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This is the third stage of childhood, the stage with which I am about to deal. I still speak of childhood for want of a better word; for our scholar is approaching adolescence, though he has not yet reached the age of puberty. About twelve or thirteen the child's strength increases far more rapidly than his needs.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born. The qualities of body and soul that now emerge are far newer. The child comes from and harks back to a remoter past; the adolescent is neo-atavistic, and in him the later acquisitions of the race slowly become prepotent.

It is far and away the most important part of the teacher's professional equipment. And then in our schools of education and teachers colleges institutions set apart for preparing teachers for our high schools and for administrative positions the study of adolescence is receiving increasing attention.

He had come putting the thing pompously to look at his "property," which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands.

Nature kills off a good many of this sort in the first teething-time, a few in later childhood, a good many again in early adolescence; but every now and then one runs the gauntlet of her various diseases, or rather forms of one disease, and grows up, as Master Weeks had done.

Those on whom the religious influence fails to operate experience the change from childhood to adolescence, on to complete maturity, without their nature evincing any lack of completeness. This is the vital truth of which Professor James loses sight, and it is ignored by the vast majority of writers who treat of the subject.

But by-and-by, if it is to have special complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be supplied by the soil; your pears will crack, if the root of the tree gets no iron, your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do. Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to come into flower and to set its fruit.

The gifts and graces of the period of youth, although timely and sufficient during the adolescence of the world of mankind, are now incapable of meeting the requirements of its maturity. The playthings of childhood and infancy no longer satisfy or interest the adult mind. From every standpoint the world of humanity is undergoing a reformation.

The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and self-sacrifice from the Old Testament come naturally first; then perhaps the prophets paraphrased as in the pedagogic triumph of Kent and Saunders's little series; and when adolescence is at its height then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon Jesus's life and work.

What will the State offer them as they emerge from childhood into boyhood, and from boyhood into adolescence? Perhaps it will offer Conscription; and, with no "perhaps" at all, some strident voices will pronounce that offer the finest boon ever conferred upon the youth of a nation.