drugs, except under a physician's direction, stop the abnormal gratification of appetites, and stop the unwise dissipation of energy in work, social amusements, and high-tension living generally, their offspring will be nervously weak and unbalanced. Education, whether secular or religious, cannot undo the mischief of a neurasthenic parenthood. Education of the right kind may indeed improve the condition of badly organized brains, so that there is no occasion for an absolutely fatalistic attitude in dealing with the latter. But education is strictly limited by the original constitution of the child, and this is the product not of instruction but of the lives the parents have lived before the child was begotten.

The infant's nervous system is not only a product of heredity. It is also a product of environment; that is to say, of the various influences that affect life after heredity has launched it upon its course. Here we have first to consider embryonic environment. During the nine months preceding the birth of the child, development is more rapid, and modifications are more profound, than during any subsequent period of existence. This means that the child's life is then most sensitive to influences, good or bad, and that the effects of such influences are radical and permanent. The mother is the primary medium of influence, but everything that affects her life constitutes a part of the embryonic environment. Nutrition, physical and mental stress, drugs, accidents, and crimes are factors conditioning the maternal life at this time, and every one of these factors is involved in shaping the life of the child. Some of them are controlled by the mother herself; others are controlled by those who create conditions under which the mother must live. How far both parents and society have thus fallen short of supplying an ideal embryonic environment is shown by medical statistics. Elise Berwig, in Medicine for September, 1898, showed that rickety, irritable, and peevish children, liable to convulsions, morally peculiar, and otherwise defective, may be the product of bad diet during the period of gestation. Dr. Spitzka says he has never seen an idiotic, malformed child, or one afflicted with morbid impulses derived from healthy parents, free from hereditary taint, in which some maternal experience could not be traced. The same authority states that he has seen in practice constitutionally melancholic or mentally defective children in whom no other predisposing cause could be discovered than worry in the mother. "Amabile, of New York, showed that not only, were the children of opium-using mothers born with a tendency to the opium habit, but that the mothers aborted frequently, and that the children who survived were very liable to convulsions." "Statistics

from the female employés of the Spanish, French, Cuban, and American tobacco factories support the opinion that the maternal tobacco habit (whether intentional or the result of an atmosphere consequent upon occupation) is the cause of frequent miscarriage, of high infantile mortality, of defective children, and of infantile convulsions."

But the results of ignorance, selfishness and intentional wrong-doing in blighting the lives of the unborn are shown still more strikingly in the awful mortality of that period. Dr. W. A. Chandler, a physician of over thirty years' experience, states as his belief that one half of the human race die before birth and that three-fourths of these are intentionally destroyed. According to Dr. Longstaff's "Studies in Statistics," out of every 1000 male children born into the world, 200 (or one-fifth) do not survive birth; and out of every 1000 female children born into the world, 160 (or about one-sixth) do not survive birth. Most of these deaths may be ascribed to ignorance, unnatural hardships, luxurious living, perverted appetites and other causes operating to impair the vitality of children during the period of gestation, or of the mother's at the crisis of maternity. The significance of these facts reaches far beyond the table of vital statistics. It affects the living no less than the dead. Forces that operate to destroy so large a percentage of the human race must affect, also, the vitality and character of those who survive. Is it any wonder that children who run the guantlet of all this ignorance, selfishness, and crime have nervous predispositions that often make our attempts at intellectual and moral education altogether futile?

The modification of the infant's nervous system subsequent to birth depends mainly upon food, clothing, activity, sleep, sense-perceptions, and those instincts that have to do with organic well-being. Health, good habits, and a normal activity of the instincts of nutrition, fear, resistance, play, and sympathy sum up the aims of moral and religious training during the period of infancy. Expressed in terms of brainbuilding, the object should be to insure: (1) the generation of an adequate supply of nervous energy, (2) the proper control of the discharge of nervous energy, and (3) the inhibition of nervous energy.

First in importance is the proper nourishment of the child. This involves not only an adequate amount of food, but also food of the right quality. Nervous energy cannot be generated unless both of these conditions are met. That many inferior brains and feeble minds are due to malnutrition is shown by the investigations of Dr. Warner among English school-children. Of 2853 boys and 2015 girls that had abnormal nerve-signs, 12 per cent of the former and 16 per cent of the

latter were suffering from low nutrition. Of 2073 boys and 1635 girls who were classed as mentally dull, 15 per cent of the former and 19 per cent of the latter were suffering from low nutrition. Among the nervous disorders due to improper nutrition, Dr. W. S. Christopher mentions the following: neuralgia, chorea, convulsions, paralysis, asthma, weak vaso-motor control, defective sensations, and feeble cerebral activity. Many of these disorders result from food that is indigestible. Such food decays in the stomach, and the toxic products of decomposition are carried to the brain, poisoning the cells and interfering with their growth and activity.

