The Moral and Religious Training of Children [pp. 26-48]

THE PRINCE TON REVIEW.
Finally, there is danger lest this change, as prescribed and
formulated by the church, be too sudden and violent, and the
capital of moral force which should last a lifetime be consumed
in a brief, convulsive effort, like the sudden running down of a
watch if its spring be broken. Piety is naturally the slowest
because the most comprehensive kind of growth. Quetelet says
that the measure of the state of civilization in a nation is the
way in which it achieves its revolutions. As it becomes truly
civilized revolutions cease to be sudden and violent, and become
gradually transitory and without abrupt change. The same is
true of that individual crisis which psycho-physiology describes
as adolescence, and of which theology formulates a higher spiritual potency as conversion. The adolescent period lasts ten
years or more, during all of which development of every sort is
very rapid and constant, and it is, as already remarked, intemperate haste for immediate results, of reaping without sowing,
which has made so many regard change of heart as an instantaneous conquest rather than as a growth, and persistently to
forget that there is something of importance before and after it
in healthful Christian experience.
G. STANLEY HALL.
48