e tradition which has not yet been acquired by the child, and the
inner emotional expansion which still remains unliberated in the child.
The adult, therefore, fortified by this superiority, feels justified in
falling back on the weapon of authority: "You may not _want_ to believe
this and to learn it, but you've _got_ to."

It is in this way that the adult wins the battle of religious education.
In the deeper and more far-seeing sense he has lost it. Religion has
become, not a charming privilege, but a lesson, a lesson about
unbelievable things, a meaningless task to be learnt by heart, a
drudgery. It may be said that even if that is so, religious lessons
merely share the inevitable fate of all subjects which become school
tasks. But that is not the case. Every other subject which is likely to
become a school task is apt to become intelligible and attractive to
some considerable section of the scholars because it is within the range
of childish intelligence. But, for the two very definite reasons I have
pointed out, this is only to an extremely limited degree true as regards
the subject of religion, because the young organism is an instrument not
as yet fitted with the notes which religion is most apt to strike.

Of all the school subjects religion thus tends to be the least
attractive. Lobsien, at Kiel, found a few years since, in the course of
a psychological investigation, that when five hundred children (boys and
girls in equal numbers), between the ages of nine and fourteen, were
asked which was their favourite lesson hour, only twelve (ten girls and
two boys) named the religious lesson.[167] In other words, nearly 98 per
cent children (and nearly all the boys) find that religion is either an
indifferent or a repugnant subject. I have no reports at hand as regards
English children, but there is little reason to suppose that the result
would be widely different.[168] Here and there a specially skilful
teacher might bring about a result more favourable to religious
teaching, but that could only be done by depriving the subject of its
most characteristic elements.

This is, however, not by any means the whole of the mischief which, from
the religious point of view, is thus perpetrated. It might, on _a
priori_ grounds, be plausibly argued that even if there is among healthy
young children a certain amount of indifference or even repugnance to
religious instruction, that is of very little consequence: they cannot
be