boys. "Girls are more nearly governed by adult motives than boys. They organize to promote sociability, to advance their interests, to improve themselves and others. Boys are nearly primitive man: they associate to hunt, fish, roam, fight and to contest physical superiority with each other." *

(4) With this awakening of the social instincts, and their expression in spontaneous organizations, there comes into the child's life a new moral force-that of the opinion of his peers. He has entered into a social order of his own, and its laws become his standards of right and wrong. He no longer imitates parents and teachers, but his own companions, or the one whom the gang holds a hero. He cares little for the opinion of older people, but a great deal for what the “ "bunch" thinks.

"It is probably from the gang that most boys learn first to codify their conduct, and while this code of honor is imperfect, it is apt to be pretty sound. This list of 'things a feller won't do' soon becomes a mighty judgment of the individual conscience. . . . Parents may have slaved a life long; they may have made the inculcation of morals a daily care; these new companions have been known only six days, but they are Public Opinion." †

This applies also to girls. In this period boys and girls alike begin, through association with their own comrades, to achieve moral inde pendence.

(5) A strong sense of honor is characteristic. A boy's funda mental virtue is loyalty. He will stick by the rest of the fellows through thick and thin. And from this loyalty springs a fine sense of what is honorable and true and just. His boyish conceptions of these things are often enough distorted; but they are virtues none the less, and virtues really his own. If you respect his loyalty and rely upon his honor, God gives you quick entrance to the soul of a boy. But there is no greater sin than to trample upon his ideals and outrage his sense of justice. And there is no better proof of the worth of a man than to have a boy think him “ "square." Judge Lindsey has been saving hundreds of the street boys of Denver from crime, and turning them toward worthy lives, simply because he is willing to take "a kid's word."

* Sheldon: "The Institutional Activities of American Children," American Jour nal of Psychology, Vol. IX., 425-448. This chapter uses Forbush's summary of his figures, in "The Boy Problem."

+Forbush: "The Boy Problem," pp. 20, 21.

It is hard to pick out crucial points in the education of a child, for everything is important, and moments may be decisive that we least expect. Yet here, certainly, we cannot be too careful. To the end of one's days his loyalties make his life. Ask what they are, and you know what the man is. Is he loyal at all? If not, he is no man. Is he loyal only to a group-to his own family merely, to a political party, or to a particular denomination? Or is he loyal to humanity and to God, and to the great eternal principles of right and truth which lie beyond all narrowness and party strife? These questions have been settled for many a man by the attitude of elders to his boyish loyalties.

All this applies particularly, of course, to boys. You cannot, even in speaking of them, mix the sexes at this age. Yet it is as true of girls, with the difference of perspective that is cast by the different social life into which they now begin to enter. Every mother knows well that a daughter now begins to have "ideas of her own," which it is idle to seek to repress or to expel by force. The wise mother is she who respects the daughter's personality, invites her confidence and seeks to share her point of view, and so by companionship, rather than by domination, leads her into clear-sighted, self-reliant womanhood.

4. This is the period of life's first idealism. Boys and girls now begin to form ideals for themselves.

These first ideals are concrete. They are found always in some person. Later childhood has well been called the age of heroworship. Middle childhood imitates persons, but not as ideals; adolescence conceives ideals, but not in personal terms. Now, ideal and person are inseparable. The boy worships his hero because he sees in him the embodiment of an inward longing of his own; and he loves strength and courage, manliness and truth, not in and for themselves, but for what they actually accomplish in the person of one about whom achievement casts its glamor. You cannot help a boy or girl of this age by talking of ideals in general and in the abstract. You must set before them a hero.

But that is not easy. Heroes are not made to order, or worshiped according to precept. Boys especially seem apt enough to idealize wrong characters, and perversely fail to be attracted by the heroes we would press upon them. Earlier in life, the child had imitated those whom he knew best-father, mother or teacher. Then their word was law, and to be like them his dearest wish. But that time is passing. Life is reaching beyond home and school. Its heroes come

from the new worlds just opening to the vision of boyhood and girlhood. They must be in some degree removed from the ordinary round of humdrum and familiar things. They must have something of that mystery which always surrounds an object of worship. Boys are more apt to get their heroes from the world about them, girls from their reading, from history or fiction. Boys always idealize men, while girls may choose either men or women.

