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 ^ I ti t 
 POINT OF CONTACT 
 
 •ACHING t 
 
 DU BOI5 « « 
 
REESE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 %eceiveJ CfZ£AJ~-< ,i8gO. 
 
 i/ltressions Mi.k>77T/. Class No. 
 
By the same author 
 
 Beckonings from Little Hands 
 
 i6mo, pp. 182. Illustrated. 
 Price, $1.25 
 
THE 
 
 POINT OF CONTACT 
 
 IN TEACHING 
 
 BY 
 PATTERSON DU BOIS 
 
 Formerly a Secretary of the American Philosophical Society, 
 
 Fellow of the American Association for the 
 
 Advancement of Science, etc. 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 JOHN D. WATTLES & CO. 
 
 1898 
 
Copyright, 1896, 
 
 BY 
 
 PATTERSON DUBOIS. 
 
 
 $%\ 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 TO THE LITTLE CHILDREN OF THE 
 
 SUNDAY-SCHOOL 
 
preface 
 
 The child mind is a castle that can be taken 
 neither by stealth nor by storm. But there is a 
 natural way of approach and a gate of easy 
 entry always open to him who knows how to 
 find it. 
 
 The ideal point at which a child's intelligent 
 attention is to be first engaged, or his instruction 
 is to begin, is an experience or point of contact 
 with life. One who understands this truth need 
 seldom have any great difficulty in getting an 
 entry into the child's mind. 
 
 This little manual is an expansion of a small 
 monograph issued over two years ago under 
 the title " Beginning at the Point of Contact." 
 Being written originally in the interest of better 
 educational standards in the Sunday-school it 
 won its way into request by Sunday-school 
 primary workers. But certain secular normal- 
 
preface 
 
 school teachers, discovering its general educa- 
 tional utility, quickly appropriated a large part 
 of the edition. 
 
 With the demand for republication came the 
 suggestion that amplification would increase its 
 practical value. The new matter now forms so 
 considerable a part of the whole as to render the 
 present manual practically a new work. Numer- 
 ous verbal illustrations have been included, show- 
 ing how the principle has been applied in dealing 
 with individual pupils, with classes, with schools, 
 and even with peoples in more or less primitive 
 stages of life. 
 
 The dissertation on the construction of pri- 
 mary Bible courses is reserved for the last chap- 
 ter, as not being necessary to the mere exposition 
 of the general principle, but as being a legitimate 
 outcome and illustration of it. 
 
 Atigust % iSg6. 
 
Contents 
 
 i 
 
 Page 
 
 The General Principle 
 
 II 
 The Plane of Experience 17 
 
 III 
 Applying the Principle 45 
 
 IV 
 Missing the Point 59 
 
 V 
 
 The Lesson Material 69 
 
 vii 
 
I 
 £be (Beneral principle 
 
I 
 Ube (General principle 
 
 " In the beginning God created the heaven 
 and the earth," — but for me he created them not 
 until he created me. Heaven and earth had no 
 beginning, so far as I am concerned, until my 
 powers of perceiving them had their beginning. 
 So, although as a new-born infant I am the latest 
 act of God's work of creation, my experience, 
 my contact with life, is my book of beginnings. 
 Heaven and earth start into existence in my 
 home, my parents, my baby-rattle. In my 
 chronology, my father's gold watch precedes the 
 sun, a silver dollar antedates the moon, and my 
 mother's jewels anticipate the stars. My world 
 is without form, and void. But by this I mean 
 not what the Bible Book of Genesis means. 
 
 Things gradually assume shape as I perceive 
 their relations, and come to know them through 
 3 
 
XLbc point ot Contact 
 
 my personal experience. The seasons, you say, 
 have their beginning in the movement of the 
 earth around the sun, but that movement has its 
 beginning for me in the seasons. The light of 
 day has its real beginning in the sun, but for me 
 the sun has its beginning in the light of day. 
 My infantile experience is my infantile book of 
 beginnings, — my Genesis. 
 
 It is a recognized philosophical principle that 
 what is historically first may be logically last, 
 and what is logically first may be historically 
 last ; or, as Aristotle puts it, " that which is first 
 as cause is last in discovery." The Creation as 
 recorded in the Bible comes historically before 
 my birth ; but logically my knowledge of the 
 sun must begin with the light in my room, my 
 study of the rock strata must begin with the 
 stones in the garden path ; of the waters, with 
 my morning bath ; of the animals, with my pussy 
 or the flies. 
 
 Not only do these illustrations represent a 
 cardinal principle in approaching the little 
 4 
 
Zbc General principle 
 
 child's mind, but to a large extent they indi- 
 cate the only royal road to success, the "line 
 of least resistance" in dealing with those who 
 are infants in knowledge of any kind. They 
 are, in truth, but another way of stating the oft- 
 repeated pedagogical maxim, " Proceed from the 
 known to the unknown." 
 
 Nothing is so truly known as that which is 
 known through personal experience or self- 
 activity in life. Therefore it is at a point in this 
 experiential knowing that we can begin to in- 
 struct the child to the best advantage. This 
 point I call the point of contact, because it is 
 the point at which his own experience and the 
 lesson he is to learn can be brought into con- 
 tact with each other, — or, better, the one evolved 
 from the other. Starting with something which 
 the child knows through experience, and is 
 therefore personally interested in, the subject is 
 thenceforth to be progressively developed. 
 (j^ We must begin where we find the child, — 
 \ as Colonel Parker puts it. The only place 
 
 5 
 
Gbe Point ot Contact 
 
 where we can be sure we find him is at some 
 point on the plane of a child's natural experi- 
 ences or contact with life. His experience may 
 be non-sensuous, internal, — emotional, or spirit- 
 ual, it is true, — but with this we have compara- 
 tively little to do in our first approach to the 
 child mind. It is at the point of the child's 
 sense contact with the external world that the 
 opportunity for our best appeal to him lies. All 
 imagery must be made of the raw material fur- 
 nished by the sense perception. 1 
 
 1 Pestalozzi says: "The starting-point of thought is sense im- 
 pression, — the direct impression, that is, produced by the world on 
 our internal and external senses. ... It is life that educates.'' 
 This is altogether a different thing from addressing our primary 
 instruction to sense perception as such. As Dr. William T. Harris 
 says : *' Thought deals with the dynamic element of experience 
 rather than with mere things, which are only static results." We 
 are quite on the child's plane of experience when we address his 
 sense of wonder, curiosity, love, or fear. But we know less of 
 those points in his experience, and cannot often be so sure that we 
 are making a close contact with his real experiential life as we 
 can when we seek a point of departure in his obvious natural 
 experience with the external world. Notwithstanding the great 
 differences between Pestalozzi and Frcebel this principle is not 
 essentially at variance with either. It is true that Miss Blow' 
 sharply contrasts these two greatest masters as to their pivotal 
 
 6 
 
Gbe ©eneral principle 
 
 It is necessary here to differentiate certain 
 phrases which educators have used. These 
 phrases are the "point of interest," "point of 
 sympathy," "point of departure." In the best 
 teaching all these points are likely to coincide 
 as one. Thus we should, in Dr. Trumbull's 
 phrase, endeavor to touch the pupil, or any one 
 whom we wish to influence, at the point of 
 sympathy between him and us. But we shall do 
 our best work if that point of sympathy is at his 
 point of contact with his experiences, and this 
 is pretty sure to be his point of interest. What 
 Miss Blow calls the "point of departure" is 
 simply the starting-point in the teaching pro- 
 ideas when she says: " Pestalozzi claims that the center from 
 which education radiates is sense perception (Anschauung). 
 Froebel claims that this center is Gemuih, a word explained by 
 Hegel to mean the ' undeveloped, indefinite totality of spiritual 
 being.' We may approximately translate Gemuth by ' heart,' 
 and affirm that with Froebel the pivot upon which true educa- 
 tion turns is the regeneration of the affections." But it is also 
 true that she shows that in Frcebel's mother-play "the point of 
 departure is usually some actual experience of the children." 
 However, there is no intention of entering here upon a philo- 
 sophical discussion, but merely to point out a practical way of 
 approach to and procedure with the child mind. 
 
XLbc point of Contact 
 
 cess; but this point of departure, like all these 
 other points, ought to be at the child's point of 
 contact with experiential life. In looking for 
 this point let us not forget the words of Rous- 
 seau : " Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, 
 feeling, peculiar to itself; nothing is more absurd 
 than to wish to substitute ours in their place." 
 
 The idea of the relative value of possible 
 starting-points, or germinal spots for the child's 
 development as determined by their closeness 
 or familiarity to the child through his own ex- 
 perience, is well illustrated in a discussion be- 
 tween Miss Youmans and Dr. Mary P. Jacobi in 
 the matter of teaching botany to children. The 
 noticeable thing is that the child is to approach 
 the science in a direction opposite to, or at least 
 different from, that from which the mature scien- 
 tist approaches it. For the child, that point of 
 the plant's life which is out of sight, underground, 
 is logically, or pedagogically, late, although in 
 the plant's history it is first. 
 
 An article on "The Scientific Method with 
 8 
 
Gbe General principle 
 
 Children " in The Popular Science Monthly, by 
 Henry Lincoln Clapp, says children "have their 
 own starting-points, and these should be taken 
 by the teacher. . . . Dr. Jacobi would use the 
 flower, in beginning to teach children botany, 
 because it is the most attractive, makes the 
 largest impression upon the senses, is easy of 
 apprehension, and leads to the appreciation of 
 specific differences. . . . Miss Youmans would 
 begin with the leaf, on the assumption that it 
 is simpler than the flower, and, in tracing its 
 scientific relations, deeper intellectual pleasure is 
 received. . . . Beginning with roots, as so many 
 systematic teachers have done, and following 
 with stem, leaves, flowers, and ending with fruits 
 as the ultimate work of the plant, although logi- 
 cal to adults, full of regular sequences, and 
 scientific from one standpoint, is unscientific 
 from another. 
 
