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Ill HOW TO TELL THE STORY is the most difficult question to answer, and one that requires time. Indeed, one might say it cannot be answered excepting in a general way, and that any effort to tell the truth sacredly is better than not to tell it at all. Where the children are still young the task is comparatively simple when once begun. It develops naturally, with time for thought on the part of the teller; and the steps are easy and convincing. One of the questions most frequently asked is this: Does not talking about these things fix the child's mind unduly upon them ? As a matter of experience it is just the other way. The child who has ak ways known the facts is not curious. Why should he be? There is nothing to be curious about. It is all as much amatter of course to him as the rising of the sun. And he is safeguarded against a certain pruriency that comes from wrongly stimulated and vilely fed curiosity. Instead of causing the child to think more about the subject, the tendency of good teaching is to prevent his thinking of it. Another question frequently asked is, Does not talking on this subject arouse curiosity in children who otherwise would not be curious? The answer is that it does not arouse harmful curiosity. The right kind of curiosity on any subject is of course good. Indeed without the desire to question and investigate everything about him man would be yet a savage living in a hole in the ground, and the starting- point of all the child's after-knowledge is curiosity. There are two kinds of curiosity, a good kind and a bad kind. The good kind is interested in finding out things for the sake of understanding them; the bad kind serves a bad end, in connectionwith this subject it leads to investigations which produce wrong thoughts and feelings, ...
