REESE LIBRARY OK THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. ^Received , igo . Accession No. 92420 . Class No. PRINCIPLES OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE LECTURES PRINCIPLES OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION A COURSE OF LECTURES DELIVERED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL COMMISSION OF THE DIOCESE OF NEW YORK WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE RIGHT REVEREND HENRY C. POTTER, D.D., LL.D. Bishop of New York LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK LONDON AND BOMBAY 1901 Cf Copyright, 1900, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. First Edition, November, 1900. Reprinted, December, 1900. ROBERT DRUMMOND, PRINTER, NEW YORK. PREFACE. THE following Lectures were originally delivered in the Autumn of 1899, in St. Bartholomew's Church, Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, New York. They formed what was called ' * The Chris- tian Knowledge Course of Lectures on the Principles of Religious Instruction. ' ' This Course was arranged under the auspices of the Sunday-school Commission of the Diocese of New York, which had been ap- pointed by the Rt. Rev. Henry C. Potter, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of New York, at the Diocesan Con- vention of 1898, to consider what steps should be taken for the improvement of the Sunday-schools of the Diocese. It had long been felt that our Religious Schools were not all that they should be, either in the Curriculum of Study or in the general Training of the Teachers. The Church has not advanced with the Day- school along the lines of educational reform. The study of pedagogical principles has been made an essential in secular education, while the Church has largely overlooked it, as applied to her Sunday- schools; and almost completely ignored it in the training of her Clergy. And she has done this, in spite of the fact that in theory the Teaching Function of the Church is her most ancient and 92420 vi PREFACE. characteristic one, lying at the very heart, of her commission. The basic principle, therefore, underlying these Lectures is that the Sunday-school is a school. Its problems are educational problems. Its scope of instruction, its curriculum, its text-books, charts, maps, the equipment and training of its teachers, the hours and times and places of its work,- all these are questions to be considered in the light of educational principles. Hence it is important to consider Re- ligious Education first from the standpoint of acknow- ledged leaders in the cause of secular education. This Course of Lectures, covering roughly the entire field, each lecture presenting its own point of view, and all converging on the one general object, was arranged and carried out with the generous co-opera- tion of the following gentlemen : The Right Reverend Wm. Croswell Doane, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Albany; the Very Reverend George Hodges, D.D., Dean of the Cambridge Divinity School; Professor Charles De Garmo, Ph.D., of Cornell University; President G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University; Pro- fessor Frank Morton McMurry, Ph.D., Professor of "the Theory of Teaching," in Teachers College, Columbia University ; Professor Charles Foster Kent, of Brown University; and Professor Richard G. Moulton, M.A., of Chicago University; together with the following Members of the Sunday-school Commission : Professor Nicholas Murray Butler, Ph.D., LL.D, of Columbia University; Dr. Walter L. Hervey, Examiner of the Board of Education, New York, and former President of Teachers Col- PREFACE. vil lege; and the Reverend Pascal Harrower, Chair- man of the Commission. The particular Topics covered by the Lectures were ' ' The Relation of Religious Instruction to Education as a Whole, " * * The Educational Work of the Christian Church, " * * The Present Status of Religious Instruction in England, France, Germany, and the United States," " The Content of Religious Instruction," "The Sunday-school and its Course of Study," "The Preparation of the Teacher," "The Religious Content of the Child's Mind," "The Use of Biography," "The Use of Geog- raphy, ' ' and ' ' The Bible as Literature. ' ' With deepest thanks to the learned gentlemen, who by their aid and encouragement have made possible the production of this Volume, and with the earnest hope that it may prove of material benefit to all who are interested in the work of Christian Education, the Course of Lectures is now placed before the Church and her teachers. Members of tbe Commission. Rev. PASCAL HARROWER, Chairman, West New Brighton, New York. Rev. WM. WALTER SMITH, M.A., M.D., Secretary, 25 West ii4th Street, New York. HENRY H. PIKE, Esq., Treasurer, 134 Pearl Street, New York. Rev. HENRY MOTTET, D.D. Rev. WM. L. EVANS, M.A. Rev. JOHN P. PETERS, D.D. Rev. CHAS. A. HAMILTON, M.A. Rev. E. WALPOLE WARREN, D.D. Rev. ERNEST C. SAUNDERS, B.D. Rev. DAVID H. GREER, D.D. NICHOLAS M.BUTLER, Ph. D.,LL.D. Rev. WM. S. RAINSFORD, D.D. WALTER L. HERVEY, Ph.D. Rev. LESTER BRADNER, Ph.D. CHARLES W. STOUGHTON, Esq. INTRODUCTION. THE occasion for the Lectures gathered in this volume is one with which thoughtful men and women can hardly fail to sympathize. No one who takes into account the forces that make for the best, whether in character or conduct, can be insensible to the pre-eminent value, in their development, of the influences that touch the deepest springs, and find their sources in the highest inspirations. That, I suppose, is the object of what we call education. We have, in a child's mind, something ductile, fluent, impressionable. His earliest perceptions and apprehensions are apt to be its deepest, most deter- minative, if not always its most enduring ; and if so, nothing can transcend the importance of the condi- tions, agencies, and instruments by which these are made. In this view it must be owned that the modern Church has not adequately recognised its responsi- bilities nor improved its opportunities, as a teacher of the young. There have been ages when that office belonged almost exclusively to it, and when its failures were due, not perhaps to its want of zeal, but to its want of wisdom. To-day the conditions ix X INTRODUCTION. are quite different. Under republican institutions, and with us in the United States, the functions of the State as a religious teacher through an established religion, have as most of us I presume believe, wisely ceased. That fact ought undoubtedly to have awak- ened and stimulated the Church to increased en- deavours to supply what a Christian man must hold to be fundamental to a right education, and which, now, the Church or the family alone can give. Our American situation, in other words, has lifted the Sunday-school into a position of preeminent import- ance which, we must acknowledge has been but feebly and imperfectly recognised. Under these circumstances, the pages that follow are opportune, and, I think they will be found, per- tinent and helpful. They are the fruit of various and earnest thought, of large experience, and of a high purpose. I am glad to believe that they will lift the office of the Sunday-school to a higher plane in the estimate of thoughtful people, and will open its aims and methods to the more appreciative sympathy of all who, whether as pastors, parents, or teachers, are in any way responsible, to use an old phrase, for "godliness and good learning " in the young. HENRY C. POTTER. CONTENTS. i. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND ITS RELATION TO EDUCATION. By NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Education in Columbia University. PAGE True education a unitary force 3 "Education" defined. Adaptation to environment, and capacity to control environment. Education first a matter of principle, and secondly one of methods 4 Chief principle found in man's relation to environment. " En- vironment " defined as, man's physical surroundings, and that accretion of knowledge, resulting in habit and conduct, called ' ' civilization " 5 Environment both physical and spiritual. Spiritual environment (civilization) divided into science, literature, art, institutional life, and religious beliefs. All these necessary to education. ... 6 Religious training part of a general education. Its separation from education an outgrowth of Protestantism and Democ- racy. Ethnic or racial religions include religious training in education. So with Christianity before the Reformation. Change and separation followed. Democracy assisted in school secularization. Reduction of religious teaching to lowest pos- sible terms. Only the Bible, Lord's Prayer, and Hymn left. The Bible thrown out as sectarian. Legislation against sectarian instruction in State schools. Wisconsin decision against Bible- reading. The Church and home circle the proper sources of xi xii CONTENTS. ?AGK religious instruction. State schools and the Government alike "Godless." This the American and French doctrines. Hence all State education incomplete 6 Education not wholly a State duty. Family, Church, and social factors. Though schools are secular, religious instruction still necessary 1 1 What are Church and family doing for education ? Is religion important? Civilization unintelligible without it. Its univer- sality. Religion a part of Man's psychical being 12 Moral and civic instruction no substitute for religion. Absurd results of contrary view in France. Confusion of religion with ethics obscures both 14 Church, Sunday-school, and family the proper agencies. Sun- day-school part of general educational work. Combination of small parishes. Teachers must be trained and paid. Their labour educational, not philanthropic. Supervision by Sunday- school Board. Course of study now too " pious." Wider scope and gradation. Religion in education ; not religion and educa- tion. Radical but necessary changes 15 The alternative, religious ignorance. Examples in universities. The key to the heart. Knowledge reacts on feelings. Benefits of wide education .. 18 II. THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. By the Rt. Rev. WILLIAM CROSWELL DOANH, DD., LL.D., Bishop of Albany. Christ's Prophetic, Priestly, and Kingly offices the three func- tions of the Church. The Prophetic function illustrated by the Sermon on the Mount. This mission that of the Church to- day. The Apostles' work of imparting the Faith 23 " Teaching," in relation to rules of Faith and Life, defined. This teaching the great Apostolic Mandate. St. Paul's labours. The Church the great religious teacher to-day. Early Christian Schools and their Influence 24 Extent of true Christion education. Scott Holland on the old CONTENTS. xiii PAGE Greek masters of theology. The Church foremost in education in the Middle Ages. The Church's work to-day inadequate. Contrasts and contradictions in the Universities. Not so irre- ligious as depicted 27 Modern theologians' weakness not the result of weakness in the Faith itself. The great Verities of the Faith beyond all investi- gation. Never in antagonism with science, reason, or philoso- phy. No real conflict of Classroom and Chapel 31 Attitude of Church toward education a difficult problem. State schools secular from necessity. Parochial schools inadequate. Broad associations best for the student for later social environment 34 Problem met by Church Halls in Universities. How the Church Hall would teach. Correlation of Science and Religion, Philoso- phy and Faith. The teachings of history, geography, and litera- ture 36 The Church's existing machinery chiefly the Sunday-school A modern makeshift replacing neglect of home and parents. The Catechism the Church's basis of instruction. Duty of the Clergy to train teachers. " Society for Home Study of the Holy Scriptures " , 39 The Pulpit as a Church organ for education. Not eloquence needed, but teaching of Faith and Life. The Old Word in modern phrases 41 ^ III. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES. By CHARLES DE GARMO, Ph.D., Professor of the Science and Art of Education in Cornell University. Origin of religious instruction in English schools. Lancaster's labours for the Dissenters. Bell's Church of England work. Lancaster's scheme of paid and pupil teachers. Its failure 49 Government grants for voluntary schools. Failure of the sys- tem. Organization of Board schools. Religious instruction made optional. Government inspection of secular education. xiv CONTENTS. American schools unfavourably contrasted. Rise of the Sunday- school system. Two systems of religious instruction side by side 52 In France no religious instruction in public schools. Weekly holiday for denominational religious teaching 56 In Germany day-schools impart the religious teaching. Thor- oughness of the system. Curriculum broad and complete. Critical spirit in the Universities. Difference in teaching for scholars and for the masses. Religious feeling neglected. New curricula now being formulated 56 The United States compared with Europe. Threefold purpose of religious instruction. Deficiency of Christian knowledge com- pared with Europe. Superiority over Europe in Christian spirit and Christian conduct. Improvements suggested. Better peda- gogical system needed. Arrangement of material for various ages. Period of adolescence crucial. Wrong treatment after adolescence 62 Reaction in England favours subjective spiritual life. Whitefield's and Wesley's systems of religious exercises. Similar tendencies in America. Need for wiser treatment. Man's relation to his fellow men. Universal conditions, not accidental circumstances, paramount. Improvement of Sunday-schools 70 IV. THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. By the Very Reverend GEORGE HODGES, D.D., Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass. Content of religious instruction determined by its purpose. The day-school, the private school, and the public school 79 Purpose of the Sunday-school to train Christians and Church- men. Parish work designed to build up Christian and Church character 80 Content of religious instruction consists of Church material and Character material. What constitutes Character material. Church material. The light of personality. Church History.... 81 The distribution of material, or order of teaching. Found in the CONTENTS. xv PAGE Sunday-school and the Congregation. The Sunday-school and its grades. Teaching in the Congregation 85 The Infant School. Small children have only memory and imag- ination. Teach what may be partly understood. Imagination best appealed to through Bible stories. Systematic and graphic teaching. Re-translation of Bible for children's minds 86 The Main School. Course of Instruction. The Catechism re- cited and explained. The Bible. The historical books. Teach- ing both content and contents. What may be omitted. The Prayer Book taught by xise. Sample Service. Special Ser- vices. Stereopticon exhibitions 89 The Congregation. Sunday Services. Need of systematic in- struction. Haphazard Preaching. The Preacher's studies. The Confirmation Class. What the order of instruction should cover. Mid-week Services. The young Minister's experiment station. Definite Bible-study. Sunday evening Services. Ser- mon or Lecture. Requirements of a Lecture course 94 V. THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND ITS COURSE OF STUDY. By the Reverend PASCAL HARROWER, Chairman of the Sunday-School Commission, Diocese of New York. Principle underlying the present course of lectures. Church school educational. Importance of education. Object of the Church school. The school's work for civilization 105 History of the Church school. The child the pivot of society. The Jewish estimate of childhood. Christ and the child. The early Church and its ministry to children. Mutual relations of preaching and teaching. Martin Luther. Archbishop Dupan- loup. The ministry of catechizing. Pedagogical training of the ministry 107 Preparation of a course of study. Church school more than a Bible school. Curriculum a problem for trained educators. The subject-matter, or lesson-material in The Church Catechism. Errors in teaching 113 xvi CONTENTS. PAGE The Bible.- International Sunday-School Lessons. Defects of this and similar schemes. What the Bible is. Its educational value. Bible-study in American colleges. Moral value of liter- ary Bible-study. The method of Jesus 114 Nature-study. Jesus near to the heart of Nature 121 Sacred geography 122 History. The " Free Church" Text Books. The Oxford Manuals 123 Christian ethics. The contemporary Christ. First contact of youth with the world. Responsibility of the Church 124 The PrayerBook and the Christian Year 125 Conclusion. The Church needs the aid of trained educators . . . 126 VI. THE PREPARATION OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. By WALTER L. HHRVHY, Ph.D., Examiner, New York Board of Education; Former President, Teachers Cpllege. Primary assumptions as to function of teacher and teaching. Three problems: Subject-matter; Pupil; Teacher 131 The Subject-matter. Two ways of learning and teaching : The Poet's and the Philosopher's ways 132 The Poet's way.' Power of dramatic imagination. Its use in Bible-teaching. Illustration : SS. Peter and John at Beautiful Gate of the Temple. Telling the story realistically. Illustra- tion : Story of "Cadmus" as told by Bullfinch. Addison, and Hawthorne. Application of this method to religious teaching . . 132 The Philosopher's way. Getting at the meaning. Illustrations. Danger of wrong interpretations. Precise meaning of every paragraph to be sought 140 Directions for the study of any subject-matter. Buried meta- phors. Illustrations. Personal assimilation. Pupil's know- ledge of the subject. Catechism, etc., compared with the Bible 144 The Pupil. General principle in dealing with him. The prin- ciple applied. Ideas in pairs. Illustrations. Paraphrasing. Appreciation of Roman history evidenced in modern slang. A CONTENTS. xvii PAGE Biblical title-page. Special rule from general principle. Intro- ducing a subject to the class. Additional points of insight re- quired by teacher. Illustrated by Hamlet and Guildenstern. An argument for child-study 147 The Teacher. Must distinguish between external and internal authority. Must help the pupil to find the truth for himself. Must set the Bible in its proper place. Must lay stress on Jesus Christ in the child-life 154 General negations. What not said or meant 157 vn. ^ THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. By G. STANLEY HALL, D.D., President of Clark University. The study of child-development a recent movement. The child the general type of the species. Difficult to observe laws of child-growth in Sunday-school teaching 161 Principles of child-evolution. The stages passed through in all animal formations. This law necessary to perfect humanity. Froebel's doctrine. The corner-stone of the new pedagogy. The coming of Christianity 165 The child's religious evolution follows same general law. Seen in his fetish-worship and in his love of Nature and his personifi- cation of her. Natural religions also prove it 168 Importance of Nature-study in the Sunday-schools. Power of Nature in all savage and primitive religions. Something of such religions should be taught in Sunday-schools. Proper uses of the Bible in teaching. Personal application of Christ's saving grace should come later 172 Importance of the adolescent period of youth. Altruism the es- sence of religion. The end and aim of education. The time for completing religious education. Cultivation and elevation of the sentiment of love. Danger of neglect of these principles. Reli- gion must not be awakened too early. Precocity. Adolescence and conversion. Science and the reality of sin. Degeneration. xviii CONTENTS. PAGE Terrible effects of sin upon conscience. Bible shows close connection with Psychology 178 Childhood the best period for teaching and training. Shown by study of biology. Childhood the noblest humanity. The teach- ing best for children 186 VIII. THE USE OF BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. By FRANK MORTON McMuRRY, Ph.D., Professor of "The Theory of Teaching," in Teachers College, Columbia University. The two fundamental principles of all instruction. Law must control all instruction, religious or secular. Object of instruction is to develop permanent interest , 193 Importance of biography in religious instruction. Depends on our aspect of the Bible This must be decided before attempting to teach. This decision equally important in day-school instruc- tion. Bible content, and hence Bible instruction mainly history 195 Selected summary of a biographical Bible instruction. This treatment does not exclude Biblical literature or underlying truths. Illustrations from the story of Joseph. History the groundwork of this teaching 197 Reason for the biographical treatment of the Bible in teaching. Tendency of children to personify everything. Geography, his- tory, Nature-study, and science now taught by personification method 198 Why biography interests and holds the child. It gives facts cor- rectly. Therefore close relation is needed between the various lessons. No such relation in present systems. Biography, be- ing concrete, appeals to children. Literature accepts this prin- ciple. Sunday-schools have ignored it, to their detriment. Illustration of possible abuse. Proper relation of concrete to abstract ten to one. Hence religious instruction should be main- ly by narrative. Biography forms good groundwork for other CONTENTS. xix PAGE facts. Helpful in reviews, and a good basis for examination of teachers '. 201 Age best suited for study of biography. Teachers must deal chiefly with facts 210 IX. THE USE OF GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. By CHARLES FOSTER KENT, Ph.D., Professor of Biblical Literature and History in Brown University. Biblical geography of utmost importance in any thorough study. Its use in Sunday-schools. Makes history real. Geography of Palestine moulded character and history of its people. In geography past and present meet. How to make its results of practical value. Importance in general education. Biblical geography now incompletely taught. Importance of good Sunday-school libraries ' 215 Suggested books for Sunday-school libraries. Palestine. Egypt. Babylonia. Asia Minor 224 Wall-maps 226 Palestine Exploration Fund. Maps and books 226 Divisions or departments of Biblical geography. Descriptive geography: Palestine, Egypt, and Assyria. Physical geography: Palestine, its six zones and rivers. Geological geography. Commercial geography. Racial geography. Historical geo- graphy 227 How to study Biblical geography. Make its scope comprehen- sive. Study the earth in its relation to man. Geography but a step to Bible -study 240 Does scientific study produce personal religious interest? Per- sonal faith seldom unsettled by it. New interest in the Bible and its teaching is produced. College students taking elective Bible courses. Increasing number of Bible students in universities. Necessity of true scientific methods. 242 Samaria and Judea are merged rather than possessed of a true boundary , 248 xx CONTENTS. X. THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE. By RICHARD G. MOULTON, M.A., Professor of Literature in Chicago University. PAGE What literary study of the Bible is. Fundamental principle of intimate connection between matter and form in literature. Illustrated by Solomon's Song and the two views of its inter- pretation, the application of Bible verses, and the true literary form of Psalm VIII 25 1 Three main forms of Bible-study: Devotional, Higher Criticism, and Literary. Devotional : possible errors in interpretation, with illustrations. Critical and literary, illustrated by Book of Micah 258 Our right to a literary study of the Bible. Original form lost in the "Age of Commentary ." Steps toward recovery of true form 265 How to study the Bible as literature. Necessity of suitable printing. Present imperfect printing. Study by Books, not by verses. Illustration from Deuteronomy. That Book chiefly one of orations. Analysis of Deuteronomy. The principle enun- ciated. The Bible a library rather than a single volume. Contents of the real Bible library 268 Literary study of the Bible. Three stages. The stage of Stories, illustrated by Genesis. The stage of Masterpieces, illustrated by Deborah's Song. The stage of Complete Literary Groups, illustrated by Bible History in the Old Testament. Analysis of the Pentateuch, illustrated by Bible Philosophy or Wisdom. Analysis of the Books of Wisdom. 277 General conclusion. 287 TOPICAL INDEX 289 I. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND ITS RELATION TO EDUCATION. By Professor NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, Ph.D., LL.D., of Columbia University. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE I. True Education a Unitary Process. Definition of Education. Educational Principles. Environment, Spiritual and Physical. Elements in Spiritual Environment or Civilization. Religious Training merely part of Education as a whole. Its Separation an outgrowth of Protestantism and Democracy. Pre-Reformation Period. Rise of Protestant Influence. Democracy and Sectarianism. State-supported Schools exclude Religion. Supreme Court Decisions against Religious Training in State Schools. General American View. View in France. Family and Church supplement the State Instruction. Place and Importance of Religion. Universality of Religion. Moral and Civic Instruction no Substitute for Religion. The Work of the Sunday-school. Its Organization and Methods. Its Teachers. Its Courses of Study. Religious Ignorance seen even in Universities and Colleges. Heart and Feelings best reached by developing Intellect and Will. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND ITS RE- LATION TO EDUCATION. THE problems of what is called religious education are part of the problem of education as a whole. True education, as distinguished from the innumer- able false uses of the word, is a unitary process. It knows no mathematically accurate sub- Trneeduca- divisions. It admits of no chemical analy- tionauni- sis into elements, each of which has a real tary pro( existence apart from the whole. When stretched upon a dissecting-table, education is already dead. Its constituent parts are interesting and, in a way, significant; but when cut out of the whole, they have ceased to live. They are no longer vital, or truly educational. For this reason I insist that while there is and may be a religious training, an intellec- tual training, a physical training, there is no such thing as religious education, or intellectual educa- tion, or physical education. One might as well imagine a triangular or a circular geometry. We do not at once feel the force of this statement, because of our loose, inaccurate, and inexact use of the word " education." In my view education is part of the life-process. 3 4 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. It is the adaptation of a person, a self-conscious being, to environment, and the develop- Swjation f ment f capacity in a person to modify or control that environment. The adaptation of a person to his environment is the conservative force in human history. It is the basis of continuity, solidarity. The development in a person of capacity to modify or control his environment gives rise to progress, change, development. Education, there- fore, makes for progress on the basis of the present acquisitions of the race. Its soundest ideals forbid, as a matter of course, both neglect of the historic past, and the blind worshipping of that past as an idol. The importance of the past lies in its lessons for the future. When the past has no such lessons, we forget it as quickly as possible. The survival of a tendency, a belief, or an institution is evidence that it is at least worth studying and that it must be reckoned with. These tendencies, beliefs, and insti- tutions are studied and reckoned with for the purpose of discovering their vital principles and of putting a value upon them. The working out of those vital principles is the future. In this view, education is first and chiefly a matter of principles. Then, and secondarily, it is a matter of methods. The place, character, and function Educational of religious training are to be settled, and principles, or j v to fo e settled, by reference to funda- mental educational principles. The first of these principles, and one of the most far-reaching, is discovered in framing an answer to the questions, What is the present environment of a RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. 5 human being ? What do we mean by the use of the word ' * environment, ' ' and what do we Environment, include in it, when we speak of it as that to which education tends to adapt a person ? We mean, I think, by the word " environment " two things: first, man's physical surroundings, and, second, that vast accretion of knowledge and its re- sults in habit and in conduct, which we call' civiliza- tion. Natural forces play no small part in adapting human beings to both elements of environment, but the process of education is especially potent as re- gards adaptation to the second element, civilization. Civilization man's spiritual environment, all his surroundings which are not directly physical this it is which has to be conquered, in its elements at least, before one can attain a true education. It is of the highest importance that we make sure that we see clearly all the elements of the knowledge which is at the basis of civilization, and that we give each element its proper place in our educational scheme. We may approach the analysis of our civilization, or spiritual environment, from many different points of view, and perhaps more than one classi- g iritual fication of the results of that analysis may environment be helpful. The classification which I " suggest, and which I have stated elsewhere in detail,* is a fivefold one. It separates civilization into man's science, his literature, his art, his institutional life, and his religious beliefs. Into one or another of these divisions may be put each of the results of * See Butler, " The Meaning of Education," pp. 17-31. 6 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. human aspiration and of human achievement. Edu- cation must include knowledge of each of the five elements named, as well as insight into them all and sympathy with them all. To omit any one of them is to cripple education and to make its results at best but partial. A man may be highly instructed and trained in science alone, or in literature, or in art, or in human institutions man's ethical and political relationships or in religion, but such a man is not highly educated. He is not educated, strictly speak- ing, at all, for one or more of the aspects of civiliza- tion are shut out from his view, or are apprehended imperfectly only, and without true insight. If this analysis is correct, and I think it is, then religious training is a necessary factor in education Eeli ions an< ^ must ^ e gi ven the time, the attention, training one and the serious, continued treatment which divisLJof ^ deserves. That religious training is not education, a t the present time given a place by the side of the study of science, literature, art, or of human institutions, is well recognised. How has this come about ? How are the integrity and the completeness of education to be restored ? The separation of religious training from education as a whole is the outgrowth of Protestantism and of its separa- Democracy. A people united in professing tion an out- * . r . r . growth of a religion which is ethnic or racial, or a nation giving adhesion to a single creed or Democracy, to one ecclesiastical organization, always unite religious training with the other elements of education and meet no embarrassment or difficulty in so doing. During the undisputed dominance of RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. 7 the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, education not only included religious training- as a matter of course, but it was almost wholly confined to religious training. Theology was the main interest of the Middle Ages, and the theological interest . ,. . . . . Protestantism. caused religious training to permeate and subordinate whatever instruction was given in other subjects. Music was taught, that the church services might be well rendered. Arithmetic and astronomy were most useful in fixing the Church Festivals and the calendar. With the advent of the Protestant Reformation all this was changed. Religion was still strenuously insisted upon as a subject of study, but the other subjects of instruction became increas- ingly independent of it and were gradually accorded a larger share of time and attention for themselves alone. Protestantism, however, would not by itself have brought about the secularization of the school, as it exists to-day in France and in the United States. Democracy and the conviction that the support and control of education by the state is a duty in order that the state and its citizens may be safeguarded, have necessarily forced the secularization of the school. Under the influence of the Protestant Reformation and that of the modern scientific spirit, men broke away from adherence to a single creed or to a single ecclesiastical organiza- tion, and formed diverse sects, groups, parties, or churches, differing in many details from each other the differences, I regret to add, being far more weightily emphasized than the more numerous and 8 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. more important points of agreement. When the state-supported school came into existence, rfUSwST^ this state of reli g ious diversity found ex- pression in dissatisfaction with the teach- ing, under state auspices, of any one form of religious belief. The first step toward the removal of this dissatisfaction was to reduce religious teaching to the lowest possible terms; and these were found in the reading of the Bible, the recitation of the Lord's Prayer, and the singing of a devotional hymn at the opening of the daily school exercise. But even this gave rise to complaint. Discussions arose as to whether a single version of the Bible must be used in these readings, or whether any version, chosen by the reader, might be read. A still more extreme view insisted that the Bible itself was a sectarian book, and that the non-Christian portion of the com- munity, no matter how small numerically, were sub- jected to a violation of their liberties and their rights, when any portion of the public funds was used to present Christian doctrine to school children, even in this merely incidental way. The view that the state-supported schools must refrain absolutely from exerting any religious influence, however small, is one which has found wide favour among the American people. It has led to more or less sweeping provi- sions in State constitutions and in statutes against sectarian instruction of any kind at public expense. A judicial decision on this subject of great interest and of far-reaching importance is that rendered in 1890 by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, in the case of the State ex rel. Weiss and others vs. the RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. 9 District Board, of School District No. 6, of the city of Edgerton.* In this case the essential ques- Wisconsin i, tion at bar was whether or not the reading ^^. of the Bible, in King James' version, in cision, the public schools was sectarian instruction, and as such fell within the scope of the constitutional and statutory prohibitions of such instruction. In an elaborate and careful opinion the court held that reading from the Bible in the schools, although un- accompanied by any comment on the part of the teacher, is ' ' instruction ' ' ; that since the Bible con- tains numerous doctrinal passages, upon some of which the peculiar creed of almost every religious sect is based, and since such passages may reason- ably be understood to inculcate the doctrines predi- cated upon them, the reading of the Bible is also "sectarian instruction"; that, therefore, the use of the Bible as a text-book in the public schools and the stated reading thereof in such schools, without restriction, "has a tendency to inculcate sectarian ideas, ' ' and falls within the prohibition of the consti- tution and the statutes. In this decision there are some very interesting observations on the general question of religious training and the place of the Bible in education. The court says, for example : * ' The priceless truths of the Bible are best taught to our youth in the church, the Sabbath and parochial schools, the social religious meetings, and, above all, in the home circle. There those truths may be explained and enforced, * Wisconsin Supreme Court Reports, 76: 177-221. io RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. the spiritual welfare of the child guarded and pro- tected, and his spiritual nature directed and culti- vated, in accordance with the dictates of the parental conscience." Judge Orton, in a supplementary opinion, adds: "[The schools] are called by those who wish to have not only religion, but their own religion, taught therein ' Godless schools. ' They are Godless, and the educational department of the government is Godless, in the same sense that the executive, legislative, and administrative depart- ments are Godless, So long as our Constitution remains as it is, no one's religion can be taught in our common schools." The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has given forci- ble, definite expression to the view held by the large General majority of American citizens, and has American clothed that view with the authority of law. It is in this sense and for substantially the reasons adduced in the decision which I have quoted, that the American public school is secular and that it can give and does give attention to four of the five elements of civilization which I have named science, literature, art, and institutional life but none to the fifth element religion. In France, the great democratic nation of Europe, the case is quite similar. The famous law of March View in i 2 ^> 1 882, excluded religious instruction France. from the public schools, and put moral and civic training in its stead. M. Ribiere, in defending this provision before the senate, used almost the exact language later employed by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. He held that the elementary RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. n school, maintained by the state, open to all, could not be used to teach the doctrines of any sect; that- it must be neither religious nor anti-religious, but wholly secular, neutral. M. Paul Bert, who pre- sented the measure to the chamber of deputies, pointed out that the ' ' religious neutrality ' ' of the school was the logical outcome of the principle of the freedom of the individual conscience. " In our eyes," M. Bert continued, "this argument has so great force that, without the prohibition of religious instruction in the schools, compulsory education would appear to us to be not an advantage, but a danger. ' ' In order that opportunity should be given to parents to provide religious instruction for their children this is explicitly stated in the law the schools are closed one day each week, other than Sunday. In France, Thursday, not Saturday as with us, is usually taken as the school holiday. This, then, is the condition of affairs in the United States and in France as regards religious training in education. The influence first of Protestantism and then of Democracy has completely secular- State edu- ized the school. The school, therefore, J^Jmplete, gives an incomplete education. The religious aspect of civilization and the place and influence of religion in the life of the individual are excluded from its view. This is the first important fact to be reckoned with. The second fact is that the whole work of educa- tion does not fall upon the school. It cannot do so and ought not to do so. The family, the Church, the library, the newspaper, society itself, are all educa- 12 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. tional institutions as truly as is the school. The school is the most highly organized of them alL Its aims and meth ods are the most de- source of finite. But it is quite untrue to suppose that nothing enters into education save through the medium of the school-programme. Therefore, it does not follow that because the school has become secular, all religious influence and training have necessarily gone out of education. If the school is not distinctly religious, it is even more distinctly not anti-religious. The real question, then, is: What are the other educational factors, especially the family and the Church, doing to see to it that school instruc- tion is rounded out into education through their co-operation ? It is the duty of the family and the an< ^ the Church to take up their share of Church. t^ educational burden, particularly the specifically religious training, with the same care, the same preparation, and the same zeal which the school gives to the instruction which falls to its lot. Before coming to the implications of this position, there are one or two suggestions which must receive p, , passing notice. It is said by a very few importance it is true that there is no such thing as region, re iigi on other than mere superstition, and that religion is not universal in any event, and there- fore that the fifth element of our civilization is but an empty name. It is urged, with Petronius, that fear first made the gods, and with Feuerbach that religion is man's most terrible ailment. These contentions seem to me to arise from simple ignorance, alike of history and of human nature. There is a response RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. 