ng to the frequent
observation, devout parents often have most irreligious offspring, just
as the bad boys at school and college are frequently sons of the clergy.

At puberty and during adolescence everything begins to be changed. The
change, it is important to remember, is a natural change, and tends to
come about spontaneously; "where no set forms have been urged, the
religious emotion," as Lancaster puts it, "comes forth as naturally as
the sun rises."[172] That period, really and psychologically, marks a "new
birth." Emotions which are of fundamental importance, not only for the
individual's personal life but for his social and even cosmic
relationships, are for the first time born. Not only is the child's body
remoulded in the form of a man or a woman, but the child-soul becomes a
man-soul or a woman-soul, and nothing can possibly be as it has been
before. The daringly sceptical logician has gone, and so has the
imaginative dreamer for whom the world was the automatic magnifying
mirror of his own childish form and environment. It has been revealed to
him that there are independent personal and impersonal forces outside
himself, forces with which he may come into a conscious and
fascinatingly exciting relationship. It is a revelation of supreme
importance, and with it comes not only the complexly emotional and
intellectual realization of personality, but the aptitude to enter into
and assimilate the traditions of the race.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this is the moment, and the
earliest moment, when it becomes desirable to initiate the boy or girl
into the mysteries of religion. That it is the best moment is indicated
by the well-recognized fact that the immediately post-pubertal period of
adolescence is the period during which, even spontaneously, the most
marked religious phenomena tend to occur.[173] Stanley Hall seems to think
that twelve is the age at which the cultivation of the religious
consciousness may begin; "the age, signalized by the ancient Greeks as
that at which the study of what was comprehensively called music should
begin, the age at which Roman guardianship ended, at which boys are
confirmed in the modern Greek, Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopal
Churches, and at which the Child Jesus entered the Temple, is as early
as any child ought consciously to go about his Heavenly Father's
business."[174] But I doubt whether we can fix the age definitely by
years, nor is it indeed quite accu