for at any moment, and that the shrewd and prudent is he who gathers provision from this world for the other, so that his rank may be magnified with God, and his pleasure in Paradise may be enlarged.

"Then, if the growing up has been healthy, this explanation at time of maturity will make a healthy impression, abiding in the heart as engraving abides on a stone. But if the growing up has been different from that given above, so that the boy has been given to play and immoderation and impudence and greediness in food and dress and adornment and to boasting, of himself, his mind will break away from receiving the truth, as a wall of dry earth breaks away. And it is the beginnings of things which ought to be considered. For a boy in his nature is created capable of receiving good and bad equally and only his parents turn him to one of the two sides. The Prophet said, 'Every child is born with a natural religious faculty and it is only his parents who make him a Christian or a Jew or a Magian.' Sahl b. 'Abd Allah at-Tusturī said, 'When I was a child of three years old, I used to rise in the night and watch the prayer of my uncle, Muhammad b. Sawwar. Then he said to me one day, "Are you not mindful of God who created you?" I said, "How ought I to be mindful of him?" He said, "Say in your heart, when you are putting on your clothes, three times without moving your tongue, ‘Allah is with me; Allah beholds me; Allah witnesseth me.' So I said that for some nights; then I told him that. So he said, "Say it every night seven times." So I said it and told him that. Then he said, "Say it every night eleven times." So I said it. of it fell into my heart. Then, after a year had passed, my uncle said, "Guard what I have taught you and abide in it until you enter the grave, for it will avail you in this world and the next." So I ceased not doing that for years, and found therein a sweetness in my secret soul. Thereafter, my uncle said to me, one day, "O Sahl, he with whom God is, whom God beholdeth and witnesseth, can he be rebellious against God? Beware of rebellion!" And I used to keep alone with myself. Then they sent me to school, and I said, "I fear that my spiritual solicitude will be separated from me." But they made a con

And the sweetness

dition with the teacher that I should go to him at a certain hour, then I should study, then I should return. So I went to the school and learned the Qur'an and committed it to memory when I was six or seven years old. And I used to fast from the world, and my food was barley bread when I was twelve years old. Then, a religious question occurred to me when I was thirteen, and I asked my people that they would send me to the people of al-Basra, that I might ask concerning it. So I came to al-Basra and asked the learned there, but none availed anything to heal me; so I went to Abbadan, to a man who was known as Abu Habib Hamza b. Abi Abd Allah al-Abbādāni. So I asked him of it, and he resolved it to me. So I remained with him for a space, profiting by his words and being educated by his accomplishments. Then I returned to Tustur and kept my food within bounds, on the basis that I would buy for myself, with a dirhem, some musty barley, then it would be ground and baked for me, and I would break my fast at dawn upon the weight of an uqiya of it, plain, without salt or seasoning. And that dirhem would suffice me for a year. Then I determined that I would fast three nights, then break my fast one night; then five; then seven; then five-and-twenty nights. And I held to that for a year; then I went out wandering in the earth for years; then I returned to Tustur, and I used to stand in prayer during the whole night, so long as God willed.' Ahmad said, 'I never saw him eat salt, until he met God Most High.'"

You will easily see the point of this last narrative. As the twig is bent, so the tree grows; that for al-Ghazzālī is the whole secret of religious training. You will notice also how easily he passes from the moral training of children in general to a special case of infant asceticism and religious devotion. Life in the world and in religion, moral training and devout contemplation, all run together for him. Further, moral training as to principles and those rules of decent conduct which we sometimes call minor morals are parts of one whole. Indeed, he makes skilful use of such details to form habits from which principles may thereafter spring. A child who is taught al

ways to stand in respectful attention to his elders will easily learn the meaning and value of respect, reverence, devotion, as principles in life. I need not enter on the many other details of the same kind which this long extract shows. Only, understand that in all this al-Ghazzālī is not an isolated, individual voice, but is expressing the attitude of all Islām.

Finally, let me give another extract which puts, even more clearly, the gradual development from mechanical acceptance to intelligent grasp. It deals, it is true, in the first instance, with theology, but theology and ethics, as I have already said, are one in Islām. It comes in al-Ghazzali's work after a creed which he composed specially to be learned by heart by children. This creed you will find translated in my "Development of Muslim Theology" where it occupies eight small-type pages. You will probably have perceived already that Muhammadan religious education moves on a strenuous plane and that the well trained Muhammadan child would think little of such trifles as our Westminster Shorter Catechism.