13 from the human heart and from the recorded thoughts and deeds of civilized men, based neither on credulity nor on fear, to the description of Hegel, that "religion is, for our consciousness, that region in which all the enigmas of the world are Definitions solved, all the contradictions of deeper- ofreiigion, reaching thought have their meaning unveiled, and where the voice of the heart's pain is silenced the region of eternal truth, of eternal rest, of eternal peace." If religion may be defined, in Dr. Mar- tineau's words, .as "the belief and worship of Supreme Mind and Will, directing the universe and holding moral relations with human life," then civilization is unintelligible without it. Much of the world's literature and art, and the loftiest achieve- ments of men, are, with the religious element with- drawn, and without the motive of religion to explain them, as barren as the desert of Sahara. This proposition hardly needs argument. ' * The religiosity of man is a part of his psychical being. In the nature and laws of the human mind, in its intellect, sympathies, emotions, and passions, lie the well-springs of all religions, modern or ancient, Christian or heathen. To these we must refer, by these we must explain, whatever errors, falsehood, bigotry, or cruelty have stained man's creeds or cults; to them we must credit whatever truth, beauty, piety, and love have glorified and hallowed his long search for the perfect and the eternal. . . . ' ' The fact is that there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude, known in history or visited by 14 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. travellers, which has been shown to be destitute of religion under some form." But it is also urged that a satisfactory substitute for religious training is to be found in moral and civic Moral and instruction. This view is widely held in civic instrnc- France and has led to some rather absurd tion no sub- ,-, statute for consequences. So scholarly a writer as religion, ]y[ r Thomas Davidson has just now urged this view upon us Americans, f He is able to do so, however, only by completely identifying religion and philosophy and (as I think) a bad philosophy at that in his definition of religion. But, in fact, the field of moral and civic instruction is quite distinct from man's religious life; it belongs to the institu- tional aspect of civilization. The moral aspect of life has long since come to be closely related to the Eeli ion is religious aspect, but nevertheless the two not ethics. are quite different. A religion, indeed, may be quite immoral in its influences and tendencies. It may lead to cruelty and sensuality, and yet be a religion. There have been not a few such. To con- fuse religion with ethics is to obscure both. Religion must be apprehended as something distinct and peculiar, if it is to be apprehended at all. Matthew Arnold was absolutely wrong when he wrote : ' ' Re- ligion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feel- ing ; the passage from morality to religion is made when to morality is applied emotion." It is still * Brinton, " Religions of Primitive Peoples," p. 30. f " American Democracy as a Religion," International Journal of Ethics, October, 1899. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. 15 easier to make clear and enforce the distinction between morality and religion, if we substitute for the general term religion the highest type of all religions, Christianity. It is Christianity, of course, which we have in mind when speaking of religion. My argument thus far has aimed to make it clear that religious training is an integral part of education, that in this country the State school does The proper not and cannot include religious training in Jfi^JJ^ for its programme, that it must therefore be education provided by other agencies, and on as high ftyaJuhT a plane of efficiency as is reached by in- Church, struction in other subjects, and that moral and civic training is no possible substitute for religious teach- ing. The agencies at hand for religious teaching are the family and the Church, and in particular the special school, the Sunday-school, maintained by the Church for the purposes of religious training. The Sunday-school is in this way brought into a position of great responsibility and importance, for it is, in fact, a necessary part of the whole educational machinery of our time. It must, therefore, be made fully conscious of the principles on which its work rests and of the methods best suited to the attainment of its ends. The Sunday-school must, first of all, understand fully the organization, aims, and methods of the public schools ; for it is their ally. It must The Sunday- take into consideration the progress of the sch o1 - instruction there given in secular subjects, and must correlate its own religious instruction with this. It must study the facts of child-life and development, 16 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. and it must base its methods upon the actual needs, and capacities of childhood. It must organ-- (a) Organiza- tion and ize its work economically and scientifically, method, anc j t mus demand of its teachers special and continuous preparation for their work. It must realize that it is, first and above all, an educational institution and not a proselytizing one, and that the inherent force of the truth which it teaches is far greater than any attempted bending of that truth to special ends. It must cease to be merely a part 01 the missionary work of the parish, and become a real factor in the educational work of the community. It must give more time to its work, and the traditional division of time on Sunday will have to be gradually readjusted in order to make a serious Sunday-school session possible. A Saturday session may also be planned for. It must recognise that ordinarily no single parish or congregation can make proper provision for the religious training of all the young people under its care. The very largest parishes and congregations may be able to maintain a fully equipped Sunday-school for children from five to eighteen, but the smaller parishes and congrega- tions in towns and cities must learn to combine for their common good. Each parish or congregation may readily, and ought always, to maintain a Sunday- school of elementary grade, but several adjoining parishes or congregations must combine in order to organize and support a proper course of religious instruction for children of secondary school age and beyond, say from thirteen to eighteen years. In a whole city, unless it be New York or Chicago or RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. 17 Philadelphia, one, or at most two, training classes for Sunday-school teachers should be sufficient. Furthermore, Sunday-school teachers, like all other teachers, should be paid. They should be selected because of competence and special training; they should be led to look upon their work not as philanthropy, not even as missionary work, but as something which is larger than either because it includes both, namely, education. The several Christian bodies, so long as they remain distinct, will naturally maintain their own separate Sunday-school systems ; but within any given branch of the Christian Church, be it Protestant Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, or other, all of the principles just stated can be applied. Sunday-schools so organized could be given the same systematic professional supervision that is provided for the secular schools. Each body of Christians in a given community could have its own Sunday-school board and its own Sunday-school superintendent and staff of assistants. Between some Christian bodies actual co-operation in Sunday- school instruction ought to be possible. For the proper organization and conduct of this religious instruction, there must be a parish or congregational appropriation, or, better far, an endowment fund, to bear the legitimate cost of religious teaching and its systematic professional supervision. The Sunday-school course of study must be looked after. It is at present I say it with all respect too exclusively pious. Religion is much more important in civilization and in life than of study, the Sunday-school now teaches* It is more real. 1 8 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. It touches other interests at more points. The course of study of the future must reveal these facts and illustrate them. It must be carefully graded and adjusted to the capacity of the child. It must reach out beyond the Bible and the Catechism. It must make use of biography, of history, of geography, of literature, and of art, to give both breadth and depth and vitality to the truths it teaches and enforces. It must comprehend and reveal the fact that the spiritual life is not apart from the natural life and in antagonism to it, but that the spirit interpene- trates all life and that all life is of the spirit. The problem, then, is not religion and education, but religion in education. This, it may be said, is a radical programme, a Aradical counsel of perfection. Perhaps so. If so, programme, it will provide something to work toward. It will at least bring religious teaching under the in- fluence of those principles and methods which have of late years so vitalized all secular teaching. It will give to it modern instruments, text-books, and illus- trative material. Before dismissing these suggestions as impracti- cable, because in part unfamiliar, it is well to face the The aiterna- a ^ternative. t It is that religious knowledge, tive, and with religious knowledge a good deal else which is worth saving, will go out of the life of the next generation. , What appears important enough to the elder generation to be systematically organized, conscientiously studied, and paid for in a terrestrial circulating medium, will deeply impress itself upon the younger. , What is put off with a RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATION. 19 hurried and unsystematic hour on Sunday will not long seem very much worth while. Already the effects of the present policy are being seen. To the average college student the first book of Milton's Paradise Lost is an enigma. Regions The epithets, the allusions, even many of *&*!* the proper names, are unfamiliar. This is colleges. due to ignorance of the Bible. It is necessary nowadays to know something about Christianity as well as to be a Christian. The study of history and of geography, in connection with the spread and development of Chistianity, is fascinating. The study of biography, in connection with the people of Israel and Old Testament history generally, may be made to put plenty of life into much that is now dead facts to be memorized. For older pupils, the study of church history, and of the part played by religious beliefs and religious differences in the history of European dynasties, politics, and literature will make it plain how moving a force religion is and has been in the development of civilization. Such pupils, too, are able to appreciate the Bible as literature, if it be put before them from that point of view. It is too often treated as a treasury of texts only, and not as living- literature which stands, as literature, by the side of the world's greatest achievements in poetry and in prose. The heart is the ultimate aim of all religious appeals. But the heart is most easily reached by informing the intellect and by fashioning Heartbeat the will. Knowledge and conduct react on ^J^ t by the feelings, and the feelings, the heart (so and will, to speak), are educated and refined through them. 20 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION AND This fact will never be lost sight of by any competent religious teacher, and his purpose will never be to amass in his pupils knowledge about religion alone, but to use such knowledge to direct, elevate, and re- fine the religious feelings and to guide and form con- duct into character. It is along such lines as these that the develop- ment of the Sunday-school, from a phase of parish mission work into an educational institution of co-ordinate rank with the secularized school must take place. There are numerous local problems to be solved, no doubt, and not a few practical diffi- culties to be overcome, but, if the ideal be once firmly grasped and the purpose to reach it be formed, the result cannot be doubtful. II. THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. By the Rt. Rev. WILLIAM CROSWELL DOANE, D.D., LL.D., Bishop of Albany. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE II. The Three Functions of the Christian Church. The Prophetic Function, as Christ fulfilled it. The Church carries on His Work. Definition of Teaching. Teaching the Apostolic Mandate. The Church the Great Religious Teacher. The Extent of Truly Christian Teaching. Canon Scott Holland's View. Educational Work of the Church To-day. Religion in the Universities. Wrong View and its Answer. The modern Theologian's Weakness due to Erroneous Theories of the Faith. The Great Verities of the Christian Faith are above Investigation. Science and Religion not opposed to each other. The State-schools and Religious Education. Inadequacy of Parochial Schools and Colleges. Every Large University should have a Church Hall. How the Church Hall would educate. The Wide Responsibility of the Church. The Modern Machinery now existing : () the Sunday-school; (b) the Pulpit. The Sunday-school and the Catechism. The Sunday-school and the Teachers, their Training, etc. The Place of the Pulpit. Need for Preaching of Faith and Life, more than for Eloquence. It is the same Old Word given in modern phrases. THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. IT is a plain and simple fact, a trite saying, a truism, almost, that in the three offices of our Lord's anointed Messialiship lie involved the three _, L 4 Inree lunc- great functions of the Christian Church, tionsofthe Prophet He was, and priest and king. ChurcL And so there are in the Church, or rather so He continues in the Church, the things which St. Luke says He only " began to do and to teach" ; because in the Church's faith., in the Church's sacraments, and in the Church's polity or order, He teaches and offers and rules. We are concerned with the prophetic office, as He filled it, and as He entrusted it to the Church to carry on. Run along the lines of the story as we find it "in Holy Scripture and ancient authors." The Divine Master spent His earthly ministry, until the Prophetic time of the fulfilling of its final purpose, in ^jj^ what the Apostles describe as their chief filled it, function, ''prayer, and the ministry of the Word." Sitting upon the mountain of the Beatitudes, He began His public teaching with the unfolding of that marvellous system of ethics, the clearest and most 23 24 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. comprehensive compendium of morality, of the rule of life, of the relation between man and God, and between man and man, that was ever spoken to mortal ear: depicting character, defining motive, dealing with the great principles of obedience, of wor- ship, of prayer, of self-denial, of almsgiving, of mar- riage, of modes of speech; and detailing the great characteristic virtues of meekness, mercifulness, and righteousness, and purity, and poverty of spirit, and peacemaking: so that the world sits at His feet to- day, as did the people who heard the words fall from His lips, " astonished at His doctrine." And from that day on, everywhere, in the synagogue, in the upper room, in the house, and in the streets; in the fields, on the lake-shore, and in the ship; by para- bles, by doctrinal discourses, above and beyond all, by His life and example, He is the Prophet, the Teacher, the Educator of the world. And this was the mission that He gave to His followers. They were to "disciple all nations by The Church t )a P^ sm > ' ' an< ^ then * ' to teach them to carries on observe all things, whatsoever He com- Hiswork, manded them." This was the work for which He specially endowed them with the Holy Spirit, ' * to bring all things to their remembrance, whatever He had taught them, " "and to guide them into all truth." So that we are ready to expect, what we actually find, the absorption of the Apostles in the occupation of teaching. I am not particularly in love with the Revisers' tendency always to translate didaxrf by the word ' teaching, ' because it seems a little to dilute the fact that this did ax?} was a distinct THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 25 and definite form of words, the " faith once for all delivered to the saints." But I am quite sure that we come short of the meaning of the word, and the method and the purpose of the early Church, if we confine the teaching office only to its religious side; the faith, the doctrine certainly, but even more than this, the whole teaching and training of the Christian life. As between the rigorists, who know nothing in religion but doctrine, and the sensationalists, who substitute emotional excitement for the impression upon the intelligence of fixed and positive truth, there is not much to choose. Teaching has to do with the rule of faith and with the rule of life. It appeals not only to the feelings, to the conscience, to the will ; but to the intelligence of men. And so we find when the Angel of the Lord de- livered the Apostles out of the common prison, where they had been cast because they Teaching the refused to obey the demand ' ' not to speak Apostolic at all or teach in the name of the Lord m Jesus," the message to them was, (and they obeyed it,) "Go, stand and speak in the Temple to the people all the words of this life. " "And daily, in the Temple and in every house, they ceased not to speak and teach Jesus Christ. ' ' Nor is it otherwise with the great Apostle ' born out of due time," whose glory was, when he was in prison that ' ' the Word of God was not st, Paul, bound"; and the closing record of whose story in the Book of the Acts is that ' < Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house and received all 26 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. who came in unto him, preaching the Kingdom of God, and teaching the things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ. " We are somewhat familiar with that old word, "the schoolmen," a technical mediaeval title for Christian philosophers. And we are still more familiar with a certain modern softness of speech which we have invented, to do away with what seems a coarse and controversial word, namely, "parties in the Church," when we call them "schools of thought." But we do not realize, in either the The Church me "diaeval or the modern use of the word, the great the facts to which it bears witness, namely, that the Church is the great teacher ; that its educational work is in many ways its first and largest work ; and that, very early in its story, Chris- tian schools were founded and carried on, in which the great teachers were trained, and were training disciples, in the particular form of truth which pre- sented itself to them. They were tremendous reali- ties and tremendous influences. Antioch and Alex- andria and Rome stand for the great educational forces of the post- Apostolic age, as they represented what we may perhaps call Oriental, Greek, and Latin philosophy and theology. Nor were they given over only to the discussion of technical theological ques- tions. Having from the very first to avoid that curious combination of natural religion and Christian philosophy called gnosticism, they reached out into all departments of thought and study and investiga- tion. That oldest contest between the two thoughts of THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 27 the Transcendence and the Immanence of God has its counterpart in what we may call the transcendence and the immanence of Christian teaching. One is the theory that the Church is only set to teach the articles of the Christian faith, with its great reservoirs of resource in the. Bible, tradition, and the Creeds ; and the other, the far truer theory, true Christian that, because of the oneness of truth, no teacMn g- matter what its source or what its special subjects, Christianity has to do with every department of education. The schools, as they were called, were the successors of the Porch and the Grove. Plato and Aristotle were succeeded, or one perhaps might say continued, by Clement of Alexandria and Origen. And every weapon of intellectual polemics was gathered into the Christian armoury of defence. The sword of Goliath, as he represents unconsecrated intellect, was taken into the hands of the anointed of God, with which to complete the victory over this giant error. Canon Scott Holland says with great power in his ' * Logic and Life " : ' * We have lost much of that rich splendour, that large-hearted fulness of power, which characterizes the great Greek la ^, g w rdgi masters of theology. We have suffered our faith for so long to accept the pinched and narrow limits of a most unapostolic divinity, that we can hardly persuade people to recall how wide was the sweep of Christian thought in the first centuries, how largely it dealt with these deep problems of spiritual existence and development, which now once more impress upon us the seriousness of the issues amid 28 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. which our souls are travelling. We have let people forget all that our creed has to say about the unity of all creation, or about the evolution of history, or about the universality of the divine action through the Word. We have lost the power of wielding the mighty language with which Athanasius expands the significance of creation and regeneration, of incarna- tion and sacrifice, and redemption and salvation and glory. ' ' Nor is this only an early phase of the Church's work. It has been its characteristic feature all along. Those great universities and schools of the Middle Ages, especially from the thirteenth century on, with their great names of Abelard and Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus and St. Thomas Aquinas, ' ' the angel of the schools," as he was called, w r ere the continuance of this method ; and the old foundations of learning in England and on the Continent bear witness to the fact, not only that in those times learning and knowledge were almost confined to ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical establishments; but that the Church recognised its duty to educate Christianity and to Christianize education. That curious creation, Mallock, who poses and poises on a seesaw of sophisms, between apparent agnosticism and concealed Roman Catholicism, thinks that the security of the Bible depends now upon that Church which locked it away, for ages, from the people in an unknown tongue ; and fills its Lectionary, not with Scriptures, but with the legends of her innumer- able and often questionable Saints. Tempting as this line of thought is, I am con- THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 29 strained to turn from it to more immediate and per- sonal considerations of the question which is assigned to me, namely, "the Educational Work of Educational the Christian Church to-day. " And I wish work of the to speak of it along two lines: first, the need that Christianity shall lay hold upon the people with strong and vigorous hand: and secondly, that the preaching of the Church to-day needs to be deeper and broader and stronger, in its definite and persistent presentation of doctrine. I confess myself old-fashioned enough to have been shocked and startled by a recent editorial in a New York newspaper headed ' * Religion in i n the Uni- the University. ' ' Beginning with the state- versities - ment that, instead of compulsory attendance at re- ligious services, the students' attendance is sought by making the service attractive in the chapels them- selves, in their musical programme, and in the elo- quence and the distinctively modern sympathies and breadth of view of the preacher, the article goes on : ' ' Yet his pulpit utterances are often in sharp contrast to the teachings of other departments of the university. He talks earnestly of God and of the influence of God in the world; but his conception of God, if judged by his way of expressing it, is apt to be totally at vari- ance with that expounded by his neighbour, the pro- fessor of philosophy. He talks of love, but his hearers have already learned that there can be no affection for the unknowable. He insists that men ought always to pray ; but his words of petition and request sound strange to the student of science, who cannot take a step in his own department save on 30 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. the assumption of the invariableness of natural law. He holds up the Bible as profitable for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness, and as in truth the very word of God; but those who listen are being elsewhere taught to approach the Bible, as they approach any other document, to dis- cover its composite authorship, to test rigidly its statements of alleged facts, and to separate its myths and legends from its historic records. No wonder that many an earnest student comes to feel that somehow things do not hang together, and that the emotional interest of the religious service is a bit divorced from its intellectual basis. The grounds of this discrepancy are mainly to be found, we think, in the persistent adherence to ancient formu- las and modes of expression, which still encumber so much of even the most advanced theological thinking. ' ' I believe this is an unfair statement of university teaching in most of the great universities of America. Somewhat careful inquiry has only discovered that individual professors, in some few instances, turn their influence, in the classroom and in their personal in- tercourse with the students, towards rationalism and unbelief; but I cannot find, and I cannot believe, that in any university in this country, this is either the purpose or the tendency of the teaching, as a whole. But granting its possible truth, the remedy proposed by the writer is worse than the disease. As a reduction to an irrational and illogical impossibility I know nothing more extraordinary. Any parent who, with the knowledge of the fact (if it be a fact), THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 3 1 sends a boy into the presence of such a poisonous personality must be held accountable for the ship- wreck of his faith. " The modern ' orthodox ' theologian, " the writer continued, ''is still too often under the tyranny of words and names. He still talks of the atonement, of redemption, of the Holy Spirit, of the Themodeni resurrection, and of the future life, appar- theologian's ently unmindful of the fact that many of ^ the terms themselves belong to a view of things long since rendered untenable Himself much in sympathy with modern thought, and not igno- rant of the havoc which science and philosophy have played with old formulas, he still hugs the past, and fancies that the outgrown clothes of a former time may still be made to fit the bodies of critical and thoughtful men. The intention is good, but the result disastrous. There can be no sure and fruitful appeal when one's words must constantly be inter- preted, and their particular shade of meaning care- fully or acutely explained. It is the weakness of modern theology that, with the best intentions and the utmost honesty of purpose among those devoted to it, it is still bound to an outgrown terminology, and shows too little willingness to cut loose from its moorings and push boldly out into the main stream of human knowledge and thought. It is this un- willingness to venture something, this impotency of expression when talking of the religious life, that gives to theology so little influence, as yet, in the university, and makes some of the most eloquent of modern preachers seem, to a company of college 32 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. students, like birds who, despite much beating of the air, somehow fail to fly. ' ' All this is a sheer insult to the intelligence of thinkers, to the honesty of teachers, to the immuta- bility of truth. It is a petitio principii^ a begging of the whole question, to which an answer of absolute denial is the only one that can be presented. The atonement, redemption, the resurrection, Erroneous r . theories of the tuture lite, are not words or names, the faith, Certain theories about them, representing, for instance, the anger of the Father appeased by the sacrifice of the Son ; or teaching a limitation of the redemption to certain elect persons, or an irre- sistible redemption compelling universal salvation, no matter what the opposing will of the individual may be ; or turning the Christian doctrine of the resurrection into a statement, whose object-lesson is a mummy and whose process is embalming, these are, like all human accretions and additions, in process of stripping off and falling away ; not because of science and philosophy, but because of the gradual return from human theories to divine truths. This is one of those curious instances of a complete con- fusion of thought, under an apparent clearness of expression. The great verities of the Christian faith, dreamed of and foretold from the first ages of man's conscious thought, and brought to light by the The great teaching of Jesus Christ, are before and Christian beyond and above and apart from all ques- faith are tions of philosophy or science or intel- above all in- vestigation, lectual investigation. They are facts that centre in, and gather about, and grow out of, the THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 33 one great fact, and the one great personality of human history, namely, the Incarnate Son of God. They are not in opposition to, or in contradiction of, or in antagonism with, any achievement of science, any attainment of reason, any conclusion of philoso- phy. They are in the upper air, the higher realm of belief. The words that express them, all imper- fectly, are nevertheless so radiant with the life that they contain, holding it as a crystal holds the light, that if you break them even into their component letters, each one will still hold and still show forth the illumination and the vitality. They are to-day, as they have been through all the centuries, the con- solation and the inspiration of trie human race. And while the progressive inquiries of philosophy and the advancing discoveries of science do need and demand re-statement, yes, even the creation of a vocabulary, the coining of a new language, because the words must express hitherto unknown facts; the cardinal points of theology, the essential verities of religion, the fundamental articles of the Christian faith, stand and will stand, as they have since Nicea, Chalcedon, and Constantinople framed the old symbols, un- changeable as the everlasting hills. What is to be done, then, about this greatly ex- aggerated conflict between the classroom and the chapel, between the pulpit and the pro- Conflictof fessor ? First of all, I think, the " ne sutor classroom supra crepidam," the cobbler sticking to his last. By which I mean to say that most of the trouble is made by the crude conclusions of secular teachers, and by the cruder contradictions of religious 34 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. teachers. There are a good many very different spirits of investigation among men, along all lines of study. Of course the one object ought to be to dis- cover truth ; to accept it at all costs and in all con- fidence when it is found, whatever may be the seeming difficulties. The cost may be the sacrifice of some opinion, cherished because associated with the traditions and impressions of all our lives; but the confidence ought to be that no real discrepancy can exist between or among any truths that God yields up to our knowledge, out of any of His innumerable treasure-houses. The real trouble is (and it is folly to conceal it) that religious teachers are too often contending for certain views and notions and opinions of or about the truth, instead of for the truth itself. And the other greater trouble is (and it is folly to conceal that) that many of the so-called scientists hail with such ghoulish glee any discovery which apparently shows the errancy of Holy Scrip- ture, that they give the impression, at any rate, that their chief object in life is to diminish the authority of the Bible. This of course is aside from the prac- tical suggestion of this discussion. The attitude of the Church toward education is a problem difficult to solve. Beginning with our The State public-school system of education and going schools, up to the university, we must face the fact that the State is obliged to educate all children, for her own protection against the dangerous element of illiteracy: and that the State must, so far as her schools are supported by taxation, absolutely refuse to allow any distinctive religious teaching in them. THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OP THE CHURCH. 