Many of its elements must no doubt be retained by us, for the child-mind demands firm outlines and examples and imagery drawn from the world of sense.

Yet grave dangers are attached to it.
On, the one hand an exclusive reliance on tradition paves the way for the disillusion which is so often experienced towards the end of adolescence, when it frequently causes a violent reaction to materialism.

On the other hand it exposes us to a risk which we particularly want to avoid: that of reducing the child's nascent spiritual life to the dream level, to a fantasy in which it satisfies wishes that outward life leaves unfulfilled.

Many pious people, especially those who tell us that their religion is a "comfort" to them, go through life in a spiritual day-dream of this kind.

Concrete life has starved them of love, of beauty, of interest--it has given them no synthesis which satisfies the passionate human search for meaning--and they have found all this in a dream-world, made from the materials of conventional piety.