deliberately, at least in result, renounces any attempt at moral
influence. A real feeling for religion is seldom the fruit of such
instruction; the children, as a rule, are glad after their Confirmation
to have done with this unspiritual religious teaching, and so they
remain, when their schooling is over, permanently strangers to the
religious inner life, which the instruction never awakened in them. Nor
does the instruction for Confirmation do much to alter that, for it is
usually conceived in the same spirit.

All other subjects which might raise heart and spirit and present to the
young minds some high ideals--more especially our own country's
history--are most shamefully neglected in favour of this sort of
instruction; and yet a truly religious and patriotic spirit is of
inestimable value for life, and, above all, for the soldier. It is the
more regrettable that instruction in the national school, as fixed by
the regulations, and as given in practice in a still duller form, is
totally unfitted to raise such feelings, and thus to do some real
service to the country. It is quite refreshing to read in the new
regulations for middle schools of February 10,1910, that by religious
instruction the "moral and religious tendencies of the child" should be
awakened and strengthened, and that the teaching of history should aim
at exciting an "intelligent appreciation of the greatness of the
fatherland."

The method of religious instruction which is adopted in the national
school is, in my opinion, hopelessly perverted. Religious instruction
can only become fruitful and profitable when a certain intellectual
growth has started and the child possesses some conscious will. To make
it the basis of intellectual growth, as was evidently intended in the
national schools, has never been a success; for it ought not to be