like training an animal to bolt any kind of food. The child, however, has too weak a stomach to digest very much of the moral pabulum that is fed him. The inevitable result is a moral indigestion, one form of which is the once fashionable sense of sin. The youth, crammed with uncriticized taboos delivered to him with the awful prestige of an Almighty God, at a certain age revolts, and all the healthy values of life turn sour within him. The cure for this spiritual dyspepsia is called conversion, but it is a question whether the cure is not often worse than the disease. For it usually means that the relish of right and wrong, which had suddenly become a very real thing, has been permanently perverted in a certain direction. By a spiritual operation, the soul has been forced to digest all this strange food, and acquires the ability to do so forever after. Those who do not suffer this operation pass through life with an uneasiness of spirit, the weight and burden of an imperfectly assimilated moral life. Few there are who are able to throw off the whole soddenness, and if they do they are fortunate if they are not left without any food at all. Religious teachers have always believed that all these processes were necessary for the soul’s health. They have believed that it was better to have mechanical morals than no morals at all. When the younger generation sees the damage such morals work, it would prefer to have none. Discarding the “good” child, then, we will find the virtues of childhood in that restless, pushing, growing curiosity that is the characteristic of every healthy little boy or girl. The child’s life is spent in learning his way around the world; in learning the ropes of things, the handles and names of whatever comes within the range of his experience. He is busy acquiring that complex bundle of common-sense knowledge that underlies all our grown-up acts, and which has become so automatic with us that it hardly seems possible to us that we have slowly acquired it all. We do not realize that thousands of facts and habits, which have become stereotyped and practically unconscious in our minds, are the fresh and vital experiences of the mind of the little child. We cannot put ourselves back into that world where the absorbing business is to give things a position and a name and to learn all the little obvious facts about the things in the house and the yard and the village, and in that far land of mystery beyond. What sort of sympathy can we have with these little people,--we, to whom all this naïve world of place and nomenclature is so familiar as to seem intuitive? We should have to go back to a world where every passing railroad train was a marvel and a delight, where a walk to the village meant casting ourselves adrift into an adventurous country where anything was likely to happen and where all calculations of direction or return were upset. It takes children a long time to get accustomed to the world.