RELIGION AND THE CHILD

children, and indeed they become a necessary part of early education, if the imaginative side of training is to be duly balanced and complemented. The child as much as the adult can be taught, and is indeed apt to learn, the meaning and value of truth and honesty, of justice and pity, of kindness and courtesy; we have wrangled and worried for so long concerning the teaching of religion in schools that we have failed altogether to realize that these fundamental notions of morality are a far more essential part of school training. It must, however, always be remembered that they cannot be adequately treated merely as an isolated subject of instruction, and possibly ought not to be so treated at all. As Harriet Finlay-Johnson wisely says in her Dramatic Method of Instruction: "It is impossible to shut away moral teaching into a compartment of the mind. It should be firmly and openly diffused throughout the thoughts, to 'leaven the whole of the lump.'" She adds the fruitful suggestion: "There is real need for some lessons in which the emotions shall not be ignored. Nature study, properly treated, can touch both senses and emotions."¹⁸