ipture lessons in his schooldays, is not under any circumstance to be
trusted to give religious instruction to his own children, shows that
those who control the religious education of the youthful 'masses' have
but little confidence in the effects of their system on the religious
life and faith of the English people." Miss Harriet Finlay-Johnson, a
highly original and successful elementary school teacher, speaks (_The
Dramatic Method of Teaching_, 1911, p. 170) with equal disapproval of
the notion that any moral value attaches to the ordinary school
examinations in "Scripture."

[169] If it were not so, England, after sixty years of National Schools,
ought to be a devout nation of good Church people. Most of the criminals
and outcasts have been taught in Church Schools. A clergyman, who points
this out to me, adds: "I am heartily thankful that religion was never
forced on me as a child. I do not think I had any religion, in the
ethical sense, until puberty, or any conscious realization of religion,
indeed, until nineteen." "The boy," remarks Holmes (_op. cit._, p. 100),
"who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to himself
when he leaves school: 'If this is religion I will have no more of it,'
is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to be honoured
rather than blamed for having realized at last that the chaff on which
he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain which, unknown to
himself, his inmost soul demands."

[170] _La Nouvelle Heloise_, Part V, Letter 3. In more recent times Ellen
Key remarks in a suggestive chapter on "Religions Education" in her
_Century of the Child_: "Nothing better shows how deeply rooted religion
is in human nature than the fact that 'religious education' has not been
able to tear it out."

[171] J.S. Mill, _Letters_, Vol. II, p. 135.

[172] Lancaster found ("The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence,"
_Pedagogical Seminary_, July, 1897) that among 598 individuals of both
sexes in the United States, as many as 518 experienced new religious
emotions between the ages of 12 and 20, only 80 having no such emotions
at this period, so that more than 5 out of 6 have this experience; it is
really even more frequent, for it has no necessary tendency to fall into
conventional religious moulds.

[173] Professor Starbuck, in his _Psychology of Religion_, has well
brought together and clearly presented much of the evidence showing this
intimate association betwe