113
THE TERROR BY NIGHT 116
THE BRAMBLE BUSH KING 119
WHERE IS HEAVEN? 122
THE CHRISTIAN ARMY 124

INTRODUCTION

In a certain Western university the president receives a salary of ten
thousand dollars a year for training young men and young women, while
not many miles distant from that university is a stock-farm the
superintendent of which receives a salary of twelve thousand dollars for
training high-bred colts. That colt-trainer is at hand when the colt is
foaled, and before it rises to its feet has rubbed down its head and put
a halter upon it, so that from birth it shall be accustomed to the
feeling of the halter.

From that time the training of the colt is not suspended for a moment.
If in training it to travel in harness a piece of paper should blow
across the training-course, causing the colt to shy, an assistant holds
the paper on the opposite side of the road, so that the animal shall
have the kink taken out of its nervous system and its tendency to shy
again in the same direction be at once corrected.

The old method was to allow a colt to run wild until two or three years
of age, then "break it in." The result was apt to be either a "cowed"
animal or a nervous horse.

Would that we were manifesting as much wisdom in the religious training
of our children as that horse-trainer. But unfortunately we are pursuing
largely the old method, allowing our children to get full of all sorts
of mental kinks up through those first plastic three or four years, and
then handing them over to the church kindergarten-teacher for one hour a
week, expecting her to straighten out all these aberrations and give
back to the parents a normally religious child.

Many parents seem to assume that the child's brain is lying dormant
during those first few years, when, as a matter of fact, the child's
mind during these years is most receptive, and expanding at a rate never
after equalled. The nervous system is receiving impressions which,
though in after-years the child has no _conscious_ memory of it, are yet
indelibly chiselled there for good or ill.

It is high time that parents and religious teachers took more
cognizance than they do of this fact.

There are other parents who deliberately refuse to give their children
any religious training during this period for fear of "unduly
influencing" them from the religious s