tely brought into
prominence. The teacher is not urged by a single syllable to impress
religious ideas on the receptive child-mind; the whole course of
instruction, in conformity with regulations, deals with a formal
religiosity, which is quite out of touch with practical life, and if not
deliberately, at least in result, renounces any attempt at moral
influence. A real feeling for religion is seldom the fruit of such
instruction; the children, as a rule, are glad after their Confirmation
to have done with this unspiritual religious teaching, and so they
remain, when their schooling is over, permanently strangers to the
religious inner life, which the instruction never awakened in them. Nor
does the instruction for Confirmation do much to alter that, for it is
usually conceived in the same spirit.

All other subjects which might raise heart and spirit and present to the
young minds some high ideals--more especially our own country's
history--are most shamefully neglected in favour of this sort of
instruction; and yet a truly religious and patriotic spirit is of
inestimable value for life, and, above all, for the soldier. It is the
more regrettable that instruction in the national school, as fixed by
the regulations, and as given in practice in a still duller form, is
totally unfitted to raise such feelings, and thus to do some real
service to the country. It is quite refreshing to read in the new
regulations for middle schools of February 10,1910, that by religious
instruction the "moral and religious tendencies of the child" should be
awakened and strengthened, and that the teaching of history should aim
at exciting an "intelligent appreciation of the greatness of the
fatherland."

The method of religious instruction which is adopted in the national
school is, in my opinion, hopelessly perverted. Religious instruction
can only become fruitful and profitable when a certain intellectual
growth has started and the child possesses some conscious will. To make
it the basis of intellectual growth, as was evidently intended in the
national schools, has never been a success; for it ought not to be
directed at the understanding and logical faculties, but at the mystical
intuitions of the soul, and, if it is begun too early, it has a
confusing effect on the development of the mental faculties. Even the
missionary who wishes to achieve real results tries to educate his
pupils by work and secular instruction before he attempts t