 " Children do not start to work with plants in 
 that way unless they are obliged to, but in a way 
 diametrically opposite, — attractive flowers and 
 
 9 
 
Gbe point of Contact 
 
 fruits first, and unattractive roots last. It is cer- 
 tainly natural, although it may be heathenish, 
 and show their natural depravity, for them to do 
 so. . . . An extensive use of imported material is 
 directly opposed to Agassiz's injunction to use the 
 material nearest at hand. Moreover, it is worth 
 while to remember that materials and methods 
 which are serviceable enough in teaching adults 
 often become forced and mechanical in teaching 
 children. It should not be taken for granted 
 that the teacher's sequences, laboriously studied 
 out, . . . are the pupil's sequences, or that he can 
 assimilate them." 
 
 Now the great fault in our religious teaching 
 of, or Sunday-school work with, the child, has 
 been that we have not sought this his most 
 penetrable point. Our approach to him has 
 been through adult ideas, upon an adult plane, 
 and complicated with conventionality and ab- 
 stractions. We have not sufficiently regarded 
 the plane of his experience as the essential 
 approach to him. Observe, I do not locate this 
 10 
 
Gbc General principle 
 
 plane as either high or low ; it is neither, and it 
 is both, according to what your terms mean. It 
 is in some ways higher than ours, in some ways 
 lower. Let that pass. 
 
 We have stood upon our adult plane of com- 
 plex thought and conventionality to manipulate 
 the little child's current of thought running on a 
 very different plane. True, we have spoken 
 baby-talk to him, but in that baby-language we 
 have spoken to him truths unsuited to babies, 
 and because he was seemingly entertained with 
 our antics we supposed that we succeeded 
 in our effort to make an adult baby of him. 
 Our Lord did not teach that way. See how he 
 made the people think by finding their point of 
 contact with common life, and proceeding from 
 this starting-point to whatever truth he had in 
 view for them. Like him, we must address 
 pupils on the level of their experiential life. 
 
 We have made too much, for instance, of time 
 sequences. The young child has a very inade- 
 quate conception of mere chronology. History 
 ii 
 
Gbe point of Contact 
 
 as history — a record of impersonal events, of 
 remote causes and effects — is wholly out of his 
 plane of comprehension. His sequences are of a 
 different sort. So, too, we have made too much 
 of formal doctrines and mere points of theologi- 
 cal reasoning, and of an objective life utterly 
 foreign and remote from the child's experience. 
 A writer in The Church Standard, C. E. Hutchi- 
 son, says : " We have lessons in the Cate- 
 chism crammed with words over which grown 
 people have been fighting for centuries, and 
 about which they do not yet agree. And there 
 are laborious series on the Bible, full of informa- 
 tion about the structure of Jewish houses, the 
 order of service in the synagogue, suggestions 
 for special investigation, and the like." The 
 child's plane is in the activities and appreciations 
 of immediate life. 
 
 Leaders in educational and pedagogical 
 
 thought have long seen the radical defect in our 
 
 Sunday-school, as indeed in all our religious 
 
 instruction of the little children. The Sunday- 
 
 12 
 
ftbe General principle 
 
 school has prominently been severely criticised 
 as an educational system. Whatever truth there 
 may be in such criticisms we know the Sunday- 
 school to be one of the grandest and most aggres- 
 sive of Christian institutions, even if we do admit 
 its shortcomings. But we ought not to be above 
 learning from our critics. A recent article in 
 The Westminster Review gives forth no uncer- 
 tain sound, thus : 
 
 " Theology should not be forced upon the 
 child's mind at a very early age. ... A child's first 
 idea of spiritual things, if these are presented to 
 him in the phraseology usually employed for the 
 purpose, is necessarily a false one, made so by 
 his natural substitution of the concrete for the 
 abstract. This fact often receives practical con- 
 firmation from the quaint notions children are 
 found to have formed about religion ; the ab- 
 surdity of the questions to which these notions 
 give rise is a frequent cause of amusement to 
 their elders, but it none the less furnishes con- 
 clusive evidence of the confusion that prevails in 
 13 
 
Gbe lPolnt of Contact 
 
 many little minds. Premature instruction rela- 
 ting to the spiritual side of religion thus leads 
 the child into errors which have to be corrected 
 by subsequent experience, and the false ideas 
 resulting from it form an undesirable starting- 
 point in religious instruction." 
 
 Where, then, will the desirable starting-point 
 be found ? In the general range or on the plane 
 of childhood experiences, and especially those 
 which arise from the child's immediate contact 
 with the external world. 
 
 Here let it be said, once for all, that in this 
 manual "the child" usually means a child under 
 eight years of age. Years do not regulate every- 
 thing, but they do regulate some things. Span 
 of time is an essential to the reaching of a cer- 
 tain plane of experience, a certain sight-level, 
 a grade of development. A forced cultivation 
 of brain cells, natural precocity or intelligence, 
 will never put a child just where an accumula- 
 tion of conscious years will. A child or a man 
 may be such a prodigy in arithmetic as to make 
 
 n 
 
Gbe General principle 
 
 gigantic calculations in a moment of time. He 
 may have such a phenomenal memory that he 
 can repeat verbatim the contents of a newspaper 
 after one reading. He may have powers like 
 these, and yet be dependent on common experi- 
 ence for just that development which such ex- 
 perience alone can bring. He must have a 
 sense of the process of time, or of conscious 
 intervals, behind him, in order to have a definite 
 historic consciousness. And the younger the 
 child the more applicable is this truth of child 
 nature. 
 
 In his outlook and in his general mental 
 method a child of six is farther from a child of 
 ten or twelve than a child of twelve is from a 
 young man of twenty. One of the first signs of 
 a real forward movement in the primary school 
 will be the removal therefrom of all the children 
 over eight years of age. Until the necessity of 
 doing this is perceived and acted upon, Sunday- 
 school " child-study " will have proved itself 
 of little utility. 
 
 i5 
 
Zbe Point ot Contact 
 
 The general principle, then, is, that in the 
 child's instruction we must begin at his point of 
 contact with life. Life, it is true, includes the 
 intuitional experiences as well as those which 
 are sensory and peripheral. But it is in the 
 region of the latter, it is upon the plane of those 
 experiences which he gets in his sense contact 
 with the external world, that we must usually start 
 with him. That these experiences are concrete 
 rather than abstract, simple rather than complex, 
 immediate rather than remote, will be more fully 
 illustrated in the next chapter. 
 
II 
 £be plane of Experience 
 
II 
 Ube plane ot Biperfence 
 
 As a practical matter, the point of entry to any 
 child's mind depends upon the individuality of 
 his life; but in dealing with classes we must 
 make sacrifices of the individual for the many. 
 We can appeal to childhood from the general 
 plane or ordinary range of childhood experi- 
 ences. Says H. Courthope Bowen, " What in- 
 terests a child must be immediate and level to 
 his thoughts. He cannot realize a far-off advan- 
 tage; or, at any rate, he cannot feel it for long. 
 Young and old, we all experience delight in 
 discovering, or in being helped to see, connec- 
 tions between isolated facts, — especially such as 
 we have ourselves picked up." 
 
 Manifestly the plane of experience, the ger- 
 mination of interest, the genesis of study, will be 
 a simple, rather than a complex^pj^etg^rather 
 
 19 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
Gbe ipoint ot Contact 
 
 than abstract. As Lange says, "the numerous 
 concrete, fresh, and strong ideas gained in earliest 
 youth are the best helps to apperception for all 
 subsequent learning." But these germinal ideas 
 have no affiliation with the " regular sequences " 
 of theology, or with " imported material," to 
 which Agassiz objected; they will not be found 
 in the local, political, or religious issues, or the 
 imagery of Haggai, Zechariah, Nehemiah, Na- 
 hum, Micah, or Habakkuk, or the complex 
 rituals and regulations of the Mosaic era. Sup- 
 posing "the elders of the Jews" did build and 
 prosper " through the prophesying of Haggai 
 the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo," — 
 what is that to a babe who has no conception of 
 space, time, organized society, or even of our 
 commonest adult conventionalities? How near 
 are the Ten Commandments to the plane of ex- 
 perience of a child who cannot count up to ten 
 — nor above four ? 
 
 Nor is there experimental contact in such a 
 "golden text" as "The Lord thy God will turn 
 20 
 
Ebe H>lane of ^Experience 
 
 thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee;" 
 nor in "We made our prayer unto our God, 
 and set a watch against them." Even for such 
 a text as " The preaching of the cross is to 
 them that perish foolishness, but unto us which 
 are saved it is the power of God," one requires 
 considerable prior knowledge before it can be 
 assimilated into the life and become formative 
 of character. To force these on the child is 
 what that remarkable teacher Thring of Up- 
 pingham would call "an effort to pour into a 
 reluctant mind some unintelligible bit of cipher 
 knowledge and to cork it down by punishment. 
 It disagrees, it ferments, the cork flies out, the 
 noxious stuff is spilt; whilst the taskmaster 
 believes it is all right because of the trouble he 
 took to get it in." 
 
 Deliberately to select a Scripture portion so 
 remote from the plane of experience of little 
 children, and then suppose that, because it is 
 God's Word, God will work a miracle in order 
 that they may understand it, seems hardly less 
 21 
 
Gbe iPoint of Contact 
 
 than presumptuous mockery. The responsi- 
 bility is upon us to see that truths are presented 
 to the children in an order consistent with their 
 capability to receive those truths through ex- 
 periential beginnings. And this is not to be 
 done by paraphernalia, or by parrot verbal 
 memorizing, or by the awakening of a pseudo 
 attention through mere spectacular exhibits of 
 hearts, ladders, crosses, crowns, and blackboard 
 intricacies which might make an adult dizzy if 
 they do not bewilder children. 
 
 "The worthless and even injurious outcome 
 of such teaching," in the language of Colonel 
 Parker, "is the memorizing of meaningless 
 words, and a permanent dislike for the subject 
 so mistaught." Take this text: "Giving thanks 
 unto the Father, which hath made us meet to 
 be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in 
 light." How absurd to attempt to force a con- 
 ception here! Let us not deceive ourselves into 
 thinking that such memorizings have a future 
 value. Says Frcebel: "At a later period of life, 
 22 
 
Zhe plane of ^Experience 
 
 when comprehension attaches a sense to the 
 sound, the senseless word will be the more in- 
 jurious. . . . Every word ought to offer to the 
 child's mind a sound to which to attach some 
 elements of thought." 
 
