We must learn to interpret the heart and our native instincts as truthfully as we do external nature, for our happiness in life depends quite as largely upon bringing our beliefs into harmony with the deeper feelings of our nature as it does upon the ability to adapt ourselves to our physical environment. Thus not only all religious beliefs and moral acts will strengthen if they truly express the character instead of cultivating affectation and insincerity in opinion, word, and deed, as with mistaken pedagogic methods they may do. This latter can be avoided only by leaving all to naturalism and spontaneity at first, and feeding the soul only according to its appetites and stage of growth. No religious truth must be taught as fundamental--especially as fundamental to morality--which can be seriously doubted or even misunderstood. Yet it must be expected that convictions will be transformed and worked over and over again, and only late, if at all, will an equilibrium between the heart and the truth it clings to as finally satisfying be attained. Hence most positive religious instruction, or public piety, if taught at all, should be taught briefly as most serious but too high for the child yet, or as rewards to stimulate curiosity for them later, but sacred things should not become too familiar or be conventionalized before they can be felt or understood. The child's conception of God should not be personal or too familiar _at first_, but He should appear distant and vague, inspiring awe and reverence far more than love; in a word, as the God of nature rather than as devoted to serviceable ministrations to the child's individual wants. The latter should be taught to be a faithful servant rather than a favorite of God. The inestimable pedagogic value of the God-idea consists in that it widens the child's glimpse of the whole, and gives the first presentment of the universality of laws, such as are observed in its experiences and that of others, so that all things seem comprehended under one stable system or government. The slow realization that God's laws are not like those of parents and teachers, evadible, suspensible, but changeless, and their penalties sure as the laws of nature, is most important factor of moral training. First the law, the schoolmaster, then the Gospel; first nature, then grace, is the order of growth.