forward by religion out of the home and the school into the larger life. The child who has been so trained that the constant presence of God is a sure conviction can be trusted anywhere. He has within him a defense against evil, and an inspiration to do good. His own, native, independent desire is to please God. He has a talisman of protection and strength which no amount of moral teaching can give him. He has been given a spiritual endowment which will make him rich as long as he lives.

A second condition of human nature is our desire for knowledge. We are by instinct inquisitive. As soon as we learn to speak, we begin to ask questions.

If children hate to go to school,—as most of them do at some time in their lives,— the fault is not in the indifference of the child but in the failure of the school to adjust itself to the child's nature. The relation between the mind and the body is even yet imperfectly understood. We are

still affected by the tradition that the child's mind comes to school and brings along his body for the purpose of annoying the teacher. Sometimes the training of the child is hindered by the lack of a point of contact between the lesson and the present life of the child. Sometimes the difficulty is in the walls and the windows and the weather and the impatience of young animals against confinement within doors. Children desire to learn.

In response to this desire, astronomy and geology and biology provide a great amount of material, and answer many questions. There are two respects, however, in which these sciences do not satisfy the mind of youth: they do not give information as to the origin or as to the destiny of life; and they do not reply to the inquirer in terms of personality. But these are matters concerning which the human mind is invincibly curious. In the childhood of the race, the universal questions had to do with origin

and destiny, and the universal answer was in terms of personal will. Thus the Bible begins with an account of the making of the universe and of Man, and comes almost immediately to the phenomenon of death, and explains everything by reference to God. In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth; in due time, God made man in His own image; then men died, one by one, and their bodies returned to the dust from which they were taken, while their souls returned to God who gave them. "Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.”

These primitive traditions are confessedly imperfect in detail. It is significant that two accounts of the creation of the world are set down side by side, with no attempt to reconcile their evident differences. One of them pictures the initial condition of the world as a great deep, the other as a great desert. One introduces man late, the other early, into the life of the planet. But

in essential substance the accounts agree, not only with each other but with all knowledge. Gradually the world came into shape, with man as the master of it. These chapters reveal the convictions in which the common mind of humanity found rest. Men were not satisfied till their questions concerning the origin and the destiny of life were answered in terms of the personal will of God.

The

That which is true of the childhood of the race is true also of the childhood of the individual. The child is occupied in making himself at home here in this new world. A great part of this process consists in interrogation. First, as to the origin of life: whence came the earth and the stars? child's mind is so constituted that he insists on ultimate answers. He is of the spirit of old Epicurus, to whom his master said: "At the beginning of all things was chaos," and Epicurus said: "And what was before chaos?" The child persistently goes back

and back to the absolute origins. It is true, that after a long series of evasive or negative answers, he becomes discouraged. He finds that neither his teachers nor his parents will tell him, or can tell him, what he wants to know. The answers are not in the books of science. The same difficulty meets him in his researches into the beginning of his own being. The phenomenon of birth makes a deep impression upon him. His questions are avoided by his elders, or are given foolish answers which affront his self-respect. Presently, he picks up some information, a good deal muddled and muddied, in the street. The case is only a little better as to the destiny of life, as to the significance of the tremendous fact of death.

The truth is that the satisfying answers to these elemental questions can be given only in the language of religion. The ultimate reality is God. When St. Augustine said: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless till it repose in Thee," he declared