In childhood we acquire the spiritual goods that we shall take with us through life; in youth we test our acquisitions and our tools, selecting, criticizing, comparing; in old age, we put them away gently into the attic of oblivion or retire them honorably, full of years and service. Our ideas, however, of what those spiritual goods were that childhood acquired have been very much confused. We have imagined that we could give the child “the relish of right and wrong,” as Montaigne calls it. The attempt has usually been made to train up the child in the moral life, by telling him from his earliest years what was right and what was wrong. It was supposed that in this way he absorbed right principles that would be the guiding springs of his youthful and later life. The only difficulty, of course, with this theory is that the moral life hardly begins before the stresses and crises of youth at all. For really moral activity implies choice and it implies significant choice; and the choices of the child are few in number and seldom significant. You can tell a child that a certain thing is wrong, and he will believe it, but his belief will be a purely mechanical affair, an external idea, which is no more woven into the stuff of his life than is one of those curious “post-hypnotic suggestions,” that psychologists tell about, where the subject while hypnotized is told to do something at a certain time after he awakes. When the time comes he does it without any consciousness of the reason and without any immediate motive. Now most moral ideas in a child’s mind are exactly similar to these suggestions. They seem to operate with infallible accuracy, and we say,--“What a good child!” As a fact the poor child is as much under an alien spell as the subject of the hypnotist. Now all this sort of hypnotized morality the younger generation wants to have done with. It demands a morality that is glowing with self-consciousness, that is healthy with intelligence. It refuses to call the “good” child moral at all; it views him as a poor little trained animal, that is doomed for the rest of his life to go through mechanical motions and moral tricks at the crack of the whip of a moral code or religious authority. From home and Sunday-school, children of a slightly timid disposition get moral wounds, the scars of which never heal. They enter a bondage from which they can never free themselves; their moral judgment in youth is warped and blighted in a thousand ways, and they pass through life, seemingly the most moral of men and women, but actually having never known the zest of true morality, the relish of right and wrong. The best intentions of parents and teachers have turned their characters into unnatural channels from which they cannot break, and fixed unwittingly upon them senseless inhibitions and cautions which they find they cannot dissolve, even when reason and common sense convince them that they are living under an alien code.