Clouston has justly observed that far more depends upon the brain that goes to church than upon what it may obtain in the church. That is to say, there must be the predisposition to break down, the religious influence being often merely an accident. It must also be remembered that religious over-enthusiasm may be merely a symptom and not a cause. Much misconception through misquotation has arisen in connexion with the writer’s views as to the therapeutic value of prayer. Reference to the context of his views expressed before the Society for the Study of Childhood will show that reference was made to the _habit_ of prayer in childhood, and its therapeutic value was there urged more as a preventive than as a curative agent. It was urged that the mental hygiene of childhood was not to be determined by any special denominational method. Such limited methods may result in the fixity of an idea or belief quite compatible with usefulness in any sphere of activity, but they do not deal with the broader and deeper question of the preservation of the mental health of the individual. The exaggerated importance of the denominational question, which has engendered passive resistance, ought to give way to the question of mental health and engender a strong and active resistance to all that tends to narrow or circumscribe the mental life of the infant. It ought to be our object as teachers and physicians to fight against all those influences which tend to produce either religious indifference or intemperance, and to subscribe as best we may to that form of religious belief, so far as we can find it practically embodied or effective, which believes in ‘the larger hope,’ though it condemns unreservedly the demonstrable superstition and sentimentality which impede its progress and power. As an alienist, and as one whose whole life has been concerned with the sufferings of the human mind, the writer believes that of all the hygienic measures to counteract disturbed sleep, depression of spirits, and all the miserable sequelæ of a distrait mind, he would undoubtedly give the first place to the simple _habit_ of prayer. Let the child be taught to believe in an anthropomorphic God the Father, or in an all-pervading medium of guidance and control, or in the integrity of a cosmic whole, with its transmutations, evolutions, and indestructibilities. It matters little, for they all lead in the same direction. Let there but be a habit of nightly communion, not as a mendicant or repeater of words more adapted to the tongue of a sage, but as a humble individual who submerges or asserts his individuality as an integral part of a greater whole. Such a habit does more to clean the spirit and strengthen the soul to overcome mere incidental emotionalism than any other therapeutic agent known to him. Our schools are as gardens for the cultivating, judicious pruning and sustaining young life by gardeners who have, or who ought to have, full knowledge of the