religious experience are so taken
in hand by the society which produces and envelops the new life that the
student of religion must deal with a social product from the outset. The
isolated religion of an individual does not exist, although in the more
mature stages of prophetism and philosophy pronounced individual
features always assert themselves.

The potential individuality in every child forbids, however, the
assertion that he is only a mirror in which the religion of his
immediate society and nothing more is reflected. There is from a very
early time an active principle of personality, a growing selective
power, a plus that comes out of the unmapped laboratory of creation,
that may so arrange, transmute, and enrich the commonplace elements of
the socio-religious matrix as to amount to genius. But, nevertheless,
the newcomer can scarcely do more than select the given quarter which
from day to day proves least unpleasant, while the fact of being on the
great ship and in one cabin or another--or in the steerage--has been
settled beforehand.

Hence the religious life of the boy depends largely upon family and
community conditions which in turn rest upon economic considerations.
Whatever demoralizes the home, degrades the community, and crushes out
idealism also damns the souls of little children. It requires no deep
investigation of modern society to prove that this is being done, and
the guilt of economic injustice and rapacity is measured ultimately in
the cost to the human spirit which in every child pleads for life and
opportunity, and, alas, too often pleads in vain.

The pre-adolescent and imitative religious life of the boy is fairly
communicative, but as soon as the actual struggle of achieving a
personal religion sets in under the pubertal stress the sphinx itself is
not more reticent. The normal boy is indisposed to talk about the
affairs of his inner life. Probably they are too chaotic to formulate
even to himself. If he is unspoiled he clothes his soul with a spiritual
modesty which some of his sentimental elders might well cultivate. If he
does break silence it will probably be in terms of the religious cult
that has given him nurture. For all of these reasons it is exceedingly
difficult to trace with certainty the development of his personal
religion.

The indubitable and hopeful fact is that in every normal boy the potent
germ of religion is present. Usually in early adolescence it bursts its
casin