There are many things of great and transcending interest which we are obliged to keep secret from our younger children, partly because they would fail to understand, but still more because they would misunderstand, and this to their own hurt and disadvantage; not to speak of possible injury to others through them.
Spiritual Evolution is the true Doctrine, but it is not food for babes in spiritual life.
To have an unlimited series of advancing lives and advancing experiences unfolded before their eyes would not only dismay and bewilder, but would also paralyse their energy for good, and terribly augment their capacity for evil—for the not good.
Until they are sufficiently versed in spiritual experience to realise the difference between purity and impurity, good and evil, God and the world, fame and peace, pleasure and happiness, the peace which passes understanding and the false glamour of sensual passion and sensuous self-indulgence, so long it is dangerous for them to know, with absolute certainty, the real facts of the case.
Even the terrible and abhorrent pictures of an Eternal Hell, of endless flames and of undying worms, have had their uses.
In this form alone could the thoroughly immature mind be made to realise the discomfort and misery that would inevitably attend wrong-doing. It was a truth, although not a literal truth. Many literal truths convey a false impression to the immature mind, whilst a symbolic truth may convey as true an impression as such a mind is capable of receiving.
The old ideas of Heaven and Hell are already doomed; but other ideas, equally untrue from the literal point of view, still hold their own, and will be more slowly eradicated. It is well this should be so. The world at large is not prepared yet to take this further step.
Frequent examinations have been found useful and inevitable in school training, both as a test of progress and still more as an encouragement.
If you tell a school of boys and girls in January that a grand examination will be held the following December, do you suppose they will work as well and as diligently as if they knew there will be short examinations at Easter and more important ones at midsummer?
Again, if you tell boys of ten years old, who are learning a little history, geography, and arithmetic, just in the Rule of Three and simple fractions, with perhaps a little Latin; of the Algebra and Euclid and Conic sections and higher Mathematics, and Latin and Greek verse and Hebrew and Philosophy, which they must some day confront, you will puzzle and paralyse their brains, and leave only a sense of misery and revolt and helplessness, which will quickly show forth in reckless despair, even concerning the tasks which are well within their present capacity.