It is clear from the beginning that this course of development really rests upon self-training, and usually takes its start in that period of life in which every earnest man is tired of the “fables of the world” and is in the same frame of mind in which Dante has his great poem begin with the words: “In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood astray;” or in which St. Theresa says: “My soul was submerged in the dream of earthly things, but it has pleased the Lord to awaken me from this slumber of death, and I beseech Him nevermore to let me fall back therein.” What education can do up to this point is, as regards the inner life, merely of a preparatory and prophylactic nature, and consists in keeping the young human being away from a wholly materialistic conception of the world, as well as from a merely formal religion, both of which would make difficult his later approach to a true philosophical and religious conviction. Such children as are educated in the natural sciences alone, as well as those who have heard of Christianity too early and too often, or have been trained to make use of religious expressions and forms mechanically (often against the grain), only rarely grow up to be men who later have the power of finding the way of peace. It is the especial task of education to keep the young soul free from the strain of immorality, and inclined toward a purer life than one that is based merely upon the senses. The soil on which the noble plant of a true religion should later take root and flourish is rendered unfit for that purpose by nothing so much as by the dominance of sensuality. The soaring-power of the spirit is thereby broken, and is regenerated again only with difficulty and partially, if at all. With this, we return to the thought already expressed elsewhere, that for the education of those who are to be given a higher culture (for the boys, at least, and probably also for their mothers and governesses and women teachers) the so-called classical education is indispensable, and on the whole to be preferred to the ordinary religious and moral instruction. Christianity then comes easily of itself, later on, if any one has honestly traversed this stage of instruction in the classical philosophy (which can not and should not be the final stage); and, as history has shown, Christianity bears its finest fruits upon a classical substratum. In particular, a classically educated spirit will never be able to sink into mere ecclesiasticism, and still less into the insipidities and the trivialities which, much as they are foreign to the great and noble nature of pristine Christianity, nevertheless, to its immense harm, cling to the quite common conception of it.