Now, reverence, which is fundamental to religion, is itself founded on the muscles. Just as we are angry, so the psychologists tell us, because we clench our fists and snarl our lips, so we are reverent because we bow our heads. As one cannot be thoroughly angry so long as he keeps his hands open and makes himself smile, so he cannot tip back in his chair, put his feet on the table, and pray. The mood will not come till the muscles point the way. There are, to be sure, genuine conversions late in life, as there are miracles of other sorts. But the normal religious man is one who, in boyhood, at the period of life when he was establishing his other great muscular correlations, has been put through the movements of worship till they became habits. We make a devotee, in short, precisely as we make a musician or an athlete. With the advent of the early gang period, however, the boy’s relation to the world undergoes a sudden change; and naturally his attitude toward religion will alter with it. He who once babbled to any listener becomes reserved. The desire for sensation is now replaced by a desire for experience. Woods and sea and the greater forces of nature are now the objects of his religious instincts. His interest is in the creation, and the proper channel through which to instill reverence is friendship with Nature. The child has become a savage, and he worships the red gods. With the later gang period and the stage which immediately succeeds it, comes normally the veneration of a hero. By this time the boy leader of the gang has emerged from the general ruck of its members, and his word has become law. Now is the time of greatest influence of the man leader--father, trainer, scout-master, pastor, or older friend. Now, for the first time, the boy, beginning to find himself, becomes capable of special and enduring friendships; probably, too, he falls frequently in love. In short, his one absorbing instinctive interest is in personality. The proper minister of religion at this stage is no longer the ritualist, but the inspired preacher; and the less of form and ceremony and church millinery, the better. The boy’s instinctive hero-worship turns him toward any prophet of righteousness whose theme is the moral life, the duties of this present day, and “the religion of all good men.” At the age of sixteen, he normally experiences conversion. After that comes, of course, the period of intellectual skepticism; and when that is by, the erstwhile boy settles down to the enduring faith of his manhood, in which all the religious experiences of youth have their part. For the rest of his life, few changes will go deeper than mere matters of taste and opinion.