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. 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.

11. 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.

1.-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 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 "" 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

please them and avoid the results of their displeasure, I must do as they say."

(4) Social initiative-the laws of a social group having common aims and interests. "If I want to share with the rest, I must do my share."

Roughly speaking, the order given is the order of appearance of these roots, and the order in which they reach the culmination of their control. Habit and association are present from the first. Imitation appears the latter half of the first year, and reaches the climax of control from the fourth to the seventh years. Authority appears as soon as the child becomes sensitive to the personal attitudes of others, and its control culminates from six to ten. Social initiative begins whenever the child first feels its helpfulness in a common task or play, and assumes constantly larger control with the coming of adolescence. Of course, none of these roots cease to be productive of laws, nor should they. Habit, imitation and authority continue to the end of life.

3. We may best understand the development of morality if we divide these roots of law into two classes. The first three may be called adaptive roots, and the last the initiative root. Through the first three the child adapts himself to the conditions of his environment, physical and social; through the last, he helps initiate laws as a member of the group which forms them.

(1) Throughout early and middle childhood, morality develops mainly from the adaptive roots-habit and association, imitation and authority. The rules of action which the child forms for himself express his sense of the conditions which are imposed upon him from without. His laws are mere statements of natural consequences. An action is good to him just in so far as it brings a pleasurable result, and bad if the result is disagreeable. He has no conception of its real moral quality. He knows no other obligation than that pleasure is desirable and pain and unhappiness to be avoided. He looks upon punishment as simply a particular sort of natural consequence—a way in which those in authority visit upon him their displeasure. He has no idea that it may be for sake of reform or prevention; it is rather natural retribution. Threats and promises mean little to him; it is what happens, rather than what you say will happen, that shapes his laws and actions. He thinks only of externals-the outward act and its results-not of inward motives. His laws are literal and particular; he is unable to penetrate to the general principles involved.

(2) In later childhood and adolescence, morality becomes more and