, at eighteen even he may not be ready to learn about it.  For if he learns about it too soon, there is the risk of his never really knowing anything about it.

If I had to depict the most heart-breaking stupidity, I would paint a pedant teaching children the catechism; if I wanted to drive a child crazy I would set him to explain what he learned in his catechism.  You will reply that as most of the Christian doctrines are mysteries, you must wait, not merely till the child is a man, but till the man is dead, before the human mind will understand those doctrines.  To that I reply, that there are mysteries which the heart of man can neither conceive nor believe, and I see no use in teaching them to children, unless you want to make liars of them.  Moreover, I assert that to admit that there are mysteries, you must at least realise that they are incomprehensible, and children are not even capable of this conception!  At an age when everything is mysterious, there are no mysteries properly so-called.