n certain cases--a doctrine
which, though entertained by many well-meaning persons, strikes a fatal
blow at all confidence in the veracity of men; for whenever we know of any
persons that they entertain this idea, it is never afterwards safe to trust
in what they say, since we never can know that the case in hand is not,
for some reason unknown to us, one of those which justify a resort to
falsehood.

But to return to the case of the children that are under the training of
parents who will not themselves, under any circumstances, falsify their
word--that is, will never utter words that do not represent actual reality
in any of the wrongful ways. Such children can not be expected to know of
themselves, or to learn without instruction, what the wrongful ways are,
and they never do learn until they have made many failures. Many, it is
true, learn when they are very young. Many evince a remarkable tenderness
of conscience in respect to this as well as to all their other duties, so
fast as they are taught them. And some become so faithful and scrupulous in
respect to truth, at so early an age, that their parents quite forget the
progressive steps by which they advanced at the beginning. We find many a
mother who will say of her boy that he never told an untruth, but we do not
find any man who will say of himself, that when he was a boy he never told
one.

_Imaginings and Rememberings easily mistaken for each other_.

But besides the complicated character of the general subject, as it
presents itself to the minds of children--that is, the intricacy to them of
the question when there must be a strict correspondence between the words
spoken and an actual reality, and when they may rightly represent mere
images or fancies of the mind--there is another great difficulty in their
way, one that is very little considered and often, indeed, not at all
understood by parents--and that is, that in the earliest years the
distinction between realities and mere fancies of the mind is very
indistinctly drawn. Even in our minds the two things are often confounded.
We often have to pause and think in order to decide whether a mental
perception of which we are conscious is a remembrance of a reality, or a
revival of some image formed at some previous time, perhaps remote, by a
vivid description which we have read or heard, or even by our own fancy.
"Is that really so, or did I dream it?" How often is such a question heard.
And persons have be