es, for they were literally my own at an early
age. Such speculations are certainly better avoided; and, indeed,
all early speculation on dogmatic questions at all is better not
suggested.

"_The Holy Spirit_. When I was a child, the dogma of the Trinity caused
me the most terrible perplexity, which was all the more distressing
because it was shrouded in a kind of awful remoteness, by the
reticence, the bewildered and serious reticence, with which my elders
approached the subject; but besides the identification with and the
appearance as a dove, the term Comforter--and Paraclete, as some of
the hymn-books had it--the expression, '_proceeding from_ the
Father and the Son,' mystified me completely. The three aspects of
the central Unity--God as Creator, as the Ideal of Humanity, as
the Inspirer of it--is a very subtle and advanced idea; yet it is
maintained that symbols should be taught first, before they are
understood, so that gradually the growing mind should come to realize
and appropriate what it already knows.

"This is a very sophistical and ingenious defence. But it seems to
break down in practice. How many people reject the idea when
realized, simply, as I hold, on account of the grotesque and
fantastic conceptions that the immature and overstrained mind
collected about it--conceptions which no amount of _reason_ is later
able to overcome! And how many never grow to realize it at all!
Besides, even of those who do, it is admitted that almost all need a
reconstruction _some time_, a breaking-up of what would otherwise be
crystallized formulae, a _conversion_, in fact. Have you ever seen
a high nature grow up from boyhood to manhood in undisturbed
possession of a vital faith? I confess that I never have!

"I can not help feeling a dismal possibility, that future students of
religion, looking over a nineteenth century 'child's catechism,' will
laugh, or rather drop their hands in blind amazement--for in truth it
is no laughing matter--at the metaphysical conglomerate of dogma,
driven like a nail into the heads of careless and innocent children
(such, at least, as have had, like myself, the advantage of a
religious bringing-up), just as we turn over with regretful amusement
and pathetic wonder the doctrinal farrago of a Buddhist or a Hindu.

"And all this because people can't wait. He must have a 'dogmatic
basis,' they say, the sinew and bone of religion, when the poor
child's head can not even take in their ide