Such children can not be expected to know of themselves, or to learn without instruction, what the wrongful ways are, and they never do learn until they have made many failures.

Many, it is true, learn when they are very young.

Many evince a remarkable tenderness of conscience in respect to this as well as to all their other duties, so fast as they are taught them.

And some become so faithful and scrupulous in respect to truth, at so early an age, that their parents quite forget the progressive steps by which they advanced at the beginning.

We find many a mother who will say of her boy that he never told an untruth, but we do not find any man who will say of himself, that when he was a boy he never told one.
_Imaginings and Rememberings easily mistaken for each other_.
But besides the complicated character of the general subject, as it presents itself to the minds of children--that is, the intricacy to them of the question when there must be a strict correspondence between the words spoken and an actual reality, and when they may rightly represent mere images or fancies of the mind--there is another great difficulty in their way, one that is very little considered and often, indeed, not at all understood by parents--and that is, that in the earliest years the distinction between realities and mere fancies of the mind is very indistinctly drawn.