 To say that a child has enjoyed committing 
 to memory proves little. Nothing is more 
 seductive to the teacher than the child's enjoy- 
 ment or delight in his task. Not that he should 
 not delight in it, but the delight may entirely 
 mislead us as to its cause. "It is possible," 
 says President G. Stanley Hall, " that the present 
 shall be so attractive and preoccupying that 
 the child never once sends his thoughts to the 
 remote in time and place." This "present" may 
 be mere verbal jingle, it may be the artificial 
 paraphernalia of the primary room, or anything 
 but the concept which the adult observer is 
 laboring to lodge in a mind impenetrable to it. 
 
 The points of contact of most children with 
 the worlds of matter and of thought are at once 
 numerous and few. Investigations conducted 
 
 23 
 
Gbe Point of Contact 
 
 under the direction of President Hall upon large 
 numbers of Boston school-children, just after 
 they had entered the lowest grade of the primary 
 school, say six years old, revealed that 35 per 
 cent had never seen the country, 20 per cent 
 did not know where milk came from, 55 per 
 cent did not know that wooden things were 
 made from trees, 47 per cent never saw a pig, 
 from 13 to 18 per cent did not know where their 
 cheek, forehead, or throat was, and fewer yet 
 knew elbow, wrist, ribs, etc. More than three- 
 fourths of the children had never seen, to know 
 them, any of the common cereals, trees, or 
 vegetables, growing. These facts indicate how 
 slenderly furnished the child's mind is for a 
 discussion involving theologies, chronologies, 
 successive wars, political complications, Judaiz- 
 ing tendencies, obscure imageries and prophetic 
 references, ancient ritual usages, tribal dissen- 
 sions, and the like. 
 
 President Hall well asks, "What idea can the 
 18 per cent of children who thought a cow no 
 24 
 
Zbc plane of ^Experience 
 
 larger than its picture, get from all instruction 
 about hide, horns, milk?" This is a pertinent 
 question, mutatis mutandis, for whoever is to 
 make lesson-courses for our primary Sunday- 
 schools, even more than for those who are to 
 teach them. To tell the average six-year old 
 that "the price of a virtuous woman is far above 
 rubies," simple as it sounds to us, presupposes 
 an experience in the matter of relative values, 
 of precious stones, of marketable abstractions. 
 Is this any better than teaching about the un- 
 known cow by an account of unknown horns, 
 hide, etc.? 
 
 In the same line of revelation as Dr. Hall's, 
 Superintendent O. J. Laylander of Iowa ob- 
 tained through certain teachers answers to such 
 plain questions as "Why should we do good?" 
 "What is Sunday for?" "Where is heaven?" 
 "What do children do in heaven?" "What do 
 the angels do?" "How does God look?" etc. 
 The replies come from children varying from 
 six to ten years. Here are a few specimen 
 25 
 
Gbe point ot Contact 
 
 answers. "Angels wear plain white clothes, 
 and don't look stylish." " Have nice hair and 
 wear nice gowns." "Angels come down and 
 tell men when they burn sheep what to do." 
 
 Other answers, about the Divine appearance, 
 etc., while they are not irreverent, seem almost 
 shocking to us, and need not be repeated here ; it 
 is natural for the child to be concrete and posi- 
 tive. One does not have to look far to discover 
 the sensuous origin of most, if not all, of these 
 answers, — perhaps not outside of some of our 
 homes and Sunday-schools. Some of them are 
 at least a serious reflection on the advisability 
 of displaying crude chromos as a portraiture of 
 our Lord. It is indeed a question how far the 
 picturing of spirit is advisable. The child's 
 imagination hardly needs this kind of stimulus. 
 
 It is easy to see that the ideally exact point 
 of departure or genesis of a child's education in 
 any sphere is an experience, or contact with the 
 world, peculiar to that child. For a certain 
 little girl's recitation from Longfellow I chose 
 26 
 
Gbe iplane ot ^Experience 
 
 a part of the potter's song in " Keramos " — with 
 great success. But this was largely because she 
 had visited a pottery, and had come into actual 
 sense contact with, and so acquired an interest 
 in, the processes of the potters' wheel. 
 
 The more closely anything lies to our per- 
 sonal experience, and the nearer it is to the level 
 of our ordinary vision, the more easily do we 
 become interested in it, and the better starting- 
 point is it, therefore, from which to follow a line 
 of thought. This is not peculiar to the child, 
 but is common to all. The range of experience 
 is much more extensive in the adult than in the 
 child. Every one knows that when he has been 
 through a particular form of experience, he has 
 always a peculiar interest in others who are 
 passing through that same experience. A per- 
 son who has been rescued from a burning build- 
 ing in the middle of the night will run to the 
 window to see the fire department go by, when, 
 previously to his rescue, he would have paid 
 very little attention to it. A person who has 
 27 
 
Gbe ipoint of Contact 
 
 contracted what he supposes to be an unusual 
 disease is surprised to discover so many other 
 persons who have been, or are, afflicted in the 
 same way. 
 
 Let me illustrate now a little more particularly 
 this matter of the plane of experience, or levels 
 of sight, or points of view, in dealing with a 
 child's mind. 
 
 An intelligent and studious child in her ninth 
 year was, with her father's assistance, studying 
 the Sunday-school lesson on " The Cities of 
 Refuge." She had never heard the word 
 " refuge," and her father explained, as well as he 
 could, first what the idea of refuge is, and then 
 what a city of refuge was. She went to Sunday- 
 school, and the teacher, in order to vivify the 
 lesson, told a dreadful story of the torture which 
 some boys had inflicted upon a companion. 
 The child was so shocked by the horror that it 
 was some time before it lost its hold on her 
 nerves. The idea of the city of refuge seemed 
 to have made no impression on her at all, 
 
Zbc plane ot ^Experience 
 
 although it was, of course, explained to her a 
 second time in the class. 
 
 Six months later she visited an old fort. It 
 was altogether a different sort of thing from 
 what she supposed a fort to be. In discussing 
 it with her father, the various wars in which it 
 had played a part were spoken of, and then the 
 father said that it had done great service as a 
 place of refuge for the inhabitants of the adjacent 
 town during an attack by the Indians. The 
 child immediately asked, " What is a refuge ? " 
 The explanations of the term which she had re- 
 ceived a half-year before had gone for nothing. 
 The father tried to recall the Bible lesson of the 
 previous term, but to little purpose. Refuges, as 
 such, had not come within the plane of her ex- 
 perience until now, and hence the definition of 
 them, and the lesson upon them, amounted to 
 little. The explanation had to be made over 
 again with the object in actual view, the father 
 recalling the lesson on the cities of refuge and 
 so establishing a logical connection. 
 29 
 
Zhc point ot Contact 
 
 Now let us look at the plane of experience in 
 this case, and the relative degrees of immediate- 
 ness to, or remoteness from, the child's circum- 
 stantial interest. Being herself a temporary 
 inhabitant of the town as a visitor, the flight of 
 the inhabitants to the fort for refuge came closely 
 within the range of her imagination — or fancied 
 experience. It is true she had never experienced 
 such an event as a flight for life, but she was 
 close enough to the conditions to be able — by 
 raising herself, through her imagination, on her 
 tiptoes, metaphorically — to come quite within 
 sight of the experience of a refugee. 
 
 Again, suppose she had actually been herself 
 a refugee from the Indians in a place of safety. 
 The idea of the fort as a place of refuge would 
 have been far more vivid, more intensely real. 
 In either case there was an excellent point of 
 contact with experience from which to teach the 
 idea of refuge in time of danger. But in one 
 case more than in the other the contact would 
 have been closer. In one case, she had sufficient 
 
 30 
 
Ube plane ot Experience 
 
 sensory knowledge of the place to imagine the 
 experience with fair correctness ; in the other, 
 she would have had an actual experience. But 
 without some such basis any instruction would 
 have conveyed little impression. In the Sunday- 
 school class the city of refuge had no basis 
 whatever in life experience, and what the imagi- 
 nation could do, therefore, was so weak that it 
 soon dropped out of her mental furniture. 
 
 Let us now take another case showing a con- 
 scious resistance of the child to the attempt to 
 force upon him truths of nature by bringing 
 them wrong end foremost or foreign to his ex- 
 periential plane. I condense and quote from 
 an article by Mrs. Mary C. Cutler in The Sunday 
 School Times. She tells of an enthusiastic high- 
 school girl who, having become interested in 
 geology, decided to use her knowledge as the 
 basis of bed-time tales for her little brother. 
 
 " Wouldn't Robbie like to have each night a part of a 
 great, long story, all about how the earth was made?" 
 she asked one evening soon afterward. 
 
 31 
 
Gbe Point of Contact 
 
 "P'raps so," he answered, somewhat doubtfully. 
 "Will you tell how the sidewalks were made?" he 
 added, seeming a little more interested. 
 
 " Oh, yes ! " replied his sister ; " only we want to know 
 first how the ground was made to lay the sidewalks 
 on." 
 
 And so the story had gone on night after night, while 
 Robbie had shown varying degrees of interest, but never 
 quite so much as his sister had expected. She tried her 
 best to adapt the story to his comprehension, and some- 
 times felt much encouraged; as when she was telling 
 about the formation of the coal-beds, and showed him a 
 piece of coal she had found, which seemed to have mark- 
 ings on it like the bark of a tree ; or, at another time, 
 when she showed him a picture of the huge bird-tracks 
 that had been found in other formations. 
 
 But now and then Robbie would ask some question 
 about the sidewalks, showing that his interest was cen- 
 tered on that with which he had first become acquainted 
 in experience. The sidewalks were his "point of con- 
 tact" with, and his first interest in, earth structure. It 
 was because he hoped to learn some time how the side- 
 walks were made, that he was trying to listen patiently 
 to all the rest of the story. 
 
