em as their parents did; they see no other way to use them, and so they
leave them unopened on their tables.

An intelligent lady said to me some time since: "My children don't know
anything about the Bible. I cannot read it to them, for I do not know what
to say when they ask me questions. I no longer believe as I was taught
about it: what, then, can I teach them?"

A confession which, if all parents were as frank, would have to be made in
many other households. Where it is still used in home readings, it is, in
hosts of houses, with the pain which mothers know when their children's
honest questions cannot be as honestly answered.

Such a state of things is sad and dangerous. Unless some way be found to
read these books without equivocation, they will gradually cease to be
used in home instruction, and the coming generations will grow up without
their holy influence. This state of things ought not to have been brought
upon us. The reverent reading of the Bible alone would never have led us
into such straits. It is the old story of all human reverence. That which
we revere, we exaggerate. Glamor gathers around it. The symbol is
identified with the spiritual reality. The image becomes an idol. The
wonderful thing becomes a fetish. So we end in an irrational reverence of
that which is worthy of a real and rational reverence. Then we have a
superstition. Superstition always results in destroying the rightful
belief of which it is the exaggeration and distortion.

This is the common story of superstition, from the totemism of savage
tribes and the image-worship of semi-civilized peoples on to the
heathenism of the Mass. Men who felt the reality of a mystic communion
with Christ, of which the Supper of the Lord was the symbol,--who felt the
strengthening of their characters as their thoughts fed upon the words and
life of Jesus,--naturally came to speak of the sacrament in terms of awe,
which magnified the mystery, until at last they bowed down before the
veritable body and blood of Christ, and trembled with fear as the tinkling
of the silver bell announced that the priest was bringing God down into a
wafer! They had really heard God speaking to them through the sacrament;
and this never could have done them harm. But when they tried to express
what they felt, they exaggerated and distorted the simple symbol of the
Infinite Presence, identified it with the spiritual reality, and set up a
Christian idol, a civilized fetish,