ship. The children come gradually to perceive the value of the religion of their parents by discovering what it actually makes of them. What sort of persons are they because of their religion? Are they patient, kind, fair, considerate, cheerful, helpful? That which they do with their money is plain enough: they live in such and such a way, proportioned to it; they buy things with it, and thus enjoy it. What is it actually which religion adds to them? When money fails, and plans go wrong, and sickness comes, and the world withdraws its consolation, is there in religion that courage and comfort which the books say? How does it honestly work? What fruit of good living does it bear?

There are fathers and mothers who have never in their lives preached to their children in the spoken language of religion, whose good examples have been convincing and enduring sermons. The honesty of honest fathers in the midst of the tempta

tions of business, the serenity of sick and afflicted mothers, these are plain religious results which win for religion the respect, the reverence and the allegiance of the children. When they asked in ancient Rome, "What made our ancestors stronger and better than we?" and answered, "It was their religion," they presented thereby the most convincing of arguments. It was evident that the religion which had thus revealed itself in character was the real thing.

Ը

CHAPTER VIII

THE PRACTICE OF PRAYER

ORMALLY, the first actual lesson in religion will be an elementary instruction in the ancient and universal practice of prayer. The child will kneel beside his mother, and she will repeat at first for him and afterwards with him, the words of petition.

In so doing, the mother will contradict a very respectable theory regarding human nature. This theory is that the act and the understanding, and more especially the word and the understanding, ought to go together. This implies that the child should not be made to do or to say that which makes no appeal to his reason. It is frequently urged against the memorizing of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the

Ten Commandments. It is sometimes pressed so far as to persuade parents to delay almost all religious instruction until their children have reached the years of some discretion. It would forbid the recitation of prayers by little children.

This theory, however, is one of those merely academic propositions which, however sustained by logic, surrender at the first vigorous attack of experience. It has a reasonable sound, but it is not true to the psychological facts. The human mind does not work that way. In the order of progress, the explanation of things appears long after the things. First the things, then, as we grow wiser or older, the thingness of things. Thus it is fairly maintained by students of the Old Testament that the book of Job, which is without date or note of time, belongs to a late stage in the history of Israel. The fact of pain, about which the book is centered, is indeed one of the earliest of facts; and the scenery and action

of the book are so simple as to seem primitive; but it is argued from the literary phenomena of all peoples that the endeavor of Job to explain what pain means is evidence that he and his contemporaries have come into the reflective period. And that period is late with nations as it is with individuals.

The normal child does not reflect. He does, indeed, ask "Why?" incessantly, but he is not in search of a philosophical answer, nor able to receive it. And meanwhile he is continually learning things the reasons for which are altogether beyond his understanding. One of these things is the alphabet, another is the multiplication table. These are imposed upon him by authority. He is made to commit them to memory, although the alphabet makes no appeal to his reason whatever, and the multiplication table,-after our most careful explanations,-is taken without reflection as one of the conditions of a mysterious world.