"Has it never occurred to you, who, in denying all innate perceptions
as well as ideas, have passed on to deductions from which poor Locke,
humble Christian that he was, would have shrunk in dismay,--has it never
occurred to you as a wonderful fact, that the easiest thing in the
world to teach a child is that which seems to metaphysical schoolmen the
abstrusest of all problems? Read all those philosophers wrangling about
a First Cause, deciding on what are miracles, and then again deciding
that such miracles cannot be; and when one has answered another, and
left in the crucible of wisdom a caput mortuum of ignorance, then turn
your eyes, and look at the infant praying to the invisible God at his
mother's knees. This idea, so miraculously abstract, of a Power the
infant has never seen, that cannot be symbolled forth and explained to
him by the most erudite sage,--a Power, nevertheless, that watches
over him, that hears him, that sees him, that will carry him across the
grave, that will enable him to live on forever,--this double mystery
of a Divinity and of a Soul, the infant learns with the most facile
readiness, at the first glimpse of his reasoning faculty. Before you can
teach him a rule in addition, before you can venture to drill him into
his horn-book, he leaps, with one intuitive spring of all his ideas,
to the comprehension of the truths which are only incomprehensible to
blundering sages! And you, as you stand before me, dare not say, 'Let
the child pray for me no more!' But will the Creator accept the child's
prayer for the man who refuses prayer for himself? Take my advice, pray!
And in this counsel I do not overstep my province. I speak not as a
preacher, but as a physician. For health is a word that comprehends
our whole organization, and a just equilibrium of all faculties and
functions is the condition of health. As in your Lilian the equilibrium
is deranged by the over-indulgence of a spiritual mysticism which
withdraws from the nutriment of duty the essential pabulum of sober
sense, so in you the resolute negation of disciplined spiritual
communion between Thought and Divinity robs imagination of its noblest
and safest vent. Thus, from opposite extremes, you and your Lilian meet
in the same region of mist and cloud, losing sight of each other and of
the true ends of life, as her eyes only gaze on the stars and yours only
bend to the earth. Were I advising her, I should say: 'Your Creator has
placed the