35 I am not forgetting the fact of the equally dangerous element of what one might call criminal literacy; that is to say, of the possibility, where no attempt is made to affect the conscience or the character, in schools, of simply making criminals more capable by knowledge, than they would be without it. If learning the three R's, as they are called, means merely to induce boys to become railroad-wreckers by reading the American equivalents for the Penny Dreadful; to make accomplished instead of clumsy forgers ; or to make men more competent than they would be if they were ignorant of arithmetic, to make false entries and so rob their employers; it goes without the saying that the State has hurt itself by its very effort at education. But at the same time it is idle to argue the question, it seems to me, as though it were an open one, as against the common-school system, which, even if it is without religion, ought not to be called " Godless " ; or to attempt by any device, out of school hours, to inject religious teaching into it. The moralities, the recognition of God, of personal responsibility, of the conscience, of law, of duty, all these there may be, but the teaching of dogmatic religion is an impossi- bility in the unhappy divisions of our Christian bodies; and the theory of teaching an undogmatic religion is as self-contradictory as the imagining of an invertebrate mammal, of a man without a back- bone. And while in abstract sentiment, I should be thankful if every child of ours were trained in a parochial school, and then went on through a Church school and a Church college, I recognise the 36 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. practical impossibility and the possible disadvantage. Inadequacy The impossibility, because no one com- SoTstnd 1 munion > much less a11 the religious bodies, colleges, could by any possibility compete with the State in the attempt to make a large number of denominational schools, as thorough and complete as the tax-supported schools are. And a possible dis- advantage exists, because in order to make a homo- geneous community it is better that all sorts and conditions of children should be thrown together in school and college life. The divisions of Christendom are bad enough in the inevitable separations of public worship. To perpetuate them in general education, and to inject them into our institutions of charity, would be disastrous to the fellowship of men in the duties of their common citizenship. Where they may be had, by all means let us have our Church schools and our Church colleges, where the Church can demonstrate its capacity for training the three-fold nature of a child ; with the best athletic advantages, with the highest intellectual cultivation, with the most positive spiritual training and development of the soul. And let us thank God for St. Paul's, and Groton, and St. Marks; for St. Mary's, and St. Agnes, and St. Margaret's; for Trinity, Hobart, and St. Stephen's; Sewanee and the rest; and may they be multiplied and prospered ! What I should be most glad of would be the carrying out of what has been in the conception of one at least, I know, of our great university presi- dents, namely, the founding of a Church hall, with its dormitories, its commons, its chapel, as one of the THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 37 grouped colleges in every great university of the land. First, that the small college might have Every large the benefit of the advantages of the big university should have university; and secondly, and still more, a Church that the Church's system of teaching might hall< show its power, side by side with any other system in the world. Because it is to be insisted on that the Church has a system of education in the largest sense of the word. She will teach astronomy upon the principle that ' ' the heavens declare How the the glory of God, and the firmament church sheweth His handywork." She will teach ddteaoh. the languages, with a view to bringing out of the old classics those dim dreams which outlined the completed truth of Revelation, when the glorious Greek language had found its final purpose in lend- ing its splendid seed-power of suggested meaning to the o-TTep/JoXoyos, the babbler, the seed-scatterer, the impersonation and representative of the one Sower who went out to sow. Or she will gather out of them, as St. Paul did from Aratus, the forgot- ten truth of God's all-fatherhood; and the distortion, in the devious twist of traditions, of the truths found in their due place and relation, only in the primeval revelation of God to man. The Heracles of Balau- stion's Adventure will be a prophecy of the only victor over death: " To herald all that human and divine, I' the weary happy son of him, half god, Half man, which made the god-part, god the more." The Sibylline oracles in her translation will be broken echoes of the Hebrew prophets. She will 38 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OP THE CHURCH. point out in her ethical system the patient progress of the divine presentation of morality, which recog- nised the necessity of adaptation and slow growth and gradual uplifting, until it rose from the enactments and prohibitions of Mount Sinai, to the sublime height of motive and character in the Sermon on the Mount. She will teach history, in order that it may unfold the equally patient providence of God in His dealing with the children of men, revealing little by little the divine purposes in the development of the human race. Her geographical maps will contain, not the camps of armies only, or the ports of com- merce, or the centres of accumulated wealth, but the pathways of the Pilgrims, the tracks of the Crusaders, the lighthouses of learning in ages of surrounding darkness, and the way of the ships through the waves, which carried round the world preachers of the everlasting Gospel. And her literature will not content itself in the study of what the French people call "beautiful letters," with the litertz humaniores, but will lead men on and up to the literce diviniores, the unequalled and unrivalled dignity and glory of the English Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. And what else, what more, in the existing condi- tion of things is the practical possibility of educational work, which this Church can do and should do in the Wide re world ? I have tried to emphasize my own sponsibiiity conviction that the Church's commission of the Church, and the Church > s duty inc i ude) by the Divine Intention, education in the largest and com- pletest sense of the word ; that, as in the past, so now and for all time, she ought to influence and impress THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OP THE CHURCH. 39 the literature and the learning of the world, colouring it, consecrating it, controlling it for the service of God. I feel free therefore to deal with two matters as to the distinct and definite trust which is her highest honour and her greatest responsibility, namely, the positive and perpetual assertion of * ' the truth as it is in Jesus," of "the faith once for all delivered to the saints. " And her natural and usual machinery to this end is of course in catechetical teaching and in preaching. For the first, there is the existing machinery of the Sunday-school, which is on the one hand, I think, unduly exalted, arid on the other unwisely The Sunday- decried. It is of course a modern make- sch o11 shift devised to deal with great masses of children otherwise uncared for and unprovided with any religious training in homes or in churches. It can never be the substitute for either parental or pastoral responsibility. But as a recognised and wide-spread machinery, it cannot be ignored and it ought to be improved. I am sorry to say that I think it is suffer- ing to-day from the same evil influences which so largely infect and infest the public ministry of the word ; namely, the sensational recourse to all manner of strange devices to attract and entertain and amuse. The childhood of a Christian child in the Church is divided into two parts, separated from each other by the act of confirmation. And the Church has pro- vided for the first of these periods a Manual of Training, incomparable in clearness, comprehensive- ness, logical sequence, and theological sufficiency, in the Catechism. We have a superabundant set of 40 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. manuals upon this Manual, which have I am afraid overlaid, in some degree, what Mr. Keble called its " heavenly notes." To learn it, until its wise and The Gate- well-weighed words enter into and make chismin part of a child's thought about religion, is the Church, the first thing . to be done . and then to keep it fresh in memory, by its frequent repetition; and then to gather about its various statements the scrip- tural proofs of its every separate phrase ; and then to illustrate it by the parallel passages, which abound in the Collects and various Offices of the Book of Common Prayer; and then to develop them and apply them as they reach out and touch the faith, the obedience, the worship, the means of grace, the life. Next in importance, in value, in power of in- fluence to the creeds, the Catechism ought to be the framework, about which all other instruction shall build the beauty and the fulness of the system of the Church. In order to do this the first essential is the training of the teacher. They cannot teach what they do not Teachers' know. And that training depends largely thTSor's u P on *he Rector's realization of his own personal duty, responsibility. Really and truly, the Sun- day-school teacher is only the alius or the alia through whom he does his duty. And no Sunday- school is complete, or is in the way of large accom- plishment, that is not preceded and prepared for by the Rector's class for his teachers. And for the period after Confirmation, there ought to be classes or some other provision for the constant study of the Word of God. Slowly and without the recognition THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 41 which it richly deserves, the Society for the Home Study of Holy Scripture and Church History ^ teacher i s is leavening the Church. If every woman, preparation, who teaches in a Sunday-school, were a member of this Society, the result would be felt in energy, in interest, in what the Prayer-book calls ' ' the live- liness of the Word, ' ' and in effect. Bible study with all its side-lights, yes, and with all its foot-lights, of technical and textual criticism, Bible study, critical and devotional, is the great desideratum of our day. And this Church, which saturates her children with the Holy Scriptures, which knows no public Bible study. service without the foremost place given to the reading and hearing of the Word, which dares and is determined to put the whole Word of God, in the language which they understand, openly, freely, continually, before her people; this Church in her relation to education must foster the study of the Bible in every possible way. The next place of educational value and power is the Christian pulpit. Diverted and degraded and for a time almost displaced from its high dignity, as the place of the prophet, we The P la e of need to recognise far more than I think we do its due position in the Church's work of educa- tion. I know all that can be said and is said about sermons. I remember the phase (passing somewhat now) when it was thought necessary to belittle the pulpit in order to magnify the Altar, when people sneered at what they were pleased to call the " sacrament of preaching. ' ' Carried along with the debris of that great current of spiritual life, known 42 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. as the Oxford movement, and thrown up like rubbish on shallow places where it stuck, as though it were the only outcome and purpose of that rushing and swelling tide, this idea never was in the minds or hearts or examples of the men who were behind the movement. Their very first power was their preach- ing. The massive weight of Pusey's learning; the crystal purity of Keble's poetry and prose; the in- comparable beauty of Newman's sentences; the ring of Manning's earlier English, these were the forces of the prophets, " clamantes in deserto. " That their influence led to more reverent worship, higher appreciation of sacramental grace, more regard for disused and forgotten customs and traditions of primitive ages, is perfectly true. But they never Proper taught and never meant to teach, and it is preaching, a corru pt following of their great leader to hold that one can only dignify the sacramental, by depreciating the homiletical, element in the Christian ministry. Those two queer object-lessons of the old-fashioned arrangement (modern old-fashioned, I mean), by which either the pulpit got behind the Altar in the place of chief honour and conspicuous- ness, or got right in front of the Altar to obscure, if not to conceal it, had, I have no doubt, their inten- tional significance. But it is high time for men, charged with the ministry of Jesus Christ, to rise to a clear vision of the duty and the dignity of preaching. Not the least power of the Altar is its proclamation; as the Master made the cross not merely the one only Altar of a true and perfect sacrifice, but also the pulpit of the seven sentences and of the seven THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 43 silences, which have filled the wide world and drawn all men unto Him. There are very, very few, (here and there one,) with special power as preachers. What is commonly known as the popular preacher is too often a very poor caricature of the prophet. There is hardly a more pitiful or painful element in our modern religionism than the column in the Saturday newspaper which gives the subjects of the so-called sermons for the next day. But the ques- tion is not of personal power or of personal popu- larity, much less of sensationalism and excitement. It is simply one of directness, earnestness, care- fulness, thoroughness, plainness, completeness, in bringing home to men's hearts the message of God. Not latitudes nor platitudes; neither altitudes nor attitudes; but the preaching, which dear Archbishop Benson said was neither high nor low nor broad, but deep. In all time, God has been pleased to take and use and consecrate the wonderful gift of articulate speech, and the marvellous organs of the human voice, to be the medium through which He should communicate with man. The old ' * segnius imitant ' ' does not apply to this. Nothing will take its place ; and the talk about the Sunday newspaper or the magazine as satisfying this need is idle and untrue. It is an excuse which would, I believe, be done away with if (and which is now contradicted where ?) men throw themselves into the simple, straight- forward, earnest delivery of their message to their brother men. It is not eloquence that is needed, it is teaching, definite, distinct, positive, plain, insistent, about the 44 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. two inseparable things, the Faith and the Life; the Notelo- 1^ of faith, and the faith in the life. Let quenoebut us ma gnify our prophetic office. Not pass- Faith and ing events, not popular excitement, not Life, personal views; and on the other hand, not remotearchaisms and unhuman speculations ; but the old truth in the new words, translated, that is to say, into the language of common speech. They showed me the other day, at the Oxford University Press, what they call the ' * knapsack Bible," made exactly to fit into its place; and bound in the same stuff of which is made the uni- forms of the British soldiers in South Africa. That The Old is the thought. The Old Word of God, modern 1 taught in phrases that fit the mental opera- phrases, tions of the time ; and presented in a form that adapts itself to the habits and needs of the leaders and fighters and sufferers and conquerors of the world. It is the marvellous advance of chemical science, which has revolutionized the treatment of physical disease; more even than the discoveries of materia medica: new media, new solvents, new com- binations of the old healing herbs and roots and min- erals, found everywhere side by side with the diseases they are meant to cure. For us, the mysteries of truth and grace, which the great Healer once for all has made known to us, can have no additions. It rests with us to find in the knowledge of ourselves, in the study of mankind, in careful keeping ourselves in touch with the subtle vanities of old deceits, and old diseases of the soul, as they take new form and colour, in the changing circumstances and conditions THE EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE CHURCH. 45 of the world ; it is for us, God guiding and helping us to deep insight and wide outlook, to find the ways and words, through which we may be such evangelists and physicians, that "by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine that we deliver, all the diseases of men's souls may be healed." And the healing will be, as the St. Luke's Day Collect asks for the prev- alence of the prayer, ' * through the merits of Jesus Christ, our Lord. ' ' III. THE PRESENT STATUS OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES. By Professor CHARLES DE GARMO, Ph.D., of Cornell University. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE III. Religious Instruction in England. Origin of Religious Instruction in the schools, through Lancas- ter and Dr. Bell. Lancaster's simple scheme of paid teachers, with multiplying scholars. Its failure. Government Grants the next step. Organization of Board-schools the final one. Similar to American schools. Religious Instruction made optional in the Day-schools. Rise of Sunday-schools, under Robert Raikes, 1780. Thus two systems in England. Religious Instruction in France. None in the Public Schools. Thursday holiday for Church and home instruction. Religious Instruction in Germany. Day-schools impart practically all. Most thorough system in the world. Critical spirit in universities. Kirchner's view. Religious Instruction in the United States. Threefold end of all Religious Instruction. Inadequacy of America in point of Christian Knowledge. Compares favourably in points of Christian Spirit and Chris- tian Conduct. Improvements suggested in American Schools. Arrangement of Material for Childhood, Adolescence, and Youth. Crucial Period of Adolescence. Wrong Treatment after this period. " Religious exercises " in England and America. Great need for wiser action. Man's Relation to his fellows. Need for Improvement of the Sunday-schools. RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. OF the four countries, embraced in our survey, two, namely, France and the United States, England have only private or denominational instruc- tion. England has a double system, having tem, a Sunday-school organization scarcely inferior to our own and a system of religious instruction in Day- schools reaching nearly all of the children of the empire. Germany relies pre-emi- nently upon the official instruction in religion given in her Day-schools, supplementing this by an amount of Sunday-school instruction which reaches less than a tenth of her children. Whenever we think of a possible system of religious instruction in our Day-schools, an end most ardently desired by all who believe that the young origin of re- should be thoroughly trained in religious ligious in- struction in knowledge, we look instinctively to Eng- English land, as an example of what can be accom- 8choolSi plished in a free Protestant nation, where the people are determined to regard this as an essential of any acceptable school system. A brief survey of the educational history of England for the last hundred years will show the genesis of her school system. 49 50 /,'///, A >//, INMKIIi UitN IN Wli> ii ill* n 1 1 1- i - ' i it 1 1 i < ni in v opened, r| MM people \\ i M in i|. n ,i i .1 i n < .1 < < i , I 1 1 1 1 r I 1 1, 1 1 I I n n | M i M 1 1 i.i I | i i IK . I. ul .1 lo I. a< h t li'-iii I here \\ as no .\ .! in ol pllhljl .1 Ii-K.l . .Hi'l hill .1 lll< .!"!< .Mi'l i III ..i I I .l.n l'l\ I >i < \ i .! in ill any l.md Im llic mas-.es ll \\.r,, how ever, .\ p-i id ! .i< 1 1\ il \ in i lr;i- m , so I h.il in I n" I, MM I .1 . 111 < .< i many, .if I IK i m . ,i i In- i '. i, ,i ma I n HI , lli. I* ideis M i i i I r ;!' HI . lil< I M .1 n h > led \ unl ilnl \ - -I evel . l< ivei ..I In . I. m. I lo ... il.. it .Ml ih. , hildren were traini 'I m iL' elements ol i< h" s I mi\\|i.|"< \l fin. 1 1 1 1 1 1 , I ', 1 1 j _ la in 1 , 1 1 in *l | ii >. * i , was .1 1 l< .1 .1 | n 1 1 1 n h >ir . \\ ilh iespe< I lo ediK alioii. I )emoi I.M y was only In iiinni}; to (eel the impnl ,e , >| a new hlr, and the idi .1 h.i.l n. .1 da\N n. .1 ii|i..n statesmen that Hie people as .. \\ holi hail an\ M .|H,I. .ihihl\ lot Ilh ' are i i" I In p. . .|.l< , I In i e aim Im \\ .11 l II . . >l I .1 1 II .1 .1 < I I II ' .1 1 1 1 1 1 .1 , .1 III I (III "" ll ll " 11 - iinn.il. .1 in I h. . .i ".mi .ill. >n < >l I In I im ni . I '.ill i .1 1 . i m I I . -i i i" n ' .. In M J So< i < I \ , \\ 1 1 1. 1 1 i i 'pi e '.ell led III ;;enei al I In d r.-.eii I I II "_ e leinelll . l I 1 IP' ll'.ll I ell" loll', hie |-ioin tin iu tivity ol I >l . Hell, hevmmm; al a si -m. \\ h.il I. it. i . l.ii . , .in'., l he nnu h i ; ' M M ni \ . \\ Im h i . | .1 esented lh< nil* i < sis < >l I lie ( Inn < Ii o| r ii' l.i i ii I I 1 1< i < In ' . M i . 1 1 1 1 1 1 . 1 1 n i. anexeeed i ii' d \ .n 1 1 \ e rivalry bet ween I hese I \\ > :.( >e let ies I. >i the control >l elementary education. / .v,,/ tNI>, IK INt I , <,IKM..INY. .-INI* ,/A// A'/r 7- S ' It i-, an interesting < iremnslaiK e that l.olh o| Mn -.,- ,\ |, m . propo ,, il to h Mn- MM i.il and n lijdoii I.-JM ticiation o| the nation at a very nominal cost. I am .1 .hi I ".I.I uill. linn limn India .in , , id. ,i \\ In. h n.d.led linn al OIK e I" < m main! lln- warmest admiration "I every philanthropist m I'.mdand, SIIK e In piopo-.rd a system wlm h would give intellectual hi. in .t as spirit". d hie is supposed to he "i\en, \\illniiil IIKHH \ and without |nn< IIJS i In ni' . il I'lin ih'Hi i. lo he p. ll. ill. led III Mn iin . h.inn al u < >i Id oiilv l>\ I In -,. Innn s l< .1 pel pelnal mot nm \\ h n h .1 1 1 .1. I .1 n il >il n .11 . l>nl mil i .1 nn . I miin I . III. pi. i n u .1 , .in i i i i i ll in I \ i in | tie < .lie I I pi po-.ed hill)'. ell lo l.il.e .1 . lass >t ten l">\ . and in .(MM I and dull lln in 111 a hunted In Id ol knowledge \\ilh "M .il Mn>i..ii"liin . , then to have e.n h o| tin - I. n I .' >\ , -.it If i .m. .1 Ii' i ( I.e.'. ol ten I i< >\ s, .unl l< .n h (In in u hal In limi.ll had l>. , n l.m-hl ! .nml.irly, cadi ol Mi. i hnndii d |.o\ -, \\oiild ''.illn i .1 < I.e.. < >l l.n of In i I n >\ . .1 1 tonl In 1 1 1 and I n .1 1 in I I In m m lln I. no\\ d < I" < \\ Ii n h In hi III sell had - .1 i in d Mm. .1! tine '.llol.e, a -.ni'di h .n In i \\oiild In al.le |<> I. ,n h a thousand l.o\ , \oihmj; < onld I >< moie alhirinj; li'iin .1 Imam ial standpoint i-- .1 p.<>ple not \nld m>l fnini.li < .. ..I le.ii Ini i. ,i a thousand children I'nl siuu lln leadinj; motive ol lln , ; .,m. .,1 n >n and m.iin l< n.itn e ol this :;< liool wa , lln n li-n.n . one, il |o| 52 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN as a matter of course that training in the catechisms, Howit creeds, and formulas of the respective succeeded, churches formed the centre of the instruc- tion. After the schools had been thus conducted for the first quarter of the century, it was found that the best efforts of a community were unable to meet the growing necessities of the schools for more and better teachers, and for the equipments necessary for carry- ing on the great system of public education. It was found that there were large areas of country in which no provision whatever was made for the education of the poor. Appeal was made to Parliament in 1833 for assist- ance, and, after much debate, Parliament responded by its first grant of a hundred thousand dollars to Government these so-called voluntary schools. Most grants, o f them were under the control of the National Society, which represented the Church of England. From 1833 onward to the present, gov- ernment grants increased in amount and regularity, until they have now arrived at enormous propor- tions. The schools under ecclesiastical control continued to be the sole means for public education down to 1870. At this time, parliamentary investi- g ation showed that there were large gaps in the system, which it was quite impossible for the private schools to fill. They therefore estab- lished a system of public education under the title of Board schools. School districts were laid out, school boards elected, local taxes levied, and a system of education, not unlike our American free public ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 53 schools, was inaugurated. All of these schools at first, however, charged tuition fees, as the , Origin of Church schools have always done. But the Board- sentiment for free public' education has so s developed, that, in London and Birmingham and many other places, the Board schools are now abso- lutely free, as they are in this country. The Board schools have naturally grown in popularity and ex- tent, until, from the beginning in 1870, they have increased their attendance so that now 42$ of all the children attend these schools; 44^ attend the schools of the Church of England under the control of the National Society; 3$ attend the Wesleyan schools; 5$ the Roman Catholic; and nearly 6% attend British undenominational and other schools. When the Board schools were established, the question of religious instruction naturally arose. After extended discussion, it was finally concluded that religious instruction must be given, but that it could not be denominational. Therefore, the Board schools are not allowed to teach catechisms or creeds or church formulas, or to institute distinctive ecclesi- astical ceremonies. There naturally arose very early, in connection with government grants to private Church schools, the question of religious toleration in connection with the instruction of religious subjects. It was very soon seen to be absolutely necessary that people, who were so situated that they could attend only Church schools, should be protected in their religious rights wherever the belief of the parents differed from that of the institution to which they sent their children. 54 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN It never would do, Englishmen thought, to allow a Eeli ious g reat church corporation like the National instruction Society to spread its religious propaganda among the people at the expense of the government. It was therefore very quickly provided, in the so-called "conscience clause,'' that the religious instruction of the school should not be forced upon the children of unwilling parents, and it was finally arranged that such religious instruction must be given either at the beginning or the close of the school day, so that pupils might absent them- selves from these exercises without losing any of the advantages of the school. In this way there was established a system of religious instruction, denomi- national in the Church schools and undenominational in the Public Board schools, which could reach almost every child in the land. A second corollary of public grants to private in- stitutions wa^ that every school, which availed itself of the advantages of the grants, should subject itself to governmental inspection. There thus grew up in England a system of school examinations by government authorities such as no other English- speaking nation has, and in connection with this the famous system of payment by results. When it was said in Parliament that these schools might use the government grants almost solely for spreading their religious doctrines and might neglect all the great purposes of a secular education, Mr. Lowe cut the Gordian knot by proposing that the schools should receive grants in proportion to the efficiency of their instruction in secular branches, and he carried the ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 55 majority of Englishmen with him when he said that if these schools were poor, they should at least be cheap, and if they were dear, they should at least be efficient. It was early provided, however, that there should be no inspection of religious training in the private schools. In the Public Board schools, if I mistake not, examinations are offered in religious subjects. We can thus see how a great, free, democratic people has succeeded in providing elementary instruction for every child in the land, and at the same time has provided religious train- ing for all who desire it in connection with secular education. The outcome of such a system is in startling con- trast to the system which has developed in our own country, whereby religion as a subject of o ontrasted , instruction appears to be forever banned withAmeri- from our public schools. The constitution of almost every state in the Union forbids the sub- sidizing of church schoojs at public expense, while the division of our population into a large number of powerful religious organizations makes it practically impossible to obtain public consent to any form of religious teaching. In England, as is well known to this assembly, there began a system of religious instruction in Sunday-schools under the leadership of Robert Raikes in 1780. These schools Sunday-school have steadily grown in popularity, exten- system, sion, and efficiency, until the number of students under their tuition is greater than the number of children in the Day-schools of Great Britain. We 5 6 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN thus see growing up side by side a double system of religious instruction in which the Day-schools may be presumed to give the body of religious knowledge, while the Sunday-school would naturally be relied upon to impart the true religious spirit to the know- ledge acquired, since, far more than the Day-school, it enjoys the sanctions of the Church and the influence of the religious ceremonial. Ideally, therefore, the English system leaves little to be desired in its opportunities for bringing up the youth of the land, "in the fear and admonition of the Lord." Turning now for a moment to France, we find a country predominantly Roman Catholic in confes- sion, although both Protestant and Jewish religions likewise enjoy state support. It would seem that in a country, in which all large religious bodies are subsidized by the state, it would be natural and easy to have a regular system of religious instruction in connection with the Day- schools. This, however, is not the fact. No reli- gious instruction whatever is given in connection with the secular schools, but Thursday is set apart as a No religious school holiday, in which children may in S puWic n re ceive religious instruction at the hands of schools, the several denominations to which their parents belong. To what extent the children are actually instructed, I am not informed. The Sunday- school naturally, under such conditions, would not have a flourishing growth in France. We find that but some sixty thousand scholars are enrolled in such institutions. Turning now to Germany, we find that practically ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 57 all serious religious instruction is imparted in the Day-schools, and predominantly by the . , r i Germany, regular teachers employed lor secular in- struction. The Sunday-school in that country, as in France, has had but a meagre development, less than one-tenth of the children receiving any Religious in- instruction whatever in such institutions. Auction given by In explaining the German system, it is state-schools, important to remember that there are but two strong religious organizations in that country, the Roman Catholic, chiefly at the south, and the Lutheran, chiefly at the north, both being under state support and control. In that country, moreover^ practically all schools are under direct governmental control, and in very important particulars have their policy directed from central government bureaus. Thus, for instance, the curriculum of study is in the main prescribed by the cultus minister. The subject of religion always stands first in programmes of studies, both as they emanate from the bureau, and as they stand in the daily school programme. Four or five hours of religious instruction per week are required in every German school. Probably in no other country in the world is the religious instruction so systematically and thoroughly given as in Germany. The principal func- M OBt tiu>- tion of the German school is officially rough in the declared to be the making of God-fearing, patriotic, self-supporting citizens. The Germans would no more think that religion could be omitted from the programme of instruction, than that mathe- matics or languages could be left out. Every teacher 58 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN in that country receives religious training for his work, although not every teacher gives religious in- struction in the schools. This is usually assigned to those who are best fitted by temperament and acquirements to impart it. The hour for religious instruction is the first one in the morning. The curriculum in the early grades is Thirs stem ma< ^ e U P of Bible stories, mostly biographi- andcurricu- cal, the memorizing of Church hymns, the Catechism, and selected Scriptural texts. In the middle grades, it is the aim to present a tole- rably complete idea of the Christian religion, as expounded by Luther, some Church history, and the meaning of the forms and ceremonies of the Church. In the upper grades of secondary instruction, no more formal memorizing is required, but there are frequent reviews to help the pupils retain what they have previously learned. The general study of the history, antiquities, and literature of Holy Writ and the history of the Christian Church is introduced. Special attention is given in all classes to broad reading, research, and exegesis, not of passages alone, but of complete parts and books. When the Bible is placed in the hands of the children, it is always an expurgated edition. A favourite method, however, is instruction by means of text-books covering selec- tions from the Bible commentary, geography and history of the Holy Land, history of the Jews, sum- mary of the New Testament teachings, Luther's small Catechism, the Church Calendar and the Church hymns. Of the effect of this instruction upon the whole ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 59 people, there are many views. Prof. Russell, in his book on German Higher Education, calls , . Critical attention to the fact that, since the rise of spirit in modern biological science, the critical spirit Tmiversities - has entered the schools of theology. Young men have been leaving the universities for years with these ideas in their minds, and the definite amount of religious knowledge, which was once supposed to be essential to every man's education, has been steadily growing less. Not a third as much is required to-day as was insisted on thirty years ago. The teachers are not so well grounded in their beliefs, while the feeling of uncertainty in the teacher begets uncertain results in the classroom. Pupils consequently take less interest in the subject ; many of them say openly that the teacher is obliged to teach them what he himself does not believe. Prof. Russell also makes the following citation from the Kreuzzeitung of November 25, 1894: "As matters stand at present, we have a double-entry system of spiritual bookkeeping. For the masses, so far as they attend the elementary schools, and theoretically for pupils of secondary schools as well, we have instruction in religion on the lines of positive Chris- tianity, in the name and by the authority of the state. In the universities, on the contrary, where the young men are being educated who will in time succeed to the leadership in Church and state, something entirely different is put forward in the name of science. Doctrines are preached which stand in sharpest contradiction to those given to the people. This is excused on the ground that religion is for the 60 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN people, and for them it is good enough as it is. Science, however, occupies another field and seeks a different patronage. The two do not come in contact." The clergy are also dissatisfied with the results, which they would better by giving more time to What reform religion. This, however, is opposed by is possible. t h e school men> who say that it is not more religion, but a better quality that is needed. They say that some text-books give as many as three hun- dred and fifty different scriptural texts to be learned by heart. It is no wonder that * ' the letter kills the spirit." The school men also complain that their scholars know the history of the Jews better than the history of the Germans. The remedy, they say, is not more formal study, for pupils might spend all their time on religion, memorizing the entire Bible, yet come out irreligious. Better no Catechism at all than so many tears in learning it. ' ' Prof. Russell also cites the opinion of Prof. Kirchner of Berlin, who speaks for the majority of his colleagues when he says : ' ' If the religious feeling is not revered, awakened, and fostered in the home, the school can do very little^ As a rule, \ HOT'S Son, t ^ ie vearnm g toward God in a child's soul ' is very slight. A surfeit of religious doc- trines, maxims, hymns, forms, ceremonies, prayers, as experience proves, often produces a result pre- cisely opposite to the one intended. Not the school, but the Church has the largest share in fostering the increase of piety. Least of all should the school be pressed into the service of a rigid orthodoxy; it ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 61 should not forget that the educational point of view must be its standard. Lessons in religion ought not to be hours dedicated to devotion, but to instruction given in a grave, cheerful manner. The school must be content to establish in its pupils genuine religious feeling and sound morality. The means of doing so is on the one hand instruction, and on the other the teahex!s_x ample. Hypercritical sanctimoniousness, external attendance to Church forms, nay, even polemics against those who hold a different faith, leave no good result. In the choice and treatment of subjects, the standard must be genuine religious stimulation rather than dead knowledge, scholastic erudition, or barren forms." The ministry have now accepted this idea, for the new curricula now lay especial stress upon the subject of instruction. " The religious instruction is to be so imparted that emphasis shall be laid upon the living acceptation and the inward appropriation of the facts of salvation and the Christian duties, and especial attention be given to the apologetic and ethical side. Along with considerable diminution in the amount taught, especially by cutting out the his- tory of the Church and dogma leading to the New $ eman taking sides in religious controversies, the currioula, instruction, so far as it is based on history, is to be limited to the occurrences of enduring significance for the ecclesiastical and religious life. ' ' Prof. Russell concludes his account by saying: " I rarely found a schoolboy whose judgment I considered of value in other matters, who was not deeply impressed with the worth of his religious training. There is much 62 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN doubt, much senseless criticism abroad in the land, but its sources are not to be sought in the schools. On the contrary, the religion of Protestant Germany, as it is presented in the schools, is one of the most powerful forces for the making of unity in German life." We have now before us in briefest outline an account of the religious instruction of the three The United foreign countries assigned for consideration. States, These facts will form a basis for an exami- nation of our own religious instruction of the young as compared with that of other countries. The leading purposes to be attained by such in- struction may perhaps be grouped under three heads. First, the development of intelligence in purpose of religious matters; second, the inculcation instruction, of a Q ir j st j an S pi r i t> O r permanent attitude of mind; and third, the cultivation of habits of Christian conduct. When we compare religious teaching in our own country with that of Germany and England, with respect to the first head we find that their system is immeasurably superior to our own. In the first place, in both countries there is more or less systematic preparation of teachers for this class of work. In Germany, teachers are per- haps more carefully prepared for imparting religious America information, than in any of the secular compared branches. The same thing is true to a with Europe, somewhat less exten t in Great Britain. In the next place, they have a regular graded course of instruction adapted to the mental powers of the children, the whole course forming a consecutive ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 63 and more or less complete survey of the whole field. Then, they devote as much time to this subject as to almost any branch of secular learning. Turning to our own country we find religious in- struction entirely excluded from the Day-schools, consequently narrowed down to thirty or forty minutes of actual teaching per week. American We find the work in charge of anybody adequate! and everybody who is willing to undertake it. The classes are taught by people of all possible grades of intelligence and of biblical knowledge. And finally, we find but ^slight attempt at adapting the subject-matter of instruction to the intellectual capacity of the children, /so that it is quite possible for children to attend Sunday-school from the very earliest years until adult life without acquiring very much fundamental knowledge of the Scriptures. Instead, therefore, of a graded course of instruction, with adequate time for presentation by a trained body of teachers, we have heterogeneous selections, presented in the main by untrained teachers, and for but very brief periods once a week. In addition to