pe for the future.
To allow it to be done merely that children may grow up in the
stereotyped mould, is simply to perpetuate in new generations the
present thick-sighted and dead-heavy state of our spirits. It is to do
one's best to keep society for an indefinite time sapped by hollow and
void professions, instead of being nourished by sincerity and
whole-heartedness.[25]

Nor here, more than elsewhere in this chapter, are we trying to turn
the family into a field of ceaseless polemic. No one who knows the stuff
of which life is made, the pressure of material cares, the play of
passion, the busy energising of the affections, the anxieties of health,
and all the other solicitudes, generous or ignoble, which naturally
absorb the days of the common multitude of men--is likely to think such
an ideal either desirable or attainable. Least of all is it desirable
to give character a strong set in this polemical direction in its most
plastic days. The controversial and denying humour is a different thing
from the habit of being careful to know what we mean by the words we
use, and what evidence there is for the beliefs we hold. It is possible
to foster the latter habit without creating the former. And it is
possible to bring up the young in dissent from the common beliefs around
them, or in indifference to them, without engendering any of that pride
in eccentricity for its own sake, which is so little likeable a quality
in either young or old. There is, however, little risk of an excess in
this direction. The young tremble even more than the old at the
penalties of nonconformity. There is more excuse for them in this. Such
penalties in their case usually come closer and in more stringent forms.
Neither have they had time to find out, as their elders have or ought to
have found out, what a very moderate degree of fortitude enables us to
bear up against social disapproval, when we know that it is nothing more
than the common form of convention.

The great object is to keep the minds of the young as open as possible
in the matter of religion; to breed in them a certain simplicity and
freedom from self-consciousness, in finding themselves without the
religious beliefs and customs of those around them; to make them regard
differences in these respects as very natural and ordinary matters,
susceptible of an easy explanation. It is of course inevitable, unless
they are brought up in cloistered seclusion, that they should hear much
of