Here it is that the danger of too emotional a type of religious training comes in.  Sentimentalism of all kinds is dangerous and objectionable, especially in the education of girls, whom it excites and debilitates.  Boys are more often merely alienated by it.  In both cases, the method of presentation which regards the spiritual life simply as a normal aspect of full human life is best.  No artificial barrier should be set up between the sacred and the profane.  The passion for truth and the passion for God should be treated as one:  and that pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, those adventurous explorations of the mind, in which the more intelligent type of adolescent loves to try his growing powers, ought to be encouraged in the spiritual sphere as elsewhere.  The results of research into religious origins should be explained without reservation, and no intellectual difficulty should be dodged.  The putting-off method of meeting awkward questions, now generally recognized as dangerous in matters of natural history, is just as dangerous in the religious sphere.  No teacher who is afraid to state his own position with perfect candour should ever be allowed to undertake this side of education; nor any in whom there is a marked cleavage between the standard of conduct and the standard of thought.  The healthy adolescent is prompt to perceive inconsistency and unsparing in its condemnation.

Moreover, a most careful discrimination is daily becoming more necessary, in the teaching of traditional religion of a supernatural and non-empirical type.  Many of its elements must no doubt be retained by us, for the child-mind demands firm outlines and examples and imagery drawn from the world of sense.  Yet grave dangers are attached to it.  On, the one hand an exclusive reliance on tradition paves the way for the disillusion which is so often experienced towards the end of adolescence, when it frequently causes a violent reaction to materialism.  On the other hand it exposes us to a risk which we particularly want to avoid:  that of reducing the child’s nascent spiritual life to the dream level, to a fantasy in which it satisfies wishes that outward life leaves unfulfilled.  Many pious people, especially those who tell us that their religion is a “comfort” to them, go through life in a spiritual day-dream of this kind.  Concrete life has starved them of love, of beauty, of interest—­it has given them no synthesis which satisfies the passionate human search for meaning—­and they have found all this in a dream-world, made from the materials of conventional piety.  If religion is thus allowed to become a ready-made day-dream it will certainly interest adolescents of a certain sort.  The naturally introverted type will become meditative; whilst their opposites, the extroverted or active type, will probably tend to be ritualistic.  But here again we are missing the essence of spiritual life.