We are beginning to learn the overwhelming importance of infantile impressions:  how a forgotten babyish fear or grief may develop underground, and produce at last an unrecognizable growth poisoning the body and the mind of the adult.  But here good is at least as potent as ill.  What terror, a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil; a happy impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nurture will do for good.  Moreover, we can bury good seed in the unconscious minds of children and reasonably look forward to the fruit.  Babyish prayers, simple hymns, trace whilst the mind is ductile the paths in which feelings shall afterwards tend to flow; and it is only in maturity that we realize our psychological debt to these early and perhaps afterwards abandoned beliefs and deeds.  So the veritable education of the Spirit begins at once, in the cradle, and its chief means will be the surroundings within which that childish spirit first develops its little awareness of the universe; the appeals which are made to its instincts, the stimulations of its life of sense.  The first factor of this education is the family:  the second the society within which that family is formed.

Though we no longer suppose it to possess innate ideas, the baby has most surely innate powers, inclinations and curiosities, and is reaching out in every direction towards life.  It is brimming with will power, ready to push hard into experience.  The environment in which it is placed and the responses which the outer world makes to it—­and these surroundings and responses in the long run are largely of our choosing and making—­represent either the helping or thwarting of its tendencies, and the sum total of the directions in which its powers can be exercised and its demands satisfied:  the possibilities, in fact, which life puts before it.  We, as individuals and as a community, control and form part of this environment.  Under the first head, we play by influence or demeanour a certain part in the education of every child whom we meet.  Under the second head, by acquiescence in the social order, we accept responsibility for the state of life in which it is born.  The child’s first intimations of the spiritual must and can only come to it through the incarnation of Spirit in its home and the world that it knows.  What, then, are we doing about this?  It means that the influences which shape the men and women of the future will be as wholesome and as spiritual as we ourselves are:  no more, no less.  Tone, atmosphere are the things which really matter; and these are provided by the group-mind, and reflect its spiritual state.