-out for disobedience, and he
is ready to chastise the offender almost before he has had time to
commit the offence. His pupils, brought up in an atmosphere of
suspicion, and taught from their earliest days to disbelieve in and
condemn themselves, can scarcely be blamed for living _down_ to the
evil reputation which they have unfortunately gained. To persuade a
man that he is a miserable sinner is to go some way towards leading
him into the path of sin. Systematic distrust paralyses and
demoralises those who live under it, and so tends to justify the
cruelty into which it too readily develops. The penalties which God
has attached to the sins which he may almost be said to have provoked
Man to commit, are so terrible and unjust that if the fear of them
has not robbed life of all its sunshine, the reason is that their
very horror has numbed Man's imagination, and made it impossible for
him even to begin to picture to himself their lurid gloom.

In the West men have loyally striven to reproduce towards their
children the supposed attitude of their God of Wrath towards
themselves. From very tender years the child has been brought up in
an atmosphere of displeasure and mistrust. His spontaneous activities
have been repressed as evil. His every act has been looked upon with
suspicion. He has been ever on the defensive, like a prisoner in the
dock. He has been ever on the alert for a sentence of doom. He has
been cuffed, kicked, caned, flogged, shut up in the dark, fed on
bread and water, sent hungry to bed, subjected to a variety of
cruel and humiliating punishments, terrified with idle--but to him
appalling--threats. In his misery he has shed a whole ocean of
tears,--the salt and bitter tears of hopeless grief and helpless
anger, not the soul-refreshing tears which are sometimes distilled
from sorrow by the sunshine of love. But of all the cruelties to
which he has been subjected, the most devilish has been that of
making him believe in his own criminality, in the corruption of his
innocent heart. In the deadly shade of that chilling cloud, the
flower of his opening life has too often withered before it has had
time to expand. For what is most cruel in cruelty is its tendency to
demoralise its victims, especially those who are of tender years--to
harden them, to brutalise them, to make them stubborn and secretive,
to make them shifty and deceitful, to throw them back upon
themselves, to shut them up within themselves, to qu