can easily make, we shall find that design obscurely mingled with them.  But the child does not analyze.  He can not.  He does not look forward to ultimate ends, or look for the hidden springs that lie concealed among the complicated combinations of impulses which animate him.  In the case that we are supposing, all that we can reasonably believe to be present to his mind is a kind of instinctive feeling that for him to say that he ate the cake all himself would bring a frown, or at least a look of pain and distress, to his mother’s face, and perhaps words of displeasure for him; while, if he says that he gave half to his sister, she will look pleased and happy.  This is as far as he sees.  And he may be of such an age, and his mental organs may be in so embryonic a condition, that it is as far as he ought to be expected to look; so that, as the case presents itself to his mind in respect to the impulse which at the moment prompts him to act, he said what he did from a desire to give his mother pleasure, and not pain.  As to the secret motive, which might have been his ultimate end, that lay too deeply concealed for him to be conscious of it.  And we ourselves too often act from the influence of hidden impulses of selfishness, the existence of which we are wholly unconscious of, to judge him too harshly for his blindness.

At length, by-and-by, when his sister conies in, and the untruth is discovered, the boy is astonished and bewildered by being called to account in a very solemn manner by his mother on account of the awful wickedness of having told a lie!

How the Child sees it.

Now I am very ready to admit that, notwithstanding the apparent resemblance between these two cases, this resemblance is only apparent and superficial; but the question is, whether it is not sufficient to cause such a child to confound them, and to be excusable, until he has been enlightened by appropriate instruction, for not clearly distinguishing the cases where words must be held strictly to conform to actual realities, from those where it is perfectly right and proper that they should only represent images or conceptions of the mind.

A father, playing with his children, says, “Now I am a bear, and am going to growl.”  So he growls.  Then he says, “Now I am a dog, and am going to bark.”  He is not a bear, and he is not a dog, and the children know it.  His words, therefore, even to the apprehension of the children, express an untruth, in the sense that they do not correspond with any actual reality.  It is not a wrongful untruth.  The children understand perfectly well that in such a case as this it is not in any sense wrong to say what is not true.  But how are they to know what kind of untruths are right, and what kind are wrong, until they are taught what the distinction is and upon what it depends.