“We must believe in God if we would be saved.”  This doctrine wrongly understood is the root of bloodthirsty intolerance and the cause of all the futile teaching which strikes a deadly blow at human reason by training it to cheat itself with mere words.  No doubt there is not a moment to be lost if we would deserve eternal salvation; but if the repetition of certain words suffices to obtain it, I do not see why we should not people heaven with starlings and magpies as well as with children.

The obligation of faith assumes the possibility of belief.  The philosopher who does not believe is wrong, for he misuses the reason he has cultivated, and he is able to understand the truths he rejects.  But the child who professes the Christian faith—­what does he believe?  Just what he understands; and he understands so little of what he is made to repeat that if you tell him to say just the opposite he will be quite ready to do it.  The faith of children and the faith of many men is a matter of geography.  Will they be rewarded for having been born in Rome rather than in Mecca?  One is told that Mahomet is the prophet of God and he says, “Mahomet is the prophet of God.”  The other is told that Mahomet is a rogue and he says, “Mahomet is a rogue.”  Either of them would have said just the opposite had he stood in the other’s shoes.  When they are so much alike to begin with, can the one be consigned to Paradise and the other to Hell?  When a child says he believes in God, it is not God he believes in, but Peter or James who told him that there is something called God, and he believes it after the fashion of Euripides—­

“O Jupiter, of whom I know nothing but thy name.”

[Footnote:  Plutarch.  It is thus that the tragedy of Menalippus originally began, but the clamour of the Athenians compelled Euripides to change these opening lines.]

We hold that no child who dies before the age of reason will be deprived of everlasting happiness; the Catholics believe the same of all children who have been baptised, even though they have never heard of God.  There are, therefore, circumstances in which one can be saved without belief in God, and these circumstances occur in the case of children or madmen when the human mind is incapable of the operations necessary to perceive the Godhead.  The only difference I see between you and me is that you profess that children of seven years old are able to do this and I do not think them ready for it at fifteen.  Whether I am right or wrong depends, not on an article of the creed, but on a simple observation in natural history.