 And so on this night Robbie settled himself down in 
 his corner of the chair, and was very quiet. He asked 
 his sister no more questions. For the first time his eyes 
 began to droop before she had finished. 
 
 " I must try to make it more interesting," she said to 
 herself as she kissed him good-night. . . . 
 
 32 
 
Gbe iplane of ^Experience 
 
 Years afterward, when our school-girl had grown older 
 and wiser, she learned how abnormal, as well as unsatis- 
 fying, had been her method, — that she ought to have 
 begun with what the child already knew something 
 about, and was interested in, and thence she could have 
 led him whither she would. To the high-school girl the 
 sidewalks were laid on the ground ; to the child, the 
 ground was hidden under the sidewalks. His first expe- 
 rience with earth was not the underlying ground, but the 
 overlying sidewalks. She had vainly thought to begin 
 at the beginning of God's works, instead of the real 
 beginning of knowledge-getting, — the "point of contact" 
 with the world. 
 
 Now to go farther. Whatever truth is com- 
 mon to Christianity and heathenism is the point 
 of sympathy at which the missionary can most 
 hopefully begin. This will be at a point of con- 
 tact with the religious life of the heathen, an 
 attitude, an act, a deed, a hope, or something 
 which has become already a part of his religious 
 experience. There will be different starting- 
 points for the Brahman, the Mohammedan, the 
 Confucian ; the educational genesis for the Bush- 
 man will be different from that for the North 
 American Indian. 
 
 3 33 
 
Zbc IPoint of Contact 
 
 A teacher at Hampton Institute told me that 
 as a matter of fact the Indians can be more 
 easily reached through the story of the early 
 Hebrews than can the negro. The Indian 
 feels a certain affiliation with Abraham which 
 the negro does not. The life experience of 
 the Indian is nomadic and closely akin to the 
 Orientals. The "point of departure" or starting- 
 point, in teaching the Indian, might therefore 
 differ from that in teaching the negro, who 
 touches life in experiences of quite a different 
 nature. 
 
 One of the most beautifully apt and convin- 
 cing illustrations of the necessity of addressing 
 primitive minds from their own plane of experi- 
 ence is to be found in the following abstract 
 from a private letter recently received from a 
 missionary in Africa. He says: "I have sought 
 in vain for a suitable abstract of Bible history 
 which might be translated. 'Peep of Day* we 
 have, and it answers a certain purpose. 'Line 
 upon Line ' has been tried, but neither appeals 
 34 
 
/0& L,B ^?K 
 
 fi Y* OF THE * r NV 
 
 I UNIVERSITY ] 
 
 TTbe flMane of Biperiencr^" '■ ^ 
 
 to the native mind. There is something far too 
 goody-goody in the phraseology to permit a 
 translation. 'My dear children/ 'Poor Daniel,' 
 ' How glad he must have been,' ' How beautiful 
 it must have been to see the angels,' and so on, 
 are not translatable. The scenes of civilization 
 are too often brought in, and the illustrations 
 fall flat. What is wanted is something vigorous, 
 not requiring much imagination to understand, 
 based on wild native life — very much like the 
 life of the old Israelites." 
 
 The principal difficulty encountered in teach- 
 ing these Africans is just the difficulty which we 
 encounter, expressed in reverse terms. The 
 Africans find no point of contact with our civil- 
 ization and modes of thought. Our little chil- 
 dren have few points of contact with ancient 
 Oriental life and modes of thought. 
 
 It is even true of ourselves. How many 
 
 can read through the Prophets with any clear 
 
 apprehension of the significance of allusion, 
 
 historical or poetical, made by those writers? 
 
 35 
 
£be lPoint of Contact 
 
 Certainly a large majority of fairly intelligent 
 teachers on reading those books gain only a 
 general sense of something poetic, something 
 historical, something religious. The unsatisfac- 
 tion which such readers feel under such circum- 
 stances is somewhat parallel with the unsatisfied 
 child's mind after a lesson in the primary school 
 of which the whole basis of thought or action is 
 entirely abstract, or is external, remote from, and 
 foreign to, his life experiences. But the child 
 cannot help himself. Because we make the 
 presentation entertaining with sentimental talk 
 and ingenious appliances, we imagine that he is 
 realizing the whole remote situation. 
 
 Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson's "Fishin' 
 Jimmy" never got hold of Christ until his plane 
 of experience was struck, — and that the fishing 
 interest. Jimmy was practically insulated from 
 salvation until one spot of contact was discovered, 
 and forthwith the current flowed. But the Book 
 of Romans would not have availed, nor would 
 Genesis have proved a genesis for him. 
 36 
 
Zhz UMane of ^Experience 
 
 The Salvation Army seeks and finds the de- 
 graded wretches of the slums, not through a 
 map of Palestine, nor through appeal to the 
 Catechism, but through that which is common 
 to their experience, — noise and racket, the bass 
 drum and the brass horn. The loud music and 
 the bright colors are the " lines of least resist- 
 ance" over which this species of human nature 
 passes into the first contemplation of a cleaner, 
 better, and nobler life. Similarly, a child is to 
 be introduced to his studies at the point of ex- 
 perience, — to geography by starting at his sense 
 perceptions of distance, direction, form, number, 
 rain, snow, clouds, steam, vapor, heat, cold, etc. 
 Then locations at home and vicinity, the yard, 
 garden, farm, or landscape in view, etc. 
 
 A live teacher in the South wrote to me, 
 "My mother most interestingly taught me 
 botany from the 'point of contact' of the yellow 
 pollen on my nose when I had smelled a fra- 
 grant flower too ardently." 
 
 In response to my first publication on this 
 37 
 
Gbe lpoint ot Contact 
 
 subject of the point of contact, an able teacher 
 in the Southwest wrote: "You are eminently 
 right about your Sunday-school methods. It 
 is God's way. Jesus went to the people at their 
 point of contact, and, though a carpenter, he 
 never drew a figure from his own calling, but 
 always from theirs." He then goes on to give 
 his experience in feeling for a point of contact 
 from which to start an interest in ornithology in 
 a country boy. He says : 
 
 " Recently I attempted to describe the oven- 
 bird to a country boy who, I knew, had often 
 seen it, but did not know it. I went through 
 plumage, size, song, nest, etc., but the case 
 looked hopeless. At last I mentioned the habit 
 of alighting near the limb and running out 
 toward its tip. His face brightened. * Is he a 
 kind of high stepper?' he asked, picking up his 
 feet exactly as the bird does. In this way the 
 boy has become a helpful observer — learning how 
 to observe. His descriptions are so accurate 
 that I often diagnose birds from them before he 
 38 
 
ftbe plane of ^Experience 
 
 is through. He has a new interest in his farm 
 work. He could never have got it from syste- 
 matic ornithology." No more can the child 
 get his interest in religious truth through syste- 
 matic theology, catechisms, or other forms of 
 conventionalized and abstract thought, or images 
 based on material things with which the child 
 has never come into sense contact. 
 
 A little girl once asked me about the bones in 
 her arm. I briefly explained, but the off-hand 
 explanation was not likely to remain with her. 
 Soon after came a day when I carved a chicken 
 for dinner. Giving her a wing, I said, "You 
 see this part has one bone and this part two. 
 It is like our arms." I subsequently showed 
 her a human skeleton. The next time she was 
 given a chicken wing at dinner I said, "You 
 know there are two bones here, as in our fore- 
 arms. Chicken's wings take the place of our 
 arms." "Or," she responded, "wouldn't the 
 chickens say, if they could talk about us, 'Their 
 arms take the place of our wings'?" 
 
 39 
 
Zbe {point of Contact 
 
 Suppose I had answered, "Ah, my child, we 
 must begin at the beginning! Anatomy is 'that 
 branch of morphology which treats of the struc- 
 ture of organisms.' There are various divisions 
 of the subject, as comparative anatomy, patho- 
 logical anatomy, practical, surgical, topographi- 
 cal, transcendental anatomies, etc. Let us take 
 nature in an orderly way. You must first com- 
 mit to memory the definition of anatomy and 
 the technology of the bones themselves. In after 
 years it will serve you when you come to study 
 the arm of man and the wing of bird." 
 
 Is this a travesty? Call it rather a parallel. 
 Has it not been practically the procedure in 
 many Sunday-schools? 
 
 Any one who does not realize how widely 
 the adult and the childhood planes are separated 
 will do well to discover, after a ten minutes' 
 conversation with a child, precisely how the 
 child understood him, and how far he under- 
 stood the child. Let him take Longfellow or 
 Bryant, for instance, and discover, if he can, 
 40 
 
Gbe plane ot ^Experience 
 
 how much there is on most of the pages of 
 these poets quite out of the range of the child's 
 vision and on another plane altogether. 
 
 Again, let any one take a child of from five 
 to eight into a legislative assembly for the first 
 time and attempt to explain the proceedings. 
 Every time he attempts to put his foot down in 
 order to take a step forward in his explanation 
 to the child, he will find that he has stepped into 
 a quicksand. The very idea of representation in 
 government, of passing bills, making motions, 
 and controlling distant sections of country by 
 these processes, is something entirely outside of 
 the child's life-plane. It is not merely a ques- 
 tion of the meaning of words, but it is one of 
 complex, unseen, and unsuspected relations, 
 one of motives affecting the social organism of 
 which the child has little consciousness. It is 
 one of generalizations, for the construction of 
 which the child is unfurnished with particulars. 
 
 During the great railway strike in Philadel- 
 phia, I closely watched some little boys who, 
 4i 
 
Gbe lpoint ot Contact 
 
 having caught the destructive spirit of the mob, 
 came in and played their part in the demonstra- 
 tion of vengeance against the railway company. 
 What degree of consciousness had these juvenile 
 offenders of what they were doing? The socio- 
 logical and economic question between the 
 labor unions and the railway corporation was 
 doubtless entirely foreign to the plane of their 
 thought. But the self-activity, the impulse to 
 change conditions, was quite within their range 
 of consciousness. 
 
