WHAT IS RELIGION? 325
children cannot be sufficiently careful what they trans- mit to them — a child is hypnotized with the absurd, immoral dogmas of so-called Christian religion, irrecon- cilable with our reason and knowledge. He is taught the dogma of the Trinity, which healthy reason cannot hold ; the coming of one of the three Gods to earth for the salvation of the human race, and his resurrection and ascent into heaven ; is taught to expect a second coming, and punishment in eternal torments for dis- belief in these dogmas ; also he is taught to pray for what he wants ; and many other things. And when all this (incompatible as it is with reason, contemporary knowledge, and man's conscience) is indelibly stamped on the child's impressionable mind, he is left to himself to find his way as he can amid the contradictions which flow from these dogmas he has accepted and assimilated as unquestionable truths. No one tells him how he may or should reconcile these contradictions ; or if the theologians do try to reconcile them, their attempts only confuse the matter more than before. So, little by little, the man becomes accustomed to suppose (and the theologians strongly support this notion) that reason cannot be trusted, and therefore anything is possible, and that there is no capacity in man by means of which he can himself distinguish good from evil, or falsehood from truth ; and that in what is most important for him — his actions — he should be guided not by his reason, but by what others tell him. It is evident what a terrible perversion of man's spiritual world such an education must produce, reinforced as it is in adult life by all the means of hypnotization which, by the aid of the priests, is continually exercised upon the people.
If a man of strong spirit, with great labour and suffering, does succeed in freeing himself from the hypnotism in which he has been educated in childhood and held in mature life, the perversion of his mind, produced by the persuasion that he must distrust his own reason, can still not pass without leaving traces — ^just as in the physical world the poisoning of an organism with some powerful virus cannot pass without leaving
