The child is passionately attached to his home, then to his school, his country, and religion; yet how entirely the particular home, school, country, and religion are a matter of accident! He is born prepared to attach himself as a climbing plant is naturally disposed to climb, the kind of stick being of little importance. The models upon whom the child or boy forms himself are the boys or men whom he has been thrown amongst, and whom from some incidental cause he may have learned to love and respect. The every-day utterances, the likes and dislikes of his parents, their social and caste feelings, their religious persuasions are absorbed by him; their views or those of his teachers become assimilated and made his own. If a mixed marriage should have taken place, and the father should die while the children are yet young, and if a question arise between the executors of his will and the mother as to the religious education of the children, application is made as a matter of course to the Court of Chancery, who decide that the children shall be brought up as Protestants or as Catholics as the case may be, or the sons one way and the daughters the other; and they are, and usually remain so afterwards when free to act for themselves.

It is worthy of note that many of the deaf-mutes who are first taught to communicate freely with others after they had passed the period of boyhood, and are asked about their religious feelings up to that time, are reported to tell the same story. They say that the meaning of the church service whither they had accompanied their parents, and of the kneeling to pray, had been absolutely unintelligible, and a standing puzzle to them. The ritual touched no chord in their untaught natures that responded in unison. Very much of what we fondly look upon as a natural religious sentiment is purely traditional.

The word religion may fairly be applied to any group of sentiments or persuasions that are strong enough to bind us to do that which we intellectually may acknowledge to be our duty, and the possession of some form of religion in this larger sense of the word is of the utmost importance to moral stability. The sentiments must be strong enough to make us ashamed at the mere thought of committing, and distressed during the act of committing any untruth, or any uncharitable act, or of neglecting what we feel to be right, in order to indulge in laziness or gratify some passing desire. So long as experience shows the religion to be competent to produce this effect, it seems reasonable to believe that the particular dogma is comparatively of little importance. But as the dogma or sentiments, whatever they be, if they are not naturally instinctive, must be ingrained in the character to produce their full effect, they should be instilled early in life and allowed to grow unshaken until their roots are firmly fixed. The consciousness of this fact makes the form of religious teaching in every church and creed identical in one important particular though its substance may vary in every respect. In subjects unconnected with sentiment, the freest inquiry and the fullest deliberation are required before it is thought decorous to form a final opinion; but wherever sentiment is involved, and especially in questions of religious dogma, about which there is more sentiment and more difference of opinion among wise, virtuous, and truth-seeking men than about any other subject whatever, free inquiry is peremptorily discouraged. The religious instructor in every creed is one who makes it his profession to saturate his pupils with prejudice. A vast and perpetual clamour arises from the pulpits of endless proselytising sects throughout this great empire, the priests of all of them crying with one consent, "This is the way, shut your ears to the words of those who teach differently; don't look at their books, do not even mention their names except to scoff at them; they are damnable. Have faith in what I tell you, and save your souls!" In which of these conflicting doctrines are we to place our faith if we are not to hear all sides, and to rely upon our own judgment in the end? Are we to understand that it is the duty of man to be credulous in accepting whatever the priest in whose neighbourhood he happens to reside may say? Is it to believe whatever his parents may have lovingly taught him? There are a vast number of foolish men and women in the world who marry and have children, and because they deal lovingly with their children it does not at all follow that they can instruct them wisely. Or is it to have faith in what the wisest men of all ages have found peace in believing? The Catholic phrase, "quod semper quod ubique quod omnibus"--"that which has been believed at all times, in all places, and by all men"--has indeed a fine rolling sound, but where is the dogma that satisfies its requirements? Or is it, such and such really good and wise men with whom you are acquainted, and whom, it may be, you have the privilege of knowing, have lived consistent lives through the guidance of these dogmas, how can you who are many grades their inferior in good works, in capacity and in experience, presume to set up your opinion against theirs? The reply is, that it is a matter of history and notoriety that other very good, capable, and inexperienced men have led and are leading consistent lives under the guidance of totally different dogmas, and that some of them a few generations back would have probably burned your modern hero as a heretic if he had lived in their times and they could have got hold of him. Also, that men, however eminent in goodness, intellect, and experience, may be deeply prejudiced, and that their judgment in matters where their prejudices are involved cannot thenceforward be trusted. Watches, as electricians know to their cost, are liable to have their steel work accidentally magnetised, and the best chronometer under those conditions can never again be trusted to keep correct time.

