RELIGIOUS TRAINING 487 



gathered materials which may help us to agree ultimately. Even 

 if doctrines be regarded as Divine revelations, yet the ways in 

 which priests, parents, and schoolmasters teach them are neces- 

 sarily human devices, and therefore legitimate subjects of criticism. 

 It is admitted that good teaching tends more than bad teaching 

 to create intelligence ; and a religion like any other subject may 

 be well or ill taught. Again, since few people are able to think 

 without bias of their own faith, and since it is probable that the 

 reader is an average individual, may I beg him, if I happen to 

 mention his religion, to try to think in terms of some other. 

 Thus, if I make mention of the Christian sect to which he 

 belongs, let him try to conceive some corresponding Mohammedan 

 sect and suppose we are discussing that. 



801. All religious knowledge is, of course, acquired, as are 

 also the kinds of thinking and the attitudes of mind that result 

 from religious teaching. It is because they are universally recog- 

 nized as highly important acquirements that so much care is 

 taken in teaching them. Since religion offers immense rewards 

 and punishments, covers the whole field of morals, inculcates par- 

 ticular views concerning the universe, influences the individual in 

 all his public and private relations, and tends, therefore, to be 

 revived in his thoughts more often than any other subject that is 

 formally taught, probably none other so profoundly affects his 

 intellectual status. But children, though they may be coerced to 

 religious thoughts and observances, are comparatively little affected by 

 them. They are too completely under the sway of strong instincts 

 which impel them to thinking which is, at least, non-religious ; 

 their minds are very ductile and therefore incapable of those 

 passionate convictions and unalterable mental attitudes which so 

 often characterize the adult, and which we term perverse and 

 fanactical in people who differ from us ; their stage of develop- 

 ment is such that they are but little capable of appreciating the 

 surpassing importance of 'religious truth/ or of being influenced by 

 religious motives in the way that the adult is influenced. To them 

 religion is but one of the many wonderful things that they learn 

 from the adult the occasion of a story or a lesson, of a game or 

 of a labour. The fervour of the saint or the dervish, the stern 

 conviction of the puritan, and even the hysteria of some sects is 

 not for children. Only after adolescence is reached does religion 

 exercise its typical influence. 



802. Speaking generally, in proportion as the mental influence 

 of a religion is wide, the intellectual status with which it is asso- 



