re Christian, even though it may only be in the
sense that the real saint feels tenderness for the hopeless sinner. And
in the second place, as I have sought to point out, the facts we are
here concerned with are far too fundamental to concern the Christian
alone. They equally concern the secularist, who also is called upon to
satisfy the spiritual hunger of the adolescent youth, to furnish him
with a discipline for his entry into life, and a satisfying vision of
the universe. And if secularists have not always grasped this necessity,
we may perhaps find therein one main reason why secularism has not met
with so enormous and enthusiastic a reception as the languor and
formalism of the churches seemed to render possible.

If the view here set forth is sound,--a view more and more widely held
by educationists and by psychologists trained in biology,--the first
twelve years must be left untouched by all conceptions of life and the
world which transcend immediate experience, for the child whose
spiritual virginity has been prematurely tainted will never be able to
awake afresh to the full significance of those conceptions when the age
of religion at last arrives. But are we, it may be asked, to leave the
child's restless, inquisitive, imaginative brain without any food during
all those early years? By no means. Even admitting that, as it has been
said, at the early stage religious training is the supreme art of
standing out of Nature's way, it is still not hard to find what, in this
matter, the way of Nature is. The life of the individual recapitulates
the life of the race, and there can be no better imaginative food for
the child than that which was found good in the childhood of the race.
The child who is deprived of fairy tales invents them for himself,--for
he must have them for the needs of his psychic growth just as there is
reason to believe he must have sugar for his metabolic growth,--but he
usually invents them badly.[179] The savage sees the world almost exactly
as the civilized child sees it, as the magnified image of himself and
his own environment; but he sees it with an added poetic charm, a
delightful and accomplished inventiveness which the child is incapable
of. The myths and legends of primitive peoples--for instance, those of
the British Columbian Indians, so carefully reproduced by Boas in German
and Hill Tout in English--are one in their precision and their
extravagance with the stories of children, but