The essential difference between the past and the present is not so much a difference, after all; in both instances the same mistaken emphasis is placed upon two separate phases of the child’s make-up. The moral tale took no cognisance of those spiritual laws which are above teaching, which act of themselves; it did not recognise the existence of the child’s personality. But when the impetus toward the study, scientific and intensive, of adolescence was begun, the teacher lost sight of the free will by which that growth advanced; anxious to prove the child’s development to be but a series of stages marked by educational gradings, he reserved no place for the self-development through which the personality finds expression. In both cases an unconscious injustice was done juvenile nature. The moral questioning warped the spirit, the educational questioning chokes the imagination and fancy, starving the spirit altogether. How many will agree with Emerson’s assertion that “what we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so”? The pessimist who challenges children’s books for children has reasons to doubt, after all. Time changes not, ’tis we who change in time. Emerson speaks in terms of evolution; by this very change from generation to generation, the vitality of a book is tested. Again, in terms of our mentality, Emerson says that when a thought of Plato becomes a thought to us, Time is no more. Truth is thus an annihilator of the fleeting moment. The survival of the fittest means the falling away of the mediocre. The Sunday-school book was no permanent type; its content was no classic expression. It filled a timely demand--that was its excuse for being. Once this demand became modified, the book’s service was at an end; hence Mr. Welsh’s indication of the decline of the Sunday-school story through secularisation,--from sectarianism to broad religious principles, thence to “example rather than direct teaching.”[46] We still have the religious tract and the church story-paper; yet the books of advice deal with the social and ethical spirit, rather than with the denominational stricture. “The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him,” wrote Emerson, while Stevenson, in his “Lay Sermons,” placed the stress thus: “It is the business of life to make excuses for others but not for ourselves.”