all this, our system is woefully lacking, in that it fails to reach at all a large part of the children. In Germany and England practically all of the children receive this thorough-going instruction, but with us only a part of them receive it for extremely brief periods per week, and for only such portion of their lives as their inclination, or the inclination and cir- cumstances of the parents, determine. Therefore, from the standpoint of the development of religious intelligence, the American system must be pro- 64 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN nounced the most fragmentary, partial, inefficient, haphazard system in the world. When we come to the second great purpose to be attained by religious instruction, namely, the America inculcation of a Christian spirit, we have better for perhaps not so much cause for regret. I Christian spirit, think it is the almost uniform testimony of observers that the Christian attitude of mind is not always to be measured by the amount of religious knowledge a people may possess. There is such a thing as formalism in religion, so that it is quite possible for a people to possess a high degree of intelligence in such matters with a low degree of active Christian spirit. It is quite possible for the religion to remain a thing apart from actual life. The extent to which the mental attitude toward God finds its counterpart in the mental attitude toward one's fellow-men does not depend primarily on the amount of religious knowledge one has. It depends upon the quickening power of God within the soul, upon breadth of sympathy, upon the development of the social instincts, upon the inculca- tion of human interests in the heart. Primitive his- tory gives us many illustrations of races who pray to their gods and prey upon their fellow-men. My own observation leads me to think that the influence of religious teaching in America is more potent in arousing this human sympathy, this Christian attitude of mind in the community and in the state, than is the case in any of the countries with which we are contrasting our own. We are accustomed to think that religion is a life, rather than a doctrine or a body ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 65 of knowledge, and it can be a life only to the extent to which the Christian spirit is inculcated in the youth. And finally, with respect to cultivation of the habits of Christian conduct, I think we need not be ashamed of the results in this country, as Algofor compared with those in England, France, Christian or Germany, especially if we take into con- c sideration the extremely limited agencies that we have for directly influencing the conduct of the young. As to possible improvements that suggest them- selves from this comparative study, though it is easy to see what were good to be done, it is extremely difficult to see how it can be done. There Improve" are, however, a few points that I will raise mentssug- for your consideration. The first is the s estedi query whether it is not practicable in our American Sunday-schools to provide a better and more child- like presentation of religious knowledge in the earlier classes of the Sunday-school. The Day-schools have long since found out that the success of their instruction depends in large measure upon the selec- tion of the subject-matter and the methods of its presentation in accordance with the psycho- logical laws of the child's interest and Better growth. While it is of course possible to needed, present in a way almost any portion of the Bible to a class of young children, whether from the Old Testament or the New, from the Gospels, the Epistles, from the miracles in the Old Testament or the parables in the New, from chronology or revela- 66 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN tion, yet it is evident, to one who looks at the subject from the standpoint of the child's capacities and interests, that much of this matter is introduced at great expense, whether we consider the powers of acquisition or the spiritual value of that which is acquired. Would it not be more profitable to confine the earlier work to the Old Testament stories, such as those of Joseph, Jacob, Abraham, and Daniel; to Suggested suc ^ histories, as that of Samuel; and to changes, simple narratives of the life of Christ ? These matters are of eternal interest to the child and form a basis for a mastery of scriptural knowledge. Along with such instruction could appropriately go the memorizing of the Ten Commandments, of suit- able proverbs, and of portions of Scripture of deep religious and moral import, expressed in the trans- parent language of the Scriptures. In the earlier years of such instruction, it ought to be assumed that every child is a child of God ; that by virtue of this fact he belongs in the Christian family, and that it would be a disaster if, for any reason, he should be considered as excluded from it. The Sunday-school should be a place for strengthen- ing him, especially in his mental attitude toward his playmates and others with whom he comes in con- tact. As the period of adolescence approaches, every effort of the religious teachers of the child should be Crucial devoted toward fixing in his mind a per- periodof manent Christian attitude toward every - adolescencei . , . , , 1 , r^ t , r . . . thing in the world. The study of primitive races and of genetic psychology show that this is ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 67 one of the crucial periods in the life of every indi- vidual. Physically, the whole body and nervous organism of the child is in its most plastic and most rapidly growing state. Strong impressions made at this period are likely to have a lasting effect. It is at this time that we find the birth of the social in- terests. The altruistic feelings begin to arise, a new consciousness of selfhood, and its importance in the world dawn upon the child. We find that, in primi- tive races, this is the period for solemn initiation into the deeper life of the tribe. Boys are often put through extremely trying physical ordeals; a loop of flesh, for instance, in the back may be pierced by a thong and tied to a revolving pole placed hori- zontally, and the young man be expected to tear himself loose. It was at the completion of his fourteenth year that the Roman boy assumed the toga virilis. It has long been the custom of the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran Churches to con- firm both boys and girls at this period. Especial pains is taken at this time to impress upon them the importance and seriousness, the sanctity and neces- sity of a religious life. It is said that children are often separated from the rest of the family, given long periods of meditation in which they are admo- nished to think upon their eternal salvation, of death, the grave, the judgment. They are led to feel and express contrition for sinful conduct and feelings. Then, when all these ordeals are safely passed, absolution is granted, when everything becomes full of light and joy and happiness ; the children don new garments, made especially for this occasion, 68 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN march in procession and formally enter upon their Church-membership. These things have a deep import for the American Protestant Sunday-school. Children ought not to be allowed to drift on and on, with the general assumption that they are lost and the vague hope that some time they will be redeemed ; but direct conscious effort should be made to initiate them into a distinctively religious life. The wisdom of such a process is not founded upon individual opinion, but finds its deep foundation in the history and practices of the race, in the psychical nature of the adolescent mind and body. What should be the quality of the religious in- fluences brought to bear upon the child when he has passed this crucial period ? Here I am inclined to Pro erin- think is a matter worthy of our deepest fluences after consideration. The history of Protestant adolescence, religion s h ow s that from the earliest times much emphasis has been laid upon purely individual, subjective states of mind. And this original tendency was vastly accentuated by religious observances, recommended and inculcated by Whitefield and Wesley. They insisted upon a positive and vigorous subjective experience, accompanied by equally vigor- ous and objective utterance as a necessary condition of salvation. In the older times, if a man had been asked, " What is your assurance of salvation ? " he might perhaps have answered, "The welfare of my nation, my community, my family, myself. Accord- ing to our thrift, our property, our health, our physical comfort, our freedom from the pains of war, or the desolation caused by natural forces, in these ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 69 things I have a warrant for believing that I stand within the favour of the Lord." Those who read the Book of Job appreciate what this test of divine favour means. With Whitefield and Wesley, how- ever, a new test of divine favour is introduced. Not my outward condition, but my inward state is the criterion of my eternal welfare. If I have had the necessary mental experience, if my feelings have passed through a certain crisis, if I have expressed in public my contrition and my joy, then am I certain of my salvation, then can I (< read my title clear to mansions in the sky." And since that time, Protes- tant denominations have been disposed to emphasize the necessity of these subjective states, so that the religious teaching, and the assumptions underlying the teaching and furnishing the basis of its spirit, have been the necessity of constant participation in these psychical states, so that we find the emphasis laid upon such things as rest and joy and inward peace; upon temptations and prayers ; upon trials and resig- nation to them ; upon trust ; a sense of sin, of atone- ment, of love of God and hope of Heaven, of a desire for strength against the ills of life. We find a disposition to constant introspection, to a self-testing, to see if we have the feelings, necessary to a public analysis of how we feel or should feel. Now all of this, or most of it, it seems to me, is not natural to the heart and mind of youth. What yearning has the active, restless mind of a boy for rest and inward peace ; what experience has he of the trials of life or resignation to them ; how long can he seriously think of death and the grave and the judgment ; how can 70 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN he be expected to have an intense love of God ; how can a lad who never fears a physical hurt seriously dwell upon his hope of Heaven ? How can he have an intense longing for fortitude against a host of ills which he never experienced; how, in short, can a mind which is by nature intensely objective, con- crete, synthetic, ever cultivate a deep introspective spirit; how can he be expected to analyze his feel- ings, and especially to analyze the feelings which he never has or which he can have only when he is abnormally trained ? Such ideas do not belong to youth; they are forced and unnatural. I confess that I sometimes look on with little less than wonder when I see a young collegian of sixteen to eighteen conducting a prayer-meeting, exhorting his fellows to these subjective experiences, with all the vigour that a college boy would work up an enthusiasm for an athletic contest. Can one rationally expect a youth under twenty to enjoy a prayer-meeting ? What has he to pray for in public ? If he says his prayers when he goes to bed, he is doing as much as can be expected of a youth. I do not know what the statistics may be as to the personnel of the teachers in our Sunday-schools, but I suspect that most of them are women, and it may be that this fact is partially responsible for the attempt to inculcate the states of mind, which are at best those of maturity, if not those that are more common in women than in men. There was in England a special reason why there should be a reaction against Puritanism in favour of a more intense subjective religious life among the ENGLAND, PRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 7 1 people. As Prof. Patten shows in his " Development of English Thought," the Puritans had . English re- arisen largely to suppress the vice that had action favours become so common in connection with rural subjective i i r^ t7 r u i religious life, and social pleasures of the English people. These customs had arisen out of their earlier, more primitive clannish life, their outdoor festivals, their May-pole dances, and their numerous social gather- ings which had degenerated so that they became scenes of debauchery and had to be suppressed. The Puritans succeeded in driving them out of existence ; they made the home the sole seat of social pleasures, and in this way deprived the people of a means of social expression, to which they had for ages been accustomed. There was naturally, therefore, a great suppressed longing for the manifestation of this old racial feeling, so that when Whitefield and Wesley devised a system of religious exercises which would allow the people to come together again, and when moreover they insisted upon a set of psychical ex- periences which gave vent to these old disused social feelings, there was an immediate and wide-spread response to the new opportunity. If the people could not go to May-pole dances and outdoor festi- vals, they could at least go to class-meetings and camp-meetings ; they could meet together again in the Church and express in new ways their old social feelings. It is not to be wondered at either that in the more primitive stages of our development in this country those ideas should be warmly welcomed by the people. A rural or pioneer community has but small oppor- 72 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN tunity for indulging their social natures ; the young Earl tti men wor ^' we ^k in and week out, alone tudeof on the farm, seeing almost nobody, having no social functions to perform, living an isolated life. Under such conditions there would be a natural receptivity to a set of religious exercises which should lend a dramatic social interest to life, as was the case in the ever-recurring religious revivals. There, on the one hand, the young man, whose social nature had been starved for the remainder of the year, found an opportunity to look on at an exceedingly dramatic performance. He beheld his neighbours, his friends, and acquaintances at the mourner's bench, alternately groaning with despair and shouting with victory; he beheld the preacher in an ecstasy of divine rage or joy, the band of singers shouting out their songs of praise ; and at the same time he felt that dread possibility that he himself might at any moment be transformed from a spectator to an actor in the drama. The point I am making is that the emphasis upon these psychical experiences, their public expression and a later rehearsal of these initial experiences, was based upon a real need of society first in England as a whole, and later in the primitive, non-social condition of the American people. While, on the one hand, I should acknowledge at once that there was an historic justification for insist- ing upon such religious experiences, I do, on the other hand, claim that the need for them has largely passed away, and that a new spiritual attitude should be maintained in all our religious work. While I ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMERICA. 73 do think that every youth, in the early period of adolescence, should pass through a some- tf ee( }f ora what analogous experience in his religious new view, feeling, so that his attitude toward Christian conduct may be permanently right, yet I think the emphasis from this time on ought to be laid, not upon subjective experience, not upon introspective analysis, not upon the straining after feelings which are unnatural to jtyouth, but upon a positive, objective, and more active jjexpression of religious life, which finds its manifesta- tion in actual work in the community. The plant of Christian character ought to thrive and grow in the human soul ; but in some sense I think it ought to grow just as the intellect grows, not by pulling it up by the roots to see how fast it is growing or how much it has grown, but by exercise upon those things that continue its unconscious development. We push a boy on in his arithmetic and encourage him to try hard examples ; we rejoice with him when he masters them ; we try to awaken his eager interest in science or literature or language, assured that while he is doing these things he is growing in in- tellectual strength. We never think, however, of trying to make him self-conscious, of trying to make him examine his own mind to see how far he has gone ; that matter takes care of itself. And so largely in the life of feeling, we want him to feel correctly about a thousand things, but we never ask him to feel that he feels. So in the religious growth. I cannot believe that this constant importunity to turn the mind in upon itself, in order that it may be con- scious of its own processes, of its own states, is any 74 RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN more wise or needful for actual growth than would a similar process be in the intellectual field. That the problem is a difficult one under existing conditions, I should be the first to grant. Religion _ itself in England and America has ceased Emphasize man's rela- to be largely subjective. Emphasis is no fellow-men l n g er laid upon the saving power of doc- trines or beliefs, the individualistic attitude, whereby a man's chief concern is to save his soul in another world, is no longer insisted upon; but the attitude of a man in society, his social interests and duties, the welfare of the country, the protection of the youth from contaminating influences of men, who would destroy that they themselves may be enriched, pure politics, social activity, reciprocity, solidarity of the community in the things that make for righteousness, for well-being, good conduct, these are the things that are emphasized in the pulpit, these are the things it seems to me that should be emphasized in the Sunday-schools. If the introspec- tive analysis of states of feeling has been remanded to a secondary position in the Church, there is all the more need that it should sink into its proper relations in the Sunday-school. Adults may perhaps indulge harmlessly in introspection, if they find pleasure in so doing, but such a custom is contrary to the whole instinct and nature of youth. If the emphasis upon psychic experience was a natural outlet for the pent-up social feelings of a race, as in England, or of primitive communities in pioneer America, so in the religious training of youth, if we would attain the highest excellence, we must rely not upon the ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, AND AMLRICA. 75 occasional needs arising from locality, or condition in life, but upon the permanent needs that grow out of the very nature of the youthful mind. gllou i dmeet Here we shall be responding to universal universal conditions, conditions, not to accidental circumstances, for I firmly believe that religious instruction, like secular instruction, can reach its highest success only when it is in fundamental accord with the nature of the mind that is to be educated. Finally it may be said that in this country, although we have done much, we have still more to do. We have first of all, and perhaps hardest of all, improve Sun- to secure adequate time for religious train- day-school methods, ing. Thirty or forty minutes per week are not enough to secure the requisite religious intelli- gence. Then we must have in some way a better trained body of teachers to do the work. We must be able to rely not upon occasional consecrated effort ; but to consecration \ve must add preparation. Then, again, we must attempt to adjust our instruc- tion to the nature of the children's minds and not present, indiscriminately to tottering age and vigor- ous manhood and budding youth and feeble childhood, the same lesson at the same time. We must too, I think, take a lesson from modern psychology and ancient race experience, and recognise more fully than we are doing the supreme importance of bring- ing the mind into the line of Christian sympathy and Christian conduct at the age of early adolescence. And finally we must, as I have said, adapt the spirit of our instruction to the spirit of youth. A mighty work to do ? it may be thought, but mightily worth doing! IV. THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS IN- STRUCTION. By the Very Reverend GEORGE HODGES, D.D., Dean of Cam- bridge Divinity School. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE IV. Content of Religious Instruction determined by its Purpose. Compared with Purposes of Public and Private Schools. All Religious Instruction in entire Parish has the same end in view. The Content of Religious Instruction, (a) Character and (^) Church Material. (a) Character Material, Catechism and Bible. (l>) Church Material, Prayer-book and Church History. The Distribution of Material found in (I) the Sunday-school, and (II) the Congregation. The Sunday-school, in Infant School, Main School, and Bible Classes. The Congregation, in Confirmation Class, Sunday Services, and Mid-week Service. 1. The Sunday-school. A. Infant School. Develop (i) Memory by Creed, Lord's Prayer, Decalogue, Hymns ; and (2) Imagination by Bible Stories. B. The Main School. Teach (i) Catechism, (2) Bible, and (3) Prayer-book, (i) Catechism recited and ex- plained. (2) Bible, the Historical Books only. (3) Prayer-book, by actual use in Services. Special Ser- vices, Christmas, Easter, Stereopticon, etc. 2. The Congregation. (i) Sunday-morning Services. Use Systematic Courses of Sermons. (2) The Confirmation Class. Full Course of Church Doctrine and Practice. (3) The Mid-week Services. Definite Bible Study. (4) The Sunday- evening Services. Use Lecture System, to interest, instruct, and convict. THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUC- TION. THE content of religious instruction is determined by the purpose for which the instruction is given and by the persons who are to be instructed. What is the purpose of religious instruction ? What is it for ? We know what the Day-school is for: its immediate intention is to train and p urposeo f inform the mind; its ultimate intention, if religious ... T, . , , . instruction, it is a Private school, is to prepare young persons for society ; its ultimate intention, if it is a Public school, is to prepare young people for citizen- ship. These intentions are by no means realized in full by administrators of secular education. The ' ' Trustees ' ' and the ' ' Board ' ' are sometimes but dimly aware of them. And the school, private and public, fails " accordingly to render its natural and needed service to the community. But this is the true ideal, and towards it an encouraging number of educators are working. The private school is to make boys into gentlemen, and girls into gentle- women, well-mannered, appreciative of what is good in art and letters, and understanding the relation between privilege and responsibility. The public school is to make boys into intelligent voters, and 79 8o THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. girls presently into intelligent voters, and thus to assist the state by raising the general level of its life, cultivating public spirit, making young persons acquainted with the history, the present conditions, and the possibilities of their own country, common- wealth, city, or township, teaching the relation between the ballot and the office and the social wel- fare of the people. What is the purpose of the Sunday-school ? It is to do for Christianity and the Church what the private and the public schools are meant to do for Ai fth society and the state. It is to make the Sunday- boys and girls good Christians, sincere disciples of Jesus Christ, knowing Him, believing in Him, loving Him, and obeying Him, showing their discipleship by the gentleness, the though tfulness, the honesty, the purity, and the unselfishness of their lives. And it is to make the boys and girls good Churchmen, understanding the Church, its history, its principles, its customs, its blessings, devoted to the Church, making the most of it for the good of their own individual lives, using it to help them to do right, and making the most of it for the good of the community, using the Church for the general establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the purpose of the Sunday-school. It is to train Christians and Churchmen. It is to build up character in the Church, with the appliances of\ht Church. The same is true of all other systematic religious instruction in the Parish. It holds in the pulpit as well as in the schoolroom. The parish priest will THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 81 be a teacher as well as a preacher. The difference between teaching and preaching is partly that preaching may appeal to the emotions, while teaching appeals to the understanding only; but chiefly that the preacher tries to bring about an immediate result, to lead to conviction, resolution, and amendment before the end of the hour, while the teacher uses a more patient process, takes a longer time and a longer look, endeavours to prepare the learner to listen to the sermon, and to assist the will gradually by informing the mind. But all the teaching, wherever given, will be for the purpose of training Christians and Churchmen. That is, it will have both an individual and a social inten- tion; an individual intention, to build up Christian character; and a social intention, to make Christian character strong, abiding, and serviceable by the aid of the Church, by bringing the individual into rela- tion with the sacramental influences which make for character, and by bringing him also into relation with the institutional conditions which will increase his efficiency, as the efficiency of the soldier is increased by keeping step with the regiment. The content of religious instruction as determined by its purpose will consist, therefore, of two kinds of material: character material and Church c ontento f material. It is neither wise nor desirable religious to make a sharp distinction between these two. It is perhaps true that in the Middle Ages, when the social idea prevailed in the Church as it did in the state, people were made Churchmen with- out being made Christians; the most frequent and 82 THE CONTEXT Of RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. emphatic teaching of the Church had to do with attendance upon Sacraments and Services, and with the position and power of the ecclesiastical institution. It is certainly true that at the present day, in this individualistic age, people are often made Christians without being made Churchmen ; they have no appre- ciation of the privilege of the sacraments, no loyalty to the Church as an institution, and little sense of social religious responsibility. What we want is that they shall be made Christians and Churchmen at the same time, as we want a man to be at the same time a gentleman and a good citizen. Ac- cordingly, what we call character material is Church material also, and what we call Church material is a contribution to character. The difference is not so much in the details as in the general tend- ency. Where, then, shall we find our character material ? What ought one to be taught in order to be a Character Christian ? There is excellent authority material, f or saying that one ought to be taught the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Command- ments, the Commandments as the moral heritage Subject- of the Old Testament; the Prayer as the matter, expression of the spirit of the New Testa- ment, as illustrating and teaching the Christian attitude towards God and towards man; and the Creed, as the voice of the mind and heart of the Church. These, then, are in immediate relation to The Gate- character, because they instruct us How to chism, act> HOW to pray, and How to think. They are assembled in the Church Catechism. Let THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 83 us, therefore, set down the Church Catechism first among our character materials. The Catechism, however, is not enough for the purposes of instruction. It lacks the power of per- sonal example. We need to see men, who have acted in obedience or in disobedience to the Commandments, that we may perceive how they fared. We need to see men, who have lived the life of prayer, and to hear their words of devo- tion. We need to see men, who have thought as the Creed thinks, and to see what sort of men they were, and how they came to think these thoughts, and what they meant. Abstract statements, dogmatic pronouncements, ethical precepts, are like a library in the dark : the truth is there, but we cannot see to read it. A single concrete example is like a match which brings light into the darkness and makes things plain. Where shall we find such examples ? They are scattered through all literature, they are to be found some of them in the daily paper, and they live on our own street ; but they are nowhere so clearly seen, with the spiritual meanings so directly taught, as in the pages of the Bible. Let us add the Bible, then, to our store of character material. Taking thus the Catechism and the Bible as our text-books for instruction in character, where shall we turn for good learning in the matter of church the Church ? The Church book is the material, Book of Common Prayer. In order to be an intelli- gent Churchman one must know that book, whence it came, what it is and means, and how it is to be so used as to get the best blessing out of it. 84 THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. The Prayer-book, however, like the Catechism lacks the illumination of personality. It does not The Prayer- ^ ac ^ this so seriously as the Catechism, book, because it stands in more close and evident relation to our own personality. It is our own book, and as we use it year by year associations gather about it, new meanings appear in it interpreted by our own experience, and its words become the words of our own hearts. There is a great difference between a treatise on prayer, and the very act of prayer; a great difference between the Command- ments quoted in order from the Book of Exodus and the Commandments followed each by the response, "Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law " ; a great difference between the explanation and the realization of the Sacraments. That is the difference between the Catechism and the Prayer-book. But as we added the Bible to the Catechism in the material for the upbuilding of Christian character, so we need to add Church His- tory to the Prayer-book in our material for the upbuilding of Christian Churchmanship. The History Church of the Church, if we can read it right, will History, teach us the origin, the progress, and the position of the Church, will make us see how differ- ent it is from other associations of Christians, will make us appreciate it and be intelligently loyal to it ; and it will assist us to be good Churchmen by the examples of the strong men and devout women, who have lived in the Church's spirit and have derived strength and devotion from the Church. So that the study of Church History is like the study of our own THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 85 ancestors. It maybe dull enough, and often is: but undertaken aright it will give us a natural and sus- taining family pride, and will fill our memories with the words and deeds of those who from their kinship offer us an inspiring example. We are not willing to learn without correction the question of the little girl who said, " Mamma, whom are we degenerated from ? ' ' We would rather be in the mind of the man who turned his back on his temptations, and from being a common tramp became a decent citizen, because he remembered that one of his progenitors had been a commanding officer in the W T ar of Inde- pendence. The history of the Church is somewhat more difficult to study than the other subjects of religious knowledge, because there is no one satisfac- tory book which contains it. It is hardly possible to make much use of it, for that reason, in the Sunday-school. But it ought to be taught, and taught with regularity and system, in every parish. It cannot be omitted from the content of religious instruction. Here, then, we have our material: character material in the Catechism and in the Bible, Church material in the Prayer-book and in Church history. The distribution of this material, the order of teaching, the use which shall be made of the content thus determined for us by the purpose for Distribution which the instruction is given, must be of the ^ decided by considering the persons who are to be instructed. They are found in two com- panies: in the .Sunday-school and in the Congrega- tion. The Sunday-school is divided into three 86 THE CONTENT OP RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. sections: the Infant School, the Main School, and the Bible Class. The Congregation meets for systematic teaching upon three occasions: at the Confirmation Class, at the Mid-week Service, and at the Sunday-evening Service. What shall be taught in the Infant School ? These little children cannot read, and they cannot follow Infant a ^ on g" train of reasoning, but they bring School, to their lessons two inestimable qualities, which many of them will never have again in a like degree: one is memory, the other is imagination. We will make use, then, of their memory. We will try to store it with that which is worth remem- bering. Here, however, we are at once Ine peda- gogicsof confronted with the question which the Zlnffl pedagogues have debated and have for the most part decided : Should children . be taught to memorize what they do not understand ? The peda- gogues say, "No." The catechetical method, so far as it consists in fixed questions and invariable answers, has no respectable position now, except in Sunday-school. It must be confessed that the memorizing of the Church Catechism, as that exer- cise has sometimes been conducted, is not to edifica- tion. It has made the children hate the Catechism; and its results have been generally discouraging. One of the classic instances is ' ' My duty towards my neighbour" as it was written out by a small child after it had been taught in an English Sunday- school : * ' My dooty tords my nabers to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I woud they shall THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 87 \ do and to me, to love, onner and suke-my father and mothe'r and bay the Queen and all that are pet in a forty under 'her, to smit myself to all , Illustration my goones teachers spartial pastures and O f wrong masters, who oughten myself lordly and every to all my betters, to hut nobody by would nor deed, to be trew and jest in all my dealins, to beer no malis nor atrecTin your arts, to kep my ands from pecking and steel my turn from evil speak and lawing and slanders, not to civhSand desar other mans good, but to learn labor trewly to get my own leaving and to do my duty in that state if life and to each it hes please God to call men." Nevertheless, it is both profitable and necessary that the memory should sometimes outrun the perfect understanding. When the memory gets altogether out of sight of the understanding, things are amiss indeed. But that need not happen. It is true of every one of us that there are sentences in our memory words of prayer and praise, verses of high poetry, utterances of saints ynderstand- and wise men which our understanding has not even yet fully overtaken. We do not even yet know what they mean. But the day will come when our experience shall teach us, and in that day the remembered word shall be an interpreter and a counsellor. We want to put such words into the memories even of little children. They cannot understand the Creed, nor the Ten Commandments, nor even the Lord's Prayer; but they can under- stand something about them. And that is all that 88 THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. can be said of us. Let us then bring those great words into the Infant School, teach them with such iteration that the children can never forget them, and tell them what they mean just so far as we can make it plain and they can see it. It is a good plan to make the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments a part of the regular opening service of the Infant School, and to follow the recitation by a lesson every Sunday in some simple text-book which takes them up in order, word by word. To these stores for the memory, may well be added words of hymns, and fitting texts of Scripture; the Scripture texts being preferably taught alphabetically " A soft answer turneth away wrath"; " Be merciful," " Be patient. " The imagination of the child will be appealed to in the instruction given in the Bible. The best way to teach the Bible in the Infant School is Imagination in the Infant to tell Bible stories. I would begin with Adam and go straight through to the last chapter of the Revelation of St. John. It is neces- sary that this be done systematically and graphically : systematically, in that the order of the stories be laid out at the beginning of the year, and followed Sunday after Sunday; graphically, in that the stories be brought as close as possible to contemporary life, and the heroes and heroines be made real. The content of this instruction will need re-translation to adapt it to the understanding of small children. Pharoah in his dream will see cows instead of " kine, ' ' and the Prodigal Son will dispute his dinner with pigs instead of ' ' swine. ' ' The men will obey THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION* 89 the command which Michael Angelo gave to Donatello's St. George; they will " march." The battle of the lamps and trumpets, for example ; the children will stand as breathless spectators of that splendid fight. They will look out through the dark, and see the dim outlines of the tents of the Midian- ites. They will watch the army of Gideon, as they hide behind the trees to light their lanterns. They will see them creeping silently over towards the sleeping camp, every man a sharp sword in his belt, in his left hand a lantern hidden in a pitcher, in his right a trumpet. Suddenly the word is given, crash go three hundred stout trumpets against three hundred breaking pitchers, and the lights shine out, and the trumpets make a noise like that of forty nights- before-the- ' ' Fourth " in one, and every brave Israelite shouts with all his might, " The sword of the Lord and of Gideon ! ' ' And then the wild panic, and the flight, with Gideon hot after them. Let us then set down as the content of religious instruction in the Infant School, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, with the words of hymns and Scripture texts storing the memory; and stories from the Bible, stirring the imagination. In the Main School, instruction will naturally be given in the Catechism, the Bible, and the The Main Prayer-book. School, It is well, in the Main School as in the Infant School, to make the catechetical instruction a part of the Opening Service. It may take the place of that which in liturgical language we call the 9 THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 1 'lesson." It does not seem advisable the time being so brief to read at the service the portion of Scripture which is presently to he studied. That has a space of its own. Take a Catechism lesson instead. There are two purposes which this lesson is to attain : it is meant to impress the exact words of the entire Catechism upon the minds of the children, and it is intended also to bring as much as possible of its meaning into their hearts. The Catechism falls naturally into five divisions : the Covenant, the Creed, the Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Sacraments. If one of these after another is recited by the school in concert every Sunday, that will take the scholars through the Catechism ten times a year; and without seriously wearying them. Let this recitation be followed by a five-minute explanation (never longer) of a single phrase, in order, each Sunday a fiftieth part of the whole. Thus the Catechism will be gone over with interpretation once in the course of a year. As for the Bible, the historical books lend them- selves most naturally to the purposes of Main School instruction. They are interesting, and abundantly Bible use Ms- suggestive, and they teach truth in the most torical books convincing way, by example. It is neces- sary, however, to bring all the Bible books, at least by allusion, into the content of instruction, even in the Main School. The children ought to be taught not only the content, but the contents of Holy Scripture; I mean the names of all the books in their succession, so that they may be able to find their way about among them. Whatever the system THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 91 of lessons, the Bible ought to be so taught, that every scholar shall know what Joseph did in Egypt, and Joshua in Canaan, what Amos wrote about in his prophecy, and St. Paul in his epistle to the Galatians, and the great successive words and deeds of the Ministry of Christ. This may be attained by taking for one year the history from Genesis to Ruth the era of the origin and establishment of the Old Testament people ; and for the next year the history from I. Samuel to Esther the era of the Old Testament Kingdom, united, divided, destroyed, and restored; and for the third year one of the Gospels ; and for the fourth the Acts of the Apostles ; with a fifth year given to the Books of the Bible, in their order, having the scholars read a brief characteristic passage of each book and giving them a brief analysis of each book, which will sufficiently answer the question, What is it about ? Taking thus the historical books for the chief con- tent of instruction in the Main School, the remainder of the Bible poetry, prophecy, and epistles may be assigned to the Bible Class, to be Leave studied a book at a time carefully and Poetry, thoroughly. The Main School lessons may be adjusted to some one of the many Bible Classes, excellent systems, whose rival attractions perplex the rector and the teacher; or they may be arranged, as I have just suggested, by the rector himself, fitting them to his own teachers and his own school. The Bible Class lessons, almost of necessity, will be chosen for the individual class. While there is an 92 THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. ideal advantage in having the entire body of Bible students intent upon the same lesson, and studying it, old and young together, around the evening lamp on Saturday night, this ideal is now so rarely realized that it is perhaps better to frankly abandon it, and minister to the harmless, natural pride of young persons of sixteen years of age and over by giving them lessons which are quite different from those studied by the youngsters. Let us take, for example, for six months the Book of Psalms ; and for the next six months, the Epistles to the Corinthians ; let us spend a year in the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of St. John; let us study Isaiah for twelve months; and the minor prophets, one each month. Once in four or five years, the Bible Classmay profitably be turned into a Prayer-book Class, taking the book from the title-page to the Articles. In the Main School, the Prayer-book is best taught, in my judgment, by actual use of it in the Prayer-book Service. It is intended partly for purposes by actual of worship, and partly for purposes of in- struction. It gives us helpful forms of praise and petition, and it appoints us Holy Seasons whereby certain great truths, on which our praises and petitions rest, are called to our remembrance. What we want is that these forms and seasons shall become a part of the lives of the children. The forms may be taught by the ordinary services of the school, and the seasons by certain special services, designed to emphasize and illustrate them. THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 93 The ordinary Service of the Sunday-school becomes not only an act of worship but a means of profitable instruction partly by the use of the Book of Tt e g^i Common Prayer in that Service, allowing Service - no service-card or leaflet to take its place ; and partly by so arranging the Service that in the following of it every scholar shall learn to "find the places." This may be accomplished by the use of some such service as this : 1. Hymn or hymns. 