can vote, for I am sure you will do all you can to make things better.' This particular boy is only eleven years old, but he is already at heart an earnest, upright citizen. There are parents who spend many unhappy hours worrying about their sons, when they should be studying them, and strengthening by every means at their command the ties between them."

Reasoning and Developing Reasoning is Seen Now. Cause and effect are grasped. Analysis and Synthesis combine. A new world is opening, and the long vista of Investigation and Inquiry dawns before him. Things and persons will be loved for a time, then doubted and dropped. Questioning the foundations, reasoning, "Why?" will be uppermost in everything. The Youth may appear fickle and fanciful. Life grows larger, past ideas are insufficient. Let us see how this works out according to the psychology of our previous study. The child now sees cause and effect, because he sees relations, because he compares events. He has formerly taken his knowledge as unrelated facts, and now he relates those facts and weaves them into a system. In the early stage, the thinking process was synthesis, and then analysis. Now it is synthesis, analysis, and re-synthesis. Formerly he cut the stones of his mosaic pattern, now he arranges them together to form the pattern. Now he can handle the abstract thoughts and think without images or pictures.

Thorndike, in his ELEMENTS OF PSYCHOLOGY, illustrates this: "The bulk of our thinking is in fact not concerned with direct feelings of things, but with mere references to them. We can do hundreds of examples about dollars and cents and hours, about feet of carpet and pounds of sugar, with never a percept of real money or carpets and with few or no mental pictures of the sight of coins or the taste of sugar. We can argue about the climate of a country with few or no mental pictures of black skies, drenched skins, of muddy soil. It is sufficient for our purposes if we feel that the words or other symbols in which we think stand for or represent or refer to the real things." Adding, in his PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING: "The processes of judging facts, reasoning, following an argument and reaching conclusions are the same processes of association and dissociation as are found in all learning; the difference is that there is active selection within the present thought of some part or aspect

which consequently determines the next thought, and selection again amongst the sequent thoughts, retaining one and discarding others. The laws of rational thought are, however, the general laws of association and dissociation, but with predominance of the law of partial activity. The principles of teaching in the case of response of comprehension, inference, invention, and the like are the principles of apperception, habit formation, and analysis; but special importance now attaches to principles derived from the fact that (1) the total set or context or system of thought, and (2) any single feature of a thought, as well as the particular thing thought of, may decide the future course of thinking. The principles thus derived are: (1) Arouse in the pupil's mind the system of ideas and connection relevant to the work in hand. (2) Lead him to examine each fact he thinks of in the light of the aim of that work and to focus attention on the element of the fact which is essential to his aim. (3) Insist that he test whether or not it is the essential by making sure that it leads on to the goal aimed at and by the logical step of verification, by comparing the conclusions to which it leads. with known facts."

Miss Harrison adds: "In fact we have not reached the really rational view of anything until we see that all things are connected; that there is no such thing as isolation. It has been well said, 'most of the world is asleep because it has been taught facts alone.' It is because we fail to see continuity that we fail to comprehend life. God is eternal, everlasting, everpresent; therefore all His creation must reflect Him-must be without isolations."

Storm and Stress Period. When puberty has well advanced the bodily and mental changes send the Youth through a fiery, seething furnace of unrest, of questioning old faiths, of realization of sin, doubt and anxiety, both of his religious faith and its verity, and of his own salvation. Conscience is acting vigously, and it drives the youth to personal investigation. He devours infidel and even atheistic books. He is an object of solicitude to home and Church, who imagine he is wandering into irreligion and godlessness. Never mind! Starbuck's figures prove that not more than 5 per cent. (a mere fraction) ever drift permanently away at this time. Almost all come back to

the fold, with faith better grounded for the proving and testing. They remain steadfast forever then, or are overturned in the second upheaval, that often ensues in the Later Adolescence or Early Manhood.

According to Mr. Barnes, this somewhat skeptical age (twelve to fifteen) is followed by a period of diminished critical activity in religious questions. "One cannot help feeling," he says, "that they (the children just past fifteen) have accepted an abstraction and a name and have, temporarily at least, laid the questions which perplexed them aside. Certainly from fifteen to eighteen there is no such persistent exercise of the critical judgment in matters theological as there is between twelve and fifteen."

