The evolution of spiritual responsiveness.—­The realization of this new spiritual consciousness in the child’s life may not involve any special nor abrupt upheaval.  If the child is wisely led, and if he develops normally in his religion, it almost certainly will not.  Countless thousands of those who are living lives very full of spiritual values have come into the rich consciousness of divine relationship so gradually that the separate steps cannot be distinguished.  “First the blade, then the ear, and then the full grain in the ear” is the natural law of spiritual growth.

The bearing of this truth upon our teaching is that we must seek for the unfolding of the child’s spiritual nature and for the turning of his thought and affections toward God from the first.  We must not point to some distant day ahead when the child will “accept Jesus” or become “a child of God.”  We must ourselves think of the child, and lead the child to think of himself, as a member of God’s family.

This does not mean that the child, as he grows from childhood into youth and adulthood, will not need to make a personal and definite decision to give God and the Christ first place in his life; he will need to do this not once, but many times.  It only means that from his earliest years the child is to be made to feel that he belongs to God, and should turn to him as Father and Friend.  Day by day and week by week the child should be growing more vitally conscious of God’s place in his life, and more responsive to this relationship.  Only by this steady and continuous process of growth will the spiritual nature take on the depth and quality which the Christian ideal sets for its attainment.

Ideals and ambitions.—­In order that religion may be a helpful reality to the child it must extend to his developing ideals and ambitions.  For even children have ideals and ambitions, however crude they may be, or however much they may lack the serious and practical nature they later take on.  Probably no child reaches his teens without having many times secretly determined that he would do this or become that, which he has admired in some hero of his own choosing from actual acquaintance or from books or stories.  There is no normal child but who has his own notions of greatness and importance, of success and fame, and who wishes and longs for certain things ahead upon which he has set his heart, and which he purposes to attain.  The things that he thus values are his ideals, goals to be reached.  Ideals are, therefore, guides to action and effort, something to be striven after and sacrificed for.  They are the things most worth while, for which we can afford to forego other things of lesser value.  It was the force of a great ideal which led Paul to say, “This one thing I do”; and to the attainment of that ideal he gave all his purpose and effort.

To form true ideals requires a trained sense of values; one must develop a power of spiritual perspective, and be able to see things in their true proportions.  He must know what things rightly come first if he is to “put first things first;” He must have some training in recognizing the value of “pearls” if he is to see that it is a good exchange to “sell all that he has” in order to “buy the pearl of great price.”