Comparative religion is unable to make a satisfactory investigation of the successive stages in the religious life of the individual.  For the purpose of religious education it is highly desirable to add to the historical survey and the ethnological cross-sections of comparative religion a longitudinal section of the religion of the individual.  This, however, is impossible because the important data at the bottom of the series are unattainable.  In the study of childhood, as in the study of a primitive race, the individual is so securely hidden away in the group that the most penetrating scientific method cannot find him, and the tendencies which are to integrate into 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.