Next to food in developing the infant's brain is motor activity. It is coming to be known that the growth of nerve-cells cannot take place unless, through work, the old material is broken down and eliminated, so that new material may take its place. Besides, the motor areas of the brain are very extensive and control, to a great extent, the flow of blood to that organ. Consequently, in proportion as the child is active physically, will its brain be well supplied with blood. From these considerations it is evident that a young child that is so restricted in its movements as to be unable to expend its energies freely and completely cannot develop a healthy brain. Hence, the necessity of the largest opportunity for play, and hence the danger in the cramped surroundings of the cities' poor, as well as in the pampered homes of the cities' rich, of children's nervous development being arrested. Closely related to the infant's motor activities are its sense-perceptions. The greater the freedom of movement, the more the child will exercise its sense of touch and sight, which are the great educative senses. Play, therefore, under suitable conditions of space and natural surroundings, is the best possible means of developing the special senses, and, through them, the brain.

This much will suffice to indicate the fundamental importance of a healthy nervous system in the moral and religious training of infancy, and to suggest a few of the most essential things to be observed by parents and society in general. We need an enlightened public sentiment and a quickened conscience regarding these deeper scientific and spiritual truths of life. We need an education for parenthood, in the home, the public school, and the church. We need instruction in the facts and laws of physiology, embryology, neurology, and other sciences that make intelligible the processes of life, upon which all moral and religious education must build. Without relaxing our vigor in the usual methods of approaching the problems of the spirit, we should avail ourselves more freely of the material and methods of modern science.

THE USE OF THE STORY IN THE RELIGIOUS EDUCA

TION OF THE INFANT

LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON

NEW YORK CITY

How early does baby begin to delight in stories? I leave it to psychologists to determine the precise week in which the thrilling drama of the little pig that went to market grips hold upon the child's moral consciousness. For that this is a morality play admits of no controversy when once you think about it. Let us say, generally, at about six months. A month earlier, perhaps, that simpler morality or mystery play, Patty-cake, exerts the first external altruistic influence "toss it in the oven for baby and me." The moral influence of both, unquestionable, though too subtle, perhaps, for our grosser ethical sense, is no doubt enhanced by the dramatic action, or if you prefer, the physical training, which both involve, and the ethical value of which no intelligent person now disputes. But why should I undertake to do in brief what that genius in child-mind reading, Susan Blow, has so masterfully done? It is unnecessary for me here to emphasize the importance of the dramastory as she has shown it in "Mother-Play and Child-Play." I would simply point out how important it is to the religious development of the "angel in the child" that the father should have his part in this work or play.

We do not train prospective fathers in kindergarten methods as, happily, many prospective mothers are now trained. In fact, there is no need. Story-telling and play-acting come naturally to fathers: is it not he, and not the mother, who takes the part of the lion and the bear in bed-time gambols, or becomes the horse upon which baby may ride at will? Let him realize the significance of this natural play-relation between father and child; and extend not only its field, but its period, with direct intent to have his part in the development of the angel who, except under most favorable circumstances, will have passed beyond the reach of influence by the time his baby is four years old, and by that time will have set, almost beyond hope of extension, the measure of the man who shall be.

The present discussion is not restricted to the Bible story, and I have no desire here to epitomize what I have elsewhere said at length. To that I would, however, add that when the art of Bible-story telling is cultivated as the art of fairy and nature story telling is now cultivated,

there is no period between the ages of two and twenty when the Bible story may not be made the means far more effectual than any devotional reading or prayer-meeting-of developing, in a perfectly normal way, that religious aptitude which was as surely the child's at birth as the power to grasp, and far more surely than the power to see and hear. Far more surely, even, than the power to grasp; for children have been born so destitute of brain power as to be unable to perform the first instinctive act of human experience, that of closing the tiny hand; but no child has ever been born into the world without some potentiality of religion.

At a conference of charities and corrections held some twenty years ago, a gifted young physician thrilled a great audience of experienced philanthropists by telling how he had awakened the religious faculty in the heart of a child who till the age of eight had done no voluntary act, never closed his hand upon any object nor looked with recognition on his mother's face. I cannot tell the story here; it may be read in the Report; I can only allude to the witness it bears to the existence, in the very lowest form of humanity, of that spark of divinity, that angel that does always behold the face of the Father.

How soon shall father or mother begin to tell Bible stories to the baby? How early may the child gain its first idea of God? Miss Elizabeth Peabody teaches us that the mother is the first form in which God reveals himself to the child; her embrace the proof that God is love. To this may we not add that it is from the father who lives up to his high calling that the baby gets his first vague notion that love is the law that rules the universe? Long before the child can use words, that sense of love and law, and of love as law, is implanted in his heart; and I firmly believe that not many months after the first joy of Patty-cake the baby is ready to hear and to be influenced - all unconsciously by simple teachings of the Heavenly Father up in the sky, who loves baby and takes good care of it when father and mother and baby are asleep.

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Let us remember that ideas reach the infant's brain through words which it comes to understand, never by definition but always by action and repetition. It is not necessary to understand language to become aware of God. The children, and especially the younger children in a family where religion is real and God a personal friend, learn far more by what they see than by what they hear. For this reason, not less than for its social influence, I think that family prayer is of inestimable benefit in developing the moral and religious faculty of very little children. Especially is this the case when Bible story telling in some degree takes the place of the more formal reading of the Bible. Yet even the reading of the Bible "in course" has a profound effect upon children.