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DOUBT AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT
our judgment of its value. This natural credulity is subjected to
severe tests in the course of our personal development.
Difficulties present themselves that may influence our religious
attitudes and provoke doubt.
Phases of Development
Development towards a personal religious life proceeds stage
by stage. At first, a child accepts the forms of religious expression
used by adults in its vicinity. This is not to say that the religious
life is grafted on to the child from without. As Edward L.
Spranger! says, it grows out of spontaneous impulses but has
not yet penetrated to the heart of the personality.
During the early part of active religious development the
child consciously tries to live itself into the traditional religion of
elders. It desires to enrich with personal experience the forms of
behaviour that tradition has made familiar.
This phase is followed by one during which the growing child
tries to emancipate itself from bondage to tradition. It is a time
of doubt and denial. The young person is beginning to discover
himself and to become aware, however inarticulately, of an
obligation to grow away from the past towards the future. This
means, in fact, that each individual is bound to seek God in a
completely personal manner. It is in the very nature of things
that he must do so.
A third phase of development slowly evolves from this one. A
relatively permanent attitude marks the resolution of the earlier
conflicts and problems one way or the other; and the young
person becomes indifferent to religion, formally religious or
actively Christian to an extent that depends upon the
completeness of the decisions made.
The most critical period in the spiritual life occurs at the end
of this third phase of development; that is, during the early
thirties, when a person has become well established in physical
maturity. At this time men and women usually feel more settled
and secure than at any other period of life, and seldom suspect
that the future holds for them disturbances of mind and
emotional upheavals greater than any through which they have
passed. In fact, as I can attest from many years of work among
1 Ungdomsarens psykologi, Stockholm, 1927.
121
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