 It ought to be evident, then, that the same set 
 of facts or phenomena may be viewed on entirely 
 different planes. A child may seem attentive, 
 interested, and even zealous, and yet be entirely 
 blind to those facts and factors which are absorb- 
 ing the chief attention of his elders. 
 
 The guests of a summer hotel were one even- 
 ing entertained with recitations by an expert of 
 the platform. The children on the front row 
 exhibited varying degrees of interest, rising at 
 times to extreme demonstrations of delight. 
 42 
 
Zbc flMane of Experience 
 
 Subsequently I found that the poem which drew 
 from them the loudest plaudits was not only 
 beyond their comprehension, but was entirely 
 beyond their recall, while that which excited 
 and absorbed them less was remembered. In 
 the first case the only thing on their plane was 
 the dramatic personal action, while the latter 
 touched them at a point of contact with their 
 own lives. 
 
 Once more : A speaker having been invited 
 to make an address, he had designed to give 
 to parents some advice about the misjudging 
 of their children. He gave numerous incidents 
 illustrating the injustice of parental treatment. 
 But before him sat many little children ! It 
 would not do to have them hear him arraign 
 their parents. He therefore moved on two dis- 
 tinct planes of motive, — one for the children, one 
 for the adults. The former roared with laughter 
 at his characterizations of the little folks in diffi- 
 culty ; the latter were less amused, but were 
 more busy drawing the inferences which came 
 43 
 
XLbc point of Contact 
 
 to them, more or less, as self-accusations. On 
 interrogating certain of the children some time 
 after, it was evident that they had not seen the 
 real point of the address, for its implications had 
 been out of their plane, while the adults gave 
 overt evidence of their appreciation of the real 
 motive of the speaker. 
 
 These illustrations ought to show clearly that 
 children of the primary class may have Scripture 
 lessons brought before them, the treatment of 
 which entertains and makes them seem to be 
 taking in the whole historical and spiritual situa- 
 tion, while, in fact, they and the teacher are all 
 the time viewing the demonstration upon planes 
 quite remote from each other. 
 
 The child's plane of life is one of simples 
 and of concretes, one of directness and immedi- 
 ateness. Any attempt to force upon him the 
 complex, the abstract, the circuitous, the remote, 
 the unconnected, will be sure to end unhappily. 
 
 44 
 
Ill 
 applying tbe principle 
 
Ill 
 Hppl^ino tbe principle 
 
 Although the general principle of appealing 
 to the youthful mind through the already famil- 
 iar fact in experience has been freely illustrated 
 in the foregoing chapter, it may be helpful to 
 show more specifically just how the principle 
 can be applied in practice with persons of vary- 
 ing ages. 
 
 It is not always possible, in dealing either with 
 an individual or with aggregations, to strike the 
 point of closest contact with life or with the 
 most familiar interests or activities, but it is 
 possible to address children on the general plane 
 of child sight. The point of contact may even 
 be one of mere mental habit or function. Thus 
 a child may be reached from his curiosity or his 
 spirit of investigation. But this will always 
 have to be found within the child-life plane. In 
 
 47 
 
Gbe lpotnt of Contact 
 
 " Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," the line " How 
 I wonder what you are," represents in the adult 
 a very different mental attitude toward the twink- 
 ling star from what it represents in the child. 
 
 Again, a " golden text," such as some of 
 those which have already been cited, would not 
 be likely to arouse the curiosity or tempt the 
 inquiring spirit, while a little bit of nature or 
 manufacture entirely unfamiliar would at once 
 incite inquiry and hold attention. 
 
 Take an instance : I was once called, as a 
 substitute, to teach a class of very frisky boys 
 of perhaps nine to eleven years of age. The 
 lesson was on the Golden Rule. The boys were 
 in a state of ceaseless activity and mischief- 
 making. It was plain that they would be utterly 
 beyond my control if I persisted either in mere 
 Scripture readings or with ethical abstractions. 
 In less time than it takes to tell it, I said to 
 myself, " Get your point of contact ; address 
 them through their senses ; get on to the plane 
 of their common activity." I immediately drew 
 48 
 
BpplEing tbe principle 
 
 an ivory foot-rule out of my pocket and asked 
 what it was. Silence and attention were im- 
 mediate. Some called it a " ruler," some a 
 " measure," and one finally said it was a " rule." 
 
 My next inquiry was to ascertain what it was 
 made of. Some said ivory, some said bone. 
 The class was in full control. It was easy then 
 to lead them on to an imaginary rule, through 
 keeping them in a certain suspense of meaning, 
 until we had reached the Golden Rule. Ques- 
 tioning then drew from them the relative value 
 of ivory and gold, and of rules made from them 
 — real or figurative. It is unnecessary to follow 
 the process more in detail, but the class was 
 conquered, for that day at least, and their dis- 
 graceful hubbub was turned into an exemplary 
 discussion of eternal truth. 
 
 Golden texts, theological doctrines, ethical 
 abstractions from the Catechism or the Epistles, 
 taken in themselves, would have been hurled at 
 these bright minds in vain ; but the contact with 
 a single tangible object such as a boy would use, 
 4 49 
 
Zbe point ot Contact 
 
 or, at all events, enjoys handling, was the suc- 
 cessful point of departure for his spiritual in- 
 struction. 
 
 Take another case : A visitor was called on 
 to address a school made up largely of children 
 more or less familiar with country life, and of 
 various ages. The lesson of the day had been 
 on the entry of the Israelites into the promised 
 land. He wanted to give the school, in less 
 than ten minutes, a general grasp of the history 
 of the Hebrews around the full circuit from the 
 promise to Abraham to the realization of the 
 promise, centuries later. The details of many 
 Bible lessons necessarily must have obstructed 
 the broader view or general trend of the history. 
 He must proceed upon the plan of a circuit or 
 circularity. From what point in ordinary life 
 could they best be led into the conception of the 
 circuit from Canaan through Egypt and the 
 Wilderness back into Canaan ? 
 
 The first interest was awakened by drawing 
 out, through questioning, their knowledge of the 
 
 5o 
 
BpplBing tbe principle 
 
 oak and the acorn, and, again, by the complete 
 circuit made by a drop of water from ocean to 
 cloud, to rain, to spring, to river, and to sea 
 again. From contact with this object illustration 
 of the idea of circularity it was easy to lead the 
 school on to the circuit that covered centuries in 
 the life of the Hebrews. This was successfully 
 accomplished in eight minutes. 
 
 On another occasion, when the golden text 
 was Luke 2 : 52, — " And Jesus increased in wis- 
 dom and stature, and in favor with God and 
 man," — a speaker wanted to press the thought 
 of growth. A class of little girls sat just in front 
 of the platform. He asked whether any of them 
 had a doll, and received a prompt answer. Did 
 that doll grow any bigger ? Why not ? It was 
 not alive. Can you make yourself bigger ? It 
 was easy to follow then into the part that we have 
 in our own physical growth, and, finally, in in- 
 creasing "in favor with God and man." 
 
 Another illustration I extract from a remark- 
 ably graphic and suggestive article by Elizabeth 
 5i 
 
Zbe iPoint of Contact 
 
 Harrison in The Sunday School Times. It 
 shows also that the application of the principle 
 is not limited to little children. 
 
 A kindergartner, visiting a mission school, 
 was asked by the superintendent to take a class 
 of " toughs " which had already been given up 
 in despair by four teachers. The threat of the 
 superintendent to eject them from the room if 
 they did not behave was received with derisive 
 laughter. This was followed, during the open- 
 ing exercises, by various outrageous antics, and 
 then came the time for the lesson teaching. 
 Miss Harrison continues : 
 
 As soon as they were settled, one boy raised his 
 blacking-box, which up to this time had been hidden 
 under his chair ; with a flourish almost too quick to be 
 seen, he scraped it across the nose of another boy. This 
 was an affront not to be tolerated. Instantly, the insulted 
 boy raised his clenched fist. In a moment more the blow 
 would have descended, and the usual street row would 
 have taken place in the Sunday-school room. 
 
 This was our kindergartner's opportunity. " From 
 the Known to the Unknown " had been her motto for years. 
 Through curiosity, reverence was to be awakened. 
 Quick as a flash, she reached out her hand, and seizing 
 
 52 
 
SpplSing tbe principle 
 
 the blacking-box exclaimed, in a tone of animation : " I 
 can tell you something about this box that you do net 
 know." 
 
 The boys were amazed, as they expected a repri- 
 mand. The clenched fists slowly descended ; all eyes 
 were fastened upon her. 
 
 " Bah ! " said one of the boys, in a tone of contempt; 
 " you're trying to guy us now." 
 
 "Indeed, I am not," replied the kindergartner. "I 
 know something very wonderful about this box, and I do 
 not believe any of you ever heard it." 
 
 "Give us a rest!" tauntingly said another skeptic. 
 But all the others cried out : " What is it ? Go ahead ! " 
 
 " Of what is this box made ?" said the teacher, in a 
 slow and mysterious tone of voice. 
 
 "Wood, of course," said two or three of the disap- 
 pointed group, the look of contempt returning to their 
 faces. 
 
 "Oh, yes! of course," responded the teacher; "but 
 where did the wood come from ? " 
 
 "Out of the carpenter-shop," again answered two or 
 three. 
 
 " But where did the carpenter get it?" said the kin- 
 dergartner, still keeping up her tone of mystery. 
 
 "From the lumber-yard," answered one boy, more 
 knowing than the rest. 
 
 "Yes," said the teacher, encouragingly; "but where 
 did the lumber-yard man get it ? " 
 
 This brought the wisest among them to the end of 
 his knowledge. 
 
 53 
 
Gbe ipoint of Contact 
 
 She then began, and described to them the long, slow 
 growth, through centuries of time, of the forest trees. 
 The long, long years of silent waiting, until the ax of the 
 woodman did his work ; the busy, picturesque life of the 
 logging-camp ; the dangerous voyage of the logs, tied to- 
 gether in a raft, as they floated down the majestic river ; 
 the wonderful invention by which machinery was made 
 to transform these round logs into flat boards ready for 
 the lumber-yard. 
 
