holding up in his sermon as ideal types
of character, to be imitated and reverenced, and for whom he has in
his young soul the most undisguised and wholesome loathing.

"Of course it is a misconception--but whose fault? Do you blame a
tender wayward mind for not having a philosophical grasp of the
ideal? Whereas, if you weren't ashamed to let him understand that the
young rascal who is always in mischief and behindhand with his work,
but who is yet affectionate, generous, and pure, though he is
quarrelsome and not particular in his talk, is a far finer fellow,
both in point of view of this world and the next than the smooth-faced
prig who thanks his Lord that he is not as this publican.

"_The Resurrection of the Body_. Intelligent people who are also
reverent and good, in their anxiety to be faithful to the letter of
dogma as well as to its spirit, prefer to cling to these words rather
than confess, what is quite certain, that an absolutely literal
sense was attached to these words by the framers of them; they were
scientifically ignorant of the fact that matter is disintegrated and
disseminated so rigorously that there may be component particles of
a hundred of his predecessors in one human body now existent. No
symbolical _interpretation_ of the words nowadays will account for
their being the expression of what was erroneously believed to be
a possibility; and to say, as I have heard a Church dignitary of
poetical and metaphysical mind say, that the phrase means that the
power resident in every individuality to assimilate to itself certain
particles will not desert the individuality even after death, but
will continue to assert itself in some way--possibly in a spiritual
or unmaterial manner--to say this, is to state a strong scientific
probability; but, after all, it is only a probability at best, and is
certainly not what the words as they stand in the Creed were meant
to mean by the persons who framed them and the first worshippers
who repeated them. In the case of children the effect is at once
laughable and lamentable. They are made to retain the phrase; no
explanation is offered, and, if sought for, shirked. And so it
resolves itself into a wonder, dimly conscious of profanity, as to
whether Tim Jones the carpenter with the wooden leg, will have a new
one; and whether papa will have the wart on his cheek or not, and how
he will look without it. Of course these are elementary speculations;
but they are true on