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teaching itself may make the means of salvation impotent in their future life.

8. We have described the will thus far in terms chiefly of its relation to the intellect. But we must not forget that the soul has a trinity of powers-feeling as well as intellect and will. One's will is determined by his feelings as truly as by his ideas. Feeling may enter into each of the three factors of an act of will. As trend or set of the mind, a feeling helps to bring before one ideas consistent with itself. It keeps the attention naturally and spontaneously upon such as appeal to it. And it gives to the idea it chooses a degree of impulsive strength that carries one into prompt and whole-souled action. There is a third great counsel, therefore, for the development of a strong and efficient will. To right ideas and habits of decisive action add the power of feeling. are worth while.

Get the affections centered upon things that Enlist the heart as well as the mind.

"The expulsive power of a new affection" is life's eternal miracle. Men have sometimes questioned the possibility of conversion. Yet it has been a blessed fact in thousands of lives. Feeling transforms even the working of that hidden mechanism of association that determines one's thoughts. Many a man's real manhood dates from his winning the love of a wife or from the opening to him of the heart of a child. His thoughts, his choices, his acts, all center about his new devotion. Conversions are natural. They are begotten in human relationships as well as divine. Love is indeed "the greatest thing in the world." It saves men.

He who lacks feeling, even were his will strong enough without it, lacks the highest manliness. The ideal of the stoics is as untrue as it is unlovely. They sought to look at the world of things and men calmly, dispassionately and impersonally. Feeling, they thought, but clouds the vision and brings turmoil to the soul. A man ought to be purely rational, his mind what Huxley called a perfect "logic machine." And so one might well be, if he lived alone, the only person in a world of matter, his only problem the comprehension of impersonal forces, and his only aim to manage them. But our world is not such. We live with other persons. Life's real problems are social; its true values are those of personal relationship. Even a God who was absolutely alone would have nothing to live for. We need feeling, therefore. It is the link that binds man to man, the fire that warms an otherwise dead and cheerless world. Without it, one might understand things, but could never live with and for persons.

Just as feeling exists for sake of personal relationships, it is begotten

only in personal relationships. You cannot by precept or proverb teach a feeling to your pupil, or generate it by command. It must be by life with him, by giving yourself to him. The secret of "personal work" is personal relationship.

9. The final secret of strength of will is the grace of God. What is true of the feelings begotten in earthly relationships is infinitely more true of those that spring from the contact of the soul with its Father. There is no love like His, no feeling mightier than the sense of His presence and help. Not upon ideas and sheer effort of attention merely, not even upon the strength alone that comes from earthly affection, need the wills of men rely; they may lay hold of the love and grace of an almighty God. The experience that Paul records in the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans, is true of all humanity. He who fails of his own strength to free himself from "the law of sin and death" may yet live to "thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord."

QUESTIONS

1. Why is every idea an impulse? How does the behavior of hypnotized persons show this?

2. Explain the distinction between impulsive and voluntary action, 2

3. Upon what does the impulsive strength of an idea depend?

4. What three factors are involved in an act of will? Upon what does each depend?

5. Why is the will dependent upon the laws of association?

6. In what sense does the will itself help to determine what ideas shall come before the mind?

7. Show how choice depends upon attention.

8. Why is a man weak-willed who cannot concentrate his attention?

9. Why do good resolutions harm instead of help if they are not carried out in action?

10. Explain how feeling helps to determine the will.

II. What is meant by "the expulsive power of a new affection"? Show how the final secret of strength of will is the grace of God.

12. In what way is one's will limited and determined by his past experiences and habits? In what respects undetermined?

13. What are some of the things that a teacher can do to help develop a good and efficient will within his pupil ?

14. What argument can be deduced from the teachings of this chapter in favor of telling children what they ought to do instead of what they ought not to do?

LESSON XI

MORALITY AND RELIGION

Our primary interest, as Sunday school teachers, is in the moral and religious growth of our pupils. We may well conclude this part of our course, therefore, with a study of the development of morality and religion in childhood and youth.

I. MORALITY

A little child is neither moral nor immoral. He is the creature of

his instincts. His actions are neither good nor bad; they are simply linis

natural. Morality begins when he can will his actions, and when he first sees a difference between a better and a worse way and chooses one or the other.

1. How does he come to tell the better from the worse? The question brings us face to face with one of the great issues of philosophy. On the one hand stand those who believe that the distinction between right and wrong is innate within us, and that conscience is an intuitive and infallible guide. On the other hand are those who maintain that our knowledge of right and wrong, like the knowledge of other things, depends upon experience.

There is truth on both sides. We shall understand it best if we think of conscience as but another name for the moral instincts. The moral nature is instinctive. Like other human instincts, it is inborn, yet delayed in development, and is indefinite and modifiable.

(1) The moral nature is inborn. Without an instinctive capacity, no child could be trained to be a moral being. The facts of the world could never give birth to an ideal. We possess an innate power to transcend in vision that which is and to apprehend that which ought to be. We are so made, moreover, that we feel in duty bound by our vision; it weighs upon us as an obligation and inspires us to its own fulfillment. No amount of experience could confer upon us the power so to conceive ideals, nor bring home to us a sense of obligation. This comes not from without; it is the God-given spirit within man.

(2) Yet the moral nature has to develop; it is delayed in appearance and ripens slowly. Not until adolescence does it blossom forth into promise of maturity,

(3) The moral instincts are indefinite and modifiable. They impel us to form ideals and to feel obligations—but what in particular our ideals shall be or just what obligations we shall feel, is left to be determined by experience. Our habits and feelings, environment and training, the ideas we have gained for ourselves or have acquired from others-all these go to shape our sense of right and wrong. Conscience is not infallible. It needs to be educated. It may tell one that an action is good or morally indifferent which to another seems bad. The consciences of some men are hardly to be trusted at all. Their finer sensibilities are dulled; their perspective distorted.

(4) Like other instincts, conscience becomes more completely rational as life goes on. Feeding, fear, sexual and parental love, sociability, imitation-soon become more than mere instincts. We get to understand them, and give them place in our life because we do understand. So too our moral ideals and feelings grow less vague and inarticulate as experience grows. We understand our duties and make rational our ideals. Conscience might finally be best defined as 66 reason concerned with moral issues.'

Will

2. The child is a natural lawmaker and law-observer. implies the recognition of law. When he cries in order to get something, it is because crying has brought it before. No matter how much you tell him not to cry, or assure him that crying will not bring what he wants; if finally you relent and crying does bring it, he will continue to use crying as a means whereby to attain his purposes. The law he made for himself out of his experience is much more real than the law you laid down in words.

By law, it is plain, we here mean a rule or principle for voluntary action. As experience grows, the child makes rules for himself, part consciously and part unconsciously. They are in general nothing more than his sense of what means to employ to attain some end ; but they constitute the first definite shaping of the moral nature within him. There are four great sources from which he derives such rules. We may call them the natural roots of law :

(1) Habit and association—the experienced connection between some action and its result. "If I want some result, I must do what brought it before," is the principle upon which the child acts, though of course he does not avow it to himself in so many words.

(2) Imitation-the observed behavior of others, with its results. "If I want the result they reached, I must do as they did."

(3) Authority—the commands and wishes of other persons, enforced by the pleasure or pain of personal relations. "If I want to

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