 The boys listened in intense interest. When she had 
 finished, there was a deep-drawn sigh, and all eyes turned 
 instinctively to the blacking-box, the mystery of whose 
 former life had been unfolded to them. 
 
 The teacher saw that she had gained a point. Rever- 
 ence must come from idle curiosity. Curiosity had been 
 gradually transformed into interest already. She con- 
 tinued : 
 
 " I think I know something else about this box which 
 you do not know." 
 
 She then drew out their knowledge about the 
 nails that held it together, tracing the process 
 of their manufacture back to the solitary bits of 
 iron ore in the mountain range, so old that the 
 life of man had no record of their beginning. 
 She graphically pictured the life of a miner. 
 By this time every boy was leaning forward in 
 breathless interest, fascinated by the new world 
 54 
 
BpplEtng tbc principle 
 
 into which she had led him. Again taking up 
 the box, she asked what color it was, and pur- 
 sued the same method on that point. 
 
 Gradually the ringleader among the boys, leaning 
 forward until his head reached far beyond his body, ex- 
 claimed in tones of deepest reverence : 
 
 " I know what you are. You're a fortune-teller; that's 
 what you are ! " 
 
 This was the highest tribute which he could pay her. 
 In the back alley in which he lived, a mysterious for- 
 tune-teller played the part of Delphic oracle. To him 
 she was the personification of wisdom. And there sat a 
 woman before him who apparently knew everything, — 
 who could tell him of that great mysterious world which 
 lay outside of his district. 
 
 She had gained her point. She had raised within each 
 of them a feeling of reverence. . . . Slowly but surely she 
 built up an altar in them to the unknown God, which 
 altar was necessary before the God of righteousness and 
 of mercy and of love could be preached unto them. 
 
 To come back more particularly to little 
 children the principle of the point of contact and 
 the way of leading the child easily from this 
 point in his experience to spiritual truth with- 
 out leaving the natural level of a 
 
 55 /* v 
 
Gbe {point of Contact 
 
 cannot be better illustrated than from Frcebel's 
 " Mother Play." l 
 
 " From so simple a point in the child's activi- 
 ties as the pat-a-cake play Frcebel carries the 
 little learner along step by step thus: "The 
 bread, or, better still, the little cake which the 
 child likes so much, he receives from his mother; 
 the mother, in turn, receives it from the baker. 
 So far so good. We have found two links in 
 the great chain of life and service. Let us be- 
 ware, however, of making the child feel that 
 these links complete the chain. The baker can 
 bake no cake if the miller grinds no meal; 
 the miller can grind no meal if the farmer brings 
 him no grain; the farmer can bring no grain if 
 his field yields no crop; the field can yield no 
 crop if the forces of nature fail to work together 
 to produce it; the forces of nature could not 
 conspire together were it not for the all-wise and 
 
 1 The reader is referred particularly to Susan E. Blow's transla- 
 tion of "The Mottoes and Commentaries of Friedrich Frcebel's 
 Mother Play," one of the volumes of Appleton's International 
 Education Series. 
 
 56 
 
Bpprging tbe principle 
 
 beneficent Power who incites and guides them 
 to their predetermined ends." 
 
 Observe how different is this process from the 
 common one of forcing the child on to an adult 
 plane through the adult abstractions of theolo- 
 gies. 
 
 Again, note the suggestion in the play of "The 
 Two Gates : " " The idea suggested in the farm- 
 yard gate is that the child should be taught to 
 prize and protect what he has acquired. The 
 thought illustrated in the garden gate is that he 
 should be led to recognize and name the differ- 
 ent objects in his environment. In your attempt 
 to carry out the latter idea, be careful to begin 
 with the things which the child sees around 
 him in the house, the yard, the garden, and the 
 meadow. From these advance to the naming 
 of objects in the pasture and the wood. Teach 
 your child not only to recognize and name ob- 
 jects, but also to recognize and name qualities." 
 
 The weather-vane is another familiar object 
 in the child's life. Frcebel here admirably illus- 
 57 
 
Gbe lpotnt of Contact 
 
 trates the difference between conducting the 
 child always on the plane of his own natural 
 powers or appreciations, and confusing him by 
 thrusting him out of it. "I might as well talk 
 to you in a foreign tongue as to tell you that 
 ' the pressure of air, or its altered density, or a 
 change in its temperature, causes wind!' You 
 would not understand a single word of this ex- 
 planation. But one thing you can understand 
 even now : A single mighty power like the wind 
 can do many things great and small. You see 
 the things it does, though you cannot see the 
 wind itself. There are many things, my child, 
 which we can be sure of though we cannot see 
 them." 
 
 Enough has been said to demonstrate the very 
 important double principle of beginning at the 
 point of contact with experience and of reaching 
 high spiritual truths by keeping always upon the 
 child's plane or level of mental and spiritual 
 sight. Or, in more popular phrase, we must 
 hold ourselves firmly at the child's point of view. 
 58 
 
IV 
 
 mussing tbe point 
 
IV 
 
 flUissino tbe point 
 
 There are those who have a certain intuitive 
 sense that the point of interest to a child and the 
 point of departure, or starting, in his instruction, 
 should be something which to them seems child- 
 ish and simple. Consequently they often suc- 
 ceed in gaining entry to the child mind. But, 
 having no formulated guiding principle, they 
 also often fail. 
 
 To illustrate : I remember hearing an address 
 to children based upon the text, " The little foxes 
 that spoil the vines." These little foxes were 
 our small vices or weaknesses. Why did the 
 speaker choose such a point of departure? I 
 suppose " the little foxes " had a simple, child- 
 like sound about it to him, and seemed as though 
 it would be easily a point of interest to little chil- 
 dren. Perhaps it was, in so far as it roused their 
 61 
 
Gbe ipoint of Contact 
 
 curiosity. Whatever the children got out of the 
 address, they got in spite of, rather than because 
 of, the point of departure, which was not a point 
 of contact with common experience. To very 
 few children does a fox exist in more than name, 
 if that; and the propensity of foxes for spoiling 
 vines is one which they could not appreciate 
 unless they had lived in a country where they had 
 actually seen this kind of destruction wrought, or 
 heard it talked about until it became a familiar 
 fact. 
 
 In the same way, writers for children often 
 seem to suppose that they are placing themselves 
 on the child's plane by the use of certain kinds 
 of youthful expressions and by a kind of forced 
 intimacy of manner, while the situations, the 
 motives and raw material out of which the story 
 or article is made, are foreign to the child's per- 
 ception, thought, or feeling. 
 
 Certain "appliances" now frequently used in 
 the primary school as a part of the process of 
 " adapting " the lesson matter sometimes fail 
 62 
 
flfttestncj tbe IPoint 
 
 because, forming no links with the child's own 
 experience, they merely center the interest on 
 themselves as objects. 
 
 Says Miss Julia E. Peck: "In our attempts to 
 meet the child on his own level we have fallen 
 very far below his level, failing to note from week 
 to week that the dignity of his simplicity is a 
 lasting rebuke to our fussy sentimentality." 
 
 Again, history as such is a concept prac- 
 tically out of the primary child's power of 
 acquirement. He has too few years behind him 
 in his own experience, and has had too little 
 dealing with that impersonal thing — organized 
 society. History as personal biography, Bible 
 stories as such, have a very large educational 
 function for the little child, but not as history. 
 No matter what delight the children show in 
 paraphernalia, no matter what pat answers they 
 give, we must be suspicious of the delight and 
 the answers, and we must look for another cause 
 than historical consciousness. 
 
 An illustration is to be found in the following, 
 63 
 
Gbe point of Contact 
 
 which was sent to me by an experienced secular 
 as well as Sunday-school teacher. She says : 
 " I shall not soon forget my own struggles with 
 the International lessons. I had small boys 
 from six to eight years old. The lesson was 
 Nehemiah's prayer. I had tried very hard to 
 make the lesson practical, and entertaining as 
 well, but I am afraid I must have succeeded too 
 well, for when I asked one small boy how many 
 years ago he thought all these things had hap- 
 pened, he opened his eyes very wide, and ven- 
 tured, ' I guess about a week.' I think he 
 thought that he had been rash in suggesting 
 such a remote period." We remember certain 
 events of our childhood only as incidents in that 
 life. They seldom have any historicity about 
 them. Their chronological order we are seldom 
 conscious of unless we have worked it out in 
 later life by reasoning upon it. 
 
 The effort to force a child on to a plane not 
 naturally his own is thus referred to in an edito- 
 rial utterance of The School Journal: 
 64 
 
AQtssing tbe point 
 
 The mistake is frequently made of assigning subjects 
 for compositions that lie outside of the pupil's range of 
 experience and vision. A premium is thereby put upon 
 shallowness in thought and superficiality of judgment. 
 It is a way of making the children hypocrites by having 
 them talk or write of things they know nothing about. 
 Every great educator from Comenius down to our day 
 has raised his voice against what Basedow terms " per- 
 nicious word culture." 
 
 Another frequent way of missing the point 
 and compelling children to express adult senti- 
 ments and feelings entirely foreign to the plane 
 of child life is found in some of the hymns they 
 are asked to sing. I quote here from an article, 
 published in The Sunday School Times, by Mrs. 
 George Archibald : 
 
 There is good sense, as well as fervent joy and full 
 assurance, in the verse which says : 
 
 " Come, sing to me of heaven, 
 When I'm about to die ; 
 Sing songs of holy ecstasy 
 To waft my soul on high. 
 
 There'll be no sorrow there," etc. 
 
 But, as children are not, ordinarily, about to die, shall 
 their spiritual songs be principally about heaven, and 
 expressive of an intense longing to go there ? Yet, when 
 
 5 65 
 
Gbe point ot Contact 
 
 we take pains to notice, we find in Sunday-school hymns 
 a vast amount of rime, time, tune, and measure devoted 
 to chanting the desolation of life, the longing for death, 
 and a submissive waiting for release and glory. What 
 could be more unnatural ? 
 