After his creed for infant minds al-Ghazzālī thus continues (ii, pp. 42 ff):

"On the method of gradual approach to guidance and the ordering of the stages of belief.

"Know that what we have mentioned in the preceding creed ought to be taught to a boy in earliest childhood, so that he may hold it absolutely in memory. Thereafter, the meaning of it will keep gradually unfolding itself to him, point by point, as he grows older. So, first, is the committing to memory; then understanding; then belief and certainty and acceptance. That is what results in a boy without proof; it is by the grace of God upon the heart of man that He opens him in earliest childhood to faith without need of evidence or proof. How can that be denied, seeing that all the creeds of the mass of the people, in their beginnings are simple imitation and acceptance of authority purely?

"It is true that the belief which results from simple acceptance on authority is not free from a certain weakness at the beginning, in the sense that it is capable of being destroyed by

contradiction if it meets with that. So there must needs be a strengthening of it, and a supporting of it in the soul of the boy and with the common people until it is firmly rooted and cannot be shaken. But the method of strengthening and confirming it is not that he should be taught the art of disputation and scholastic theology, but that he should occupy himself in the recital and exposition of the Qur'an and in the reading of traditions of Muhammad and their meanings and in the functions of the acts of worship. Then his belief will continue to increase in firm-rootedness through what meets his ear of the proofs and evidences of the Qur'an and through what shines out upon him from the lights and functions of acts of worship, and what reaches him from observation of the pious and their intercourse and their signs and their practices in humility to God, in fear of Him and submission to Him. So the beginning of imitation is like the casting of seed into the bosom, and these other causes are like the tending and watering of it until that seed sprouts and grows strong and rises into a pleasant tree, well rooted, with its stem firm and its branches in the heavens.

"But he should be guarded in the most absolute way from hearing disputation and from scholastic theology. For the degree to which disputation discomposes him and to which it injures him is greater than that to which it benefits him. Strengthening him by disputation would resemble beating a tree with a pestle of iron in the hope to increase its fruits. But such treatment mostly crushes and injures it. That is what happens usually; and observation will show you this sufficiently. Compare, then, the creed of the pious and God-fearing from the masses of the people with the creed of scholastic theologians and disputers, and you will see that the creed of the people is like a lofty mountain which calamities and thunderbolts cannot move, but the creed of the theologian who is on guard and his belief in the subtleties of disputation are like a thread hung in the air, which the winds move at one time thus, and at another time thus. And if anyone hears from them the proof of the belief, and accepts it on authority, is he not like one who accepts the belief itself on authority? For there is no distinction with

regard to accepting on authority, between learning the proof or learning the thing proved. Imitation of a proof is one thing and developing a proof by meditation is another thing, far distant from the first.

"Then, when the early development of a boy has been according to this creed, if he busies himself with the gain of this world, nothing more than this creed will be open to him, but he will be safe in the world to come through belief in the truth, since the law did not impose upon wild Arabs more than acceptance of the external meaning of these doctrines. As for investigation and seeking and requiring of proofs, they were not held to that at all. But if he desires to be one of those who follow the path of the other world, and if Providence assist him, so that he occupy himself with works and hold to the fear of God and deny his soul to lust and occupy himself with exercises and striving, gates of guidance will be opened, revealing the essential proofs of this creed, through a divine light which will be poured into his heart on account of his striving, in accordance with the promise of God when He said, 'And those who strive for Us, We will indeed guide them in Our paths. And verily God is with the well-doers' " (Qur. xxix, 69).

These are all actual words of Islam and will probably suffice to make plain to you the fundamental Muslim position on the training of children. Briefly, they advocate, first, mechanical imitation and practice; to grow, second, into habit; and, third, into intellectual acceptance and devotion. That imitation has its object first and principally in the figure of Muhammad, imitation of whom is the ideal of all Muslims. Therefore children learn by heart from the earliest the Qur'ān, which is the character of the Prophet, and the traditions which tell of his words, actions, and ways. Secondly, they learn by heart elaborate creeds, the greater part of which develop the conception of the being and nature of God and thus have a converse action on the heart of their learners. A pretty description has come down to us in the biographies of Saladin of how he made one of his court chaplains draw up for him a special little creed and how he used himself to instruct his children in it and make