influencing" them from the religious standpoint. This point of view is
stated, whether seriously or not, in the following quotation from a
recent writer: "I think it is a bad thing to be what is known as
'brought up,' don't you? Why should we--poor, helpless little children,
all soft and resistless--be squeezed and jammed into the iron bands of
parental points of view? Why should we have points of view at all? Why
not for those few divine years when we are still so near God, leave us
just to wonder? We are not given a chance. On our pulpy little minds our
parents carve their opinions, and the mass slowly hardens, and all those
deep, narrow, up-and-down strokes harden with it, and the first thing
the best of us have to do on growing up is to waste precious time
beating at the things, to try to get them out. Surely the child of the
most admirable and wise parents is richer with his own faulty but
original point of view than he would be fitted out with the choicest
selections of maxims and conclusions that he did not have to think out
for himself. I could never be a schoolmistress. I should be afraid to
teach the children. They know more than I do. They know how to be happy,
how to live from day to day, in godlike indifference to what may come
next. And is not trying to be happy the secret we spend our lives trying
to guess? Why, then, should I, by forcing them to look through my stale
eyes, show them, as through a dreadful magnifying-glass, the terrific
possibilities, the cruel explosiveness of what they had been lightly
tossing across the daisies, and thinking they were only toys?"

All of which sounds very pretty, but when simmered down, the wisdom, if
wisdom it be, of a statement like that can be compressed into the old
adage, "Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise." But the point
is that the world has pretty generally come to the conclusion that
bliss is not necessarily the most healthful thing, either for adults or
children. "Soft and resistless!" Precisely, there is the crux. If these