 The child's first effort is toward the continuance of its 
 earthly existence. The mother's first care has the same 
 object. The first warnings of the infant are those against 
 dangers that might imperil its life, — the flame, the edge- 
 tool, the flight of stairs. Its first work at school is as a 
 foundation for the needs of the terrestrial sojourn. And 
 its first spiritual teaching should be that of active good- 
 ness, and cheerful, kindly Christian endeavor in the 
 sphere to which it is born. 
 
 "The home of the soul " may often fitly be the goal 
 of adult longing. But the first home of the soul is the 
 natural body. Let the children learn to magnify the 
 offices of this body. Let their songs be those which 
 will inspire their souls to use the lips, the hands and feet, 
 in the service of man, as the children of God. . . . 
 
 One of God's best gifts to the little child is its joyful 
 anticipation of the life that now is. We have no right 
 to put into its mouth the song of lamentation. 
 
 This child's plane may be spiritually quite as 
 elevated as that of the adult, but the mode of 
 the child's spiritual self-expression will be quite 
 different. 
 
 There is another way of forcing a n entrance 
 66 
 
flflltssing tbe lpoint 
 
 to the child's mind at an unnatural and danger- 
 ous point. Doubters, agnostics, skeptics, or in- 
 fidels, are not found in early childhood. When 
 children inquire, they do it because they want to 
 know more, not because they doubt. It is there- 
 fore a fatal mistake to address the child as if he 
 were a skeptic. 
 
 A discerning student of the child, a primary 
 worker, Miss Lida B. Robertson, says : " Jesus 
 is 'the way, the truth, and the life,' and our 
 teachings of him should be positive, and not 
 negative. We do him and the pupils irremedi- 
 able harm to fill their embryo minds with the 
 accursed doubts of scribes, Pharisees, and Sad- 
 ducees, in order that we may try to prove the 
 truth to them." 
 
 Even if a child has unfortunately been in an 
 unbelieving environment, and so may be said to 
 have had some experience with that phase of 
 life, points of contact with it are not to be taken 
 merely because they seem to touch his experi- 
 ence, Observe, this ruling is not arbitrary, but 
 67 
 
Gbe point of Contact 
 
 is based largely on the fact that unbelief is not 
 on a plane natural to the condition of childhood. 
 Skepticism, if it can be found in a little child, has 
 been received through suggestion from without, 
 and is therefore abnormal and premature. Any 
 suggestion of unbelief is liable to beget unbelief. 
 It is time enough to deal with it later, when it is 
 begotten. 
 
 It is not merely the starting-points, then, that 
 must be within the child's range of experience, 
 but it is the whole teaching which proceeds step 
 by step from it. This means not only that we 
 must find the proper points of contact, but that 
 the body of lesson material itself be appropriately 
 selected for its simplicity, positiveness, imme- 
 diateness, concreteness, and connectedness. 
 
 68 
 
V 
 
 Gbe lesson (material 
 
V 
 
 Zhe %c3son Material 
 
 It is now a much heralded idea that it makes 
 little or no difference what the subject-matter of 
 the Bible-study lesson is, provided the teacher 
 "adapt" it to the children. It is contended that 
 the selection of uniform lessons for pupils of all 
 ages is quite consistent with the demand for 
 graded instruction ; and that the grading should 
 be, not in the subject-matter, but in the method 
 of its impartation. At the International Sunday- 
 school Convention of 1893, the primary workers 
 themselves formally made the declaration that 
 " experience has proven that the International 
 lessons are susceptible of being adapted to 
 young children by suitable methods of teaching." 
 
 I do not intend here to debate the question as 
 to whether experience has proved this or not. 
 It is, indeed, rather a question of what the child's 
 71 
 
Zbc point ot Contact 
 
 experience is with us, than ours with him, and 
 the trend of evidences in the foregoing chapters 
 must suffice. The issue which I make is, that 
 choice of material is the first essential to be con- 
 sidered, and the method of presenting the mate- 
 rial comes second. 
 
 Some Scripture passages are certainly better 
 for some purposes than others. If this is not so, 
 why have certain passages always studiously 
 been omitted from the International courses ? 
 Now the little child is a purpose, and a very 
 different sort of purpose from the man or woman 
 or the youth. It is therefore quite reasonable 
 to suppose that some Scripture lessons would 
 be better than others for the child. 
 
 But apart from this, if we recognize the right of 
 each child to his individuality, we should recog- 
 nize the right of childhood to its individuality. 
 It seems almost humiliating to plead for a truth 
 so well understood in every other sphere except 
 that of Sunday-school instruction. Does the 
 secular school take trigonometry, or Greek 
 72 
 
Gbe %c66on fBlatcrtal 
 
 grammar, or constitutional law, into the primary 
 school ? Would any sensible parent consent to 
 send his children to a secular primary school 
 where there was no choice of lesson material, 
 but where any and every subject, however ab- 
 struse and remote from the child's plane of 
 thought, was ordered to be " adapted " by the 
 teacher ? Such " adaptation " as one often sees 
 is a misnomer. It results in a nominal but not 
 real teaching of the assigned text. 
 
 If it be claimed that any and every text in the 
 Bible is suitable for the children provided it be 
 suitably adapted by the teacher, let the words 
 of Pestalozzi answer: "The reform needed is not 
 that the school coach should be better horsed, 
 but that it should be turned right around and 
 started on a new track." 
 
 The turning around will be the adoption of a 
 lesson course selected especially from the child's 
 point of view, as well as the ordering of the ser- 
 vices and the mode of address to the child upon 
 his own plane of sense, thought, and feeling. 
 73 
 
Gbe point of Contact 
 
 Until this is accomplished a high grade of teach- 
 ing will be impossible. 
 
 Miss Blow, speaking deprecatingly of the lack 
 of clear insight in the choice of themes, says : 
 " It would seem that the selection of suitable 
 themes is a matter of prime import." And a 
 writer in The Westminster Review says : " What 
 is true of bodily food is true also of spiritual 
 food. Children's intellects cannot digest that 
 which is suited to adults; and however sincerely 
 religious beliefs may be held by parents, this 
 does not prevent them from assuming a differ- 
 ent complexion in the mind of a child. At 
 second hand they are not merely useless, but 
 pernicious." 
 
 And Herbert Spencer : " Good exposition im- 
 plies much constructive imagination. A pre- 
 requisite is the forming of true ideas of the men- 
 tal states of those who are to be taught; and a 
 further prerequisite is the imagining of methods 
 by which, beginning with conceptions which 
 they possess, there may be built up in their 
 74 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 Zbc Xesson ^material 
 
 minds the conceptions they do not possess. Of 
 constructive imagination, as displayed in this 
 sphere, men at large appear to be almost devoid; 
 as witness the absurd systems of teaching which 
 in past times, and in large measure at present, 
 have stupefied, and still stupefy, children." 
 
 Says Louis Heilprin: "We teach a child to 
 bound every state in the world, and make him 
 learn all the capitals, before he has the slightest 
 interest in land that he has not seen. We teach 
 him to locate a long array of capes and prom- 
 ontories without his having any conception of 
 their significance as landmarks. . . . We drag him 
 from one corner to another of the great tableau 
 of history, and compel him to take in its insig- 
 nificant details before he has been given a chance 
 to acquire any interest in any age but his own." 
 
 This fairly pictures our tendency, in all deal- 
 ings with the child, to keep him in the remote 
 instead of the near, and in minor details to him 
 disconnected and unrelated, instead of large sim- 
 ple generals or wholes. 
 
 75 
 
Zbc {point of Contact 
 
 It will not do, however, to show the weakness 
 and harmfulness of our present system without 
 indicating in what direction reform must lie. It 
 is not my part or purpose to work out the de- 
 tails of a primary Bible course. Nor is it essen- 
 tial that every instructor, in order to be famil- 
 iar with the principle of the point of contact 
 and the plane of experience, should be expert in 
 the construction of lesson courses. But some 
 basal suggestions, some foundation principles, 
 may be here laid down for completeness' sake. 
 
 The Bible is a complex of abstracts and con- 
 cretes, of history, nature, ethics, prophecy, doc- 
 trine, etc., embracing also many bloody and, to 
 us, revolting historical pictures, altogether un- 
 suitable for a child's reading. It is therefore, 
 as a text book, unique, and accordingly difficult 
 of presentation. Nevertheless, it is possible to 
 construct Bible lesson courses from the child's 
 point of view. 
 
 Beginning where we "find the pupil," then, 
 we must take a few near-at-hand points in the 
 
 7<* 
 
XLbc Xesson {material 
 
 child's experience, — objects in the home, in 
 nature, parental relations, etc. These must be 
 combined or thought into a simple, easily-con- 
 ceived whole. We must observe peoples before 
 we talk about "a peculiar people," "the chosen 
 people." "The simplest general whole," says 
 Parker, is the "first objective point." And "the 
 plain rule of procedure, in going from the part 
 to the whole, is to form a real whole that can be 
 most easily imagined or appreciated. . . . The 
 anatomy of a finger or a muscle is more difficult 
 than the anatomy of the entire framework of the 
 body." A child understands sentences and 
 phrases of which he does not understand the 
 isolated words. He can swing his arms mightily, 
 albeit he cannot control his fingers precisely. 
 
 Pursuing the germinal idea of relations w r e 
 approach the idea of Creator and Father of all. 
 Next we might aim for the concept of communi- 
 cation through the simple percepts of speech, 
 books, etc.; then a great simple, general whole 
 again, a concept of revelation, — the Bible. The 
 77 
 
Gbe point of Contact 
 
 way is thus naturally and logically opened for 
 the revelation of God in human form, — the 
 Word "made flesh," the Saviour Jesus. (All 
 the steps that this paragraph implies cannot, of 
 course, be detailed here. Nor is it meant to say 
 that this is the only right beginning, but rather 
 that it is the only right principle of beginning 
 and of proceeding, — from the known to the un- 
 known.) 
 
