And yet, though this document is in theory the most
important which any one can sign in his whole life, they will have him
commit himself to it at an age when neither they nor the law will for
many a year allow any one else to bind him to the smallest obligation, no
matter how righteously he may owe it, because they hold him too young to
know what he is about.
I thought this seemed rather hard, and not of a piece with the many
admirable institutions existing among them. I once ventured to say a
part of what I thought about it to one of the Professors of Unreason. I
asked him whether he did not think it would do serious harm to a lad's
principles, and weaken his sense of the sanctity of his word, and of
truth generally, that he should be led into entering upon an engagement
which it was so plainly impossible he should keep even for a single day
with tolerable integrity--whether, in fact, the teachers who so led him,
or who taught anything as a certainty of which they were themselves
uncertain, were not earning their living by impairing the truth-sense of
their pupils. The professor, who was a delightful person, seemed
surprised at the view I took, and gave me to understand, perhaps justly
enough, that I ought not to make so much fuss about a trifle. No one, he
said, expected that the boy either would or could do all that he
undertook; but the world was full of compromises; and there was hardly
any engagement which would bear being interpreted literally.
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