It is only fair to say that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such things.

_I_ think they are fools, but perhaps you don't all agree with me.
Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable of understanding Calvin's "Institutes," and nobody has honesty or sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches: that they are as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable spiritual cowards--that is, if they have any imagination--that they will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal more which they teach themselves.
I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books and those who knew what was in books.

I was carefully instructed in things temporal and spiritual.

But up to a considerable maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have been superhuman beings.

The central doctrine of the prevalent religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper .-- Why did I not ask?
you will say .-- You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive children.