EARLY IMPRESSIONS-1832-1851 523 



profoundly and pithily, in his essay on &quot;Superstition,&quot; 

 when he said: 



It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an 

 opinion as is unworthy of Him j for if the one is unbelief, the 

 other is contumely : and certainly superstition is the reproach of 

 the Deity. Plutarch saith well to that purpose : &quot; Surely, I had 

 rather a great deal that men should say there was no such man 

 at all as Plutarch, than that they should say that Plutarch ate his 

 children as soon as they were born ; n as the poets speak of 

 Saturn : and as the contumely is greater towards God, so the dan 

 ger is greater towards men. 



The &quot;danger&quot; of which Bacon speaks has been noted 

 by me often, both before and since I read his essays. 

 Once, indeed, when a very orthodox lady had declared to 

 me her conviction that every disbeliever in the divinity of 

 the second person in the Trinity must be lost, I warned her 

 of this danger and said, i We lately had President Grant 

 here on the university grounds. Suppose your little girl, 

 having met the President, and having been told that he was 

 the great general of the war and President of the United 

 States, should assert her disbelief, basing it on the fact 

 that she had formed the idea of a much more showy and 

 gorgeous person than this quiet, modest little man; and 

 suppose that General Grant, on hearing of the child s mis 

 take, should cruelly punish her for it; what would you 

 think of him? and what would he think of you, were he to 

 know that you asserted that he could be so contemptibly 

 unjust and cruel? The child s utterance would not in 

 the slightest offend him, but your imputation to him of 

 such vileness would most certainly anger him.&quot; 



A contribution to my religious development came also 

 from a very different quarter. Our kitchen Bridget, one 

 of the best of her kind, lent me her book of devotion the 

 * * Ursuline Manual. It interested me much until I found 

 in it the reasons very cogently given why salvation was 

 confined to the Roman Catholic Church. This disgusted 



