oy really needs, and, indeed, all immature things--for I found
it equally true of immature men--is a simple, practical religion, based
more on the facts of life and conscience than on doctrines and dogmas.
To know God as his Father; to know that he has a Redeemer who laid down
His life to save him from sin and who takes account of his smallest and
most broken effort to do what is right; to realize that it is only so
far as he is like Christ and in Christ that he can be really a man and
work out what is highest in him; to know that he has been baptized into
a Divine Society, binding him to fight against all wrong, both within
and in the world without; above all, to know that there is a supreme
spiritual Power within him and about him to enable him to do right, and
that in the line of duty "I can't" is a lie in the lips that repeat, "I
believe in the Holy Ghost"; this is as much as his young soul can
assimilate, not as mere religious phrases, but as realities to live by.

"So nigh to glory is our dust,
So nigh to God is man,
When duty whispers low 'Thou must,'
The soul replies, 'I can.'"

But see that beneath all this he has the special Christian teaching with
regard to the sanctity of the body thoroughly instilled into him. If the
Incarnation means anything, it means not the salvation and
sanctification of a ghost, but the salvation and consecration of the
whole man, of his body as well as his soul. True, the animal body to a
spiritual being must always be a "body of humiliation," but nothing can
be more unfortunate and misleading than the epithet in the Authorized
Version of "vile" as a translation of the Greek word used by St. Paul.
On the contrary, we are taught that even this mortal body is a temple of
the Holy Ghost.

In teaching this there can be no difficulty; you can make use of a
child's natural reverence for a church. You can say, "What would you
think if you heard of some loose lads breaking into a church, and just
for the fun of the thing strewing the aisles with cinder dust and all
sorts of loose rubbish; tearing out the pages of Bibles and hymn-books
to light their pipes, and getting drunk out of the chalice? You would be
honestly shocked at such profanity. Nay, even in the dire exigencies of
war we do not think better of the Germans for having stabled their
horses in one of the French churches and left their broken beer-bottles
on the high altar and the refuse of a stable strewn up a