Such facts as these--which can easily be multiplied and are indeed familiar to all, though their significance is not usually realized--indicate the special tendencies of the child in the religious sphere. He is unable to follow the distinctions which the adult is pleased to make between "real," "spiritual" and "imaginary" beings. To him such distinctions do not exist. He may, if he so pleases, adopt the names or such characteristics as he chooses, of the beings he is told about, but he puts them into his own world, on a footing of more or less equality, and he decides himself what their fate is to be. The adult's supreme beings by no means always survive in the struggle for existence which takes place in the child's imaginative world. It was found among many thousand children entering the city schools of Berlin that Red Riding Hood was better known than God, and Cinderella than Christ. That is the result of the child's freedom from the burden of tradition. Yet at the same time the opposite though allied peculiarity of childhood--the absence of the emotional developments of puberty which deepen and often cloud the mind a few years later--is also making itself felt. Extravagant as his beliefs may appear, the child is an uncompromising rationalist and realist. His supposed imaginativeness is indeed merely the result of his logical insistence that all the new phenomena presented to him shall be thought of in terms of himself and his own environment. His wildest notions are based on precise, concrete, and personal facts of his own experience. That is why he is so keen a questioner of grown-up people's ideas, and a critic who may sometimes be as dangerous and destructive as Bishop Colenso's Zulus. Most children before the age of thirteen, as Earl Barnes states, are inquirers, if not sceptics. If we clearly realize these characteristics of the childish mind, we cannot fail to understand the impression made on it by religious instruction. The statements and stories that are repeated to him are easily accepted by the child in so far, and in so far only, as they answer to his needs; and when accepted they are assimilated, which means that they are compelled to obey the laws of his own mental world. In so far as the statements and stories presented to him are not acceptable or cannot be assimilated, it happens either that they pass by him unnoticed, or else that he subjects them to a cold and matter-of-fact logic which exerts a dissolving influence upon them.