ion coming
to eat them up. But for all that, I want to beg you to handle some of
these points, which are so involved in the creed of a good many
well-intentioned persons that you cannot separate them from it without
picking their whole belief to pieces, with more thought for them than you
might think at first they were entitled to. I have no doubt you
gentlemen are as wise as serpents, and I want you to be as harmless as
doves.

The Young Girl who sits by me has, I know, strong religious instincts.
Instead of setting her out to ask all sorts of questions, I would rather,
if I had my way, encourage her to form a habit of attending to religious
duties, and make the most of the simple faith in which she was bred. I
think there are a good many questions young persons may safely postpone
to a more convenient season; and as this young creature is overworked, I
hate to have her excited by the fever of doubt which it cannot be denied
is largely prevailing in our time.

I know you must have looked on our other young friend, who has devoted
himself to the sublimest of the sciences, with as much interest as I do.
When I was a little girl I used to write out a line of Young's as a copy
in my writing-book,

"An undevout astronomer is mad";

but I do not now feel quite so sure that the contemplation of all the
multitude of remote worlds does not tend to weaken the idea of a personal
Deity. It is not so much that nebular theory which worries me, when I
think about this subject, as a kind of bewilderment when I try to
conceive of a consciousness filling all those frightful blanks of space
they talk about. I sometimes doubt whether that young man worships
anything but the stars. They tell me that many young students of science
like him never see the inside of a church. I cannot help wishing they
did. It humanizes people, quite apart from any higher influence it
exerts upon them. One reason, perhaps, why they do not care to go to
places of worship is that they are liable to hear the questions they know
something about handled in sermons by those who know very much less about
them. And so they lose a great deal. Almost every human being, however
vague his notions of the Power addressed, is capable of being lifted and
solemnized by the exercise of public prayer. When I was a young girl we
travelled in Europe, and I visited Ferney with my parents; and I remember
we all stopped before a chapel, and I read upon its front,