2. The Lord's Prayer, and versicles. 3. One psalm, or a part of a psalm, from the psalter for the day. 4. The lesson, from the Catechism. 5. A canticle, sometimes from Morning Prayer, sometimes from Evening Prayer. 6. The Creed, and versicles. 7. The collect for the day, and prayer. 8. Hymn. This is not so much of a Service as to appear to make the Sunday-school a substitute for the Church. At the same time, it is enough to give the children that familiarity with the book, which will prepare them to take an intelligent and devout part in the Church service. It is helpful, also, as a matter of instruction and reminder, to have the Sacrament of Baptism adminis- tered in the presence of the school, several times a year, and to have the children follow the service in their books. Special Services marking the seasons of Christmas and Easter are held in all Sunday-schools ; but the 94 THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. number of days thus brought happily to the attention Special f tne children may easily be extended. Services, By t h e use of the stereopticon, picture services may be held on the evenings of Epiphany, Good Friday, and Ascension Day. The service may begin with hymns and prayers, and then the appropriate pictures may follow as the Gospel story is re- told. Thus on the evening of the Epiphany, the pictures may begin with the Annunciation and go on to our Lord's visit to the Temple, when He was twelve years old. On the evening of Good Friday, the pictures may begin with the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and proceed through all the days of the Holy Week to Easter. On the evening of Ascension Day, the pictures may illustrate the miracles and parables and other events of our Lord's Ministry. Such a service is not a difficult nor an expensive matter. The rent of fifty pictures with a lantern and screen and the attendance of a man to operate them will not cost more than fifteen dollars. The pictures are the most beautiful in the world, the great paintings which men whom God has inspired have made for the Church, the treasures of galleries and cathedrals, the masterpieces of Raphael and Angelo and Da Vinci ; here they are assembled in any parish church for the delight and instruction of little children. The impressive effect of such services is very great; the children recognise and understand and appreciate and remember. The great Christian Days shine with a new light. The content of religious instruction in the Parish will be determined by the Sunday-school ; it will also THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 95 be determined by the Congregation. In every parish, the Sunday-school is systematically Instrilction instructed. The work may not be done oftheCon- 1 11 i_ L greeration- very wisely nor very well, but in some manner it is done, and what I have been saying has travelled over roads familiar to you all. It is not enough, however, to instruct the Sunday-school, there is imperative need of the systematic instruction of the Congregation. The Congregation is of course instructed it is to be hoped in every parish every Sunday, in the sermon. But the most admiring parishioner can hardly say, in many parishes, that the instruction thus given is systematic. Systematic instruction implies a reasonable and progressive and visible purpose, adding precept to precept, like Generally the building of a house, for the accomplish- tematic, ment of a certain action or conviction or the acquire- ment of a certain knowledge. It means that the ser- mon which is preached on Sunday has a logical as well as a chronological relation to the sermon which was preached a week ago. And that is a condition which is not realized of a Sunday morning in two pulpits out of fifty in all Christendom. On the Sun- day before last, 'the preacher talked about loaves and fishes ; last Sunday, his theme was the Day of Judg- ment; and here he comes with a sermon, on the doctrine of Inspiration. This is a rather haphazard fashion of dealing with so serious a matter as religion, and its results are plainly seen in an imperfectly in- structed laity. The people need systematic instruction; but they 96 THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. do not need it any more than the parson needs to give it. For his own sake, as well as for their sake, preaching ought to be supplemented by teaching. For the life of the minister is one of continual dis- traction and interruption, whereby actual study is made very difficult. To this is added the perplexity, which arises from the many-sided character of the life which the minister lives. There are twenty ways in which he may spend his day: how shall he choose ? The result of this interruption and per- plexity is that in a good many cases the Clergy need minister lets his reading go. He ceases systematic to be a student. He knows that there teaching, i 1 are great books being written, which trans- late the truths of the ages into the language of our own time, but he knows nothing about them, except what he chances to read in a Review. As for the masters of theology and the facts of history, he has, as he thinks, no time for them. Happy is he, if he continues to read even his Bible to any pur- pose. The chances are that he reads more in the Bible in the course of the services on Sunday, than he read during the whole previous week put together. It is inevitable that the ministry of such a pastor and preacher should suffer. He cannot preach well unless he himself is preached to ; and he must find his sermons in books. Under these circumstances, the conscientious minister will apply the goad of necessity. He will compel himself to read. This he will do by improving three natural occasions for such compulsion: the Confirmation Class, the Mid- week Service, and the Sunday-evening Service. He THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 97 will decide upon such subjects for these occasions, as will make it absolutely necessary for him to study in order to speak upon them; and he will make his decision so public and irrevocable, by announcement from the chancel and in type, that neither indolence nor interruption shall be able to effect his escape. Under these circumstances, for the good alike of minister and people, what shall be the content of instruction in the Confirmation Class ? Tne Confir- The Confirmation Class, it is plain, is ma tion meant not merely to prepare young persons GlasSl for Confirmation, but to make them intelligent citi- zens of the Kingdom of Heaven. The intention of the instruction, then, will be to set forth for their learning the great outlines of Religion : the things which one should believe and do in order to be a good Christian. This must be done simply and briefly; for the hearers are young and the time is short. How it may be done best, everybody must decide for himself; every minister must make his own plan. The essential thing is that there be a plan, that it be a large one, which shall make a considerable demand upon both teacher and taught, and that it be announced and maintained. Such a plan, however made, will have a certain invariable content. The order and the treatment will differ, but the things to be taught will be about the same everywhere. Every pastor will teach his people who are preparing for Content of * r . Confirmation Confirmation what Confirmation is, what is i ec tnres, implied in the Commandments, what the Creed means, what is intended in the Creed by the 98 THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. phrase ''the holy Catholic Church," how to pray, and how to come aright to the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Setting down these matters, then, in order, and making six lectures out of them, or twelve, if the conditions permit, by subdivision, we have such an exhibit of the content of Confirma- tion instruction as this: First lecture: 1. Baptism. 2. Confirmation. Second lecture: 1 . Character. 2. Commandments. Third lecture: 1. The Creed (general). 2. The Creed (particular). Fourth lecture: 1. The Church. 2. The Churchman. Fifth lecture: 1. The Lord's Prayer. 2. The Prayer-book. Sixth lecture: 1. The Holy Communion. 2. The Communion Service. The Mid-week Service is the young minister's experiment station. Here he tries his various schemes upon the saints, and finds out whether they THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 99 will work. The saints will not mind it; they come to church in the middle of the week because they are good Christians, and the young TheMid . minister's failures will not drive them away, week Ser- When, by some happy fortune, the experi- ment succeeds, some other persons will be added to the little company. And in the mean time, whether anybody else gets anything out of it or not, the young minister gets much. It is likely that after an extended series of experiments, he will settle down to a regular instruction in Holy Scripture from which he will not lightly depart. He will make the Mid- week Service his goad of necessity for the definite and genuine study of the Bible. He may so arrange the lessons as to go along with the Sunday-school, thus attracting the teachers; taking the History of the Jewish Church, with Stanley ; and the Life of our Lord, with Edersheim ; and the Apostolic Church, with Farrar; and the Messages of the Books, with Professor Sanders and Professor Kent. Or he may take certain great books, and read them :o his people, with comment; as Isaiah, interpreted by George Adam Smith. Or he may take the Biography of the Bible, and draw out the lessons taught by the lives of its men and women ; or the Geography of the Bible, for the sake of making the events and the people more distinct and alive against the background. It is plain that such a course of study, persevered in, will enrich both the preacher and his people. It will illuminate the lessons which are read in Church, so that the hearer and the reader shall find a message loo THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. from God in much which seems at present to mean nothing. It will give suggestions for new sermons, and give the congregation a new understanding and a new interest. It will make the Bible a new book, and bless the parish which comes thus into possession of it. There remains a third occasion, which the minister may employ, if he will, for the shaping of his own study and for the systematic instruction of The Sunday- * J evening the people. 1 hat is the Sunday-evening Service, Service. The Sunday-evening Service is the parson's perplexity. What shall he do with it ? He may do either one of two things : he may preach the gospel in the old way, with a text and a written sermon ; or he may preach the gospel in a new way, without a text, and with a lecture in the place of a sermon. If he chooses to abide in the old way, he will have a small congregation of exceedingly respectable people, most of whom know more about the Christian religion than he does; and his sermon will be either an old one or a rather poor new one: for it is not in human nature to go on week after week writing two good sermons. To write even one good one is for most of us a tremendous under- taking, and we miss the mark a good many times ; but two good ones is out of our reach altogether. Suppose that the preacher stops trying to do that. Suppose that at his second Sunday Service he gives up his paper and his text, and speaks in- Systematic formally, following a line of topics which plan!* he has announced to the congregation. His first purpose is interest: he wants to get a congregation. His second purpose is in- THE CONTENT OP RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION- 101 struction: he would teach himself and them. His third purpose is conviction : he would bring his hearers close to the spirit and power of Jesus Christ. Not one of these three purposes can be omitted, but they will stand thus in the order of impression. The congregation will come, because what the preacher says interests them ; they will come, because what is said instructs them ; and they will speedily discover that the interest is not for its own sake, and the in- struction is not for its own sake, but that throughout the preacher speaks, no matter what his subject be, as a man of God, having for his supreme endeavour the bringing of the lives of men into the obedience and love of God. Suppose that in this spirit there be given every year a course of instruction in the History of the Church, a series of six or eight lectures, perhaps in Lent, taking era after era, year by year. Thus: 1. The First Six Centuries. 2. The Middle Ages. 3. The Reformation on the Continent. 4. The Reformation in England. A suggested 5. The Puritan Revolution. coursei 6. The Evangelical Revival. 7. The Oxford Movement. 8. The Church in America. It is a history as full of God as the Old Testament, whose saints are as high examples as the patriarchs, whose preachers are as eloquent as the prophets, and in whose mighty movement the arm of the Lord is made as plain, as in any era of the ancient people. It ought to be made available for doctrine, for 102 THE CONTENT OP RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteous- ness. There is no end to the content of religious instruc- tion, profitable to the Sunday-evening congregation. The preacher may occupy all the chairs of the theological school in turn. He may be professor of liturgies, of Biblical literature, of Biblical theology, of systematic divinity, of ethics. And the congre- gation will grow, and the preacher will grow. Thus in the Sunday-school and in the Congrega- tion, by the Catechism, by the Bible, by the Prayer- book, and by the History of the Church, shall be attained, God helping us, the end for which all the whole content of religious instruction is intended, the upbuilding of Christian character, the training of Christian Churchmanship. V. THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND ITS COURSE OF STUDY. By the Reverend PASCAL HARROWER Chairman of the Sun- day-school Commission, Diocese of New York. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE V. The principle underlying the present Course of Lectures. Church- school. Sunday-school. Education one of the most important subjects. The object of the Church-school. What the school represents in the history of civilization. The approach to the subject on its historical side. The child the pivot of society. The Jewish estimate of childhood. Christ and the child. The early Church and its ministry to children. The mutual relations of preaching and teaching. Trumbull's Lectures. Martin Luther. Archbishop Dupanloup. The ministry of catechizing. Pedagogical training the need of the modern Ministry. The preparation of a Course of Study not a simple matter. Questions involved in it. Church- school not exclusively a Bible School. Curriculum a problem to be studied by trained educators. The Subject-matter, or Lesson Material. 1. The Church Catechism. Errors in teaching-method, not in the matter taught. 2. The Bible. The International Series of Sunday-school Lessons. The Bible crowding out the Catechism. Defects of this and similar schemes. What the Bible is and is not. President Hadley on Bible Study. Its educational value. The Bible in American colleges. Recommendations of the U. S. Bureau of Education. Moral value of the literary study of the Bible. The bearing of these on the Bible in the Church -school. The method of Jesus. 3. Nature-study in the Church-school. 4. Sacred Geography. 5. History. 6. Christian Ethics. The contemporary Christ. The first contact of youth with the world. The responsibility of the Church. Conclusion. The Church must call to her assistance those who have been trained in matters of Education. THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND ITS COURSE OF STUDY. THE principle underlying this course of lectures is that the Sunday-school, or rather let us call it, the Church-school, is an educational institution. Its problems are educational problems, its work is edu- cational, it deals with minds that lie in the educational or school period of life. What theories we may indulge in as to material and form of lessons, the arrangement and details of management, the quali- fications and work of teachers, these are subordinate to the one fact that the Church-school is a School. It is subject to the same laws as govern school work elsewhere. As these are or are not clearly appre- hended and applied, the school succeeds or fails. The question of education is one of the most im- portant that can engage our minds. The modern system is a very comprehensive one. It ~ . . A Education, covers a large number of subjects. Apart from the actual and available knowledge it gives to fit men for the various duties of their professional and business careers, there is another result that must also follow from it, before we can call it truly successful, and that is the character it produces. Something fine and strong in character must be the last test of 105 io6 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. education. Coming to the particular question of religious education, so far as that is involved in the Sunday-school, it is a question of the deepest interest whether the methods commonly in use have produced the result we have a right to expect. It should fit men for the duties of life. It should ground them firmly in certain truths, and make these part of their very character and common knowledge, before they can become a permanent factor in their lives. Now the only way by which this can be accom- plished is by school training. "There are two The Church Churches, " to use a phrase of Principal and the Salmond's, " the Church of to-day and the Church of to-morrow. ' ' For the older ones, who are bearing the burdens and doing the work of to-day, the Church provides her Sacraments and Services, but for the children, who are the Church of to-morrow, the school must do the main and im- portant work. We are not to overlook the home, and the many other sources of influence in the social environment of the child. But it still remains that education implies careful and regular instruction. The school, in whatever form it may have existed from age to age, however crude its nature, represents the effort to put the child in possession of himself and in possession of the world about him. It was there that he became part of the race, and imbibed the ideas and truths, political or social or religious, that made his manhood what it was. When we speak, therefore, of the Church-school, we are not thinking of a haphazard gathering on Sunday morn- ing, to read a few verses from the Bible, and join in THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY- 107 the somewhat confused, yet sacred, duties of the hour. We are really guilty of using- a misnomer, when we call such a gathering a " school. " It lacks definite and intelligent organization, it follows no clear method of work, its course of study is restricted and lacks both breadth of subject and progressive movement of truth, and fits nowhere into the natural development of the child. There can be, therefore, no more important work undertaken by the Church than to meet this question of religious instruction, and order it upon tlie best and surest foundation possible. I. First, let us approach our subject on its -histori- cal side. We commonly place the origin of the Sunday-school some hundred or more years The history of back. But in its essential relation to the the Church- child, it is in reality as ancient as religion. From the beginnings of human life, the child has been the pivot on which history and institutions and religion swung. It is important to keep this in mind because it determines largely the significance of the School in the economy of the Church. If it be something irrelevant to the Church, something merely annexed to it, a rather questionable and per- haps impertinent intrusion upon its life, then we may dismiss it, with its disorganized mass of ill-trained and misdirected effort, as something that has no claim upon our respect. On the contrary, no department of modern Church work has the authority of a more venerable tradition. Without dwelling upon ancient Jewish history, we need go no further than to refer to that profound inter- io8 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL-ITS COURSE OF STUDY. est in childhood which underlay the whole structure The Jewish of Jewish civilization. Coming down to the estimate of age of Jesus, we find that the religious in- struction of children commanded the most serious interest. Every synagogue had attached to it one of these schools. Later on, in the various provinces, and wherever Jewish colonies were estab- lished, schoolmasters were appointed, who should take charge of all boys from six or seven years of age. These schools were one of the most impressive features of their national life. They were regarded as fundamental to the very perpetuation of the race. We are living in an age, happily, when child-study is coming to the front in all systems of teaching. But we cannot overlook the fact that the Jewish people based their whole structure of life upon the child and his teaching. And this w r ork was also based upon a love for the child of the deepest and most beautiful character. Child-life was holy to Jewish thought. When our Lord, speaking of chil- dren, said : " Their angels do always behold the face of My Father which is in Heaven, " He was ex- pressing the true Jewish estimate of childhood. As Christianity passed out on its mission, it carried this noble estimate of childhood, enriched with the Childhood in P ecu li ai *ly strong and tender authority of the Early the Holy Childhood. There are forces stronger than laws. It would have required a wrench, more violent than we can easily express, for the Christian Church to have broken with this old thought of the child. This it is that explains the pervading presence of childhood through the New THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. 109 Testament. Everywhere we meet it. We are never left long without the sound of the children. They move ever through the story of the Apostolic Age with the benediction of the Christ-Child upon them. The early Church, true to this instinct, went at once to the childhood of the Empire. She gathered them, in every possible way, into her schools. One of the charges made by Celsus against Origen was that Christians carried on their most powerful and insidious propaganda, through the children whom they lured into their schools. Origen allowed the charge, but claimed that the teachings of Christianity were directly favourable to the child's welfare and would promote reverence for, and service of, parents. The early Church "made the school the connecting link between herself and the world." When the Emperor Julian ' ' determined to take the control of education into the hands of the state," he declared that unless he could arrest the movement of the Church in the school, the progress and triumph of Christianity were inevitable. In his " Yale Lectures on the Sunday-school, ' ' to which I am here Trumbull's glad to make my deep acknowledgment, "YaleLec- Dr. Trumbull has carefully traced the his- Stmday- tory and progress of this great educational school> " work, a work which only reveals its larger dignity and importance as we come thus into the fuller knowledge of its facts. We are accustomed to attach special importance to the work of preaching in the propagation of the Christian faith. But while allowing the fullest recog- nition of its value and place in the Church, it remains no THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL-ITS COURSE OF STUDY. S true that the woof and web of Christian character and faith are wrought out during the school and teach- period of life. Ideas cannot become the mgi permanent possession of the world, which do not first enter through the door of childhood. When Luther had brought about the Reformation in Germany, he at once saw the necessity of the Church- school. " Young children and scholars are the seed and source of the Church," was the way he echoed the familiar proverbs of the old Rabbis. But Luther took St. Paul's position, and claimed that aptness to teach was a pre-requisite for the work of the ministry. ''I would," said he, St Ut p e a r ui nd " that nobod y should be chosen as a minister, if he were not before this a school- master. ' ' So deeply did he estimate the need of this that he followed up his work of preaching with the publication of two catechisms which he prepared for the instruction of children. Let me also call attention to the movement in France, within our own century, led by Dupanloup, the illustrious Archbishop of Orleans. He Dupanloup tells us how France had suffered from the cat d ecMsfs r , eat decay of faith in the last century, and how, in his own diocese, he had found the clergy not only indifferent themselves, but also totally in- * capable of teaching their children. To meet this he instituted conferences, and began his great pedagogi- cal work of training them in the art of catechizing. The hope of France lay in the catechism, the school- ing of the children, and he cited with eloquent words the example and work of those great catechists of THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY, in the Church who had devoted themselves to the per- sonal instruction of the young: such men as St. Charles Borromeo, who instituted the Confraternity of Christian Teaching in Milan, of the illustrious Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, who in his old age held the catechism for children in the Church of St. Paul at Lyon ; of Abbe Fenelon and Bossuet, and Borderies, Bishop of Versailles, who began his work as a catechist of the Church of the Madeleine. The significance of these facts is most important. In nothing is the Ministry of the Church so poorly equipped as for this work of religious in- struction. The function of the preacher is Ministry in important, but the function of the teacher Represent is of even deeper importance. The Church does not prepare her clergy for this work, and yet in theory she makes them primarily responsible for it. Yet nothing would so richly enhance the power of the Christian pulpit, and deepen the influence of the Ministry, as the thorough training in the art of teach- ing to which Luther referred, and which the very conditions of the present age so imperatively demand. Until this has been done, and the Church grasps the importance of the pedagogical training of her minis- try, we cannot expect her to give her children that religious training, which alone can secure her proper influence upon the life of the nation. II. The preparation of a course of study for the Church-school would at first seem to be a very simple matter. It depends primarily, of course, upon the study-material appropriate to such a school. If H2 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. it is first and only a Bible School, then it can admit only the Bible into its curriculum. Its Questions lessons will be taken from the Bible, and involved in . a curriculum, all things will converge upon that text- book. Even in this case, there must be exercised the highest possible wisdom to arrange and edit the subject-matter of instruction in accord- ance with approved educational principles. But the Church School is something more than a Bible- school. It is a school of Christian knowledge, and must gather into its course of study more than the content of the Bible. So far as may be, this course must give to childhood and youth the largest possi- ble knowledge of the principles of religion. What religion is, what it has done for man, what it proposes to do, all the naturalness and truth of it, how it fits into the young heart of life, how all its wonderful experiences lie wrapped up in the soul and mind of the child, this is what a man should learn in the school days of his life. Now the arrangement oi the subjects involved in such a curriculum as this is no slight task. It will certainly require as careful consideration, a problem as broad and thorough knowledge of the for trained child, as are involved in the matter of educators, secular education. We are not to consider such a question already settled by past experience. Nothing could more fairly command the attention and study of our wisest educators. And it cannot be expected that the Church can properly solve this question until she has called to her aid those who are qualified experts in matters of education. THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. 113 Let me now ask you to consider the subject-matter of such a religious education as the Church should give her children. We are not now speaking of the arrangement of these subjects in curriculum. That is a matter that must follow the selection of subjects to be taught. I. If we start at the point of view of the Church, as expressed in her Baptismal formula, we shall con- sider the child as from that moment the declared member of a divine family. That catecWm! 