dog, and makes it stand for all the rest. All a child's senses are at least as keen as those of an adult, and yet the adult seems to see and hear more than the child does. The explanation is that we see with our minds as well as with our eyes, we see the present thing in the light of all we have seen before, so that the adult brings to his observation much that is still unknown to the child.

"For a similar reason, adults seem to remember things better than children, and yet children have the advantage in the way of memory. Perhaps the period between seven and ten years of age is that at which memory is at its best. At that age children find it easiest to learn things by rote. The memory is plastic, and can take in and retain all sorts of unconnected ideas. Systems of classification, therefore, are foreign to his mind. This is par excellence the Story Age, reached by stories, illustrations, and parables."

There should be a clear distinction drawn between story, biography, and history. A story is a detailed concrete portrayal of an event, or a portion of an event, or a man's life, or a portion of his life. The story age runs from about eight and one-half to nine years. The child never wearies of repetition. The same story told in precisely the same way is its demand, and woe betide the mother who varies a line from the story as she told it first. "Tell it the way you told it before, mamma. You have not told me just as it was," is his constant demand. Biography is less detailed, but more complete. Biography must have a beginning and an ending, it must be presented as a whole, the man's whole life. Dr. Butler tells the story of a little child of ten who burst out crying when his teacher told him about David and Goliath only. "You didn't tell about David as a baby," he wailed. This biography age runs from about eight and one-half years to twelve years. History is still different. History means relationships and generally rests on cause and effect. It is the man and his times, that is the man in the setting of his times. Thus the same Bible material may be at one time story, at another biography, and at another history, depending upon the treatment and the age of the child.

The Conscience of the small child is not yet developed. His moral nature is guided by Impulses or Instincts, rather than by Conscience. Questions of conscience are not for the small child.

The child exercises little effort in choosing between a right and wrong situation. Conscience is very vague. Conscience is developed, or rather it is read and interpreted, through mental knowledge. Conscience does not appear strongly in a child until at least the age of ten. A child does not think of moral quality in the abstract. For a young child, good is what is permitted, evil is what is forbidden. His religious ideas are few and vague; he is not immoral, he is unmoral. The second period, that from eight to twelve, is the era of conscience building. The purpose of instruction in this second grade is so to educate conscience and the whole moral nature that the child, being impressed with a deep sense of God's authority and love, should be obedient to and helpful to others, and so in right doing find his own happi

ness.

Mrs. Birney says that it is in the first three years of a child's life that the habit of obedience is most easily inculcated. If parents would only bear this in mind, they would save themselves much needless friction and anxiety. The wee toddler, just beginning to walk and talk, is quick to detect the difference between the voice of authority and that of irresolute command. I believe in giving reasons as early as one can, but in the matters of nursery discipline the child must early be taught to obey, because he is told to do so. The child's needs in connection with his physical well-being are much the same from day to day, while his wishes are subject to many variations.

One of the simplest ways of insuring obedience to law and a willingness to accept the discipline which aids in the establishment of right habit and thought is by a continual direction of the child's mind to the rights of others. If he has broken his companion's toys, he should replace them with his own, not because he will punish himself thereby, but because his little friend would have to do without them on account of his carelessness, and that would not be right. The application of the principles of justice is, in the daily lives of children, a powerful factor in character building.

In punishing children the difference between penalty and discipline should be kept in mind. Penalty is the inevitable price demanded by broken law, and though it may teach knowledge by experience, it does not necessarily develop the moral

nature of the child. True discipline is corrective, and, when given by either parent or teacher in wisdom and a spirit of love, tends to strengthen the will of the child to desire the good and to avoid the evil. Choose, of course, the discipline which leads and directs rather than that which threatens and coerces through fear.

Only one sanction is as yet known to the infant-that of success; the knowledge of good and evil has not yet emerged. The formation, therefore, of the earliest habits is a normal phenomenon. Doubtless the young child sometimes presents an ugly spectacle of apparent selfishness in the satisfaction of its appetites, and of passionate resentment to restraint in their indulgence. But in such behavior it is only following its "nature." Children's dislike of restraint upon pleasure, until developed intelligence discerns its reasonableness, is both natural and inevitable.

