During the first years of school life, a point of prime importance in ethico-religious training is the education of conscience. This latter is the most complex and perhaps the most educable of all our so-called "faculties." A system of carefully arranged talks, with copious illustrations from history and literature, about such topics as fair play, slang, cronies, dress, teasing, getting mad, prompting in class, white lies, affectation, cleanliness, order, honor, taste, self-respect, treatment of animals, reading, vacation pursuits, etc., can be brought quite within the range of boy-and-girl interests by a sympathetic and tactful teacher, and be made immediately and obviously practical. All this is nothing more or less than conscience-building. The old superstition that children have innate faculties of such a finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle of things by a rapid sort of first "intellection," an error that made all departments of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for centuries before Comenius, Basedow and Pestalozzi, has been banished everywhere save from moral and religious training, where it still persists in full force. The senses develop first, and all the higher intuitions called by the collective name of conscience gradually and later in life. They first take the form of sentiments without much insight, and are hence liable to be unconscious affectation, and are caught insensibly from the environment with the aid of inherited predisposition, and only made more definite by such talks as the above. But parents are prone to forget that healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of conduct are, at first, very feeble, and that the sense of obligation needs the long and careful guardianship of external authority. Just as a young medical student with a rudimentary notion of physiology and hygiene is sometimes disposed to undertake a more or less complete reform of his diet, regimen, etc., to make it "scientific" in a way that an older and a more learned physician would shrink from, so the half-insights of boys into matters of moral regimen are far too apt, in the American temperament, to expend, in precocious emancipation and crude attempts at practical realization, the force which is needed to bring their insights to maturity. Authority should be relaxed gradually, explicitly, and provisionally over one definite department of conduct at a time. To distinguish right and wrong in their own nature is the highest and most complex of intellectual processes. Most men and all children are guided only by associations of greater or less subtlety. Perhaps the whole round of human duties might be best taught by gathering illustrations of selfishness and tracing it in its countless disguises and ramifications through every stage of life. Selfishness is opposed to a sense of the infinite and is inversely as real religion, and the study of it is not, like systematic ethics, apt to