1 family is based upon certain truths. It has a certain history in the past, a certain life with its traditions, its usages and customs and ideals. It is a family, with its laws of fellowship, with an im- memorial faith that has been from age to age wrought into clearer shape and structure through the experi- ences of innumerable souls. The ground of this faith is unchangeable, its perpetuation is assured, because it represents in the last analysis of its principles the essential experience of man as man. This is the fact that determines the place which the Church Catechism occupies in the training of the child. If we read it, with this in mind, we shall find its value unique. It is most guardedly free from the subtleties of definition. It give us statements of truth in the form of statements of fact. It has a statuesque simplicity. It sets forth the truths of religion in figure, so to speak, as things seen and tangible to the senses, rather than as speculations of the mind. There have been many grave errors committed in teaching the catechism, and often no doubt the child has acquired nothing beyond a parrot-like repetition 114 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL-ITS COURSE OF STUDY. of words. Yet on the other hand, this result lies rather in the method of teaching than in the matter taught. A certain little lad had been taught to define the mystery of the Trinity, and had in vain cudgelled his brain with the strangely meaningless words. One day in the country he was watching the men stowing hay in the barn-loft. Suddenly he saw three doors opening here and there into the huge black interior, each separate, yet each a door opening into the one great structure. It is needless to say that the boy had solved to his own satisfaction the doctrine of the Trinity. He had found his own point of view, and the truth had at last swung into his vision. Bishop Brooks once said to the students of Yale University in his ' * Lectures on Preaching ' ' that there was no truth too great and deep for Bishop Brooks on them to preach, if they would only preach Preaching. it That is the Divine art of the teacher also, the art of getting truth within view of the child, finding, as Mr. Patterson Du Bois tells us, the point of contact where the child and the truth touch each other. We need not fear to teach Christian doctrine, if we only teach it. 2. Again, such a course of study must teach the Bible. But let us distinguish carefully between the Bible as a wonderful library, gathered The Bible, through many centuries, with its epics and histories, its dramas and poems, its proverbs, idyls, and stories, carrying us onward through the eventful life of a great race, between this and the Bible as a text-book. I would not speak a word in dis- THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL-ITS COURSE OF STUDY- 115 paragement of the very remarkable work, done dur- ing the last thirty years in the interest of Tlle Inter the International or Uniform Series of national Sunday-school Lessons. He would indeed be ignorant of the facts, who should deny that that series of lessons has rendered great service in the cause of religion. It has called attention to the Bible as never before. "It has," to use the words of Dr. Vincent, whose name commands the reverence of all who would serve the childhood of the Church, "it has driven teachers to the study of educational principles and examples; it has led to general schemes and outlines of Bible study; has increased the intellectual power of plain men in the Church ; has led young and scholarly men to appreciate the higher intellectual standards, and has tended to connect Biblical and scientific study. The one great Text-book has thus increased the power, the teach- ing power of our Sunday-schools. ' ' Such a testimony from such a source is not lightly to be dismissed. "But," and we quote again, "it is possible" that enthusiasm in such a scheme as the Inter- _, _., Ine i5i ble national may have to some extent crowded excluding back some exercises which hitherto found Catechism - large place in the Sunday-school. So much regular Bible study may have had this effect. The historical method of studying history may have left too little time for verbal memorizing. The Bible may have taken the place of the Catechism." * It is sufficiently clear from these words that the *"The Modern Sunday-school," pp. 252-3. The Rev. John H. Vincent, D.D. n6 THB SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. methods of Bible study so commonly followed in Sunday-schools during the past generation have not proved altogether wise or successful. The Bible is not a book to be used in this way. It does not lend itself to the principles of the uniform lesson. Lessons favourable to the adult student are not necessarily useful for the child. There is no known law of education, by which a series of lessons can be selected from the Book of Psalms, or the Prophecies of Isaiah or Jeremiah, which can be equally useful in all grades of a Church-school. The Bible is a vast storehouse of historic and literary and spiritual wealth. It has something of What the ^ iat m fi n i te variety that meets us in Nature. Bible is, It is pre-eminently a book created out of human life. It reflects everywhere this life, with its ceaseless change, its exhaustless variety of experi- ence, its deep undertones of mystery and sorrow, the tragedies and sins and toils of men, the play and interplay of souls, the sweep of empires, the rise and growth and fall of nations. Such a Book cannot be measured off and divided by hard-and-fast rules into uniform lessons, without two results : first, a faulty and forced interpretation of its selected passages, and second, a superficial and unworthy conception of the Book as a whole. Yet, on the other hand, we cannot teach religion without the Bible, just as we cannot teach music without the works of the great masters. Speaking of the value of the Classics in secular education, President Hadley of Yale University has recently pointed out the fact that their moral value TH SUNDAY-SCHOOL-ITS COURSE OF STUDY. U7 lies in the remoteness of the standards which they set before the student. They lift before the President modern age standards which are not affect- Hadley on ed by the shifting ideas and standards of the present. * ' The morality which ripens in such a soil may be fantastic; but it is powerful, it is dis- interested, and it leads the boys outside of themselves, . . . and nothing in secular education has been found to take the place of this classical background as a means of stimulating the growth of such a spirit. ' ' And then he adds these words: "The Bible is in many ways like the Classics, in possessing this sort of moral influence npon those who study it; and in some respects, of course, it far exceeds them in the intensity of its workings. Now right here is the point I desire to emphasize, that such a conception of the Bible recognises its singular and wonderful value to education Educational as education. It has too generally been value of ,'', i the Bible, considered a .Book whose proper use lay in its presenting a certain raw material for the con- struction of theological systems. Men have claimed for its widely separated writings an artificial unity, which has been the creation of their imagination, rather than the note of its own inner life. The Bible is not to be so treated. It is not a storehouse of texts, which one uses by means of concordance and reference words to create altogether fantastic systems of belief. Rather, the Bible is so entirely the Book of Religion, that we cannot get its true meaning unless we study it book by book, and, if I may say so, set aside largely the sort of study of it which has been nS THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. so common in the past, and which must prove largely inadequate to the deeper knowledge of it as the Book of Religion. There is a unity in it deeper than that of separated texts, a unity of spirit and soul, the unity of a great race, finding through a thou- sand years and more the ever-deepening knowledge of itself and its God. At this point, allow me to call attention to the suggestions made by the United States Bureau of United States Education, for the study of the Bible in Bureau of American colleges. In reviewing the general situation, the report observes that 1 l the history and literature of the Hebrews and the Jews may and should be studied as other history and literature are studied. The peculiar religious element need not be dealt with, and modern sectarianism is not found in the Bible. Such a large and influential portion of universal history and literature should not be ignored or left to chance instruction." The following are some of the suggestions made : Suggestions ' ' * ' TllC aim should be some B i ble for Bible work in every college in the country, state institutions included. " 2. Bible study should be conducted in the best modern way, with the use of the best books, and with the most skilful teachers obtainable. It is im- portant that the colleges understand that modern methods and radical higher criticism are not synony- mous. "3. The college Bible course should be so free from avowed and direct devotional aims that the teacher can demand as thorough work as in any THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL-ITS COURSE OP STUDY. 119 college course. Bible study will then take its place as a worthy part of the college curriculum. "4. The assignment of the systematic curriculum work to a trained specialist should not and will not in- terfere with extra-curriculum devotional Bible classes. "5. It would seem a natural outcome of the care- ful differentiation of devotional study of the Bible from the curriculum study, which has been recom- mended above, that an important objection to the requirement of Bible study from college students dis- appears, viz., that it interferes with the sovereign rights of an American. It seems that a boy reaches the age of consent earlier in religious matters than in intellectual. Horace's Odes and Greek philosophy, but not the Psalms or the teaching of Jesus, may be required studies for him. ' 'On the other hand, the absence of the strictly devotional element would for many destroy the chief argument for making Bible study required. It would seem, however, that moral and religious profit from the study of the Bible does not disappear with the disappearance of the immediately devotional ele- ment; that Bible truth, presented without appeal or invitation, presented as judicially as possible; that the facts of the Bible, recited as the facts of profane history are recited ; that the ethics of the Bible, studied as any other subject is studied Moral value of literary (and no conscientious scruples, however Bible study abnormally developed, can stand in the way of such treatment), ought to form in the end as potent an influence over thoughtful men and women as could be demanded. 120 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL- ITS COURSE OF STUDY. "6. It is a sad commentary on former methods that the phrase prohibiting teaching which is * sec- tarian in religion ' should be quoted as forbidding Bible study. Doubtless the legal difficulties differ in the various states. It may be that the time has not yet come when it would be fitting to press the claims of formal Bible study upon certain state institutions. Meantime, there is an abundant oppor- tunity, with rare, if any, exceptions, to include Hebrew history in ancient history, Biblical master- pieces of literature in literary courses, Biblical ethics in general ethics, until, in entire conformity to law, the students are put in possession of a fair knowledge of Bible facts. " The suggestions are of the greatest value and sig- nificance. They point to a new and deeper use of the Bible in schemes of religious as well important as secular education. We shall use it as to Church- literature a divine and inspired literature, schools i it is true, but still a literature. We shall use it with such naturalness and freedom, with such intellectual and spiritual earnestness, with such fresh- ness of thought and feeling, that it will become to the childhood of the world a living and human book. We shall do much to take from it the stamp and atmosphere of unreal devotionalism by getting back into the Book itself. This was indeed the method of Jesus. You will recall His mode of dealing with the Pharisees when Method of He replied to them after this manner: Jesus, < < You know within your hearts the truth of which I speak. But instead of following this inner THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. 121 voice you allow a literal and narrow traditionalism to dethrone your reason, your own sense of eternal things." It is for us to-day to learn this higher method, to use it and trust it. The child who is taught the story of Jonah, for example, in a narrow and unsympathetic spirit may give up his faith with Jonah. On the other hand the child who is taught that the faith of the soul rests on that which lies behind Jonah, discovers that the prophet to Nineveh was a man face to face with conscience, and not merely the hero of what to the growing lad seems an impossible and unreal adventure. True religious education must put the child in possession of the Bible, in such a sense and so far as to make it touch his life in the simple realities of his growing experi- ence. God, Who gave Himself to the boy Samuel, must through our ministry give Himself to the children of our present age. 3. Once more, the Church must draw the child close up to God as revealed in His works. Have we ever stopped to notice how saturated u a ture- the Bible is with nature ? Why, it begins 8tud y- in a Garden, and its last chapter sets the Heavenly city in the midst of trees and meadow-lands, and through it flows ' * the river of water of Life clear as crystal." Everywhere, God touches man through the earth, this outward life of flower and star and mountain and storm. With this in mind, it is sugges- tive to note how ordinary methods of teaching reli- gion have used nature as a kind of outside illustration and adornment of truth, rather than as something out of whose very life itself flow the truths of the spiritual 122 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL-ITS COURSE OF STUDY. world. There is a vast difference between Nature- study, as a concrete element in religious teaching, and telling stories about flowers and birds. When Jesus close J esus ^o\d men to consider carefully the to the heart lily, how it grows, He was telling them of Nature, ^ they wQuld find m .^ unfolding Hfe something to fill their own life with richer sacredness and power. Not some growth meaningless to their life, but rather a growth into its own wondrous beauty by the eternal life of God working within it, as it worked in their own souls. 4. Without dwelling at too great length on the various subjects connected with Religious Instruction, Geography let me briefly suggest some of them in ChSch- addition. The history of the world is a school, history of changes in the map of the \vorld. I think we have all been impressed with the general ignorance of young people in all questions of Sacred Geography as compared with their knowledge of what may be termed, for the sake of distinction, Secular Geography. Yet it is unquestionable that no really clear knowledge of the religious history of Christianity can be had unless it embraces some measure of geographical knowledge. Why so ? Because Bibli- cal Geography furnishes a concrete introduction to the life and teachings of the Bible. It brings the past into close and vital relations with the present. It should therefore be made a definite department in our Sunday-school curriculum. For this purpose we need reliable and scientific text-books, with the best maps available. Geography should be studied progressively and thoroughly, not impersonally, but THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. 123 always from the point of view of its relation to man. It is not an end in itself, as merely so much knowl- edge, but only an indispensable aid to the full under- standing of the message of God, revealed through and to mankind. 5. Once more, the Church School must make far more of History than is commonly done. At present there seems to be no adequate attempt to give young people such definite knowledge. ^! ace of The Christian of to-day is in danger of finding himself, as it were, suspended in air, with no firm standing in historic facts. Between the times of the Apostles and our own age there is a vast history, of which the average Christian is almost absolutely ignorant. It may be stated, and, I fear, without much danger of question, that with the exception of two or three names and events, even the scholars in our Bible Classes have very little con- ception of those great historic movements that have made the modern world what it is. Yet the Faith of to-day is rooted in this great corporate life of the world, and the works of Christ, the Gesta Christi, as the late Charles Brace so happily put it, have filled the past nineteen centuries with events which are marvellous in their power to strengthen the hold of Christ upon modern life and thought. It is interest- ing and important in this connection to notice that this conviction of the value of history in The .< Fr the religious instruction of the young has Church " led to the preparation in Scotland, under Text - books - the editorship of Principal Salmond, of extremely fine Manuals of Church History, written for the Free 124 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. Church Sunday-schools, and that the Oxford Church Text-books, for a similar use, are now Manual^ in course of publication in England. The range of subjects covered in these manuals is very great, embracing not only history, but re- ligious doctrine and worship, and the study of New Testament ethics as applied to modern life. 6. It is beyond question important to interpret present-day life in the terms of Christian truth. The Christian ancient Jewish Church was contemporary Ethics. with the life of the race at every point. The singular charm and power of the Bible is that it is vital at every point with the experience of the age, in which its saints and its sinners lived. The secret of power in Christianity must be the same. Christ must be contemporary with the twentieth cen- tury or He will become an obsolete factor in the growing life of humanity. God reveals Himself to- day whether the day be that of Moses or Isaiah, of St. Paul or Luther, or of Lincoln and Gladstone, of Maurice and Beecher and Newman. God is the God of those now living, even as He was in their own day the God of the dead. Therefore the instruction of our youth must be abreast of the present problems which they are to face. Talk with any thoughtful man of business, and he will tell you that what he needs is to feel the The business strength of a powerful moral force im- woria, mediately identified with his daily work.. He will confess that his perpetual danger lies in the ease with which this present life, with its glamour, its almost brutal frankness, and its insidious yet THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY- 125 tyrannous demands, confronts him. The laws of ethics, their ideal statements and standards must enter man's life in its youth. There comes a time in this period of adolescence, when the youth is already passing out to the work of the world, going into offices, taking his first lessons in business, looking through and periences within to the inner structure of the business of y uth - world. The Church has a right to assume that the boy shall begin to study the moral problems that now confront him. It is a period when he finds himself drifting out from the influences of the Church. He is trying to adjust himself to the world as he sees it, and he feels far more keenly than we often realize the break between the ideals and the ignorances of childhood and the first rough disillusioning of early manhood. The Church must include Ethics in the religious instruction of her youth, if she would send them out properly equipped to meet the dangerous sophistries of the world. The boy must carry within himself a moral antidote to the temptations of his own manhood. 7. I have not dwelt upon the important part which the Prayer-book and the Christian Year must play in any scheme of religious education. The Prayer- Some one has said that if the Christian Year, 5, k and the ' Christian with its cycle of Holy Days and Seasons, Tear, had been the invention of any one man, he would have established his claim upon the perpetual gratitude and veneration of the world. This is none too high an estimate. The Prayer-book is probably the most remarkable Book of Worship Christianity has pro- 126 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. duced, and is also its finest statement of faith. These subjects are to be taught and taught thoroughly. And by their use in Worship, by their continual pres- ence and influence in daily life, they become imbedded in the memory and affections forever. Their educa- tional value is beyond estimate. They create their own atmosphere, provide their inconceivably rich associations and traditions, and must be a constituent element in the educational work of the Church. III. In conclusion let me go back to the point from which we started out: the Church-school is a school, and must do its work in accordance with the principles of education as applied elsewhere. This must be the position, from which any real advance is to be made. Further, we must bear in mind that, whatever success the Sunday-school has had in the past, has been gained more in spite of the faulty methods generally used than in accordance with correct methods. The time has come Demand for new when the wide-spread dissatisfaction with methods. past met hods calls for an earnest effort to correct them. There are many difficulties in the way of accomplishing this result. But the Church certainly has upon her side in this great task the interest, the experience, the costly skill, and rich devotion, of the leading educators of the age. This work is one that demands more of expert and " highly trained intelligence, than at present Church needs can be found within the Ministry of the cl d tol edT1 " Church. As in the creation of her cathe- drals, she calls to her aid those who have been trained as architects and builders, and in THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL ITS COURSE OF STUDY. 127 her worship those, whom God has inspired with the gifts of music and song; so in the education of her children, the Church may well command the service of those whose lives have been consecrated to the Ministry of Education, and whose minds have been inspired with that gift of God's Spirit, by which they are called to rightly divide the words of know- ledge and truth. Indeed it is by so doing that the Church will prove herself faithful to that most sacred trust of guiding the youth of the world into the truth and knowledge of God. VI. THE PREPARATION OF THE SUNDAY- SCHOOL TEACHER. By DR. WALTER L. HERVEY, Examiner, New York Board of Education; Former President, Teachers College. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE VI. Primary assumptions. Three Problems: (a) Subject-matter, (8) Pupil, (c) Teacher. The Subject-matter, two ways of treating it. The Poet's Way. Power of Dramatic Imagination. Its use in the Bible work. Illustrated by S. Peter and S. Paul at Beautiful Gate of Temple. Also by the " Story of Cadmus." Applied to Bible Teaching. The Philosopher's Way. Illustrations of its use. Danger of Wrong Interpretations illustrated. Important to find precise meaning of each paragraph. Directions for the Study of any Subject-matter. Knowledge and the Pupil. Catechism compared with Bible. The Pupil. General Principle in his treatment by teacher. Illustrations of its use. Special Rule from General Principle. Additional Points of Insight needed by teacher. Illustrated by Hamlet and Guildenstern. The Teacher Himself. External and Internal Authority. Help the Pupil to find the Truth himself. Proper Place of the Bible. Jesus Christ in the Child-life. General Negations. THE PREPARATION OF THE SUNDAY- SCHOOL TEACHER. IN attacking this problem of the preparation of the Sunday-school teacher, I shall assume that the Sunday-school teacher, who has read the p r i ma ry chapters that precede this, understands assumptions, pretty clearly what he is preparing for ; and I shall further assume that we are in substantial agreement that religious teaching is not a matter of form, or of convention, the teaching of certain things which it were a shame not to know, and that it is not primarily a matter of knowledge, but is an affair of" life: that religious teaching has to do primarily with the normal life and growth of spiritual beings, and that its end and aim is to raise up a generation of well-nourished and normally growing children who have keen interests and true tastes, ' ' who love and hate aright, ' ' and who know what they know in the right way. ' In pursuit of this aim it is necessary that Three prob- every teacher should grapple with three lemstobe problems: the problem of the subject- subject- matter of instruction, the problem of the ^"^'.j 11 ' pupils to be instructed, and the problem of m, The himself and his conception of the truth. 131 132 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. I. The teacher's mastery of his subject of what does it consist ? What must the teacher have done, I The sub- or ^ e a l e to do, before it can be said of ject-matter, him, < ' He is master of that which he would teach " ? In other words, How must a Sunday-school teacher know his Sunday-school lesson in order to teach it ? There are two chief ways of JfTealnTg, g ras P in an 7 truth : one we ma 7 cal1 the way of the poet, and the other the way of the philosopher. I should say that the teacher must have both. By the ' * way of the poet ' ' I mean the power to create, to put life into persons and things. And I have in mind that dramatic imagination which enables Kipling to find the soul of an engine or a ship; which makes him able to look on the world (a) The through a horse's eyes, talk horse-talk, poet's way, even the horse-slang of the back pasture and make the horse that played polo say : ' * My hock is swelled as big as a nose-bag. ' ' Ernest Seton-Thompson's stories of Vixen, Rag, and Wahb are in this respect not less truly dramatic than Browning's "Ring and the Book," for in both the author identifies himself with the life which he de- picts, and touches the springs of that life-. This dramatic imagination the teacher must have. For how can the teacher depict so vividly that those Power of w ^ ^ ear seem a ^ so to see > if ne have not dramatic the vision himself ? How can he read with such expression that the words make pictures in the minds of those who listen, unless in his own mind there lives the image he would create THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 133 for another ? The teacher, like the poet, is a maker ; he is a creator ; it is his office to take material from the Catechism, from the Bible, from Nature, from human experience, that but for him might be with- out form and void, and make it live. In preparing to teach, or to tell a Bible story, therefore, the first thing a teacher should do is to put himself into the place of the chief char- acter, and then to put himself into the place t Je Bible. of each of the other characters in turn. He must think what the past of each has been ; he must stock his own mind with the memories they must have had ; he must think what is their present out- look on life, and their hopes and fears for the future. Let us take, for example, the story of Peter and John's affair with the elders, as told in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. Peter and John had healed a lame man at the fjt. Petwand Beautiful Gate of the Temple, and had then St. John in the Temple, preached to the crowds of people that ran together unto them ' ' in the porch that is called Solo- mon's, greatly wondering " ; and then, as the narra- tive tells, ' ' As they spake unto the people, the priests and the captain of the Temple and the Sadducees came upon them, being sore troubled because they taught the people, and proclaimed through Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they laid hands on them, and put them in ward unto the morrow ; for it was now eventide. But many of them that heard the word believed ; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand. And it came to pass on the morrow, that their rulers and elders and scribes 134 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. were gathered together in Jerusalem ; and Annas the high priest was there, and Caiaphas, and John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest. And when they had set them in the midst they inquired, By what power, or in what name, have ye done this ? ' ' Then follows the story of Peter's brave and telling reply, and the complete discomfiture of the great men who would have been glad to do away with them, as they had with their Master some three months before, but that they feared the people. The narrative is a very brief and plain one. Those modern aids to emotion, and devices for depriving men of the necessity of thinking for themselves, are conspicuous by their absence. There are no head- lines to make you feel, and no editorials to keep you from thinking. Nothing is easier than to read the words of this story, and to miss the points of the situation. I do not say that boys and girls ought to be expected to put themselves wholly at the point of view of Peter and John ; but that they can to some extent, and to a greater extent than they sometimes do. Their difficulty is not wholly due to the fact that the passage is set for Sunday reading and study, though I think it more than likely that its unreality is enhanced by the fact that the passage comes out of the Bible and is read on Sunday. I do not believe that Sunday is quite so real as other days, or the Bible quite so real as other books, though I firmly believe in fact I know that both can be made so. The wise teacher, therefore, in preparing a lesson THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 13$ on Peter and John, will not deceive himself. He will be fully conscious that boys and girls have, under certain circumstances, a char- acteristic way of dealing with words, a way which is not wholly peculiar to boys and girls either. Words, coming through the ear and seeking admis- sion to the mind, they receive with outward sem- blance of hospitality, show them to a back room, remote from the living-room, and keep them there, with no warmth except that which they may supply to one another, and no food except what they may have brought with them. When the words are wanted by the teacher they are, or may be, pro- duced, in about the same state of preservation as when they were stored. Such words as Annas, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, in the passage be- fore us, are especially liable to be put into cold storage in this way ; abstract terms also, and anything that is not understood, or made real, or at least felt. How shall this sort of burial alive be avoided ? How may the teacher make sure that the words of the story shall be taken into the living-room where they may make friends with the family and the favoured guests already there, and become part of the life of the little community gathered round the hearthstone ? The answer is : The teacher may make words live for his pupils by first of all making them live for himself. For who were Peter and John ? They were just poor fishermen, and for some time back they had not been even fishermen. They spoke in such a way that educated people could tell at once that they were 136 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. "unlearned and ignorant men." Moreover, it was only about three months ago that these Making words men had fled for their lives for fear of these hve> same gentlemen who had seized them and locked them up the day before. And who were these gentlemen ? Why, they were men in authority in the Church, they were among the most important and powerful people in the city. They had had people put to death before now for disagreeing with them. The social and official distance between Peter and John and Annas and Caiaphas was as great as if two Italian chestnut-venders should be haled before the presence of His Honour the Mayor, and the Corporation Counsel, and the Controller, and His Honour the Mayor's brother; and the courage dis- played by these fishermen in * * talking right up to " the high priest was certainly not less than might be shown by the poor Italians if, in that dread presence, they spoke brave words in their defence. For Peter courageously struck out from the shoulder and accused these men of having crucified Jesus by whose power the miracle of healing was done ; and they actually cowed their questioners, so that all they did was to threaten them if they ever did such a thing again. And so, when Peter and John said that if it came to a choice between obeying God and obeying them, they would easily know which to do, these great men could do nothing but impotently threaten them some more, and let them go. And what were the feelings of these people ? What, for example, were the feelings of the man who had been lame for forty years, and a beggar for THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 137 almost as long, as he looked on Peter and John ex- pecting an alms, as he heard one of them say ' * Silver and gold have I none " ? as Put yourself he heard ' ' but such as I have give I thee ' ' ? laC6i as he found that he could walk ? as he went to his home and back again to the Temple the next day, not to beg, but to praise God ? These feelings are worth entering into, they can be entered into, and they should be entered into by the teacher preparing the lesson. So also into the inner life of each of the other actors in the drama in turn the teacher should enter: the group around the high priest, their discomfiture, and their schemes for accomplishing later what they had been baffled in now ; and Peter and John with their fearless courage when under fire, and their jubilant rejoicing with their friends after it was all over. I even think that the teacher, who wished to establish perfect rapport with the situation, might imagine and construct the accounts of the affair that might have appeared in the public prints of the day, assuming that there were such things as public prints, the account appearing in the official paper of the established Church, that in the Christian's paper, that in the secular paper, with titles and headlines as real as life. He should, in a word, make the story live in his own mind, not only by transporting himself to antiquity, but also by translating the story into terms of modern life, though there are grave dangers in this, of which I shall speak later on. And now, lest by my crude illustration I deter any from attempting to carry out the principle I advocate, 138 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. allow me to cite a classic instance from the hand of A further a master. First I will read an incident illustration, f rO m the story of Cadmus, as it appears in Bullfinch's " Age of Fable," and in Addison's trans- lation of Ovid, and then alongside of these I will place the version in Hawthorne's Second Wonder Book, beginning at the point where Cadmus has sown the dragon's teeth. "Scarce had he done so," says the Bullfinch story, "when the clods began to move, and the points of spears to appear above the surface. Next helmets with their nodding plumes came up, and next the shoulders and breasts and limbs of men with weapons, and in time a harvest of armed warriors. ' ' Here is Addison: " He sows the teeth at Pallas's command, And flings the future people from his hand ; The clods grow warm, and crumble where he sows, And now the pointed spears advance in rows ; Now nodding plumes appear, and shining crests, Now the broad shoulders and the rising breasts ; O'er all the field the breathing harvest swarms, A growing host, a crop of men and arms." Succinct and fairly vivid recitals both. Now for Hawthorne : "The sun was shining slantwise over the field, and showed all the moist, dark soil, just like any other newly planted piece of ground. All at once Cadmus fancied he saw something glisten very brightly, first at one spot, then at another, and then at a hundred and a thousand spots together. Soon he perceived them to be the steel heads of spears, THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 139 sprouting up everywhere like so many stalks of grain, and continually growing taller and taller. Next appeared a vast number of bright sword-blades, thrusting themselves up in the same way. A moment afterwards the whole surface of the ground was broken by a multitude of polished brass helmets, coming up like a crop of enormous beans. So rapidly did they grow that Cadmus now discerned the fierce countenance of a man beneath every one; in short, before he had time to think what a wonder- ful affair it was, he beheld an abundant harvest of what looked like human beings, armed with helmets and breastplates, shields, swords, and spears; and before they were well out of the earth, they brandished their weapons, and clashed them one against another, seeming to think, little while as they had yet lived, that they had wasted too much of life without a battle. Every tooth of the dragon had produced one of these sons of deadly mischief. Up sprouted, also, a great many trumpeters " But I must leave you to imagine how the author has, by the use of mere words, made us hear the tremendous and ear-shattering blasts of martial music, just as he has made us see, with our own eyes, as he certainly must have seen with his, the sprouting of this crop of men ; for if he had not been an eye-witness of the scene, how could he tell us later on "how the earth out of which they had so lately grown was incrusted here and there on their bright breastplates, and even begrimed their faces ; just as you may have seen it clinging to beets and carrots when pulled out of their native soil " ? 14 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. From the Bullfinch accouht you gather that the warlike crop came up, but frobi the- Hawthorne story you learn that they grew, and you feel that you must have seen them growing yourself. The latter story has sound, colour, atmosphere, movement, life. Once heard it is a thing to live in the imagination for ever. And now let me make an important qualification. Nowhere is good taste and a certain reserve more requisite than in such appeals to the imagination as these I advocate. The typical negro sermon is a Application warning against excess and offence against to teaching, taste. Moreover, the bow of Hawthorne is not for every one's stretching. But every teacher can prepare himself by exercising his own imagination, however much he may be constrained to refrain from elaborate attempts at expanding before the class. The essential thing is that the teacher make the sub- ject live in his own mind. If he has done that, he will find little by little that his very inflections and tone and gestures show that something is behind them. He will find the imagery creeping into his speech, and will see the answering light coming in his pupil's eyes, and in the strength of that assurance he may venture farther flights until he finds that he too is a member of the guild of those who can make the " eyes see pictures when they're shut." But the poet's way must needs be followed up by the way of the philosopher, by which I mean that the teacher in preparing his lesson should philosopher's make a desperate effort to find out what it wa ^' means. For if metaphysics, as Professor James has said, ' ' is only an unusually stubborn effort THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 141 to think clearly, ' ' a philosopher is only a man who tries to penetrate the disguise of things and find out what they really are. Every man you meet on the street, every character you run across in a book, every story, every parable, has a meaning more or less definite and precise, more or less susceptible of being expressed. It is the teacher's business to form for himself as clear a notion as. he can of that meaning, to express it in his own words, or find other words in which to express it better. I am speaking for myself and I may be speaking for others when I say that effort is required to search out the true meaning of a man or a book, and that that effort is sometimes so great that it does not come natural to make it. We all of us take our judgments at second hand once in a while, some ot us most of the time ; and it is a rare and precious thing to meet one of those balanced and judging minds that are bent on giving every one his absolute due, in spite of prejudice and in spite of custom. Have you ever figured out for yourselves the pre- cise meaning, to yourselves at least, of the Book of Jonah, or tried to view the characters of Jacob and of David as wholes, or studied the parables of our Lord with intent to see the prin- ciple of which each was the illustration ? This sort of thing the teacher must do, for if he fail here he may find himself teaching particulars unillumined by the rays of universal truth, and hence inapplicable to your case or mine. For if we do not know the meaning of a fact, how can we use it ? Not only is a meaning an illuminator, throwing light on blind 142 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. facts and showing their applicability; it is also a bond, binding together individuals that are useless alone. Professor Moulton in his book of Bible Stories from the New Testament has grouped his material, and given telling names to the groups. For exam- ple, under the heading, ' * A Specimen Day in the Life of Jesus," he groups several incidents, and thereby makes both the incidents and the life mean more to us. " An Encounter with a Foreigner " is one of his titles, and later on-, in the Acts of the Apostles, we read of missionary adventures, including the " Mob of Ephesus " and the " Conspiracy." I need not dwell on the difference between calling a lesson ' ' The XIX. of Acts, " or ' ' Paul at Ephesus, ' ' and "The Mob of Ephesus"; or the difference between "Christ and the Syrophenician Woman," and "An Encounter with a Foreigner." In the one case you have what the incident is called; in the other you have what it really is. There is no doubt that this is a work of difficulty, and a work fraught with considerable danger. There is danger that we may seek serious and formal morals, where there exists nothing that will not be spoiled by formulation ; as when one attempts to read into a song, like Tennyson's " Alone and warming his five wits The white owl in the belfry sits," a meaning so formidable as that ' ' This expresses the yearning of the solitary after social life " ; or as when one might try to read into some of Haw- thorne's vague allegorical stories, meanings of which OF UNIVERS1T THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 143 the author was but dimly conscious when he wrote them, and of which, when asked to explain what he meant, he said, " I suppose I had some idea about what those things meant when I wrote them, but I declare I don't know what it is now. " There is danger, too, that we shall get wrong or partial meanings, as did the little German peasant boy whom I once heard in the religion Danger of class, reciting the lesson on how Abraham wrong in- delivered Lot from the four kings. The terpretations illustrated, time had come for the last of the ' ' formal steps," and the child was trying to formulate in set terms the lesson of the narrative. " Abraham helped Lot in his time of need, ' ' said he, after considerable questioning. " Well, what do we learn from that ? " Said the boy after much cogitation, " My neighbours ought to help me in my time of need." Granting that there are some things of which the meaning is something felt, rather than something thought, there are plenty of meanings that must, by the teacher at least, be sought out and made thinkable by being; expressed every para- graph read, in terms, and I want to suggest two ways of doing this. First, let the teacher, in his Bible- study or in ordinary reading, school himself in finding and stating the precise meaning of each paragraph he reads; for if a paragraph is rightly constructed, it has a topic that may be expressed in a single sentence or a single phrase. And second, having done this, let him in like manner arrive at the meaning of a whole chapter or an entire book, by grouping together these topic sentences into a topic 144 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. paragraph. By way of summary of these points I am now going to quote from a syllabus which, at the request of the Commission, I have prepared for the use of teachers studying one of the books in the Course ; for the directions for study here given seem to me to be applicable to the teacher's study of any book. 1. Read the whole chapter (or lesson) through once for the purpose of getting a general idea of Directions what it means. When you have finished for the study this reac jing close the book, and write a of any sub- ject-matter, brief statement in answer to the question, ' ' What is the point of this passage ? ' ' 2. Read the chapter, sentence by sentence, para- graph by paragraph, trying to grasp the meaning clearly, precisely, personally. Some of the words contain " buried metaphors," pictures; see that you see these pictures, and are prepared to make others see them. Some of the sentences are expressed in abstract language, conveying a general truth ; find concrete illustrations of every one of these. Where the author uses an illustration, find other illustrations of your own. Where the author uses one form of statement, use another of your own. See in how many ways you can say the same thing. (There are many ways of putting things, as there are many flies in the fisher- man's book.) This is the step of clearness, of detail, of pictur- ing, of amplification and enrichment of materials. Its purpose is to make the truth clear, definite, THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 145 concrete, and so warm, living, and ready for action. 