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Religious Instruction 303
had said she did not believe in hell, and there-
fore thought she must be very wicked.
We are certainly a long way off from those
times when, to use the picturesque expression
of an historian of civilisation, " The fear of
the devil constantly darkened the life of men,
as the shadow of the sails of a windmill dark-
ens the windows of the miller " ; far from the
times, too, when divine persons constantly re-
vealed themselves to the believer, and when
miracles belonged just as really to the daily
habits of thought as to-day they are disre-
garded even by the believer. But so long as
belief in the devil, providence and miracles is
upheld in religious instruction, it will be im-
possible for the sunshine of the civilised view,
which is the scientific as opposed to the super-
stitious view, to penetrate the darkness where
the bacilli of cruelty and insanity are nurtured.
The ideas children form of heaven are gen-
erally fine examples of childish realism. A
child thought his brother could not be in
heaven, because he would have to climb a
ladder, and so would be disobedient, for he
had been forbidden to climb one. A girl
asked, when she heard that her grandmother
was in heaven, whether God was sitting there
and holding her from falling out. These are
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