With less difficulty, that is to say against less resistance, but
not with less responsibility or even with less anxiety. For the nearer
the work approaches to its completion and the more perfectly it has been
begun, the more deeply must anyone approaching to lay hand upon it feel
the need for great reverence, and self-restraint, and patience, and
vigilance, not to spoil by careless interference that which is ready to
receive and to give all that is best in youth, not to be unworthy of the
confidence which a young mind is willing to place in its guidance.
For although so much stress is laid upon the impressionability of first
childhood and the ineffaceable marks that are engraven on it, yet as to
all that belongs to the mind and judgment this third period, in the
early years of adolescence, is more sensitive still, because real
criticism is just beginning to be possible and appreciation is in its
spring-tide, now for the first time fully alive and awake. A transition
line has been passed, and the study of history, like everything else,
enters upon a new phase. The elementary teaching which has been
sufficient up to this, which has in fact been the only possible
teaching, must widen out in the third period, and the relative
importance of aims is the line on which the change to more advanced
teaching is felt.
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