ergy into fresh
channels, is little in comparison with what might be achieved in the
plastic growing psychic life of children did we appreciate our full
opportunity and the importance of using it. This is why I propose now to
consider one or two points in the relation of education to the spiritual
life.

Since it is always well, in a discussion of this kind, to be quite clear
about the content of the words with which we deal, I will say at once,
that by Education I mean that deliberate adjustment of the whole
environment of a growing creature, which surrounds it with the most
favourable influences and educes all its powers; giving it the most
helpful conditions for its full growth and development. Education
should be the complete preparation of the young thing for fullness of
life; involving the evolution and the balanced training of all its
faculties, bodily, mental and spiritual. It should train and refine
senses, instincts, intellect, will and feeling; giving a world-view
based on real facts and real values and encouraging active
correspondence therewith. Thus the educationist, if he be convinced, as
I think most of us must be, that all isn't quite right with the world of
mankind, has the priceless opportunity of beginning the remaking of
humanity from the right end. In the child he has a little, supple thing,
which can be made into a vital, spiritual thing; and nothing again will
count so much for it as what happens in these its earliest years. To
start life straight is the secret of inward happiness: and to a great
extent, the secret of health and power.

That conception of man upon which we have been working, and which
regards his psychic life on all its levels as the manifold expressions
of one single energy or urge in the depths of his being, a life-force
seeking fulfilment, has obvious and important applications in the
educational sphere. It indicates that the fundamental business of
education is to deal with this urgent and untempered craving, discipline
it, and direct it towards interests of permanent value: helping it to
establish useful habits, removing obstacles in its path, blocking the
side channels down which it might run. Especially is it the task of such
education, gradually to disclose to the growing psyche those spiritual
correspondences for which the religious man and the idealist must hold
that man's spirit was made. Such an education as this has little in
common with the mere crude imparting of