In other words, sin first becomes a possibility when the child has acquired moral personality. And this it does through what is called social heredity. Conscience is made, not born; or rather, it is given. It is obtained by the child from its human environment. The growth of human personality, and especially of moral personality, has been found to be pre-eminently a matter of social suggestions. The child grows into the adult only by drawing upon the store of accomplished activities, forms, and patterns which society already possesses.

Psychologists tell us that, roughly and generally speaking, the awakening of the moral faculty occurs somewhere about the age of three years. The rudimentary stage of conscience is called out chiefly by enforced obedience to commands-obedience compelled by punishments. It gradually learns the content of moral law, however, partly by instruction and correction, partly by imitation, and later, by reflection. Thus there grows up very slowly a moral ideal, whose fulness enlarges as experience widens. But from first to last the content of the moral law is learned from environment. And when conscience has thus been sufficiently developed to enable the child, unaided, to condemn its own actions, it ceases to be innocent with the innocence of good and evil. Now, for the first time, sin becomes a possibility; for

there is no sin without a law and an apprehension of the claim of law.

The teacher's attitude toward questions of Truth, or of Right and Wrong should be that of exactitude and precision rather than that of a moral wrong. The child will not realize the objective wrong of it to God until he knows God as LawGiver. The question of the parent's relation to the child's religion is an important one at this point. Frederick D. How, in the BOOK OF THE CHILD, says: "Probably one of the earliest perplexities that presents itself to a parent, is the question of the child's religion. And yet, it is doubtful whether in the generality of cases the matter is considered early enough. There are, evidently, three kinds of parents taking three separate views of the question. There are those who hold distinctly materialistic opinions, and who therefore deliberately decline to enter into the subject at all. They agree with the sentiments expressed in a French work on children, published some quarter of a century ago, in which the following passages occur: 'We may boldly assert that the sense of religion exists no more in the intelligence of a little child than does the supernatural in nature.' And again: 'In our opinion parents are very much mistaken in thinking it their duty to instruct their little ones in such things, which have no real interest for them-as who made them, who created the world, what is the soul, what is its present and future destiny, and so forth.'

"But, in the second place, there are some parents who are simply careless. They would be rather shocked at being told that they themselves were irreligious, but, when they forget all about their children's religion, it cannot be supposed that their own is of much more real concern to them.

"Thirdly, there are the parents who desire beyond all things that their children shall lead religious lives, and are anxious to do their utmost to start the little feet on the right path. It is this class of parent who is often perplexed to know what is best. The difficulties are certainly great. Children differ so widely, that what is good for one child may be harmful for another. But in almost all cases the tendency is to put off religious teaching too long. The mind of a very young child-one who would be commonly described as a baby-has been proved again and

again to be remarkably receptive of evil as well as of good influences and impressions, and the earlier a baby's mind can be filled with the very simplest religious truths, the less room there will be for evil, and the greater the likelihood of a firm belief in truths that have been absorbed almost with the mother's milk. "This leads to the question of how far a very young child has any direct personal religion; any feeling, that is, of a direct communication even of the most elementary kind between itself and its God, without the intervention of any human being. It would probably be true to say that at first this is impossible, but that at a very early age the sense can be imparted. To quote the words of a mother who has brought up a number of children in the fear and love of God, personal religion in children 'of course begins by being mixed up, with Mother, who, if she is a real mother, is to her babies the representative of warmth, comfort, love, and everything that they want.' When, in addition to this a child has depended for months upon its mother for food, and has constantly slept in her arms, the influence of that mother is so great that her religion naturally becomes the religion of the child, who accepts every word she says absolutely. Thus, the 'God bless you,' and the words of loving prayer which come so often and so naturally to a mother's lips, are absorbed by the child until its faith in some unconscious way grows into its life, and becomes a real thing between itself and its God.

"Observation leads at this age to a love of nature, especially in its wilder aspects. At about six the child asks who made the flowers, the grass, and the different objects of nature. It is not satisfied with the general answer: 'God made everything.' In its struggle for monotheism it seeks concrete statements. By the end of the kindergarten class period, the child knows God not only as Father, but as Creator. He must come to know the Ruler of the Universe. Like the savage he likes to read about and imitate, he worships the God of nature.

"As he sees nature obey laws, so he sees the soldier and sailor obey. He has had his own first lessons in obedience. Once appreciating this, the child has a firm foundation for a moral conscience. At the beginning of this stage, although the child may not know the meaning of the word conscience, he knows. the voice of right and wrong within him.