hen I get through, perhaps, to consider as to
whether you do not agree with me the trouble with the human mind up to
the present time has not been a too great readiness to doubt: it has
been a too great inclination to believe. There has been too much of
what has been called perhaps by the time I am through you will think
miscalled faith; and there has been too little of honest, fearless,
earnest doubt. This is perfectly natural, when you consider how the
world begins, and the steps by which it advances.

Let us take as an illustration the state of mind of a child. A child at
first does not doubt, does not doubt anything. It is ready to believe
almost anything that father, mother, nurse, playmate, may say to it.
And why? In the first place it has had no experience yet of anything
but the truth being told it; and in the next place it lives in a world
where there are no canons or standards of probability. In the child-
world there are no laws, there are no impossibilities, there is nothing
in the way of anything happening. The child mind does not say, in
answer to some statement, Why, this does not seem reasonable. The
child's reason is not yet developed into any practical activity. The
child does not say, Why, this cannot be, because there is such a force
or such a law that would be contravened by it. The child knows nothing
about these forces or laws: it is a sort of a Jack- and-the-Beanstalk
world. The beanstalk can grow any number of feet over night in the
world in which the child lives. Anything is possible. If father and
mother and nurse tell the child about Santa Claus coming down the
chimney with a pack of toys on his back, it does not occur to the child
to note the fact that the chimney flue is no more than six inches in
diameter, and that Santa Claus and his pack could not possibly pass
through such an opening. All this is beyond the range or thought of the
stage of development at which the child has arrived.

So in the childhood world. As I said, anything may happen. But you will
note, beautiful, sunny, lovely as this childhood world is as a phase of
experience, as a stage of development, sweet as may be the memory of
it, yet, if the child is ever to grow to manhood, is ever to be
anything, ever to do anything, it must outgrow this Jack-and-the-
Beanstalk world, this Santa Claus world, this world in which anything
may happen, and must begin to doubt, begin to question, begin to test
things, to prove things, fin