3. Read the chapter, paragraph by paragraph, asking yourself, ' ' What question is answered by this paragraph ? " " What short statement will precisely express the point of this paragraph (and so be the answer to the question just framed) ? " * * What maxim, or text, or proverb, or pithy saying applies at just this point ? ' ' How is this paragraph related to the whole, does it express a new thought, or amplify one already developed, does it suggest a paragraph or sentence in another connection ? How does it follow from what precedes ? how lead to what follows ? In a word, if it is a link, what are the co-ordinate links ? Make an outline of the chapter or the book, with heads and sub-heads, being careful not to make heads sub-heads, or sub-heads heads. And with all this thinking, be alert for personal meanings, for applications. This is the step of comparing, condensing, gene- ralizing, binding together into wholes. Its purpose is to get at the truth by weeding out ideas that seemed true when standing alone, but which on comparison are seen to be false; and, by massing and organizing, to make our mental forces into reg- ular troops instead of guerrillas and bushwhackers. To sum up: First a rough general view, such as a civil engineer might gain by riding over the country he is to survey. Second, clearness as to facts ; warmth in details ; putting yourself into the thing, whether it be thing done, thing seen, or 146 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. thing felt. Third, compacting parts into wholes, seeing ends from beginnings, organizing for action. And at each step the thought of personal assimila- tion, and of use: What does this mean to me ? Is it true ? Could I defend it ? Do I disagree with it, and why ? How can I use, apply, follow, live it ? How make it live in the minds and lives of my pupils ? Before leaving this part of my subject I want to make the same qualification I made in speaking of the teacher's dramatic imagination. When I speak Knowled e ^ *^ e teacher's need to know as well as feel and the the meaning of that which he teaches, I do not necessarily imply that the pupil should also have this knowledge with equal explicitness. It is sometimes well that he should hear, or at once make for himself, a clear and definite formulation, and it is sometimes better that the moral or the prin- ciple should remain just beneath the surface, ready to break through of itself in due time. The full discussion of this point does not belong to the present subject. The point I am now making is that the teacher at any rate must be clearly conscious of that which he is teaching as a rational whole, and he must be conscious of the meaning of that whole for himself and for his pupils. For if the teacher have this clear view of the way, he will be able to lead the pupil toward the light where he can see for him- self; but if the teacher have it not, he will be as the blind leading the blind, where both fall into the ditch. In treating of the teacher as poet and philosopher THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 147 I have spoken as if the teacher's work were confined to the teaching of concrete passages, like catechism, the stories of Scripture. I have not for- etc,, com- pared with gotten that the teacher muct also prepare the Bible for to teach relatively abstract matter such as teacllill g' that found in the Catechism, or in the Sermon on the Mount. But the difference between teaching a concrete passage and an abstract text is only apparent. In the story the teacher must construct in his own mind a fabric which is partly particular and partly general: he must fill in colour, and atmo- sphere, and detail, and he must find the meaning; and so make the story live. In the Catechism he must do precisely the same thing: he must make the dead words live, by clothing them with imagery, which is, as it were, flesh and blood to them, and must breathe into them the breath of human sym- pathy and human application. The only difference is in the data. In the one case the story you have given the concrete and your problem is to invest it with universal meaning. In the other case the text or Catechism you are given the universal and your problem is to invest it with particular signi- ficance and application. In either case you are to give the touch that makes alive: for the particular deed is not alive except it be lighted up by the word, and the general word is not alive except it be clothed upon by a deed. II. And now we come to the second element in the teacher's preparation. For it is not u. The enough that the teacher know the subject he P u P iL is to teach. He must also know the person he is to I4# THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. teach. It is not enough that he accomplish the feat of putting himself at the point of view of Peter and John, of David and Abraham; he must also get on the inside of each member of his class, and look out on life through his eyes, be circumscribed with his limitations of imagery and of language, feel with his feelings, like with his likes, burn with his burnings. The teacher must be his subject before he can teach it. He must be his pupil before he can teach him. For only thus can he find the point of contact between both. This principle finds illustration every time a teacher translates his thought into terms of the child's understanding, explaining what he has not seen by The prind- what he has seen ; as when the teacher pie applied, helps the child to understand the draft of a stove by showing him the draft in a lamp-chimney ; or teaches the child, who knows fog but not steam, that steam is a kind of fog; and to another child, who knows steam but not fog, he explains fog as a kind of steam. A teacher who has little regard to this need of sacrificing one's own point of view and entering into the consciousness of the one he is try- ing to teach, will be apt, when explaining the curious phenomenon of liquid air how it boils when placed on ice, to say that the liquid air is so much colder than the ice that it boils when placed on it, and will mystify his pupils, for who ever heard of a thing boiling because it was colder than something else ? The true teacher will readily resolve the mystery by reducing to a common denominator either saying that liquid air boils on ice because ice THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 149 is so much hotter than liquid air, or that the tea- kettle boils over fire because the water is so much colder than the fire. Skill in this fine art of reducing ideas to a common denominator is the sine qua ncn of all good teaching. The good teacher drives his ideas in pairs, has 'at' least two strings to every bow. If he be a geography - teacher, wishing to give an idea of the Illustrations, magnitude of Alaska, he says: "Place the original thirteen colonies down on Alaska ; now turn them over as if their edge were a hinge ; turn them over again, and you have enough territory yet un- covered to hold all of Europe. ' ' Or if density of population be the subject, he will say : ' ' Take the entire population of the United States and put them in Texas, and the density is no greater than in Belgium." Or if he be a Latin teacher, he will be continually shocking his pupils into a livelier con- sciousness by such means as paraphrasing the Latin proverb "You can't squeeze water out of a pum- ice," by, " You can't suck blood out of a turnip." Sabura, a street in Rome, he will paraphrase by ' ' Bowery ' ' ; trojugenas, by ' ' upper ten " or ' ' first families of Virginia"; endromis, a woollen cloak worn by gladiators, by " sweater " ; toga and alceus, by ' ' frock coat and patent leathers ' ' ; and the phrase gladius avi, which boys will always translate, a sword of a grandfather, or the sword of the grand- father, or a sword of the grandfather, all of which are mere words, he will translate by the more modern and real and common-sensible " grandfather' s sword." And if as the result of his efforts he overhears his 150 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. pupils on the playground saying, "Awful socks for old Caesar when that chap Ariovistus said he'd no business in his Gaul," he will not be shocked, he will rejoice ; for has he not here a proof that a spark from the subject has caught the tinder of the child's mind ? I once heard a great teacher teach the Book of Amos to a class of over five hundred pupils. The first verse was one of those things that seem formal and perfunctory until you see their significance. 44 The words of Amos, who was among the herdmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel, two years before the earthquake. " ' ' Why, ' ' said the teacher, "here we have a title-page, with the name of the author and who he was, and the date." In Pro- fessor Moulton's ''Modern Reader's Bible" you will see the title-pages written as such ; and you will find also poetry and dialogue written as poetry and dialogue are usually written, and orations like those of Moses in Deuteronomy called by their proper modern name, to the enhancing of our ability to comprehend their meaning and their marvellous power ; for, when the orations of Moses are reduced to a common denominator with those of Cicero and Demosthenes, we are at once able to place them where they belong, immeasurably beyond both. Out of this general principle there grows the special rule that the teacher must be careful how he introduces a subject to a class. Now at first thought it seems as if it ought not to make such a vital differ- THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 151 ence what the first step is whether the boy learned his Catechism question first, and then had g ecialrule it explained to him, or first had it ex- from general plained to him and then learned it. He pnr has to learn it some time and he has at some time to have it explained. What difference which comes first ? But it really does make a great deal of differ- ence in most things, doesn't it? whether we begin at the right end or the wrong end, whether we put the cart before the horse or behind him, whether we begin with the soup or with confetti, whether we step down from the second-story window by the aid of a ladder previously placed in position, or step down without the aid of the ladder placed in position after we had had our fall, and whether we learn to slide down a rope before the fire or afterwards. And these figures are not so far. out of the way ; for a proper beginning does serve, does it not?, as a ladder to help us climb step by step to the truth we are trying to understand. The condition of a child's mind, after he has been given a form of words of the meaning of which he has as yet no inkling, is not unlike the condition of a child's stomach when he has been fed a heavy meal for which he has no appetite. It is possible in either case to help the child to some semblance of digestion, or at least to keep the dose from killing him, but not without loss, and perhaps not without producing in the child a rooted distaste for that kind of food. A fact or idea unloaded upon a mind not made ready to receive it is like a minister supplying a strange pulpit in an inhospitable community. There I5 2 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. is no one at the train to meet him ; no one offers to entertain him ; the inn has but one bed and that is not made up, and there is no fire in the room. The people come to church, but they do not greet him before the service, or respond during the service, or thank him after the service ; and the man is so chilled that the virtue in him is frozen at its source. Some men there are who cannot be frozen out, and there are some truths that will live and thrive anywhere, whether they be prepared for or not. But in most cases some sort of preparation is necessary. This may take the form of the arousing of curiosity regarding that which is to be presented; or of a demand for the solution of a problem. It may be accomplished through establishing emotional or in- tellectual congruity : by arousing feelings akin to the tone of the story, or by calling to remembrance kindred facts or ideas, and stationing them at the threshold as a kind of reception committee, for it is the ' law of the mental jungle ' that only on the introduction of some one already in can entrance be granted to him who is without. In planning this preparation the teacher should remember that there is possible an artistic and ele- gant way, whereby meanings are conveyed without explicit or formal statement, whereby the subject of the lesson is made to be felt without being, as yet, formulated, whereby the introduction shades into the body of the story without jar or jolt. In general I should say that the teacher should aim to make the preparation indirect rather than direct, informal rather than formal, and as brief as possible. THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 153 There are other essential qualities and aspects of the teacher's knowledge of his pupils, but the limits of my time forbid, and the plan of this Additional course makes it unnecessary, that I should points of insight which enter upon them. Suffice it to say that in a teacher addition to the sympathy which the teacher needs - must have with the child's point of view, there must be the teacher's insight into the child's stage of religious development, into the method of his growth, into the difference between boys and girls, into the relative place of action and of contemplation, and into the peculiar dangers that beset the path of one who would provide proper nutrition and exercise. This insight is essential. For if the teacher have not this knowledge and the skill to use it, he will be like poor, prying Guildenstern, trying to Illustrated peep through the chinks of Hamlet's in- hy Hamlet, scrutability. Guildenstern, you remember, fo^/i 8 has been set to find out Hamlet's secret, stud y- and he knows no other way but plain pumping. Hamlet gives him a lesson in pedagogy which might be taken to heart by many a teacher, and which is the classic argument for knowing the mind you would teach. " HAMLET. . . . Will you play upon this pipe ? "GUILDENSTERN. My lord, I cannot. " HAM. I pray you. "GUILD. Believe me, I cannot. " HAM. I do beseech you. " GUILD. I know no touch of it, my lord. " HAM. 'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ven- tages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath 154 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. with your mouth, and it will discourse most elegant music. Look you, these are the stops. " GUILD. But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not the skill. "HAM. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me ! You would play upon me ; you would seem to know my stops ; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass : and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe ? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. ' ' III. And now we come to that in the teacher's preparation which lies at the root of everything else, and is the fundamental dynamic in all III, The teacher teaching a something which I can try to himself, describe but hardly know what to name. I mean the quality that enables the teacher of re- ligious truth to speak as one having authority, and not as one who takes things at second hand, or as one who has allowed himself to be overwhelmed by a load of conventional lore which he cannot make his very own, or as one who does not know whom he has believed. But let us here distinguish between two things radically different. For there is an External and au ^hority that works from without and there internal is an authority that works from within; authority. and the working of these is vital i y different each from the other. External authority says, "You must believe be- THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 155 cause I say so, or because the Book says so." Its attitude is one of compulsion from without. The voice of authority that speaks from within says, " I must believe because I cannot do otherwise because this is the truth, and I know it. " External authority says, " This is true because it is the Bible." Inner authority says, "This is the Bible because it is true." The teacher, who depends on outer compul- sion, is continually desirous of making his pupils think as he thinks, and believe as he believes. The teacher, who aims only to arouse the inner voice in the depths of the child's own soul, seeks only to help the child to find the truth, to find the In the class of the former you will find a trnthl teacher trying to teach by talking at the pupils and trying to convince by talking them down. In such a class you will even see the questions of the class frowned down, slurred over, postponed till a later time that never comes as if questions were not the terminal buds of the child's growing life. Such a teacher is trying to press the death-mask of his own arrested development upon the living faces of his pupils. In a class of the latter type the teacher is not less positive, but he is more honest, more patient, and more fair. I do not mean that teachers of the former type are confined to the Sunday-school, or that teachers of the latter type are found only in secular schools. Far from it. And yet the tendency is to regard religious teaching as the proper field for authority (in the narrower sense), and secular teaching the proper field for private judgment. And from this I5 6 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. distinction there has arisen that gulf that tends to divide the one realm from the other, with the in- evitable result of making one realm less real than the other. It has often been thought that the Bible should be looked upon and treated as something separate and Proper atti- s P ec ^ a ^ to be rea -d at set times, and in a tude toward special, holy tone ; and to be interpreted in the Bible, . , ,.- r a special way, different from that used re- garding any other book. This mode of isolation has borne its proper fruit. Led or forced to simulate emotions they had not had time to come by honestly, the children brought up on that theory developed an attitude toward the Bible which was partly aversion, partly apathy, and which was wholly unreal. I know of one girl, reared in a Christian home, who did not lack intelligence in other lines, who reached the ripe age of thirteen before she realized that the doings recorded in the Bible occurred on this earth, she having all along thought that they had transpired in heaven. Let no one fear that the Bible will be lowered or shaken by being treated in an every-day common-sensible fashion. Let us not fear to tell the truth about Bible characters. If some were rascals, say so, man-fashion, without fumbling or evasion. If the old Israelites attributed to their God commands that outrage our children's sense of justice and mercy, do not excuse that which is brutal, or attribute it to God, but rather explain how such things were the fruit of a rude age, point out the steps of growth, and the contrasts between the Law of Moses and the Gospel of Christ. And when the THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. 157 child asks the inevitable question, " Is it true ? " or "Is it fact or story ? " if you do not know, say so ; and if you can, add that this was a story the Israelitish mothers told their children, or that it is certainly a beautiful story, or that it doesn't seem to make very much difference whether it really happened or not, for we can easily see what it means. It- is a fatal blunder to attempt to prop up the Bible by external aids. If the Bible is worthy of love and reverenceA the child rightly taught will inevitably come to love / and revere it. If you force reverence, or the sem- blance of love, you destroy that which must be at the root of both the honest judgment, the personal liking, and the sense of reality. For the same reason I urge the looking at Jesus Christ first of all as a man. Let the child dwell on his manliness before dwelling on his God- , Jesus Christ hood. If the child learns to like Jesus, the in the child- man, as a dear friend, he will be the more llfe< ready to worship the Christ as the Son of God. This order seems to me essential. If you begin with the supernatural side, the natural side can never be quite so natural. But if you begin with the natural side, you will be in due time compelled to say with Thomas, " My Lord and my God. " There are ex- ceptional cases ; but even those not thus compelled to believe are certainly in far better case than if they had begun with formally accepting the Godhead of Christ and had never reached and many never do reach the human friendship of Jesus. And now let me distinctly set forth what I have not said or meant. I have not said or meant that 158 THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER. we should not accept that which we do not under- stand. And I have not said, and do not Conclusion, . intend to say, that we should not teach children anything they do not at the moment under- stand fully. I have not said that we should not con- form for a time, at least, to conventions into which we cannot at the time enter with the heart. And I have not said that the teacher, however determined to be, with Rossetti, "one of those whose little is their own," and determined to let his pupils stand upon the solid rock of their own sense of what is good and true and beautiful, shall not be respectful and even reverent toward that which has long been sacred to others, but which he has not yet grown into himself; and seek to inspire his pupils with a like spirit. You will observe that in discussing the teacher's preparation I have not mentioned lists of books to be read, or spoken of the teacher's need of becom- ing familiar with authorities and helps ; with ancient manners, customs, and geography; with modern trades and occupations; with pictures and poems; with the principles of education and the practice of those who are masters of the art of teaching,- though I believe that the teachers' study of all these things should be thorough and constant. I have thought it a better plan, in treating a theme like this, to aim to set forth an ideal of good teaching, rather than to speak of many things a teacher should know in order to teach ; believing that we touch the springs of action better by giving a desire for the end than by pointing out means in detail, and that " He who loves flowers will find out all about soils." VII. THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. By President G. STANLEY HALL, D.D., of Clark University. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE VII. Study of Child-development. The child the type of the species. Difficulties of the Sunday-school. Child-evolution. Stages passed through. Necessity for this law of development. Child's religious evolution the same in manner. Illustrated by Fetish -worship. And by Nature-love. And by Natural Religions in the world. Nature-study in the Sunday-school. Power of Nature in Primitive Religions. Natural religions, study of, in the Sunday-schools. Personal application of Christ's Saving Grace best taught at Confir- mation Age. The Adolescent Period of Youth. Danger of neglect of these Principles at this time. James Stuart Mill's View. Adolescence and Conversion. Science and Sin. Awful results of Sin on the Conscience. Psychology and the Bible. Childhood the best period of life. Biology's Witness. Childhood the noblest humanity. Teaching best suited for the child-age, before adolescence. THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. IF I were a clergyman, as I wish, indeed, I might be for an hour, to speak upon this subject, and if I could take a text, it would be, " Suffer little chil- dren to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven." I shall undertake, as best I may, to outline some of the results of the recent movement for the study of the child nature, which bear upon the work of the Sunday-school, and which seem to me may be help- ful for all who may be superintendents or teachers in it. There has been, as many of you are aware, within the last decade, a general movement, that has spread throughout the civilized world, for studying gtudyof the mental and physical traits of childhood. Ohiid-de- Children are measured with the greatest vel P ment> minuteness. Every dimension of the hand, the brain, the skull, the chest, has been minutely studied, in order to ascertain the rate of growth of the body, and the circumstances that must further and that must retard the growth. These studies are all made upon very many children, and the average is then computed, and has chief significance. 161 162 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. But it is of none of this that I wish to speak now, but rather of a still larger body of investigations upon the mental content and the emotional activities of childhood. And let me preface what I have to say, by the general conclusion of all these biological investiga- tions. It is that childhood is the very best period of human life; that then all human faculties are at their best; that it is the paradise from which growth is always more or less of a fall. The child represents the species, the general form of human nature. Adults are specialized in this, that, or the other direc- tion. Men, particularly, who are far more special- ized than women, have to sacrifice, always, part of their nature for the completer development of other parts. The modern conception, then, of childhood is that its later stages, at least, are almost always, in all modern civilizations, more or less of a decline, and that Wordsworth was right when he spoke of the child as coming from a far country, with partial forgetfulness. It is as if the old pre-existence theo- ries of the soul were more or less true. In all its activities, physiological and psychical, then, the child is nearer the type of the species, and has less of the limitations of the individual, the type of The doors of the prison-house have closed the species, U p on m ' mj f ar l ess tightly than they have upon us. It used to be said, in the days when per- haps the recognition of the intuitive power of woman was at its very best, seventy-five or a hundred years ago, in the time of Goethe, that the woman's THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OP THE CHILD-MIND. 163 instinct was the surest of all compasses by which those who wished to go back to first principles and base their work on their study of human nature should act : as Goethe says, ' * das ewige weibliche, ' ' "the eternally womanly. " Woman's instincts are greater instincts, are of greater breadth and are less specialized, than man's. So that woman's instinct was thought to be, by these investigators of that time, the highest in the world. But we are gradually coming to recognise something that is still more generic, namely, childhood at its best. It is the most truly and really divine thing in the world. It is the most complete and whole thing we have. So that the boundaries of the child's nature are so wide, its sympathies, its power of appreciation, its capacity to grasp, at least in a cursory and superficial way, something from all the environment of know- ledge or moral character that is about it, are so great, that we know that, in everything that is essential to high and holy and happy living, the boundaries of the child's nature are far more nearly coterminous with those of the race than are those of the adult, or even of the woman. The conditions under which the Sunday-school works are hard conditions very hard. A little time, but once a week, perhaps, or twice; j)^ cu i t i es teachers that rarely, if ever, have any pro- oftheSun- fessional training, and that, too, in this ays< day when professional training in education is a real science ; when the character of the professional teaching never stood so high and never was growing so rapidly. In that time the Sunday-school has, 1 64 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. less than any other department in the whole educa- tional field, felt the influence, on the whole, of these unfolding movements. Then, besides that, we are suffering under the influence of the " Uniform-lesson System." It has done a great work in the world. ' It has brought into sympathy and rapport the great body of Bible- teachers in the world. But it has done its best work, and has now a limitation in so many places and ways, that those of us who are familiar with Sunday- school work, I think, will hesitate a good while before we are willing to say that those are not right who declare that its usefulness is at an end, and that we should supersede it by far more individual train- ing, in subject-matter and methods, even in the Infant Sunday-school. The true source of appeal in all matters educa- tional, then, is human nature and human need. So that all religion has done its great work in the world because it has rightly appreciated and correctly met the great and most crying needs of humanity. And so education is now making an appeal to first prin- ciples. It is going back and asking, by all the methods that it can command, What is the real nature of childhood, and What are the deeper interests of childhood ? What are its real capacities ? What kind of mental food does it need, in order to bring every power of mind and body to the fullest and best development of which each child is capable ? That is the work. The bond, especially in re- ligious work, should be a personal tie from the heart of every child to the heart of every teacher. We THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OP THE CHILD- MIND. 165 know that the Day-school suffers very much under the uniformity of the modern class-graded system, and we are now, in very many ways, trying, and successfully in many directions, to emancipate our- selves from the rigidity of this procrustean grade system, so that the school shall be a thing of rescue a rescue not merely from sin, but a rescue from the calamity of mistaken vocations. To discover the thing that a child can do best is a work of rescue. It is a child-saving, a career-saving, an economizing kind of work greater, perhaps, than any other kind of educational work that can be done. Now when we look at the child, what do we find ? We find this great result, which came with surprise to many of us as it slowly dawned, and as ohild- the hand mounted up and became so evolutio:Q ' formidable that not one single person here present can look the facts in the face and get the common information that is now available, without accepting it. It is this : that the child normally represents the history of the human race. That it has, in its early stages, a great deal of the animal about it. There is a great deal in its physical and psychical nature that suggests the higher animals. We know that every child has at least 133 rudimentary organs in its body (so called), which are atrophied, and which suggest that something a little like what the evolu- tionists tell us must be true. Why is it, for instance, that a few months before birth I had an immense organ here, for breathing in the water complete gills which gradually transformed, so that soon after birth the upper part of them had been twisted around into 1 66 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. the nostrils, the lower part had been turned around and grown into the vocal cords, another part had been spiralled around into the cochlea, or the organs of hearing ? Why is it that I was a gill-breathing animal at one time, suggesting aquatic life ? Why is it, too, that the infant has all the caudal appen- dages ? Why is it that we have the vermiform appendix, and w r hy all these 133 different organs, of absolutely no use, but many of them a positive disadvantage in our human stage ? What do they mean ? They mean that we pass up the whole his-, tory of animal life, and that from the time a few months before birth, up to maturity, every child Stages passed re p resen ts in his history every stage of ani- through, mal life, as repeated since the world began. You and I have all been a union of similar organs: those organs have divided, and those halves divided again, until at last it has appeared that we were going to be an invertebrate, then a protovertebrate, then a metazoan, then a vertebrate, and then one of the higher vertebrates, and then a quadrumanal, and then a bimanal creature, and finally a man, and then, perhaps, a man of high character. Of course the early stages are passed over with great rapidity. They are telescoped into one another, so that it is with great difficulty that they can be detected. We have lived thousands we don't know: possibly millions of years in a day, an hour, perhaps a minute, in the earliest stages of our development. But something, we know not what, some unknown and inscrutable formative prin- ciple, has pushed us on and up through all the lower THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 167 stages, and it has persevered until at last we have reached the highest of all human organisms and have developed even a brain and nervous system that most marvellous of all material things: four thousand million nerve-elements, on the average; every cell composed of scores of millions of mole- cules, and broken up into a number of scores of parts, invisible even to the microscope: the brain, the only organ through which God has ever spoken to the world, or ever can; the mouthpiece of the Absolute, through which every revelation has come. All that has been developed in us in a few years from beginnings that, so far as any method of science can discern, are on a level with the lowest forms of animal life. So that there is a great deal of what might be described as the tadpole-tail function, if you will accept that familiar parable. I Necessity for sometimes used to ask my students how thislaw - many of them believed that the tadpole's tail ever fell off when it became a frog; and most of them thought it did. But every naturalist knows that there never was a tadpole's tail in the world that fell off: and that is the point of all we have to say. Never a tadpole lost his tail. It was absorbed : and the very matter and blood that went to make tail was simply made over again into legs. And if the tad- pole's tail is cut off, then the legs never grow, and the frog is condemned to pass his life in a lower aquatic stage. He never becomes an amphibian, and never gets up on the land. That is the parable of the tad- pole's tail. There are plenty of others, with rudi- mentary histories that illustrate the same general 168 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. law, which is that the lower organ has to be devel- oped, or else the higher, which supersedes it, will never grow. You may say, ' ' To develop the frog nature of this tadpole, I will clip off this tail, so that the energy will go into the legs and he will get mature a little earlier, and the legs will be strong. ' ' That is what we do in the training. We forget that Froebel was right when he said, ' Every child must live out completely every complete stage of childhood, or he can never develop into complete maturity. ' ' So that when I say every child recapitu- lates the history of the race, I say that that must be taken as the cornerstone of the new pedagogy, in religion as in everything else. Now Christianity came in God's own appointed time. It came late in the history of the world : if scientists are right, very late. But why ? Because mankind was not ripe for it. And the child has to repeat a great many of these pre-Christian stages of evolution in its own life. One of the most striking and interesting results of modern psychological studies, or studies in the growth of the souls of children, consists in C lii Id s Eeligious showing, with such overwhelming masses of Evolution, evidence, how every child repeats the his- tory of the race in its religious development. It is a fetich-worshipper. Every child that has a fair chance at life passes through the stage of being a fetich-worshipper. Examine the contents of a boy's pocket. You will find, very probably, a pretty stone, a bit of lead, a curious piece of coal or old junk iron or ore a lot of these things ; a knot of THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 169 wood with a curious