I know surely enough what must be in your minds at this point:  I am running up my head hard against the doctrine of Original Sin, against the doctrine that in dealing with a child you are dealing with a ‘fallen nature,’ with a human soul ‘conceived in sin,’ unregenerate except by repression; and therefore that repression and more repression must be the only logical way with your Original Sinners.

Well, then, I am.  I have loved children all my life; studied them in the nursery, studied them for years—­ten or twelve years intimately—­in elementary schools.  I know for a surety, if I have acquired any knowledge, that the child is a ‘child of God’ rather than a ‘Child of wrath’; and here before you I proclaim that to connect in any child’s mind the Book of Joshua with the Gospels, to make its Jehovah identical in that young mind with the Father of Mercy of whom Jesus was the Son, to confuse, as we do in any school in this land between 9.5 and 9.45 a.m., that bloodthirsty tribal deity whom the Hohenzollern family invokes with the true God the Father, is a blasphemous usage, and a curse.

But let me get away to milder heresies.  If you will concede for a moment that the better way with a child is to draw out, to educate, rather than to repress, what is in him, let us observe what he instinctively wants.  Now first, of course, he wants to eat and drink, and to run about.  When he passes beyond these merely animal desires to what we may call the instinct of growth in his soul, how does he proceed?  I think Mr Holmes, whom I have already quoted, very fairly sets out these desires as any grown-up person can perceive them.  The child desires

(1) to talk and to listen; (2) to act (in the dramatic sense of the word); (3) to draw, paint and model; (4) to dance and sing; (5) to know the why of things (6) to construct things.

Now I shall have something to say by and by on the amazing preponderance in this list of those instincts which Aristotle would have called mimetic. This morning I take only the least imitative of all, the desire to know the why of things.

Surely you know, taking only this, that the master-key admitting a child to all, or almost all, palaces of knowledge is his ability to read. When he has grasped that key of his mother-tongue he can with perseverance unlock all doors to all the avenues of knowledge.  More—­he has the passport to heavens unguessed.

You will perceive at once that what I mean here by ‘reading’ is the capacity for silent reading, taking a book apart and mastering it; and you will bear in mind the wonder that I preached to you in a previous lecture—­that great literature never condescends, that what yonder boy in a corner reads of a king is happening to him. Do you suppose that in an elementary school one child in ten reads thus?  Listen to a wise ex-inspector, whose words I can corroborate of experience: