(1) It brings a multitude of new instincts. A new instinct means new interest, a new opening of life. It means an unstable equilibrium -a new danger and a new opportunity. Character is never more plastic; habits form quickly.

(2) The youth thinks himself a man, but is not. His ideals and ambitions reach out into the great world; yet he is only a boy, and hardly more than a child. He is not old enough to decide for himself any of life's greater issues; but he wants to. To deal rightly with him you will need all your love and tact and hard common sense. You must bear responsibility, yet let him feel it. You must take him seriously, and not let him know your doubts. In short, you must think with him, not simply for him, and so lead him to right conclusions. You must share his life, and give him a share of yours.

(3) The youth of this age is peculiarly open to suggestion. His suggestibility is in fact as great as that of the child under six-but it is of a different sort. Early childhood was open to direct suggestion; it would believe and act upon whatever is told it. Now the suggestion must be indirect. The youth will resent a direct command or wish; but he is very sensitive to influence. The reason is plain. His new consciousness of the great world about him shapes his sense of values. He will esteem those things that he finds esteemed in what he gets to know of the grown-up world; he will reject what is there rejected. There is no time of life when social environment is so potent. The youth is bound to be like those about him—not merely because he imitates, but because their life is the source from which he imbibes his new ideas of what life is. To help him you must suggest, not in words but in deeds. Don't talk; be and do. Go about your business, live straight and get things accomplished, and your influence will do what advice never could. Be a friend of the boy, not a patron. Let him work with you; don't make him feel that you are working for him.

QUESTIONS

1. What years does adolescence cover? Why does the Sunday school fix the beginning and end of the period where it does?

2. Describe the physical growth and vigor of early adolescence. How do girls differ from boys in growth and development during these years?

3. How does the independence and self-assertion of early adolescence differ from that of later childhood?

4. How do the records of the public schools prove the expansion of selfhood in early adolescence?

5. Show how the social instincts mature in these years. How do they differ from those of later childhood?

6. Why does the development of the sexual instincts throw life into unstable equilibrium? What changes of attitude toward the other sex does the adolescent pass through?

7. In what sense is early adolescence a time of doubt?

8. Why is the youth of this age awkward and self-conscious?

9. What are the three periods of special religious awakening found by Coe?

10. At what time of life do the greater number of conversions take place?

11. Why is early adolescence a peculiarly critical period?

12. Compare the suggestibility of youth with that of childhood.

LESSON VII

LATER ADOLESCENCE

We have agreed to regard the seventeenth birthday as the beginning, and the twenty-first as the end of later adolescence. These boundaries are by no means exact. There are no rules by which the passage from early to later adolescence may be precisely defined. Yet in every life there is a more or less definite turning point around sixteen to eighteen. It may be some moral or emotional crisis; it may be conversion. Or it is the beginning work to support one's self, or leaving home to go to college. It may be nothing more than the attainment of full growth in height. To know, in any particular case, just what the turning point has been, is essential to any real understanding of the succeeding years.

We have seen, too, that adolescence ends more often at twenty-four or twenty-five than at twenty-one. Yet here practical considerations impel the Sunday school to regard the age of legal majority as the end of youth.

1. The development of individuality is the fundamental characteristic of this period. It has been well called a time of selection and concentration. Early adolescence was a time of expansion. It presented a wealth of possibilities. It spread the world before youth's eager vision. Its instincts pulled a hundred ways. Later adolescence begins to select from among life's possibilities and to concentrate its energies. Life begins to narrow, but to become deeper. The time of mere vision is over; choice must be made. And with choice comes individuality. Lives diverge. Each must have its own work; and each its own quality

2. The difference between individuals is thus the great fact of which we must take account in this period. At no time, of course, are pupils to be treated in the bunch. The individuality of the tiniest and most uninteresting must be respected. But now, of all times, individual interests are primary. Each pupil presents a separate problem in himself.

