Our aim should be to induce, in a wholesome way, that sense of the spiritual in daily experience which the old writers called the consciousness of the of God.  The monastic training in spirituality, slowly evolved under pressure of experience, nearly always did this.  It has bequeathed to us a funded wisdom of which we make little use; and this, reinterpreted in the light of psychological knowledge, might I believe cast a great deal of light on the fundamental problems of spiritual education.  We could if we chose take many hints from it, as regards the disciplining of the attention, the correct use of suggestion, the teaching of meditation, the sublimation and direction to an assigned end of the natural impulse to reverie; above all, the education of the moral life.  For character-building as understood by these old specialists was the most practical of arts.

Further, in all this teaching, those inward activities and responses to which we can give generally the name of prayer, and those outward activities and deeds of service to which we can give the name of work, ought to be trained together and never dissociated.  They are the complementary and balanced expressions of one spirit of life:  and must be given together, under appropriately simple forms.  Concrete application of the child’s energies, aptitudes and ideals must from the first run side by side with the teaching of principle.  Young people therefore should constantly be encouraged to face as practical and interesting facts, not as formulae, those reactions to eternal and this-world reality which used to be called our duty to God and our neighbour; and do concrete things proper to a real citizen of a really theocratic world.  They must be made to realize that nothing is truly ours until we have expressed it in our deeds.  Moreover, these deeds should not be easy.  They should involve effort and self-sacrifice; and also some drudgery, which is worse.  The spiritual life is only valued by those on whom it makes genuine demands.  Almost any kind of service will do, which calls for attention, time and hard work.  Though voluntary, it must not be casual:  but, once undertaken, should be regarded as an honourable obligation.  The Boy Scouts and Girl Guides have shown us how wide a choice of possible “good deeds” is offered by every community:  and such a banding together of young people for corporate acts of service is strongly to be commended.  It encourages unselfish comradeship, satisfies that “gang-instinct” which is a well-known character of adolescence, and should leave no opening for self-consciousness, rivalry, and vanity in well-doing or in abnegation.