The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Underhill, Evelyn
Spiritual life
attitude of many young adults to religion. Their beliefs and their
scepticism alike are often the acceptance or rejection of the obsolete.
If they be agnostics, the dogmas which they reject are frequently
theological caricatures. If they be believers, both their religious
conceptions and their prayers are found on investigation still to be of
an infantile kind, totally unrelated to the interests and outlook of
modern men.
Two facts emerge from the experience of all educationists. The first is,
that children are naturally receptive and responsive; the second, that
adolescents are naturally idealistic. In both stages, the young human
creature is full of interests and curiosities asking to be satisfied, of
energies demanding expression; and here, in their budding, thrusting
life--for which we, by our choice of surroundings and influence, may
provide the objective--is the raw material out of which the spiritual
humanity of the future might be made. The child has already within it
the living seed wherein all human possibilities are contained; our part
is to give the right soil, the shelter, and the watering-can. Spiritual
education therefore does not consist in putting into the child something
which it has not; but in educing and sublimating that which it has--in
establishing habits, fostering a trend of growth which shall serve it
well in later years. Already, all the dynamic instincts are present, at
least in germ; asking for an outlet. The will and the emotions, ductile
as they will never be again, are ready to make full and ungraduated
response to any genuine appeal to enthusiasm. The imagination will
accept the food we give, if we give it in the right way. What an
opportunity! Nowhere else do we come into such direct contact with the
plastic stuff of life; never again shall we have at our disposal such a
fund of emotional energy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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