But the adult knows that he has on his side tradition which has not yet been acquired by the child, and the inner emotional expansion which still remains unliberated in the child. The adult, therefore, fortified by this superiority, feels justified in falling back on the weapon of authority: "You may not want to believe this and to learn it, but you've got to."
It is in this way that the adult wins the battle of religious education. In the deeper and more far-seeing sense he has lost it. Religion has become, not a charming privilege, but a lesson, a lesson about unbelievable things, a meaningless task to be learnt by heart, a drudgery.
It may be said that even if that is so, religious lessons merely share the inevitable fate of all subjects which become school tasks. But that is not the case.
Every other subject which is likely to become a school task is apt to become intelligible and attractive to some considerable section of the scholars because it is within the range of childish intelligence. But, for the two very definite reasons I have pointed out, this is only to an extremely limited degree true as regards the subject of religion, because the young organism is an instrument not as yet fitted with the notes which religion is most apt to strike.
Of all the school subjects religion thus tends to be the least attractive. Lobsien, at Kiel, found a few years since, in the course of a psychological investigation, that when five hundred children (boys and girls in equal numbers), between the ages of nine and fourteen, were asked which was their favourite lesson hour, only twelve (ten girls and two boys) named the religious lesson.
5In other words, nearly 98 per cent children (and nearly all the boys) find that religion is either an indifferent or a repugnant subject. I have no