_insight_—of so understanding the forces and principles of life that one’s whole self is surrendered in deep reverence and service to the things that ought to be. Assuredly, no character is mature until it has reached this last stage. There is indeed something beautiful about the boy who in the midst of temptation goes to his father and talks it all out with him; who clings to the father’s hand to lead him safely through the dangerous ways. But the boy is only on the way to moral and spiritual maturity; he is not yet morally and spiritually mature. The doctrine that the great evangelist and the evangelical churches in general preach is a doctrine admirably adapted to a condition of moral and spiritual immaturity; it is a doctrine, in short, for little boys and girls; it is not a doctrine for morally and spiritually mature men and women. I doubt even, in fact, whether it is a doctrine for college youths and maidens; for I note in my own relations with college men and women that there is among them the growing consciousness of right for right’s sake, a growing cleanness and earnestness of life; and this is so, I take it, not because they believe such conduct and attitude to be commanded or because they are aware of a heavenly Father who watches, but because their eyes have been opened to see the truth and the truth has made them free. I believe that the problem of how to teach a young man to meet temptation is a deeply serious problem. But I believe small good will come of falling back upon the old easy expedient of half-frightening, half-cajoling the young man into submission by reminding him of the all-watching eye and the all-considering heart of the great Father. That way is so easy that it is really unfair to the victims. It is like hypnotizing a man into morality. The way of the new religion is the harder but more lasting, more self-respecting way of developing the whole moral self of the boy and the youth and the man,—beginning far back in childhood and unremittingly, understandingly continuing the training, until when the child becomes the youth and the youth the man, righteousness is the firm, sweet habit of his life. We human beings have an inveterate love of shirking our tasks. We neglect the essential moral culture of the infant and the child; we let the moments and the days slip by in the life of the youth without putting any hard thought upon his training in self-control, in courage, in moral insight; and then suddenly, when signs of danger begin to show in the young man, we grow panic-stricken and implore him to call on God to save him. The fact is that the task was ours and we shirked it. Ours was the responsibility; and we had no right to put it off on a miracle-working Deity.