shuts in the prospect, and seems to render exit from the hamlet in 
that direction impossible. The child as little dreams of the long 
winding course which the stream has traversed since it left the 
mountain tarn, from which, many miles away, it first issued, as he 
imagines the grandeur to which the river will attain, or the 
leagues it will traverse, ere it reaches its goal. 
The child’s ideas of the universe are bounded by the limits of his 
vision in his mountain home ; and all his conceptions, subjective 
and objective, are influenced by the narrowness of his horizon. As 
he grows in years, however, he begins to climb the mountain side, 
and as he does so, his outlook gradually widens, revealing the 
existence of a new and larger world. Prom his new point of 
vantage he catches glimpses of what seems another valley, with the 
waters of another stream dancing in the sunlight. The vision is 
startling, and the child does not at first suppose that the stream he 
now for the first time sees, has any connection with the one with 
which he has been so familiar ; but as he climbs higher, the vista 
opens out, and the whole course of the valley is mapped out below, 
and the truth of its continuity breaks upon him, as he sees the 
little silver thread appearing and re-appearing, until ho loses 
it in the hazy distance, which his sight cannot penetrate. 
As time goes on, he will track the stream to its source, and will 
learn to understand the laws, by the operation of which it has been 
called into being ; and in the other direction he will trace its progress, 
finding that it ceases its comparatively useless existence, and 
fertilizes the plain through which it flows, in its more tranquil 
course. 
The child’s theory of the universe has to be largely modified by 
the new facts which he has apprehended ; but many things become 
plain to him which were before mysterious : and who shall say that 
the child’s first knowledge — his first faith, were the best, or who 
shall say that his apprehension of moral or religious truth will be 
injured by his wider grasp of the facts of his surrounding? 
It is undoubtedly true that the views I have been endeavoring 
to establish will necessitate a far more serious reconsideration 
of current theological theories than has any set of facts which 
