y particular effect upon my mind. As I grew up,
the obsolete exuviae of doctrine dropped off my mind like dead leaves
from a tree. They could not get any vital hold in an atmosphere of
tolerable enlightenment. Why should we fear the attempt to instil these
fragments of decayed formulae into the minds of children of tender age?
Might we not be certain that they would vanish of themselves? They are
superfluous, no doubt, but too futile to be of any lasting importance.
I remember that, when the first Education Act was being discussed,
mention was made of a certain Jew who not only sent his son to a
Christian school, but insisted upon his attending all the lessons. He
had paid his fees, he said, for education in the Gospels among other
things, and he meant to have his money's worth. "But your son," it was
urged, "will become a Christian." "I," he replied, "will take good care
of that at home." Was not the Jew a man of sense? Can we suppose that
the mechanical repetition of a few barren phrases will do either harm
or good? As the child develops he will, we may hope, remember his
multiplication table, and forget his fragments of the Athanasian Creed.
Let the wheat and tares be planted together, and trust to the superior
vitality of the more valuable plant. The sentiment might be expressed
sentimentally as easily as cynically. We may urge, like many sceptics
of the last century, that Christianity should be kept "for the use of
the poor," and renounced in the esoteric creed of the educated. Or we
may urge the literary and aesthetic beauty of the old training, and wish
it to be preserved to discipline the imagination, though we may reject
its value as a historical statement of fact.

The audience which I am addressing has, I presume, made up its mind
upon such views. They come too late. It might have been a good thing,
had it been possible, to effect the transition from old to new without
a violent convulsion: good, if Christian conceptions had been slowly
developed into more simple forms; if the beautiful symbols had been
retained till they could be impregnated with a new meaning; and if the
new teaching of science and philosophy had gradually percolated into
the ancient formulae without causing a disruption. Possibly the
Protestant Reformation was a misfortune, and Erasmus saw the truth more
clearly than Luther. I cannot go into might-have-beens. We have to deal
with facts. A conspiracy of silence is impossible about matters wh