should also be referendum and recall in the power of more experienced advisers. Young girls can imitate only such forms of group action as have come within their experience, but they are able and willing to improve them in adapting them to their own plans. Parliamentary procedure, committee work, and business management are better and easier learned now than later, and work that arouses interest can be well carried out. The service chosen for these early years should be definite, personal, and not interminable.

SUMMARY AND CONNECTING LINK

The social and educational problems connected with the young girl are urgent and concrete. Outwardly they concern her manners and speech, her occupations and her companions, but inwardly they concern the moral and spiritual ideals which determine the direction of the woman who is to develop. Help must come to her through the persons who incarnate these ideals; and from such, direction, even authority, is welcomed. Teaching is most effective by example, but unless the girl comprehends the principles underlying the examples, she will fail in some of her most intimate problems.

To one who should consider merely the activities and spoken words of a young and rapidly growing girl, no creature could seem more frankly materialistic and earthly-minded. Yet if one will enter sympathetically into her secret life, unspoken because she knows no words which can express her thoughts, the most important factor in all this ferment is her religious

life. The new self and the new world that should be bounded by the present and the seen would fail to meet the craving and the possibilities of the growing girl. The educational problems of her religious life must have a chapter for their consideration.

Helpful Books for Further Reading.

Bibliography,

Numbers 9, 21, 22, 25, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 52, 53, 54, 55, 71, 72, 73, 80 (Chapter IX), 85, 86, 95, 97, 103, 105, 111, 113, 118, 123, 136, 141, 150.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS AND MORAL

EDUCATION

THERE are some good old phrases that are falling into disuse because they were too often used without full consciousness of their meaning. Always churches have sought to save "immortal souls." But sometimes they have attempted to separate, in thought, that immortal soul from the body which conditioned its growth, and from the world of persons and things through which it grew into human value. So the pendulum swung to the other extreme. Because "soul" in religious usage seemed to be a detached something having its interests in another and a future world, those who were acutely conscious of the vivid present activity of living came to drop the whole phrase, and with it a needed emphasis on the immortal quality of human life. Those who would give adequate help to the girl whose life is so rapidly enlarging must recog nize its spiritual needs.

The New Self and Religious Ideals. We have seen that the inner forces of early adolescence make inevitable a change in the girl's interests and point of view. Yet this change must always be conditioned by the interests and viewpoint which were dominant in childhood. Past environment, past ideals and habits must add to or subtract from the energy available for present ideals and efforts. The girl who has been trained from baby

hood to think of the comfort and convenience of others may no more ardently desire to be an unselfish Christian woman than the girl who has all her life been "spoiled"; but what each will have to do now, in this thirteenth year of her life, to insure her achieving this ideal, will be vastly different. One will have to form an entire new set of habits, and to watch lest she slip into the old ones. She will even have to learn to see that certain things are selfish, so much a matter of course have they become to her. The other may have to make considerable effort to continue her thoughtful service for others, because of the strange new languor and indifference which accompany the fastgrowing bones and muscles. She will certainly have daily opportunities to enlarge her scope of thought and service to equal her new powers. But each will strive toward her ideal with a new fervor, because she feels that she is growing up.

Because she is growing up, too, each girl will look at her ideal from the inside instead of from the outside. Fitfully and only partially attained, but enlarging daily, is the consciousness of self as an inner, spiritual "me." It is this consciousness which we have seen makes every adolescent boy and girl want to be recognized as a person to be reckoned with, not as a child to be directed and informed. The self must express the fact that it is a self. Therefore much of the disagreeable assertiveness that is now manifested is due to the fact that the only way which seems open to assert oneself is to deny or contradict the self of some one else. The positive form would be as welcome, but it does not occur to the self concerned. Yet when the chance for positive affirmation is presented, how rarely

is the response at variance with the best of her early family affection!

The Nature of the Girl's Religious "Decisions." It is normally not otherwise in the girl's religious development. If the heavenly Father has had her earliest affectionate reverence, if the church has been part of the family connection, these same inner forces of growth bring her to the consciousness: "I love God not because I was taught to, but because I do. I want to belong to the church, not as a part of my family but as myself." To be sure, "natural reactions" differ1 in no other manner in this field than in any other part of her life. If any definite act or commitment of herself-to sing at a school exhibition, or to give up skating to make doll clothes for a sick little sister-habitually brings a nerve-storm, or a period of interlocked impulses, so will the presentation by her pastor or her Sunday school teacher of the matter of joining the church. She may take gladly the opportunity to assume individual responsibility, or she may inwardly protest against the consciousness of change shown in this recognition by others of her growing maturity.

But there is no issue of "deciding against Christ," and to state thus falsely the issue of her uncertainty is little short of a crime. We shudder when we hear of a mother who said to her fourteen-year-old daughter, "If you go to that party to-night, you cannot come into this house again." The child went, and by the disobedience chose against the family. But after the fun was over it was a very frightened and little-girl person

1 It has been said that most of the controversies in psychology, education, and theology arise from the fact that nearly every human being supposes that all other human beings, unless there is something radically wrong with them, are like himself! The temperament of religious workers has certainly had much to do with insistence on specified "experiences."