ery
drawn from the world of sense. Yet grave dangers are attached to it.
On, the one hand an exclusive reliance on tradition paves the way for
the disillusion which is so often experienced towards the end of
adolescence, when it frequently causes a violent reaction to
materialism. On the other hand it exposes us to a risk which we
particularly want to avoid: that of reducing the child's nascent
spiritual life to the dream level, to a fantasy in which it satisfies
wishes that outward life leaves unfulfilled. Many pious people,
especially those who tell us that their religion is a "comfort" to them,
go through life in a spiritual day-dream of this kind. Concrete life has
starved them of love, of beauty, of interest--it has given them no
synthesis which satisfies the passionate human search for meaning--and
they have found all this in a dream-world, made from the materials of
conventional piety. If religion is thus allowed to become a ready-made
day-dream it will certainly interest adolescents of a certain sort. The
naturally introverted type will become meditative; whilst their
opposites, the extroverted or active type, will probably tend to be
ritualistic. But here again we are missing the essence of spiritual
life.

Our aim should be to induce, in a wholesome way, that sense of the
spiritual in daily experience which the old writers called the
consciousness of the of God. The monastic training in spirituality,
slowly evolved under pressure of experience, nearly always did this. It
has bequeathed to us a funded wisdom of which we make little use; and
this, reinterpreted in the light of psychological knowledge, might I
believe cast a great deal of light on the fundamental problems of
spiritual education. We could if we chose take many hints from it, as
regards the disciplining of the attention, the correct use of
suggestion, the teaching of meditation, the sublimation and direction to
an assigned end of the natural impulse to reverie; above all, the
education of the moral life. For character-building as understood by
these old specialists was the most practical of arts.

Further, in all this teaching, those inward activities and responses to
which we can give generally the name of prayer, and those outward
activities and deeds of service to which we can give the name of work,
ought to be trained together and never dissociated. They are the
complementary and balanced expressions of one spirit of life: and must
be given