d to work upon matter it cannot grasp nor
assimilate. Nor is it possible to secure full effort without a
reasonable degree of mastery. The feeling of confidence and assurance
that comes from successful achievement increases the amount of power
available. The victorious army or the winning football team is always
more formidable than the same organization when oppressed and
disheartened by continued defeat.

If the task is interesting, children do not ask that it shall be easy.
Once catch their enthusiasm and they will exert their powers to the
full, and take joy in the effort. But the effort must be accompanied by
a sense of victory and achievement. There must always be immediately
ahead the possibility of winning over the difficulties of their lessons.
Except in rare moments of emotional exaltation the most heroic of us are
not capable of hurling our best strength against obstacles upon whose
resistance we make no impression. And the child possesses almost none of
this quality. Without a measurable degree of success in what he attempts
to learn his _morale_ suffers, enthusiasm fails, and discouragement
creeps in to sap his powers.

Kept in the presence of mental tasks he cannot master nor understand,
the child will soon lose interest and anticipation in his work. Without
mastery intellectual defeat comes to be accepted and expected, and the
child forms the fatal habit of submission and giving up. Because he
expects defeat from the lesson before him, the learner is already
defeated; because he has not learned to look for victory in his study,
he will never find it.

Preventing the habit of defeat.--This is all to say that in teaching
the child religion we must not constantly confront him with matter that
is beyond his grasp and understanding. That we are doing this in some of
our lesson systems there can be no doubt. The result is seen in the
child's hazy and indefinite ideas about religion; in a later astonishing
lack of interest in the problems of religion on the part of adults; in
the child's unwillingness to undertake the study of his lessons for the
Sunday school; in the fact that to many children the Sunday school
lesson hour is a task and a bore; and in the fact that the Sunday school
does not in a large degree continue to hold the loyalty of its members
after they have reached the age of deciding for themselves whether they
will attend. _Fundamental to all successful classroom results with
children are enjoym