more largely a matter of social initiative. It begins in games with rules and plays that call for team-work. Gangs and clubs are forms of its expression. Lawmaking and law observance are spontaneous and natural under three conditions: (1) There is a social group of some sort of which the boy feels himself to be a member. (2) There is a common end toward which the activity of the group is directed, and for which he with the rest feels responsible. (3) There is a physical material for this activity which makes possible the expression in some concrete way of its results. In other words, if boys get together to do something, and that something is tangible enough for them to see results, they are naturally law-abiding. The rules of the bunch may be but custom; they may be enforced by nothing but public opinion; but each boy feels that they are his own, and will stand by them.

We need not trace out again the development of social initiative. We have done that at length in the chapters upon adolescence. Enough to say that the inward mandate of the newly awakened social sense carries with it an obligation that the pressure of external conditions could never make one feel. The laws of this stage are more than mere statements of natural consequence. They tell what ought to be. Life becomes genuinely moral.

4. The work of the teacher in moral development is to be thought of in a later chapter. Yet it may be well to note here some immediate practical conclusions. Some of them apply more directly to parents than to us; but we need to understand the whole if we would do well our part.

(1) Moral training must go along with moral instruction. What we tell a child about right and wrong has beyond question a great deal to do with his moral development. He has constant need of instruction, "precept upon precept, line upon line." But he is all the time working over his experience into laws and ideas of his own; and these determine the attitude he takes toward our teaching and the way he understands it. Parents and teachers should so manage the conditions of his life that the laws which grow from the natural roots of which we have been thinking, may illumine and enforce their instruction, rather than contradict and weaken it. When there is conflict, the precept generally loses out and the law from life abides. (2) In early and middle childhood, training must be mainly through the pressure of external conditions; in later childhood and adolescence, it must be through appeal to internal initiative. This opposition, of course, is not absolute. One cannot draw sharp lines. The

child who is brought up to help and to feel some share of responsibility in the family life will early manifest something of social initiative. The adaptive roots, on the other hand, persist in the later stage of moral development. They are caught up into the higher motive and transformed. Habit and association come to deal with social results. Imitation becomes idealistic. Authority takes the form of public opinion.

(3) Training upon the adaptive basis requires of us consistency and inflexibility. We are not to force the child to do right; we are to confront him with such conditions that he will want to do right. We must make his environment, physical and social, express just that law and order that we wish him to make a part of himself. The way is plain. Training will begin at birth, with regular habits of eating and sleeping and bathing. We will see to it that good actions without exception bring pleasant results; and bad actions, unpleasant. We will be consistent in our demands upon him and in our attitudes toward him. When we reason with him, it will be simply to explain how certain consequences are bound to follow upon certain actions, not to appeal to principles. If we appeal to higher motives, it will never be as an excuse for transgressing a simpler law, rather as an additional reason for obedience.

Above all, we will do nothing for sake simply of present discipline. A six-year-old disappeared one morning this summer, and his parents got out searching parties and dragged the river. At the end of the day he came home alone and asked whether the "census man" had gone yet. His mother had quieted him a few days before by telling him that the census man carried away naughty boys; and he had run away when the enumerator appeared. The one unhappy day is by no means the only or the worst effect of such foolish discipline. We are too prone to think of our own wants, and to do and say anything that will make the child fit in with them. But it all forms a part of the material out of which the child makes his laws. It is the effect upon him that we must consider. No bit of discipline should stand alone; it should be a part of a connected and consistent scheme of moral training.

(4) Training upon the basis of social initiative requires us to share the life of the boy aud let him share ours. Give boys something real to do something in which they feel that you are as vitally interested as they—and work with them toward its accomplishment. They crave fellowship and responsibility. Be a boy with them, and they will become men with you.

There are two difficulties. The first is with the boy. It is the difficulty of making real things seem real. The whole atmosphere of the school seems artificial to him, and remote from his own interests. He does not know his real needs. You will often enough have to throw yourself heartily into some enterprise that seems to you trivial, that you may maintain fellowship and responsibility and in time win him over to more serious things.

The other difficulty is with you. Can you really make yourself one of the boys, and yet be teacher and guide? Are you willing to give enough of yourself? Will you abide by the rules of the bunch? And can you keep from going too far, making yourself silly, and losing their respect?

A minister organized the boys of his church into a secret society which took as its object the study of nature. They soon became eager collectors and dissectors. The minister himself, young, athletic and a good biologist, was their leader. But he spoiled it all by telling the secret to an over-inquisitive mother who one day let it slip from her tongue. The boys thought him a traitor; and he soon closed his work in that community. You ought ask nothing from boys that you are not yourself ready to give. You can never lead them to your virtues if you cannot stand the test of theirs.

