Looked upon from this light, childish goodness and childish conscientiousness is an unhealthy and even criminal forcing of the young plant, the hot-house bringing to maturity of a young soul whose sole business is to grow and learn. When moral instruction is given, a criminal advantage is taken of the child’s suggestibility, and all possibility of an individual moral life, growing naturally and spontaneously as the young soul meets the real emergencies and problems that life will present to it, is lost. If, as we are coming more and more to realize, the justification of knowledge is that it helps us to get along with and enjoy and grapple with the world, so the justification of virtue is that it enables us to get along with and enjoy and grapple with the spiritual world of ideals and feelings and qualities. We should be as careful about giving a child moral ideas that will be of no practical use to him as we are in giving him learning that will be of no use to him. The virtues of childhood, then, we shall not find in the moral realm. The “good” child is not cultivated so much to-day as he was by the former generation, whose one aim in education and religion was to bind the young fast in the fetters of a puritan code; but he is still, in well-brought-up families, an appalling phenomenon. The child, who at the age of five has a fairly complete knowledge of what God wants him and all around him to do and not to do, is an illustration of the results of the confusion of thought that would make childhood instead of youth the battle-ground of the moral life. We should not dismiss such a child as quaint, for in him have been sowed the seeds of a general obscurantism and conservatism that will spread like a palsy over his whole life. The acceptance of moral judgments that have no vital meaning to the young soul will mean in later life the acceptance of ideas and prejudices in political and religious and social matters that are uncriticized and unexamined. The “good” child grows up into the conventional bigoted man. The duties and tastes which are inculcated into him in childhood, far from aiding the “excellent workings of his soul,” clog and rust it, and prevent the fine free expression of its individuality and genius. For the child has not yet the material of experience that will enable him to get the sense of values which is at the bottom of what we call the spiritual life. And it is this sense that is so easily dulled, and that must be so carefully protected against blunting. That the child cannot form moral judgments for himself, however, does not mean that they must be formed for him by others; it means that we must patiently wait until he meets the world of vivid contrasts and shocks and emergencies that is youth. It is not repairing his lack of moral sensitiveness to get him to repeat parrot-like the clean-cut and easily learned taboos and permissions of the people around him. To get him to do this is exactly