temple, is as early as any child ought consciously to go about his heavenly
Father's business. If children are instructed in the language of these sentiments
too early, the all-sided deepening and broadening of soul and of conscience
which should come with adolescent years will be incomplete. Revival sermon
which the writer has heard preached to very young children are analogous to
exhorting them to imagine themselves married people and inculcating the duties
of that relation. It is because this precept is violated in the intemperate haste for
immediate results that we may so often hear childish sentiments and puerile
expressions so strangely mingled in the religious experience of otherwise
apparently mature adults, which remind one of a male voice constantly
modulating from manly tones into boyish falsetto. Some one has said of very
early risers that they were apt to be conceited all the forenoon, and stupid and
uninteresting all the afternoon and evening. So, too, precocious infant Christians
are apt to be conceited and full of pious affectations all the forenoon of life, and
thereafter commonplace enough in their religious life. One is reminded of
Aristotle's theory of Catharsis, according to which the soul was purged of strong
or bad passions by listening to vivid representations of them on the stage. So, by
the forcing method we deprecate, the soul is given just enough religious stimulus
to act as an inoculation against deeper and more serious interest later. At this age
the prescription of a series of strong feelings is very apt to cause attention to
concentrate on physical states in a way which may culminate in the increased
activity of the passional nature, or may induce that sort of self-flirtation which is
expressed in morbid love of autobiographic confessional outpourings, or may
issue in the supreme selfishness of incipient and often unsuspected hysteria.
Those who are led to Christ normally by obeying conscience are not apt to
endanger the foundation of their moral character if they should later chance to
doubt the doctrine of verbal inspiration or some of the miracles, or even get
confused about the Trinity, because their religious nature is not built on the sand.
The art of leading young men through college without ennobling or enlarging
any of the religious notions of childhood is anti-pedagogic and unworthy
philosophy, and is to leave men puerile in the highest department of their nature.
At the age we have indicated, when the young man instinctively takes the control
of himself into his own hands, previous ethico-religious training should be
brought to a focus and given a personal application, which, to be most effective,
should probably, in most cases, be according to the creed of the parent. It is a
serious and solemn epoch, and ought to be fittingly signalised. Morality now
needs religion, which cannot have affected life much before. Now duties should
be recognised as divine commands, for the strongest motives, natural and