Men like St. Paul and St. Augustine knew in the most direct way what sexual desire can do to distract the religious life; how if it is not sternly regulated, and if it is allowed to run wild, it intoxicates the whole personality to the exclusion of spiritual interests. They knew, too, although perhaps not quite so explicitly, that these same passions, if they are repressed and redirected, may come forth as an ecstasy of religious devotion. They were not reformers. They did not think of progress. They did not suppose that the animal in man could somehow be refined until it was no longer animal. When Paul spoke of the law of his members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin, he had made a realistic observation which any candid person can verify out of his own experience. There was no vague finical nonsense about this war of the members against the inward man seeking delight in the law of God. If the sexual impulse were not deeply related to the religious life, the preoccupation of churchmen with it throughout the ages would be absurd. They have not been preoccupied in any comparable degree with the other physiological functions of the body. They have concerned themselves somewhat with eating and drinking, for gluttony and drunkenness can also distract men from religion. But hunger and thirst are minor passions, far more easily satisfied than lust, and in no way so pervasive and imperious. The world, the flesh, and the devil may usually be taken to mean sexual desire. Around it, then, the churches have built up a ritual, to dominate it lest they be dominated by it. Tenaciously and with good reason they have fought against surrendering their authority. [p091] With equally great insight they have kept the closest possible association with family life especially during the childhood of the offspring. Here again they anticipated by many long ages the discoveries of modern psychologists. They have always known that it is in the earliest years, before puberty, that tradition is transmitted. Much is learned after puberty, but in childhood education is more than mere learning. There education is the growth of the disposition, the fixing of the prejudices to which all later experience is cumulative. In childhood men acquire the forms of their seeing, the prototypes of their feeling, the style of their character. There presumably the very pattern of authority itself is implanted by habit, fitted to the model presented by the child’s parents. There the assumption is fixed that there are wiser and stronger beings whom, in the nature of things, one must obey. There the need to obey is fixed. There the whole drift of experience is such as to make credible the idea that above the child there is the father, above the father a king and the wise men, above them all a heavenly Father and King.