icion of
vulgar fraud, and seems associated with a strange secret desire to
attract notice. Ecstatics, seers of visions, and devout fasting
girls who eat on the sly, often belong to this category.

EARLY SENTIMENTS.

The child is passionately attached to his home, then to his school,
his country, and religion; yet how entirely the particular home,
school, country, and religion are a matter of accident! He is born
prepared to attach himself as a climbing plant is naturally disposed
to climb, the kind of stick being of little importance. The models
upon whom the child or boy forms himself are the boys or men whom he
has been thrown amongst, and whom from some incidental cause he may
have learned to love and respect. The every-day utterances, the
likes and dislikes of his parents, their social and caste feelings,
their religious persuasions are absorbed by him; their views or
those of his teachers become assimilated and made his own. If a
mixed marriage should have taken place, and the father should die
while the children are yet young, and if a question arise between
the executors of his will and the mother as to the religious
education of the children, application is made as a matter of course
to the Court of Chancery, who decide that the children shall be
brought up as Protestants or as Catholics as the case may be, or the
sons one way and the daughters the other; and they are, and usually
remain so afterwards when free to act for themselves.

It is worthy of note that many of the deaf-mutes who are first
taught to communicate freely with others after they had passed the
period of boyhood, and are asked about their religious feelings up
to that time, are reported to tell the same story. They say that the
meaning of the church service whither they had accompanied their
parents, and of the kneeling to pray, had been absolutely
unintelligible, and a standing puzzle to them. The ritual touched no
chord in their untaught natures that responded in unison. Very much
of what we fondly look upon as a natural religious sentiment is
purely traditional.

The word religion may fairly be applied to any group of sentiments
or persuasions that are strong enough to bind us to do that which
we intellectually may acknowledge to be our duty, and the possession
of some form of religion in this larger sense of the word is of the
utmost importance to moral stability. The sentiments must be strong
enough to make us ashamed at th