"'Yes, I am sure he does,' assented Max. 'So he won't give her any more punishment than he thinks she needs. It will be a fine thing for her, and all the rest of us, too, if this hard lesson teaches her never to get into a passion again.'"
Better surely to kick a wilderness of babies than to wallow in self-righteousness like this!
One more serious charge must be brought against these popular Sunday-school stories. They are controversial, and, like most controversial tales, they exhibit an abundance of ignorance and a lack of charity that are equally hurtful to a child. It is curious to see women handle theology as if it were knitting, and one no longer wonders at Ruskin's passionate protest against such temerity. "Strange and miserably strange," he cries, "that while they are modest enough to doubt their powers and pause at the threshold of sciences, where every step is demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong and without one thought of incompetency into that science at which the greatest men have trembled, and in which the wisest have erred." But then Ruskin, as we all know, was equally impatient
