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It seems especially desirable that Laura should never be obliged to remodel her faith. There is a moral in the story of the boy who when the microscope first revealed to him the minute and wondrous structure of one of his hairs, was surprised and pained at not finding the number upon it; he had believed literally that the hairs of his head were all "numbered;" and being of a shy nature he would not ask any explanation, but allowed his faith in the Bible to be seriously impaired. Laura can never use a microscope, but she will, by-and-by, bring the magnifying power of mature judgment to bear upon all that she now takes unhesitatingly from others as literal truth; and I would that she might always find the number written upon every thing on which she had been led to look for it.

But, I have given in former Reports, some of my reasons for deferring this most important part of her education, and I need not now repeat them; suffice it to say, that I wished to give her only such instruction about religion and God, as she was prepared to receive and understand, so that her moral and religious nature should be developed pari passu with her intellect. It was delightful for me to find that without any particular direction being given to it from without, her mind naturally tended towards the causes of things, and that after an acquaintance with the extent of human creative power, she perceived the necessity of superhuman power for the explanation of a thousand daily recurring phenomena. She could not indeed like the poor Indian, "see God in clouds and hear Him in the wind," but then He was manifest in the springing grass, the bursting flower, and the ripening fruit; the genial sun, the falling rain, the driving snow -- these, and countless other things which became known to her by her single sense, made her aware of a power transcending the power of man. It would have been more delightful still to lead her wondering mind to the perception of the higher attributes of God, as her capacity for such perception was unfolded, until, her moral nature being fully developed, she might have been as much impressed with love for his tender mercies as she had been with wonder at his Almighty Power.

I am aware that many will say it is impossible that Laura, ignorant as she is, should have by herself conceived the existence of God, because it is said that of the thousands of deaf mutes who have been received into the Institutions of this country, no one ever arrived at that truth unaided.

Now there is very great vagueness in such general negations; the words can be taken in various senses, and are difficult to be proved in any. It may be said that no man ever arrived at the knowledge of the fact that ten and ten make twenty, by the unassisted efforts of his own mind; for if he had never associated with other human beings he would probably never have perceived that relation between numbers.

The words "knowledge of God" may also be understood in different ways; if a child ascertains that tables and chairs and carpets; houses, ships, and machinery; carriages, tools, watches, and a thousand other things, are made by men, and then infers that the sun, moon, and stars, the hills, rivers, and rocks, must have been created, but could not have been made by man, -- that child has an idea of the existence of God; and when you teach him the three letters G-O-D, you do not make to him a revelation of God's existence, you only give to him a name for a power the existence of which he had already conceived in his own mind. We teachers are apt to overrate our own efforts: let us attempt to convey a knowledge of abstract truths to parrots and monkeys, and then we shall know how much is done by children, and how little by ourselves.

It is in this sense that I mean to be understood when I say that Laura Bridgman of herself arrived at the conception of the existence of God.

Unless there has been some such intellectual process in a child's mind, the words God, Deity, &c. must be utterly insignificant to it. We pronounce certain words with great solemnity and reverence, and the child perceives and understands our manner, for that is the natural language of our feelings; he imitates us, and the repetition of the words will ever after, by association of ideas, call up in his mind the same vague feelings of solemnity and reverence; but all this may be unaccompanied by any thing like an intellectual perception of God's existence and creative power.

It will be said that children three years old will repeat devoutly the Lord's prayer, and tell correctly what God did on each of the six days of Creation; but in so doing they too often take the name of the Lord in vain, and sometimes, alas! worse than in vain.

Children wish to attach some ideas to every sign which is given to them; we give them words as signs of things before the capacity of understanding the things is developed in their minds, they attach to the sign some idea, no matter how inappropriate or grotesque, and there it remains trammelling the thoughts, and preventing them from afterwards using the words in a right sense. How vague is the idea which many people attach to some words! and of how much mischief to the world has this vagueness been the source. How long does it take us to sever these ties! how many of us go to our graves without ever breaking a fibre of them -- without ever having divested words of the crude ideas attached to them in childhood, or contemplated the things with the clear eye of reason. We look with contempt upon a man who is instantly and irresistibly moved to solemnity of feeling, and to acts of devotion by the bare sight of two pieces of wood nailed together crosswise, or by the elevation of the host: but, how many sounding words which are insignificant in themselves are dinned into our ears to excite our feelings, or overpower our reason, in the same way that the sublime image is held up before the eyes of our wondering brother.