In speaking of the Development of Belief in Youth, Pratt says: "Certainly for many men the great wave of doubt comes at about eighteen, and for many women about two years earlier. The two great causes or occasions for adolescent skepticism are, first, an inherent, almost instinctive, tendency to doubt, a natural rebellion against authority of all kinds, a declaration of independence on the part of the youth; and secondly, and much more important, the reaction of the young reason upon the new facts put before it for the first time. It comes upon the young man with an overwhelming surprise that the beliefs upon which he has been brought up, and which have been inculcated in him as the very surest and most unshakable verities of life, are after all based on such very uncertain foundations and bolstered up by such exceedingly flimsy arguments. For so the newly awakened young man regards these arguments. There is no time in a man's life when his reason is so unflinchingly logical, so careless of consequences, so intolerant of make-believe." And since it is the age of doubt it should be met with the utmost sympathy and given the fullest consideration. There should not be an attitude of reproach. Our religion will bear investigation.

Miss Slattery puts it thus: "I do not believe one should lead them to express their doubts, but when they do, may God give us the wisdom we need more than at any other time in our work. The phrase 'I don't believe' more often means, 'I cannot understand,' and I know from experience that it is possible to make them feel that it is the inability to understand which

leaves them so perplexed. They are not wicked doubters, these questioning young people of ours. They are striving to reason out answers. The only person who never questions is the one who never thinks. I have had girls and boys in their later teens tell me that they 'don't believe in anything, not even that there is a God.' 'If there is,' they say, 'why does He let such things happen?" Well, I have met that question and answered it for myself; all I can do is to give them my answer. I have found that, if wisely treated, they almost always return to a larger and better faith when the period of doubt is over. It can be made a short period for many of them, if we can lead them to see the marvellous power of Almighty God whom they question. How impossible it is for the human mind to understand the great problems they are attempting to solve, and yet the mind must ever seek to solve them.

"The main thing it seems to me is to rob doubt of its heroic element by not treating it as wicked. Then we can help them as best we may to reach conclusions which shall in a measure satisfy. Let us remember that the best, and highest reasoning never leads to final disbelief. The reason seeks the positive always rather than the negative. Personally, I am not as anxious about these young people as I am about those who say, 'There is a God; all you teach is true,' and then live as if there were no God and none of it were true."

The Sunday School is no place to drag in mooted questions of criticism, but it is the place to settle doubts when they arise, and a doubt should never be allowed to linger and lurk unanswered. As we state in the chapter on The Teacher, when a pupil comes with a query during this Age of Doubt, answer the child. Do not turn him away. If you do not know, say so frankly. It will not be to your discredit, no one is supposed to know everything. But when you say you don't know, be sure to add, "But I will find out," and then never fail to find out. Do not "bluff" the boy off. If you have not gray matter enough to transfer the knowledge from your source of information, then take him to someone who can deal with him first hand. At any rate, under no consideration, let the doubt lurk. Some of the saddest instances of the result of this policy have come to the knowledge of the writer. One bright Yale man in post-graduate

work in Columbia, said that he had not been in Sunday School since his college days, because he had asked his teacher a question which she could not answer, and he thought if she did not know, the whole of religion was a fraud. In a Washington Sunday School Institute a teacher stated that a lady had committed suicide, who on her deathbed blamed her Sunday School teacher for not answering her doubts.

One must watch carefully for this period, for the Course on Christian Doctrine, which should be given at this time, may be given too early or too late. A teacher in one of our large city schools said that she had given the Course on Doctrine to girls of thirteen, who appeared absolutely uninterested. They queried, "Why should anyone want to prove the Resurrection of Christ, or His Divinity? Did not the Creed say so? Did not everybody believe it? Was not that enough?" The next year she was teaching them the Apostolic Church and they were that year in the Age of Doubt and Investigation. Then they were asking her to prove the very questions that she had proved the year before and which did not properly occur in their text book. Doctrinal material should be given in full during this time and the child cannot have too much. Nor should we be afraid of science. IN THE LION OF ST. MARK, it says: "Science is swinging with increasing momentum from the materialistic toward the spiritual reading of the universe; and the number of men, great in science and in invention, who array themselves on the side of the Christian faith grows steadily. The latest witness is Mr. Edison, perhaps the greatest of living inventors, and certainly one of the keenest brains of the present generation. The New York TRIBUNE publishes the latest interview with Mr. Edison. Among other questions was one asking if his theories of evolution and cellular adjustment made him a disbeliever in the Supreme Being. He replied: 'Not at all. No person can be brought into close contact with the mysteries of Nature, or make a study of chemistry, or of the laws of growth, without being convinced that behind it all there is a supreme intelligence. I do not mean to say a supreme law, for that implies no consciousness, but a supreme mind operating through unchangeable laws. I am convinced of that, and I think that I could-perhaps I may sometime demonstrate the existence of such an Intelligence through