an immediate divine experience. She let herself down for the most part upon the level of habit-only keeping visibly an upward look of expectation, that what she might prepare in righteous habit should be a house builded for the occupancy of the Spirit. Her stress was laid on industry, order, time, fidelity, reverence, neatness, truth, intelligence, prayer. And the drill of the house in these was to be the hope in a large degree of religion.

The intelligent kindergartner of to-day who is an earnest Christian comes nearer to finding the natural laws of the Christian life for childhood than all the Sunday preaching and teaching of our fathers. We have been slow to learn that habits in any virtue are a house for the Spirit. Here are some of the principles which are emphasized by the intelligent student of child-life and of Christ's life: Overdeveloped self-consciousness destroys naturalness, and this destroys the spiritual life. Whatever associates the highest life with common, everyday experiences helps to make the spiritual life natural. The naturalness of a child's spiritual life is not fostered by an appeal to a sense of danger, but by a call to do something for fellow-man and God. A child is won more by love of good than by hatred of evil. Let the child see that religion is not for the few, nor for special days, nor for restraints merely, nor for getting ready to die, but for knowing God and finding in his service the grandest life possible on earth. We are not to set the children to chasing the rainbow for the pot of gold, but to show them that everyday duties well done will put gold into their characters and more than rainbow beauty into their lives.

A child's sympathies can be permanently enlisted for a person, while there may be but a short-lived enthusiasm in ethical teaching. We must remember that the simple pictures of the synoptics come before the deep philosophy of John. We are all Christians before we are theologians, and our Christian life is measured by our love for Christ rather than by our comprehension of his words. Whatever cultivates the community idea, the sharing of the life of the family, responsibility for the comfort of others, fosters the essential religious life. Whatever teaches the child to subordinate the senses to the intellect and conscience, whether in food, or dress, or play, helps to the religious life. Whatever teaches the child self-mastery anywhere, liberty through law, highest liberty

through highest law, is the foundation for the noblest Christian life. Training a child to see the unseen as clearly as the seen trains for faith in God and for the use of all things which the faculty of faith brings to the service of the soul. All lessons which cultivate reverence, wonder, admiration for God's works, are helps to the religious life of children, as to that of any of us. Thoreau said in his graduating address, "The world is more beautiful than useful; we must teach the child that the world is as useful as it is beautiful, that God is in it everywhere. Whatever shows the child this world as the working of an infinite Father, speaking, watching, listening, will make the Father's presence real in temptation and in high resolve for good deeds. An earnest Christian teacher, with the eyes of a Ruskin, a John Burroughs, a William Hamilton Gibson, or a Celia Thaxter, is an instructed high priest leading the child to talk with God. The opening of a rose may be to a child as the parting of the veil of God's temple, and its fragrance as incense for a worshiping soul. · A child dedicated to God by a holy mother and brought under temple influences will early hear a call to service. Slow, sleepy, indulgent Eli may not quickly perceive that the child Samuel has heard the voice of God; but the true spiritual priestwhether the teacher lovingly telling the story of Jesus or the mother in the holy activities of the home-will gladly prompt the answer, "Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth." There will be knowledge and worship of God.

With the religion of childhood kept in the heart we shall see the world redeemed. Leslie Stephens said that he based his whole philosophy on the identity between the instincts of childhood and the cultivated reason, and could show how those early intuitions "are transformed into settled principles of feeling and action." Principal Shairp is sure that we "may condense the instincts of childhood into permanent principles by thought, by faithful exercise of the affections and high resolve; that, if we allow these to pass from us as sunbeams from the hillside, character is lowered and worsened ; that, if they are retained in our thought and melted into our being, they become the most fruitful sources of ennobled character." This can and will be done; and the signs are

d;

many that it is being done now as it never was before. Helen Hunt Jackson once said that she could measure her friends by their estimate of Hawthorne's story, "The Snow Image." And well she might, for the story is full of meaning; the creations of the childhood mind, ideals pure as the beautiful snow, too often melt away under the prosy, practical handling of well-meaning parents, teachers, and preachers. Or another of Hawthorne's stories, "The Great Stone Face," is worth our study, as we try to bring to children the shaping influences of lofty ideals. The child who is led to contemplate lovingly the mountain character of Jesus Christ will see in it human features of inspiring benevolence and strength, and will be transformed into a manhood which bears the same image and brings blessing to his fellow-men. The highest ideal is the most real, and makes character like itself. The mountain face wins the boy Gladstone at four years, and holds a greater fascination for the Gladstone of fourscore.