It is achievement that makes a hero. Men who can do things well, men who can get results, men who can in anything, are the boy's heroes just as they are ours. Because his instincts and interests are primitive, he is most ready to idealize physical strength or skill or daring. He will worship the leader of the gang, the football captain or the star pitcher, the town's best hunter or fisherman. But it is only because he is not yet able to realize achievements of a different sort. As fast as he becomes able to comprehend the work of Edison, of Lincoln, of Luther, he is ready to pay tribute to strength of intellect and heart and will.

The counsel is simple but hard to live up to. If you would be a hero to the boys of your class-and you must be if you are really to influence them as you should—you need only succeed in what you do before them. It may be that you are able to approach them from the physical side, and are fortunate enough to win them because of your athletic prowess. But that is not always essential, and that alone is never enough. The one thing needful is that you be absolute master of yourself and your work. Teach well, live strongly, do things, get results, and you will have the influence you wish. Heroism, like the kingdom of God, "cometh not with observation." He soonest becomes a hero who thinks least of it, but most of the things he is set to do.

The principle tells us, too, how to present Jesus to our pupils. It must be as a hero, in the sheer strength of His manhood and His achievements. Talk of what He did, not of what He was. At this age, children will not love Him for His goodness, but they will learn to love goodness because they honor Him and His deeds. Do not talk much, however, about His being a hero; and certainly do not ask your pupils to call Him one. There are some things in life that cannot stand much talking about-heroism and loyalty are among them. Simply present His life and its deeds so vividly and concretely that the strength and power of His personality cannot help but shine through.

5. At no time of life is there a greater hunger for books and

reading than now. Most of us can remember how eagerly we awaited the weekly arrival of the Youth's Companion, or how we pored over Henty and Alger and Oliver Optic. What woman can forget her girlhood's delight in Louisa Alcott and the Elsie books?

The teacher could ask for no better opportunity than is afforded by this insatiable demand of later childhood for something to read. And it is, like all times of opportunity, a critical point in the development of personality. The boy may easily acquire a taste for the "dime novel" of impossible adventure and hair-breadth escape, the girl for mawkish romance; and they grow into the man or woman who can enjoy nothing but highly-spiced and frothy fiction. On the other hand, children who are given books too serious may lose entirely the desire to read, and become those pitiable beings-men who never read, except the newspaper, and women whose only literature is in the oral form of gossip. Give a boy "goody-goody" books-the typical Sunday school library books of a few years ago— and you may turn him, not only against reading, but against religion itself.

We make a mistake if we treat the child's reading either as a mere amusement or as a sugar-coat for a moral. To the end of life, the love of good literature remains one of its mightiest spiritual forces. The child must learn to love the best. It is as important that you guide him to great fiction and poetry, to well-written biography and history. as that you teach him Bible verses. It is better to co-operate with the town library than to attempt to provide a Sunday school library, because of the wider resources the public institution is apt to afford. It is your privilege to put your pupil in touch with the literary heritage of the race. Pick things that he can comprehend; but do not be afraid of the best. "Periods which no master has described, whose spirit no poet breathes," says Herbart, "are of little value to education." Books of real insight into life and of genuine literary value, books of truth caught by the imagination and felt within, will grip the minds and hearts of children as they do our own.

6. Habits are more easily formed in this period than at any other time of life, and are more lasting. A multitude of brain cells are just maturing. Impressions are easy, and connections between cells quickly established. Every boy knows that if he is ever to become a great baseball player he must begin now. Later he will not be plastic enough to get the finer knack of the man who "handles himself as if he were born to it."

It follows that memory is best in these years, for memory, as we

shall see, is after all a kind of habit. It is the time for drill work in school. Repetition will now fix anything in the mind, whether it be understood or not, and many a glib answer will deceive us into thinking that the pupil has really grasped our teaching. The boy will learn his daily lessons word for word with only a couple of readings, keep them until the recitation is over and then let them go forever. If he is ever to learn a foreign language, better now than later, for he will soon be able to use it easily and naturally, while there will always be some little hesitancy or artificiality about the speech that he learns in later years. This is the time to learn Bible verses, the shorter psalms, and whatever else should be laid up in the mind word for word. If you keep these tasks within reason, you need hardly fear repelling your pupil. Most boys and girls delight in them because they are so easy.

7. We shall see in the next chapter that there is a marked awakening of interest in religion at the end of this period and the beginning of early adolescence. The child is approaching life's decision time. We must keep this in mind throughout these years. We shall not attempt to hasten it: but we shall make ready. And if the child of eleven or twelve wants to make a public profession of his love for his Father and the Lord Jesus, we shall let him join the church. Happy the little one who has been so brought up that he has never known himself to be anything other than a child of God.