ism?"
"No, my friend, my children don't learn their Catechism." "So pious a
mother!" I exclaimed; "I can't understand. And why don't your children
learn their Catechism?" "In order that they may one day believe it. I
wish to make Christians of them."[170]

Since Rousseau's day this may be said to be the general attitude of
nearly all thinkers who have given attention to the question, even
though they may not have viewed it psychologically. It is an attitude by
no means confined to those who are anxious that children should grow up
to be genuine Christians, but is common to all who consider that the
main point is that children should grow up to be, at all events, genuine
men and women. "I do not think," writes John Stuart Mill, in 1868,
"there should be any _authoritative_ teaching at all on such subjects. I
think parents ought to point out to their children, when the children
begin to question them or to make observations of their own, the various
opinions on such subjects, and what the parents themselves think the
most powerful reasons for and against. Then, if the parents show a
strong feeling of the importance of truth, and also of the difficulty of
attaining it, it seems to me that young people's minds will be
sufficiently prepared to regard popular opinion or the opinion of those
about them with respectful tolerance, and may be safely left to form
definite conclusions in the course of mature life."[171]

There are few among us who have not suffered from too early familiarity
with the Bible and the conceptions of religion. Even for a man of really
strong and independent intellect it may be many years before the
precociously dulled feelings become fresh again, before the fetters of
routine fall off, and he is enabled at last to approach the Bible with
fresh receptivity and to realize, for the first time in his life, the
treasures of art and beauty and divine wisdom it contains. But for most
that moment never comes round. For the majority the religious education
of the school as effectually seals the Bible for life as the classical
education of the college seals the great authors of Greece and Rome for
life; no man opens his school books again when he has once left school.
Those who read Greek and Latin for love have not usually come out of
universities, and there is surely a certain significance in the fact
that the children of one's secularist friends are so often found to
become devout church-goers, while, accordi