The religion of childhood is to bring back the Church to a normal type of living for God. Materialism may be routed intellectually--it has been routed--but materialism of character will hold the field until the natural religion of childhood brings forward all the habits of faith and love into the thought and activity of manhood. The years of captivity now allowed between the ages of eight and twenty are of incalculable loss to the Church. The small number converted before the end of that time does not change the fact that the Church is robbed -robbed not only of what those years could have done, but robbed of the increased efficiency of all later years which those twelve shaping years could have added. Let this period be given to making the spiritual life reasonable and natural, and the Church will make God real to this world. Had we, forty years ago, given intelligent attention to the winning of the children, fostering the life of the Spirit already within them; had we trained them to see and serve Christ in common things; had our homes nurtured spiritual life by precept and example, instead of associating that life so largely with evangelists and revival scenes, we would have to-day a Church of stalwart Christians, and beautiful homes, and irresistible power. While the revival has been a most blessed agency

for the moving of the ungodly and indifferent, it has not been the best means of stimulating and maintaining the religious life of children. We have unintentionally given our attention to the methods of the revival rather than to the Spirit and the giver of the Spirit, Jesus Christ. By waiting for the revival we have wrought harm to the Church; have taught the children to connect the beginning of their Christian life with an occasion and method rather than with the ever-present Christ; have allowed ourselves lazily to wait for circumstances to accomplish that which God has given us as our bounden daily duty; and have arranged to bestow our labors upon the most unproductive material when we should have given first attention to the most productive. A few generations of children kept for God would find the world turned to God. The homes, at present nominally Christian, would soon make the whole world Christian.

During the Renaissance some ideas were unearthed from the classics which we gladly would have left in oblivion, and which brought poison to morals and death to faith; but the historical method used in making the discoveries brought us also other and better things than the classics, gave us a clearer light on the whole path which lay between Bethlehem and Olivet. The studies of to-day-relating to the evolution of the body and mind of man, and to the physical and psychical basis of man's religious life-may sometimes lead us far afield and bring confusion to the faith of some. But the faithful search for reality in child-life and in Christ's life, the faithful effort to find a natural entrance for Christ into the life of the child, the faithful endeavor to make holiness natural in the home, will give to the world another and true Renaissance, will give to the Church her new and true revival. The things revealed unto babes shall become beauty and strength and righteousness in the lives of men.

John A. Story

ART. III.-THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS

STEVENSON.

We have fallen upon an age of notes and notelets. The old leisureliness requisite for the cultivation of the epistolary art is ours no longer. The telegraph, the telephone, the typewriter-all the paraphernalia of our swift commercial agewill never comport with the writing of letters in the true significance of the term. The demon of haste lurks at our elbow, and we no longer take time to observe the amenities of friendship. In days that are past a letter was at once a newssheet, a record of mental taste and delight, and a flashing mirror of the heart. Every word exhaled an aroma of personality. Now we receive a few type-written lines of colorless language, and we must accept them forsooth as a letter. Yet these latter years have not been wholly devoid of the kindly instincts of the genuine letter-writer; and when we turn to the correspondence of Lowell, the Brownings, Dante, Rossetti, and Robert Louis Stevenson it is like breathing again the atmosphere in which Keats, Cowper, Schiller, and Lamb indited letters with a pen dipped in their own hearts.

It is posterity that pronounces final judgment upon a writer. He may fill a large and unique place among his contemporaries, and seem to the eyes that look upon his own day as destined to a seat among the immortals, but it is those who come after him to whom is committed the ultimate adjudication of his claims to remembrance. The writer who lacks vitality and a fecund and fertilizing power over others will, immediately that death has vindicated his universal sway, quietly slip into the limbo of forgetfulness. But he in whose veins life warms and riots, who makes his pages breathe with a full and healthy scope, who appeals to the fundamental instincts and loves of humankind, may falter for a little while in his march toward the Pantheon of perpetual renown, but sooner or later he assuredly arrives.

Robert Louis Stevenson was an artist, curious and delightful, dealing with his subjects in the fresh, joyous, and zestful manner in which an active-minded boy inspects each new ob