the exercise of thought has attained the position of a Christian, but he resents the so-called Christian who is merely in the Church because he finds himself there, without any effort of his will or his intelligence. The convinced secularist feels respect for the sincere Christian, even though it may only be in the sense that the real saint feels tenderness for the hopeless sinner. And in the second place, as I have sought to point out, the facts we are here concerned with are far too fundamental to concern the Christian alone. They equally concern the secularist, who also is called upon to satisfy the spiritual hunger of the adolescent youth, to furnish him with a discipline for his entry into life, and a satisfying vision of the universe. And if secularists have not always grasped this necessity, we may perhaps find therein one main reason why secularism has not met with so enormous and enthusiastic a reception as the languor and formalism of the churches seemed to render possible.
If the view here set forth is sound,—a view more and more widely held by educationists and by psychologists trained in biology,—the first twelve years must be left untouched by all conceptions of life and the world which transcend immediate experience, for the child whose spiritual virginity has been prematurely tainted will never be able to awake afresh to the full significance of those conceptions when the age of religion at last arrives. But are we, it may be asked, to leave the child's restless, inquisitive, imaginative brain without any food during all those early years? By no means. Even admitting that, as it has been said, at the early stage religious training is the supreme art of standing out of Nature's way, it is still not hard to find what, in this matter, the way of Nature is. The life of the individual recapitulates the life of the race, and there can be no better imaginative food for the child than that which was found good in the childhood of the race. The child who is deprived of fairy tales invents them for himself,—for he must have them for the needs of his psychic growth just as there is reason to believe he must have sugar for his metabolic growth,—but he usually invents them badly.17 The savage sees the