=Heroes Held Up for Admiration.=--One point, usually wholly ignored, must have some mention here, and that is the effect upon the minds of children and youth of types of social order that are taken for granted as proper and right in the setting of heroes and even of heroines commended to their example. We have taken our heroes from the past. That is natural. It requires an atmosphere of distance to render clear in outline the lives of the great and good. It may be that some prophets are held at just value by those with whom they live; it is almost never that great prophets are seen at their full stature, by the common apprehension, in the time of which they are a part. This makes us offer as stimulant to the ethical imagination, and sometimes as definite incitements to imitation, men and women whose social surroundings were quite other than those we are now striving to secure. How seldom is the teacher able to make the distinctions in social judgment required for full understanding of the character without spoiling the personal influence of the hero extolled. This is particularly true in the use of much Biblical material in Sunday School and in the unexplained classic references to the great and good. One wonders what children are thinking about, children who read in the daily papers long and spectacular accounts of trials for bigamy or adultery, when the worthies of the Old Testament are spoken of and their two or several wives taken as a matter of course in the lesson! One wonders what is the meaning of justness or kindness to the "servant" conveyed to the child in commandments which link together a man's ox and his ass, his laborer and his wife! The fact is that education has a narrow and perilous path to travel in moral lessons of every sort, a path between a dull and critical analysis of differences in moral standards and moral practice in the ages from which we have come and a wholesale commendation of people who would be haled before our modern courts for disobedience to laws were they to reappear upon our streets. The need for stimulation of the ethical imagination is so great, however, that we must dare this perilous path and master its difficulties. Perhaps no one has been able to do this more effectively than Mr. Gould, of the Moral Education Committee of England, who has used the story method with consummate tact in building up from the lower motive and the more ancient condition a series of pictures of human greatness, which end always on some summit of personal devotion in universal conditions to universal laws of right.[18] His method leaves the pupil in a glow of admiration of excellence without dulling his perception of realities of every-day life in his own time and place.