Many factors enter into the determination of individuality. There are differences of heredity and of home environment. There is the natural inborn variation of capacity and temperament. God makes

no one of His creatures or of His children exactly like any other. It is the provision by which His wisdom insures progress in the world. All these differences show themselves with especial definiteness in later adolescence. And they do so because they are called out by differences in external conditions. We do not all have the same opportunities. We cannot all get the same education, or do the same work. There we come to the bottom of the matter-it is because the lives of your pupils are now getting set toward work, and toward different lines of work, that you must deal with each in its own way.

Recent studies show that not more than half the children who enter our city schools finish the work of the grades, and that only one-tenth of them continue to the final year of the high school.* It has been estimated, again, that only ten per cent of those who take a high school course go to college or to a professional school. Consider what differences, simply from this standpoint, later adolescence presents. Our pupils divide themselves into at least three great classes: (1) Those who have gotten only an elementary education, or a part of one, and have gone to work at an early age. They are more mature than others in some ways, for they have had to face life's seri. ous business. In other respects they are more immature. Their lives are circumscribed; their interests narrow. They cannot appreciate things that appeal strongly to those of more culture.

(2) Those who are now finishing high school, and entering upon work-a-day life.

(3) Those who are entering college or professional school. For these the period of adolescence will be prolonged. They will broaden and mature intellectually, yet lack development into manhood and womanhood until they finally face the world to make a living.

3. All three classes are experiencing in this period a contact with reality more direct and definite than at any former time of life. The first two are wage-earners; the former with a little experience, the latter just beginning. They face the realities of business life, with its routine, its competition and its uncompromising standards of efficiency. The college students are leaving home for the first time to enter upon a new life. Protected from economic necessity as it is, college life yet has its realities. It is a world to itself, but within it the student stands upon his own feet. He must make good in life with his fellows as well as in the eyes of the faculty.

We shall here consider later adolescence from the standpoint simply of the first two classes. Very few of you have to deal with college Ayres: · Laggards in Our Schools," p. 65.

students. The problems of the student, moreover, are peculiarly his own, and must be solved by college men.

4. For most of our pupils, then, later adolescence marks a new stage in life because it brings their first wages. It is the time of transition from economic dependence to self-support and independence. At some time or other within these years, life's real responsibilities begin.

Nature has made ready for the transition. The youth of this age possesses a splendid equipment for work—a high degree of physical energy, strength and comparative maturity of intellect and vigor of will. The physical energy, that before was needed for growth, can now be turned into activity and the development of strength. This is the age when athletes develop-great baseball and football players, boxers and runners. They reach their best in the middle twenties. The baseball player of thirty is a "veteran," and we wonder whether he can stand the pace for another season. The runner has usually had to stop racing before that age. He no longer possesses the endurance that he had in the years just before and after twenty-one. The intellectual energy of the period is just as great. Reason and will are maturing, and the mind is restlessly active. Much of the world's best work has been done by young men. The list of its great youths reaches into every sphere. Napoleon was a lieutenant at fifteen, and by study made himself the master that he was of the science of war. He was but twenty-four when he astonished the world at the siege of Toulon. Lafayette sailed to the help of the American colonies at nineteen. Byron published his first volume at seventeen ; Bryant wrote "Thanatopsis" at the same age. Shelley had published romances and poems before he was eighteen, and at that age was expelled from Oxford for publishing a tract on "The Necessity of Atheism." Pascal discovered geometry for himself at twelve, and at sixteen wrote a treatise on conic sections. Savonarola passed his later youth in meditation upon the evils of his day; and at twenty-two decided the work of his life. At seventeen Leibniz wrote a thesis containing the germ of his philosophy, and at twenty was ready for a doctorate of laws. Descartes doubted all knowledge save mathematics while yet a stripling, and at twenty-three passed through the crisis which determined his whole future life and philosophy. At nineteen Schelling was writing upon the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, at twenty-two published his first great book, and at twenty-three was himself professor of philosophy at Jena. Michael Angelo was at work in the palace of the Medici at sixteen. Peter Cooper vowed at