Lastly, we are told to have faith in our conscience? well we know now a great deal more about conscience than formerly. Ethnologists have studied the manifestations of conscience in different people, and do not find that they are consistent. Conscience is now known to be partly transmitted by inheritance in the way and under the conditions clearly explained by Mr. Darwin, and partly to be an unsuspected result of early education. The value of inherited conscience lies in its being the organised result of the social experiences of many generations, but it fails in so far as it expresses the experience of generations whose habits differed from our own. The doctrine of evolution shows that no race can be in perfect harmony with its surroundings; the latter are continually changing, while the organism of the race hobbles after, vainly trying to overtake them. Therefore the inherited part of conscience cannot be an infallible guide, and the acquired part of it may, under the influence of dogma, be a very bad one. The history of fanaticism shows too clearly that this is not only a theory but a fact. Happy the child, especially in these inquiring days, who has been taught a religion that mainly rests on the moral obligations between man and man in domestic and national life, and which, so far as it is necessarily dogmatic, rests chiefly upon the proper interpretation of facts about which there is no dispute,--namely, on those habitual occurrences which are always open to observation, and which form the basis of so-called natural religion.

It would be instructive to make a study of the working religion of good and able men of all nations, in order to discover the real motives by which they were severally animated,--men, I mean, who had been tried by both prosperity and adversity, and had borne the test; who, while they led lives full of interest to themselves, were beloved by their own family, noted among those with whom they had business relations for their probity and conciliatory ways, and honoured by a wider circle for their unselfish furtherance of the public good. Such men exist of many faiths and in many races.

Another interesting and cognate inquiry would be into the motives that have sufficed to induce men who were leading happy lives, to meet death willingly at a time when they were not particularly excited. Probably the number of instances to be found, say among Mussulmans, who are firm believers in the joys of Mahomet's Paradise, would not be more numerous than among the Zulus, who have no belief in any paradise at all, but are influenced by martial honour and patriotism. There is an Oriental phrase, as I have been told, that the fear of the inevitable approach of death is a European malady.

Terror at any object is quickly taught if it is taught consistently, whether the terror be reasonable or not. There are few more stupid creatures than fish, but they notoriously soon learn to be frightened at any newly-introduced method of capture, say by an artificial fly, which, at first their comrades took greedily. Some one fish may have seen others caught, and have learned to take fright at the fly. Whenever he saw it again he would betray his terror by some instinctive gesture, which would be seen and understood by others, and so instruction in distrusting the fly appears to spread.

All gregarious animals are extremely quick at learning terrors from one another. It is a condition of their existence that they should do so, as was explained at length in a previous chapter. Their safety lies in mutual intelligence and support. When most of them are browsing a few are always watching, and at the least signal of alarm the whole herd takes fright simultaneously. Gregarious animals are quickly alive to their mutual signals; it is beautiful to watch great flocks of birds as they wheel in their flight and suddenly show the flash of all their wings against the sky, as they simultaneously and suddenly change their direction. Much of the tameness or wildness of an animal's character is probably due to the placidity or to the frequent starts of alarm of the mother while she was rearing it. I was greatly struck with some evidence I happened to meet with, of the pervading atmosphere of alarm and suspicion in which the children of criminal parents are brought up, and which, in combination with their inherited disposition, makes them, in the opinion of many observers, so different to other children. The evidence of which I speak lay in the tone of letters sent by criminal parents to their children, who were inmates of the Princess Mary Village Homes, from which I had the opportunity, thanks to the kindness of the Superintendent, Mrs. Meredith, of hearing and seeing extracts. They were full of such phrases as "Mind you do not say anything about this," though the matters referred to were, to all appearance, unimportant.

The writings of Dante on the horrible torments of the damned, and the realistic pictures of the same subject in frescoes and other pictures of the same date, showing the flames and the flesh hooks and the harrows, indicate the transforming effect of those cruel times, fifteen generations ago, upon the disposition of men. Revenge and torture had been so commonly practised by rulers that they seemed to be appropriate attributes of every high authority, and the artists of those days saw no incongruity in supposing that a supremely powerful master, however beneficent he might be, would make the freest use of them.

Aversion is taught as easily as terror, when the object of it is neutral and not especially attractive to an unprejudiced taste. I can testify in my own person to the somewhat rapidly-acquired and long-retained fancies concerning the clean and unclean, upon which Jews and Mussulmans lay such curious stress. It was the result of my happening to spend a year in the East, at an age when the brain is very receptive of new ideas, and when I happened to be much impressed by the nobler aspects of Mussulman civilisation, especially, I may say, with the manly conformity of their every-day practice to their creed, which contrasts sharply with what we see among most Europeans, who profess extreme unworldliness and humiliation on one day of the week, and act in a worldly and masterful manner during the remaining six. Although many years have passed since that time, I still find the old feelings in existence--for instance, that of looking on the left hand as unclean.

It is difficult to an untravelled Englishman, who has not had an opportunity of throwing himself into the spirit of the East, to credit the disgust and detestation that numerous every-day acts, which appear perfectly harmless to his countrymen, excite in many Orientals.

To conclude, the power of nurture is very great in implanting sentiments of a religious nature, of terror and of aversion, and in giving a fallacious sense of their being natural instincts. But it will be observed that the circumstances from which these influences proceed, affect large classes simultaneously, forming a kind of atmosphere in which every member of them passes his life. They produce the cast of mind that distinguishes an Englishman from a foreigner, and one class of Englishman from another, but they have little influence in creating the differences that exist between individuals of the same class.