[168] Mr. Edmond Holmes, formerly Chief Inspector of Elementary Education in England, has an instructive remark bearing on this point in his suggestive book, _What Is and What Might be_ (1911, p. 88): "The first forty minutes of the morning session are given in almost every elementary school to what is called _Religious Instruction_. This goes on, morning after morning, and week after week. The fact that the English parent, who must himself have attended from 1500 to 2000 Scripture lessons in his schooldays, is not under any circumstance to be trusted to give religious instruction to his own children, shows that those who control the religious education of the youthful 'masses' have but little confidence in the effects of their system on the religious life and faith of the English people." Miss Harriet Finlay-Johnson, a highly original and successful elementary school teacher, speaks (_The Dramatic Method of Teaching_, 1911, p. 170) with equal disapproval of the notion that any moral value attaches to the ordinary school examinations in "Scripture." [169] If it were not so, England, after sixty years of National Schools, ought to be a devout nation of good Church people. Most of the criminals and outcasts have been taught in Church Schools. A clergyman, who points this out to me, adds: "I am heartily thankful that religion was never forced on me as a child. I do not think I had any religion, in the ethical sense, until puberty, or any conscious realization of religion, indeed, until nineteen." "The boy," remarks Holmes (_op. cit._, p. 100), "who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to himself when he leaves school: 'If this is religion I will have no more of it,' is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to be honoured rather than blamed for having realized at last that the chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain which, unknown to himself, his inmost soul demands." [170] _La Nouvelle Heloise_, Part V, Letter 3. In more recent times Ellen Key remarks in a suggestive chapter on "Religions Education" in her _Century of the Child_: "Nothing better shows how deeply rooted religion is in human nature than the fact that 'religious education' has not been able to tear it out." [171] J.S. Mill, _Letters_, Vol. II, p. 135. [172] Lancaster found ("The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence," _Pedagogical Seminary_, July, 1897) that among 598 individuals of both sexes in the United States, as many as 518 experienced new religious emotions between the ages of 12 and 20, only 80 having no such emotions at this period, so that more than 5 out of 6 have this experience; it is really even more frequent, for it has no necessary tendency to fall into conventional religious moulds.