supernatural, are needed for the regulation of the new impulses, passions,
desires, half insights, ambitions, etc., which come to the American temperament
so suddenly before the methods of self-regulation can become established and
operative. Now a deep personal sense of purity and impurity are first possible,
and indeed inevitable, and this natural moral tension is a great opportunity to the
religious teacher. A serious sense of God within, and of responsibilities which
transcend this life as they do the adolescent's power of comprehension; a feeling
for duties deepened by a realization and experience of their conflict such as
some have thought to be the origin of religion itself in the soul—these, too, are
elements of the "theology of the heart" revealed at this age to every serious
youth, but to the judicious emphasis and utilization of which, the teacher should
lend his consummate skill. While special lines of interest leading to a career
must be now well grounded, there must also be a culture of the ideal and an
absorption in general views and remote and universal ends. If all that is pure and
disciplining in what is transcendent, whether to the Christian believers, the poet
or the philosopher, had even been devised only for the better regulation of
human energies set free at this age, but not yet fully defined or realized, they
would still have a most potent justification on this ground alone. At any rate,
what is often wasted in excess here, if husbanded, ripens into philosophy, the
larger love to the world, the true and the good, in a sense not unlike that in the
symposium of Plato.
Finally, there is danger lest this change, as prescribed and formulated by the
church, be too sudden and violent, and the capital of moral force which should
last a lifetime be consumed in a brief, convulsive effort, like the sudden running
down of a watch if its spring be broken. Piety is naturally the slowest because
the most comprehensive kind of growth. Quetelet says that the measure of the
state of civilization in a nation is the way in which it achieves its revolutions. As
it becomes truly civilized, revolutions cease to be sudden and violent, and
become gradually transitory and without abrupt change. The same is true of that
individual crisis which psycho-physiology describes as adolescence, and of
which theology formulates a higher spiritual potency as conversion. The
adolescent period lasts ten years or more, during all of which development of
every sort is very rapid and constant, and it is, as already remarked, intemperate
haste for immediate results, of reaping without sowing, which has made so many
regard change of heart as an instantaneous conquest rather than as a growth, and
persistently to forget that there is something of importance before and after it in
healthful religious experience.