II. RELIGION

5. What we have learned concerning the development of morality will help us to understand the development of religion. Matthew Arnold said that religion is but "morality touched with emotion." It is more than that; but it is at least that much. Religion includes morality; and one's moral development has much to do with determining the character of his religion.

"The thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion." *

You can find no better definition of religion than this of Carlyle's. One's religion is his sense of the disposition of the universe toward himself and his assumption in turn of an attitude toward it. It in

* Carlyle : "Heroes and Hero Worship," ch. i.

volves three terms: one's own interests, his sense of the disposition of the universe toward them, and a working plan for the reconciliation of the two.*

This may seem a needlessly complex statement of what religion is. We might have said the same thing in simpler words-that it is one's sense of God's disposition toward him and his answering attitude toward God. The more complex definition is worth using, however, because it makes plain how closely the development of religion is bound up with the development of intellect and will. One's religion becomes different if any one of the three terms be changed-if he gets new interests and ideals, if he arrives at a clearer understanding of the world about him and of the God whose disposition it shows forth, if he conceives a better working-plan for his life. The whole self, as a matter of fact, enters into religion. Belief is a matter of intellect, feeling and will. Religion changes as the intellect matures, as feeling deepens and the will gives life direction. It develops with personality. One's religion is always a reflection of what one is. The religion of a child must be different from that of a youth, and the youth's again from that of a man.

This insistence that religion develops with the rest of personality will not be understood as a denial of its instinctive character. Like morality, religion rests upon an inborn capacity. God has made us for Himself, as Augustine says, so that we can find no rest save in Him. And like morality and other human instincts, the religious instinct is indefinite and modifiable and must be shaped by experience.

We will not be understood, again, to deny the supernatural character of religion. It is true that in prayer man stands face to face with God, and that the Spirit works within us to the salvation of souls. It is true that the Father reveals Himself and His will to the hearts of His children. But revelation depends upon the capacity of the recipient as well as upon the will of the Giver; and the hardened heart may resist even the Spirit of God. There is a law of apperception for spiritual things as well as for material. Jesus spoke often of it, and put it in a parable when He told about the sower.

6. The religion of early and middle childhood is one of nature and of home. There are four chief factors which contribute to the development of religion in the life of a child:

(1) His interest in nature. His unwearied senses; his eager questions about the causes of things and their purposes; his personifying imagination; his delight in stories of the miraculous and supernatural * Cf. Perry: "The Approach to Philosophy," p. 87.

-throw his mind open to the conception of God as the Creator and Sustainer of the world about him.

(2) His credulity and faith. At first the child accepts without question whatever we tell him of God simply because he believes anything.

"A little girl was questioning her mother minutely concerning the domestic habits of the angels. Her mother replied that she was sorry she could not answer all the questions, as we really do not know very much about what goes on in heaven. At this the child looked very much astonished, and said, 'Oh, don't you know? Why, cook knows all about it!'"*

As rational curiosity develops and he begins to put things together, he carries out to many a naive and fantastic conclusion the things that he has been told about God.

Two boys were talking about the rain. J. was giving whatever information he had to W., and finally said, "When the clouds are rent, the rain drops out. Rent means torn, just as you would tear your clothes." W., after thinking for a time, exclaimed, "I should think God's mother would get tired mending." A little girl was convalescing from typhoid. Her mother was telling her of God's great love; that even the sparrows are included in it. She retorted quietly, "Don't you think God spends too much time on sparrows? If He gave a little more attention to me, possibly I shouldn't have to go for a whole month without a bit of real, solid food." A little girl heard a man in argument use the phrase, "There is not a spot on this footstool," etc. She asked, "What footstool?" Being told that he referred to the earth as the footstool of God, "O-h-h!" she muttered in astonishment. "What long legs!" Her face was perfectly grave; not for a moment did she think of irreverence. The suggested idea was that God must be an exceedingly big man. †

Such interpretations are neither to be feared nor laughed at. They result from the child's attempt to make his ideas coherent, with his literalness and inability to comprehend our figures of speech. We should meet them by a simple explanation of the truth, not by a reiteration of figures or by telling the child that he will understand better when he grows up. Certainly they need not be taken, as they are by Oppenheim, as an argument against giving children any re* Drummond : An Introduction to Child-Study," p. 301.

† Condensed from Oppenheim: "The Development of the Child," p. 136.