The mental activity of the girl in her teens reveals itself also in her great desire to know. During the period of her teens the girl so often appears superior to the boy mentally. Sometimes she is, but more often the seeming superiority can be explained in two ways: the hunger for knowledge and longing to understand life come to her earlier than to the boy; she desires to excel, and feels more keenly the disgrace of low rank and unsatisfactory progress in her studies, which leads her to devote more time and conscientious effort to master them. While her brother is buried deep in athletics, she is buried in dreams, romances and facts. She wants things explained. After sixteen, there dawns the period when she demands that her teacher shall know. She must have knowledge. Some teachers of girls in the later teens hold their interest through a charming personality, a knowledge of the heart of a girl, and a clever presentation of lessons. Still, such teachers are unable oftentimes to help the girl in her struggle to straighten out tangles of what she calls “faith” and “knowledge.” She asks with a new earnestness, “Are the miracles true?” “Is the Bible different from other books?” Only last week a girl of eighteen, suffering with her dearest friend, whose brother had been sentenced to a term in prison for gross intoxication, said to me: “That man prays often when he is sober to be kept from drinking, how can God let him do it when it is just killing his mother and all the family? I don’t see how it can be true that God loves men when he lets them be so wicked, and when people suffer so, and starve and die in wrecks and fires and—it’s terrible. I know you will think I’m awful, but sometimes I don’t believe in God at all.” Her voice trembled, and I knew the hurried sentences represented months of thinking. I did not consider her “awful.” God help her—she has looked the old, old problem of evil squarely in the face for the first time, and is staggered by it. How to help her in this crisis we shall consider in our discussion of the “Spiritual Side.” She needs now more than ever a teacher who can understand her, who has thought things out for herself, who can teach positively, who is too near life to worship creed, and too large to be dogmatic. One so often wishes, when looking into the face of some thoughtful girl, with mind keen, alert, active, but perplexed and confused by knowledge that seems to contradict itself, for some miracle by which for a moment the Great Teacher might come and speak to her the words that made his doubting pupil say, “My Lord and my God.”