 Recalling again that young children have 
 very little conception of time or space, we must 
 consequently avoid much dependence upon con- 
 cepts rooted in them. It is useless to take 
 primaries step by step from Egypt to the Prom- 
 ised Land until they have a comprehensive 
 view, a simple idea of Israel (whether we call it 
 "Israelites," "Hebrew's," "Jews," "peculiar peo- 
 ple," or any other name) from Abraham to the 
 modern Jew. The complex of historical details 
 within that view cannot be appreciated. "The 
 fatal mistake," says Colonel Parker, "of many 
 teachers ... is that of leading pupils into the 
 78 
 
Zbc Xesson material 
 
 search for (to the teachers) alluring details, in- 
 stead of teaching just enough of facts to sub- 
 serve the purposes of clear and simple generali- 
 zations." Creeping week by week from the 
 Creation to Joshua or David or Zerubbabel is 
 utterly futile if the intention is to convey the 
 history or chronology idea. Herbart observes 
 that the impression of the present moment 
 throws the one previously apprehended too 
 quickly below the threshold of consciousness. 
 
 Moreover, the distracting details are a serious 
 interference with the child's generalizing powers. 
 There is no implication here that children do 
 not apprehend great religious truths. They do. 
 But I mean to emphasize the difference between 
 the simple and the complex, the high and the 
 intricate. Hawthorne clearly saw that " children 
 possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is 
 deep or high, in imagination or feeling, so long 
 as it is simple likewise. It is only the artificial 
 and the complex that bewilder them." 
 
 Again, we must have always in mind a simple 
 
 79 
 
Xlbe point of Contact 
 
 idea of relations, centering in the God-ward. 
 Here the value of Bible stories is very positive. 
 They lead pupils to put themselves in the place 
 of others, and to look for relations and conse- 
 quences. If they touch the child's experience, 
 and arouse his curiosity, they educate memory, 
 enforce moral, become a basis of action, and so 
 develop character. 
 
 The stories must, however, be wisely selected. 
 The continuous depicting of bloodshed and hor- 
 rors in the illustrations given in certain Bible 
 story-books for children, is simply barbarous. 
 A child should not get as a dominant thought of 
 God the idea of retribution, of killing, warring, 
 etc. Nor ought his early impressions of God's 
 Book to consist mainly of such things as are 
 repellent to a sensitive nature, especially in its 
 most impressible period. The child cannot have 
 sufficient knowledge of situations to justify a 
 repeated exhibit of vengeance and horror. For 
 the same reason the physical sufferings of our 
 Lord on the cross must not be too minutely pic- 
 80 
 
Zbc Xc69on flQaterial 
 
 tured, and his death ought seldom to be men- 
 tioned apart from his rising again. Then, too, 
 the stones must have a certain simple complete- 
 ness of their own, and not be too dependent on 
 remote causes and complications, or on local 
 conditions. 
 
 There can be no ideal course of lessons for all 
 alike. Differences of condition among schools, 
 and among the pupils in the same school, forbid 
 it. The great variance in the qualifications of 
 teachers, and the power of old associations, pre- 
 dilections, and prejudices, forbid it. And yet 
 there is a sense in which there can be a course 
 ideal in its recognition of these difficulties, and 
 ideal in its concessions to them. But such a 
 course must regard those fundamental princi- 
 ples without which the primary teaching of the 
 future must be pitiably in arrears to a progres- 
 sive age. 
 
 Recapitulating, we find that, in teaching the 
 child, child nature is the first consideration; that 
 the child is capable of perceiving certain pro- 
 6 Si 
 
XLbc point of Contact 
 
 found spiritual truths, although he be incapable 
 of receiving them through a conventional adult 
 phraseology; that we must take the child where 
 we find him; that the mind grows only upon 
 that which it assimilates; that we cannot force 
 this assimilation .beyond a more or less well- 
 defined power of the child's nature; that we 
 must proceed from known to unknown, and 
 from concrete to abstract ; that we must teach 
 by wholes rather than in complications of detail; 
 that the child mind has little power of perceiv- 
 ing matters of time or space, and consequently 
 can assimilate but little of history or geography ; 
 that the connection of one lesson with another 
 must be a connection of thought rather than of 
 mere chronology; that the narration of things 
 painful and horrible must be as far as possible 
 avoided ; that Bible stories have an important 
 pedagogical value, and that instruction must be 
 positive rather than negative or apologetic. 
 
 Any one who has attempted to build up a 
 primary course in which the foregoing principles 
 82 
 
Zbc Wesson falaterial 
 
 have been fairly respected, will have discovered 
 that, if he can construct one such course, he can 
 about as satisfactorily construct more. He will 
 have found himself, at times, in a strait betwixt 
 two paths through Primary Land. He comes 
 now and again to a parting of ways, both or all 
 equally primary, equally promising, all trending 
 toward the same goal. The resources are great 
 and varied. 
 
 For the first time in twenty-three years, the 
 International lessons in 1896 began to acknowl- 
 edge the rights and claims of the child as a per- 
 sonality peculiar and distinct from that of the 
 youth or the adult, in a special " optional " pri- 
 mary course. So far, so good. The Journal of 
 Education recently said, editorially : " The first 
 great modern movement in Sunday-school work 
 was the organization of the International Sun- 
 day-school Committee, and the adoption of the 
 idea of uniformity. Too much praise cannot be 
 given the wisdom and devotion of those who 
 made the perfection of the idea possible. But, 
 
 83 
 
Gbe H>olnt ot Contact 
 
 with all its virtues, uniformity is a very small 
 idea in and of itself around which to weave a 
 perpetual system. The educational world has 
 waited patiently these many years for the Inter- 
 national to add to that incidental virtue some 
 pedagogical principle, and the first real move- 
 ment in that direction is in the issuance of the 
 International Optional Primary Lessons for 1896." 
 
 The fact that this course, to many, seems un- 
 systematic, planless, unbookish, would suggest 
 the possibility that there might be plan under it, 
 and system in it. It might even be unchrono- 
 logical, and yet truly logical. 
 
 The Book of Genesis is not genesis to the 
 child. Daylight comes before the sun. If we 
 think we can teach the child the Bible best in 
 what, to an adult, is consecutive order, because 
 it is literary order or historical order, we deceive 
 ourselves. We are not bringing the child the 
 truth in his orderly way, even if it is ours. Con- 
 nection and order to us are not necessarily order 
 or connection to him. 
 
 84 
 
ftbe %cs6on fulaterlal 
 
 On looking at the International primary les- 
 sons, one of the first things that strikes the eye 
 is the absence of any visible line dividing book 
 from book, or Testament from Testament. The 
 procedure is chiefly by interdependent themes 
 or a series of connected topics. So far, this is 
 as it should be. The fourth quarter, however, 
 retreats from this principle to become chrono- 
 logical, albeit laudably simple. 
 
 It must once more be noted that, so far, the 
 International primary course contemplates pro- 
 gressive teaching by topics, logically, — not by 
 book, chronologically. The need of the child 
 determines what the topics shall be, whether 
 they cover the whole Bible or not ; and " Testa- 
 ments," as Testaments, are not, as they need not 
 be, in the case. 
 
 The Sunday-school can as little afford to 
 ignore or to repudiate those fundamental peda- 
 gogical laws upon which all great educators are 
 now practically agreed, as the secular school. 
 Education is education, no matter what name 
 
 85 
 
Gbe point ot Contact 
 
 the school goes by. The Sunday-school suffers 
 from a hallucination that, because it is a reli- 
 gious institution, it must educate by some 
 method peculiar to itself, — a method which too 
 easily presumes on God's willingness to make 
 good our shortcomings. 
 
 It will be a long time yet before we fully 
 realize that the child under eight is not a mere 
 diminutive adult; that he has strictly no historic 
 consciousness, very little appreciation of the 
 remote in cause or effect, in time or in space; 
 and that he has no business with any series of 
 facts which, because of the half-wrong impres- 
 sion which he must needs get of them, make 
 " utter nonsense or mere verbal cram of the most 
 careful instruction." 
 
 The truth is that the child is robbed of his 
 right as a child by our everlastingly thinking 
 of him only as the coming man. We think 
 too much of what he may be, and not enough 
 of what he is. At best, the ideal man must first 
 have had an ideal childhood. We shall not 
 S6 
 
Zbe Xesson ^material 
 
 make a perfect child of him by forcing him into 
 an adult mold. Even Jesus had to be a baby 
 before he could become a man. " It is danger- 
 ous," says the immortal Frcebel, "to interfere in 
 any way with a ripening process." 
 
 Apart from this, any child may finish his 
 mission in childhood. Out of every thousand 
 children, over two hundred die before they reach 
 nine years of age. Are we going to let these 
 short lives be a failure just because it is easier 
 and more sentimental to have all grades using 
 the same lesson? Who can measure the influ- 
 ence which children have had upon history? 
 I refer not merely to their attractions and 
 sweetening influence upon us — that were adult 
 egotism. I refer to their direct powers, — powers 
 which we have lost, powers which convention 
 and artifice have pressed and dried out of us. 
 
 " Our simple childhood sits upon a throne 
 That hath more power than all the elements." 
 
 It is idle, if not immoral, to suppose that be- 
 cause we are trying to teach God's word to chil- 
 
 87 
 
XTbe point of Contact 
 
 dren we can therefore ignore the demands and 
 defy the laws of child nature. God never works 
 a miracle to relieve us from our obligation to 
 use common sense. Our Lord respected the 
 child's point of view, and gave it a foremost 
 place. He never told the child to be as a man, 
 although he did tell the man to be as a child. 
 A child is entitled to all that goes with child- 
 hood, no matter whether we are dealing with 
 him in secular or in religious matters. 
 
 The remedy for our evils lies in commanding 
 child nature by obeying child nature; in induct- 
 ing a child into a subject through his natural 
 point of contact with life, his experience, his 
 activities, his appreciations, his sense percep- 
 tions and his conceptions. In short, the child's 
 Genesis is not the man's Genesis. The story of 
 the beginnings of things is by no means the 
 beginning of the story of things. The child was 
 not made for lessons, but lessons must be made 
 for the child. 
 
 88 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 MAR 9 1915 
 MAY 2 1918 
 
 JAR 8 1923 
 
 Ml 
 
 
 S«j 
 
 10 
 
 \932 
 
 ao/M-i.'is 
 
<L.