spot in it something that he has, perhaps, carried in his pocket for a long time. In severe weather it is wrapped up, so that it won't feel cold. It is taken with the child wherever he goes, so that it will have been to New York, Phila- delphia and Boston, and shared the child's experi- ences. The temperature is regulated for its benefit. And sometimes we find this fetich-worship surviving very curiously in different persons. I know a lady who has a string of spools that she played with as a baby. She can't go to sleep without that Fetich-wor- string of spools. She keeps it in her top shi P- bureau drawer, and, whenever she is specially tired, sits down and gets it out and takes a good look at it, and is refreshed and rested thereby. That is simply an exceptional survival of the fetichism that is common to all children. Some toy, some utterly unconsidered trifle, is, by an instinct, almost always frowned upon and therefore somewhat secreted and never mentioned to adults, but by an instinct that is almost universal in childhood, some insignificant trifle is invested with many of the attributes of per- sonality. It has something in it that corresponds with something or other in the soul of the child. And so it goes on up to higher and higher stages. Who has not seen the passionate love of children for particular flowers ? How many children in the country find a chance to know enough of Nature to feel its real influences and to learn that _ r Illustrated Nature-love which is the first religion of byNature- every race that has existed in the world ? love ' Who has not seen cases of this Nature-love, very 1 70 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. obvious ? The little girl, perhaps, talking to the flowers, thinking they speak to her ; saying her pray- ers to them, wishing and hoping they won't be cold, and covering them up, not to save them from wilt- ing, nor because there is any danger of frost, but that they may feel the warmth she wishes. She imagines she hears voices whispering in the trees. Every child is dwarfed in some function of his soul, who has not been brought in contact with animal life: and the more of it, the better. The animal soul is described by some people as the human soul without the inspiration. Suppose, for instance, that a child knows a peacock has seen it strut and spread its feathers. Suppose it finds a parable in which that bird is referred to. It is familiar with the qualities that are implied in the human life. We say of a lady, " She is a parable: she is a peacock." And so all other animals are psychological specimens, and the first school of human nature, that precedes all others, is to know them. That is why ^Esop and all these many fables have had such far-wrought influence on the childish soul, as vehicles by which morals, and sometimes even religion itself, are taught. Children talk to their pets, and believe they are interested. They personify them, as you know. They think they go to Heaven with them. They believe the doll speaks, and shares all their own sympathies. I know a little girl who learned French in order to talk to the French doll that her mother brought her from Paris, so strong was the doll passion, which usually de- THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 171 velops in her at about the age of eight or nine years, in the average child. And when you pass up higher, you find these natural religions there manifesting themselves. A son of a friend of mine, who lives in Washington a boy about four some two or three years ago, when I was visiting this friend, was in the back natural door of the house, as the full moon was Religion, rising : and as I sat there, I overheard him saying something like this: " Moon, come down and speak to Henny. Good moon, Henny love you." It may not have been exactly those words, but in that childish way addressing the moon a kind of primi- tive prayer or orison, or something of that sort. And I believe that something very deep and striking and important was taking place between that child's soul and the moon. We forget that many people have had no higher religion than this. For instance, Socrates, in his trial, says, before his judges, to Miletus, his chief accuser, " O Miletus, with all your rage against me, you surely would not go so far as to say that I do not believe that the sun and moon are the supreme gods in this universe." Nobody would say that. Of course he didn't. Every Greek believed that the sun and moon were the supreme deities, and said their prayers to them. And some of the gods and goddesses, as you know, had some of the most beauti- ful temples that ever were reared in the world, as products of the religious sentiment. And so on, from the rudest kind of fetich- worship from the simple stone ebenezer. The Palestine Exploration 172 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. people tell us that the chief thing they find there is the stone set up one stone on another by the primitive population, perhaps not simply because they were idols of stone, as some people say. Per- haps there was a good deal of symbolism, and they represented something, as they certainly do in all higher forms of idolatry all through the worship of inanimate objects, up to the worship of sun and moon and stars, which have implanted a sentiment so deep in man, that one of the deepest thinkers we have ever had declared that the undevout astronomer was mad. From the lowest to the highest, we see the religious effect of nature : and it has first place, and it must have; for it is detrimental, it is cutting off the tadpole's tail, to try to teach the higher forms of religious sentiment without the child having had a good radical experience \vith the lower forms. It is assuming that we can skip stages in human evolu- tion, which Nature's stern decree makes it impossible for us ever to pass by. We must always pass through them all. When we come to ask the practical question, whether or not we would teach Nature in the Sun- u t tud day-school, we may well pause: but for in the Sun- myself, I am quite convinced of the wis- dom of two recent Sunday-school pro- grammes that I have seen, which give a place for teaching Nature, as from the religious standpoint. There is nothing that stimulates the child sentiment of awe, reverence, and dependence sentiments which all religious philosophy now agrees in making the basis of religion in the soul there is nothing that THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 173 teaches these sentiments, stimulates them, causes them to grow, like a judicious course of Nature-study. Of course, I don't mean the study with the micro- scope, or the technique of names or nomenclature, but I mean the poetic aspect of nature, the spontane- ous sentiment that springs up in every warm-hearted child when coming in contact with nature. On a summer's day, take a group of children into the woods, and you find that, although in the meadow and open land they may have been jolly and running and climbing, the moment they enter the forest there is a hush. They feel a certain sort of awe in the gloom and sombreness of a quiet summer forest. That sentiment, Professor Zeller tells us and he is, perhaps, the most competent man to speak on that subject Professor Zeller, in his "History of the Religious Sentiment among the Ancient Romans," says that that sentiment of awe in the presence of the forest was the only religious sentiment that the ancient Romans ever developed at the root of all the religion they ever had. And we know, in the latter part of the Roman Empire, it was at least rich enough to produce in their people a rank growth of superstitions, such as the world has never seen. And the child should have a chance to develop that at its proper time, in order that the sentiments on which the higher forms of religion rest, and without which every kind of religious development is defec- tive, may come to their highest perfection. When we look over the history of savage religions and primitive religions, especially the ethnic re- ligions, we find that there is hardly one single ob- 174 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. ject in all nature that has not been worshipped by Its Power in some savage race. Max Miiller tells us Primitive that it would be difficult to find anything so repulsive, so insignificant, so vulgar, even, that it had not been made by some race, somewhere, the object of superstitious and supreme worship. And we know that in the three thousand deities of the Arians almost every kind of natural object was somehow represented and personified. Of course, particularly the sky. We have plenty of sky-worshippers to-day. The clouds what would become of the imagination if it were not for the clouds ? The child in the country gazes at them, and he forms palaces, and sails, wild scenes of Judg- ment day, crowds of angels: he sees great ships, and flags everything that can be conceived of: and the clouds have had an immense influence in giving a sense of reality to something up above us. I am inclined to agree with M. Renan, who tells us that the clouds, and thunder, and mountains, each had more to do than any other one factor, he thinks, in shaping the religious conceptions of the ancient Hebrews. But however that may be, no one who knows children can doubt that they have a very deep and instinctive love and reverence for objects in Nature, and that they do pass through a great many more of these ancient idolatrous stages than we know, and the dictum of modern science is that these have their place; these instincts must be developed. The objects are more tangible, they are more con- stant. And just as that child is unfortunate who has never had a mother to watch over it until it grew to THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 175 years of maturity : especially that infant is unfortunate who has not been able to gaze into its mother's eyes, and to develop toward her precisely those sentiments of reverence and love and dependence which later, turned toward God, constitute so much of the essence of religion, just so, the child who has not had access to Nature and has not felt her uplifting power is liable to build his religious life upon the sand, because it has not the solid foundations in the primeval life of the human soul to rest upon. Of course this is only one fact. We have to-day a great many schemes of instruction from the Bible. I had one come to me yesterday, and brought it down on the train, and looked it over. It Natural re- is very liberal more liberal than almost jfg^ any that I have seen. It recognises Nature- schools, worship at the beginning of the course, and at the end of the course. It insists upon some training in ethnic religions in other religions than Christianity. It accepts as rather fundamental the dictum that, just as philologists tell us that he who knows only one language really knows none, because he does not know it comparatively, and does not know the derivation of words, just so it is true that he who knows but one religion really knows none adequately. So that it has even introduced something about Bud- dhism, and two or three other of the higher ethnic religions, at the latter part of this course. I do not know what the justification of that might be. Per- haps we may question it. But I think there can be no hesitation whatever in insisting that the mytho- pceic and sentimental aspect of Nature, and some of 176 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. its great facts, should be taught to children in the Sunday-school in a way to bring out natural religion all there is of it to make the most and the best of it, because that is the best foundation on which to build the higher structure of Christianity. It seems to me we cannot say very much, perhaps, upon the order of Bible-study. We have it in these various programmes, sometimes beginning ofSraSe, * n ^6 m iddle and going both ways, some- times beginning with the ancient heroes in the Pentateuch, sometimes beginning with the New Testament and working backward. But it does seem to me that the Bible, certainly the most consummate text-book in psychology that the world has ever seen, not only knows and touches the human heart at deeper and more points than any other, but that the order of its books, in the main, is the most pedagogic. It begins with the most majestic sweep, and gives us a background of the universe. To me, as an educator and psychologist, that question is not of so much consequence, because the main point is to teach the dependence of all things upon God. Criticism has its place, the scientific estimate has its place, but not in the Sunday-school. The Sunday- school is to edify, it is to cultivate the heart and the feelings, out of which the intellect springs, of which the intellect is only a sort of dried specimen, so to speak. The heart, in which we live, which is the largest thing in us, is to be educated. The Sunday- school is to educate the emotional and the instinctive nature, and is not for the training of the reason, ex- cept incidentally, so far as it may be made to min- THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. i?7 ister to this nature. In that respect it seems to me it differs very largely from the Day-school. If this order, in general, be followed, that would bring the stress of teaching Christianity, from the New Testament, a little later than we put it. And while I would by no means Application advocate, as some have lately done, that of Christ's the child be kept in ignorance of Chris- tianity until he reaches the age of twelve or at Confirma- tion Age, fifteen, until the dawn of that transforma- tion of adolescence which takes the child out of his own individuality and makes him a member of the race, yet I am entirely convinced that if we wish to work with Nature, and not against her, it is necessary that the chief stress of the New Testament teaching, and the chief personal application of the experience and the saving work of Christ, be applied not much earlier than the decade in which the Episcopal Church confirms, than the time when the Roman Catholic and the Lutheran churches confirm, than the time when the very careful statistics in the Pres- byterian and the Methodist and the Baptist and the Congregational churches show that most conversions take place, with children twelve or thirteen or there- abouts, until the beginning of this transformation. Nature indicates there the necessity of new and larger views, the necessity of regenerative processes, be- cause then the child's whole nature is turned about. It has lived for self until then, and properly. For the most part, it is necessary. It is necessary, rather, that the child up to that period should grow in body, soul, and strength, and get knowledge; that it should 178 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. be done for. But here is a great break the break when most children leave school for good. The average age of leaving school in New York, Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis is just about thirteen or four- teen years, or thereabouts. It is just about the time when Nature decrees a break, when children can support themselves, and there is a tendency to run away, because there is the point where the genera- tions break off a little from each other, as it would seem. But it is especially the time of life when the thoughts of young man and maiden begin to turn to other things than self. The great instincts of altruism begin to be felt, and to transform the soul, and far off and dimly, at first, looms up the great conception that life is, after all, not to be lived for self, but for others, and the instinct of subordination, The Adoies- ^ saci "ifi ce > f being ready to die for what cent Period one would live for, begins then, and if life is complete, if people do not stop their mental growth, if they are not, by some accident of education or environment or heredity, condemned to live their lives out upon a plane far lower than Nature intended them to be lived, if none of these things occur, and they come to complete maturity, then altruism has its complete work, and sacrifice and work and service are a passion, not only a duty, but a passion and joy. And that is the essence of religion, that is its work in the human soul, to subordinate self, and to make the life of the race, and the larger life of God, have supreme dominion over the heart. Love is the greatest thing THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OP THE CHILD-MIND. i?9 in the world, and to fix it on the greatest objects in the world is the end and aim of Education: and this comes chiefly at adolescence. It begins then. Children are more animal than we have thought them to be. We must think more of animals than we thought. They are more of savages than we thought them to be. We must have a larger esti- mate of savage life than we had, if we are to under- stand them aright. They come to their highest intuitive development in a very few years, and the dawn of this critical period, and the time for the con- summating and completing of religious education, is then. I believe that in all our Sunday-schools the consummate care of the superintendent and the teacher and the Rector should be bent not so much upon the lower classes, important as they are, but upon the classes of boys who are in early teens, and perhaps a little later, who are coming into maturity, and have no guide, almost nothing in the school, almost nothing in their environment, to really develop and cultivate and elevate this great sentiment of love, than which nothing is more liable to go astray and become perverse ; than which, if it is perverted, noth- ing works greater havoc in the soul and the body. To elevate and expand this, so it shall take hold of what is eternally good, true, and beautiful that is the time, and that is the immortal work of the Sunday-school teacher. To love and to be interested most in those things that are most worthy of love and of interest that is the end of life : and religion is the only thing, in all this vast mass of cultures that our curriculums are i So THE RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OP THE CHlLD-MMD. trying to train in so many ways religion is the only thing that can ever lead us to that consummation. I think that in some of our communions we have Danger of been premature ; we have sought for too S^Prin- s P eed y results. A great many have sought ciples. to reap where they had not sown. They have endeavoured to pick open the bud before it was ready to blossom of itself. We have even revival sermons, I believe, still, to children; and one of these revivalists was kind enough to send me a list of his conversions, and I figured up over four thousand of them, and found that the average of the children he had converted was nine years. Now whether or not so early an age is the age at which the consum- mate effect of religious training ought to be aimed at, I question whether the soul is expanded enough. We know what the results of precocity are. If chil- dren's minds are brought in contact with great things that they cannot grapple, there is a kind of inocula- tion that takes place. They are vaccinated. They have the chicken-pox form, instead of the severe form, and they are prevented from taking a deeper and more permanent transforming interest in these things: and I am very strongly persuaded, for one, that while a great deal of good may be done in many cases, there is a very grave danger in bringing home the supremest questions of religion to young people until those instincts and those passions are developed, which are stronger than any other in life, and which, if misguided, may lead to destruction. When those are unfolded, they need every restraint that religion can possibly afford, and they should receive the THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 181 strongest and the best training. There should be no course of training that makes possible rubbing the bloom off, or dulling the effect of all these, but in their pristine power they should be applied when they are most necessary to check passion and to subdue rampant personality and selfishness, and to civilize and humanize the soul. I am inclined to think that John Stuart Mill said a rather good thing about this. He said that teach- ing children to be good too early was a little like early rising. People who were very early j g Mm , g risers, he said, in the morning, were quite View, apt to be very proud of it all the forenoon, and then rather stupid in the afternoon, and very uninteresting in the evening. And I am inclined to think that something of that occurs in those who wake up too early to religious truths. They may be very interest- ing as precocious children or boy prodigies, possibly; but I think they grow uninteresting and sterile in the afternoon of life, and in them often the power and stress of religion somehow loses its force. It does not grow with the years and strengthen with their strength, as it really ought to do. Then to leave this there is another point of view which must not be overlooked. Science in many ways is coming to reaffirm many of Adolescence the old principles of religion. Take this andConver- of conversion. There are a great many people who think that there is not much in it, that Confirmation, and so on, do not mean very much. There is great reason to believe that the next five years will see a revolution of sentiment in all the 1 82 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. churches, on this subject; that it will come to us from science, which will show that Nature has a real regeneration in the soul at this time; that the in- terpreting faculties, the imagination, and the senti- ments are immensely quickened. There is a vast new literature on this subject of adolescence. It shows that mankind becomes different in a very few years. Stature increases. Boys begin to grow especially at twelve, and grow for a few years and then stop. They grow in their weight; their brains develop in a remarkable way. Their muscular strength increases, new interests, new passions arise ; new dangers, of course; and it is the time of greatest prevalence in the line of crime. Later statistics show that before the close of the years of adolescence most of the crimes are committed not the deepest and darkest crimes, but the most. So that it seems as though good and evil struggle together for the mastery of the human soul at no other time of life so much as at this time. All we know, then, of this period seems to indi- cate that it is a kind of regeneration, of the same sort which takes place in the soul, and that religion, in formulating it, has simply been true to Nature, giving it its crown of development. So, too, with regard to sin. I am very strongly persuaded that not many years will pass before we Science and shall have from science a very strong plea Sin - for more preaching of sin from the pulpit. I say this with great diffidence, and I hardly meant to put it quite so 'strongly, but I will not go back now, for I very rarely get an opportunity to talk THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD- MIND. 183 back from the pulpit; my place is in the pews. But I do feel very strongly persuaded that we ought to have a little of the old-fashioned doctrine of sin preached. Augustine preached it. The Church deifies some of our good Calvinistic friends for preaching it. We do not hear so very much of it: but it is a dreadful thing. Read a book like Nordau's "Degeneration." Read the modern studies in criminology that are being made. Read the litera- ture that is abroad, stamped with the marks of human decadence. Look at life as you see it. Is not sin a real thing ? One of my students investigated with great labour, a while ago, and culled from the newspapers various advertisements that are circulated in all the papers of this country, to young men, warning them against the errors of youth, and adding that they could be cured with so many bottles, at so much, perhaps. And he found that there were now no less than seven of these great societies publishing syndicates, if you please for the circulation of the answers to these advertisements. The business is conducted in . this way. Scare advertisements are sent out. Un- wary youth write, asking questions. These Awfal resilltg young men, most of whom are normal, are of sin on Con- instructed to send in their complaints. s< They write their letters with their hearts' blood. I have read them. I bought a thousand at the syndicate price, and looked them over. The most awful letters that I ever read because most of them, as I say, were ingenuous young men, and though perfectly normal, were made to think, 184 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OP THE CHILD-MIND. through the neglect of their parents and their teachers, that they were all wrong and corrupt, and they are made to buy these nostrums and to eat out their own soul and become cankered by a sense of sin they ought not to feel, in very many cases. It is most fearful reading. We estimated the number of these letters. We know what they cost. They cost twenty-five dollars a thousand the first time, the second time twenty dollars, and so on until they have been sold five times because the young man will perhaps buy of the fifth different company, and the fifth time the syndicate price is five dollars a thousand for those letters, written with the utmost secrecy by young men, many of them from our best families. And there are now on sale such letters from four and a half million young men in this country, that can be bought at those prices. Now don't tell me that sin is not a real thing, that it does not need to be preached. It is sin shown, not so much in the acts, as in the consciences of these young men. It is the power exercised over them by their delusive impressions of their own acts, by reason of the tendencies which exist in their hearts, and in their nature, which need right guidance. The recent studies from many points studies in psychology, studies of the emotions, of the brain, of the whole nervous system, with many experiments Ps cholo- conducted in the laboratory, show, in a far and the more minute way than has ever been shown before, that there is a very close rapport between psychology and the Bible a rapport which amounts to sympathy, and which perhaps is going to THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 185 amount almost to identity. This is to be the point of contact between science and religion, in that day which is speedily coming. And I believe we shall realize that there has been a vast amount of energy lost because we have thought that the primary reve- lation of God in His works could be set over against the revelation which God has made to us in His holy word. The two are one. They reinforce each other. All the essentials of the two are implied in each. And I am myself hopeful enough to believe that when this old view shall be ended, and that when this sad chasm between them, in which so many unsightly and rank weeds have grown up, is closed, out of a full heart we shall be able to ex- press some such sentiment as Daniel Webster did, in that famous speech of his, you remember, which I might almost parody by saying, ' ' When our eyes shall behold for the last time, perhaps, the sun of this century, or the sun of the next decade, they will not see him shining upon a culture divorced, broken, but rather upon the two great wings of human in- terest, Science and Religion, the standards of both high advanced, and bearing no such miserable inquiry as * What is Science worth ? ' or those other words of delusion and folly, ' Religion first, and Science afterwards ' : but everywhere men will unite in feeling that the two are one and inseparable. ' ' And when it comes, we shall realize what an im- mense amount of energy has been los., and how much we have faltered in our upward strivings in religious work, because we have been intimidated by science. The higher ranges of science, that deal iS6 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD- MIND. with the human soul, reinforce every one of the great fundamental tables of the Bible. And it is high time that we recognise this, and adopt all that it can give us into the Sunday-school and the pul- pit. I must add one final thought. It is almost ex- actly the thought with which I began. The best period in life is childhood the best period of human life. It is the richest and the Childhood largest. It has most sympathies, most period o*! delusions, most capacities, most pleasures, Life, between birth and complete maturity, which we now believe does not occur till well on in the twenties, and perhaps even later, as the best authorities tell us but in the growing period of life is found almost all that makes life worth the living. Biology tells us that every cell and tissue of the human body is simply a servant of those minute pro- ductive elements which pass on the sacred torch of Biology's life from one generation to another. They witness, are immortal. We are all literally physical parts of our parents, back, back to Adam. The primitive cell divides, the pieces divide again; finally two collide, and become two organs. There is no death, there is no corpse. That is the way in which life began. There was physical immortality. But later organs were necessary for special purposes, and it was with specialization that death began. Biol- ogists describe this origin of death in the world thus: "It is the lower functions, the more special- ized, that die: but that immortal part that still repre- sents and passes on this sacred torch of life to the THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 187 further generations that is the master tissue that everything else serves." And so of childhood, we may say that childhood represents, often, the noblest humanity. It is the human nature at its very best, highest and fullest and richest, before sin has very deeply entered for the child, before the teens, cannot commit any so very grievous sin nothing compared to the temptations that assail it later in life. Wordsworth , Childhood was right. He was speaking literally, and the noblest biology reinforces him in all those glorious ^ manit y- ascriptions of transcendent insight to the human child's soul. It does not reason, it can hardly walk in thought, but its intuitions are subtle. There is not a thing in the environment to which it is not respon- sive. It is like a seed which is in the soil. Perhaps the sunlight does not shine directly upon it, but there is not a ray over it, not a drop of moisture above it, that does not refresh it in every particle of its being, and does not quicken it to new life. Is it so with the soul of the child ? It is, as I said, the soul of the race. It is generic, it is complete. There have been none of the necessary subtractions. And civilization is measured by a new standard. The Church, the home, the school, are good only so far as they are means of bringing human nature to a fuller and completer maturity. That is the highest thing to be gained to develop the race on and up, and thus evolution always proceeds. It starts off from childhood. To bring to maturity is to keep young, to carry childhood into old age, and keep it green, so that there shall be no decadence, 1 88 THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. and old age shall not be repulsive, as it often is. The best possible test of every human culture is whether or not it can preserve that curious and unique and divine freshness of soul that is the peculiar badge and characteristic of childhood whether it keeps us eternally young. That is genius. Genius is nothing but childhood perpetuated into old age. And the best, the highest service that can possibly be rendered is the service and the ministry to childhood. The Roman Catholic Church is waking up upon this subject. I heard, in France, this last summer, some very remarkable things about a new movement * n ^ s direction, which I wish to know TeacWn best for more about. And I think our churches children i i , /- are coming to realize now as never before, that it is a far higher thing, because it does more good, to really reach children before they are highly matured, than to preach and work for par- ents. Not but that that work is needed sadly enough, but it requires higher talent, greater capacity, more genius, more full mastery of know- ledge, to teach children. The true teacher can go through the highest and most consummate mastery of expert subjects, and make them interesting to a little child. Any one who ever saw Professor Huxley talk to his own children would realize that there was not a thing that that great mind knew in science, that he could not make fascinating to the little child. . And so in religion. Mastery in the knowledge of religion, sympathy with Christ, that makes us really interested in His mind and will, is THE RELIGIOUS CONTENT OF THE CHILD-MIND. 189 best tested by capacity to lead and minister to child- hood. So that the child is leading us again, as never before. And if some methods of thought change in the world, if some of us lose a little confidence in the ideas that have guided us hitherto, there is one test that is sure, because it comes right up from the heart of Nature, and is the criterion by which every other truth soever in the world must forever be tested : whether or not it ministers to the more com- plete growth and maturity of childhood. VIII. THE USE OF BIOGRAPHY IN RELI- GIOUS INSTRUCTION. By Professor FRANK MORTON McMURRY, Ph.D., Professor of "The Theory of Teaching," in 'Teachers College, Columbia University. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE VIII. The two Fundamental Principles of all Instruction. Law controls all kinds of Instruction. Object of Instruction is to develop Permanent Interest. Importance of Biography in Religious Instruction. Depends on our aspect of the Bible. Decision important in Day-schools. Bible Instruction primarily History. Selected Summary of Biographical Bible Instruction. Literature and underlying Truths not excluded. Illustrations. Yet History the Groundwork. Reason for Biographical Treatment of the Bible. Child uses Personification. Hence even Geography taught by Personification. Also History, Nature- study, and Science as well. Why does Biography interest ? Because it gives Facts connectedly. Hence close Relation needed between Lessons. Difficulties in Sunday-school Lessons. Because Biography is Concrete. Literature accepts this Principle. Sunday-schools ignore it. Abuse illustrated by Story of ''The Match Girl." Proper Ratio of Concrete to Abstract, 10 : I. Hence Instruction should be mainly by Narrative. Biography forms good groundwork for other Facts. Also helpful in Reviews. Good basis for Examinations of Teachers. Age best suited ftJr Study of Biography. All Teachers deal best with pupils by using Facts. THE USE OF BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. SOME statement of fundamental principles is first necessary, as a basis for the remarks that r 11 T i ,1 c Two Funda- are to follow. I desire, therefore, to men- mental Prin- tion two such guiding thoughts. ci P les< In the first place, law prevails in religious teach- ing, as in other kinds of instruction. We know that, in the physical world, the man who _ r J I, Law con- Opposes himself to natural law invariably trolsall suffers, no matter what his intentions may Instniction ' be. We know also that in the ordinary field of in- struction we are subject to what is called ' ' psychical law. ' ' He who follows that law meets with excellent results, and, to the extent that any one ignores it, he meets with bad results. Sometimes there is a tendency, in the field of religion, to feel that the situation there is different; that, if teachers mean well, whether they possess proper knowledge or not, good results are somehow assured. There is no warrant, however, for believing that the Lord will interfere with law more in this case than in the others. This is one of the presuppositions for our later argument. 194 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. In the second place, what we are aiming- at primarily in religious instruction is the development of a permanent interest in religious facts. II, Object is JL , ^ . to develop To be sure, we often aim at knowledge, a permanent knowledge of religious truth, and of the Interest, historical facts contained in the Bible. But in the Sunday-school, as in the Day-school, we are growing more and more inclined to accept an inter- ested attitude of mind as the largest immediate end to work for. If the instructor brings about a proper attitude toward the Bible, namely, that of deep in- terest, he has the best guarantee of future thinking, feeling, and acting along that line. No matter how much knowledge one may possess, it may easily lie dead, a stored, unused capital; but it must be pre- sented in a certain skilful manner in order to awaken permanent interest; it is therefore merely a means to an end rather than the highest immediate end in itself. There, then, are my two fundamental presupposi- tions. It is especially important to remember the Onrlove latter, since it will directly influence the based on later discussion. The thought might be 6 ge< worded differently by saying that we are aiming at love, a religious love as our highest direct object. Of course this object is based upon knowledge, for clear ideas must be the basis of most permanent interests. But since we can impart a fair degree of knowledge without arousing a love and in fact it is very often done we must fix the larger purpose in mind and hold it before us continually. Knowledge does not necessarily include love; but BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. IQ5 love for religious thought includes knowledge to a fair degree and is an outgrowth from it. The one is larger than the other, and guarantees far more for the future. Any thoughtful normal-school teacher will admit that what he most cares to develop among young teachers is a love for teaching, rather than a knowledge about teaching. In making this asser- tion, therefore, about the worth of interest as a teaching aim, I am in full harmony with those engaged in the professional training of teachers. Our first problem for consideration is this: "To what extent is biography a subject of im- importance portance in Sunday-school Instruction ? " ? f Biography in religious Is it merely a matter that affects method ? instruction. Or does its influence extend much farther ? The answer depends entirely upon our conception of the Bible. If the Sacred Book is primarily litera- ture, in distinction from history; biography Dependson cannot play a prominent part in its teach- our aspect ing. Or if it deals mainly with abstract religious truths pertaining to religious life, biography cannot be of great importance in Sunday-school instruction. On the other hand, if the Bible is con- ceived of, as containing principally religious history, biography can prove of great influence. It is particularly important that this problem be solved before we proceed further. In the Day- school, it is necessary that the teacher know ... . Decision im- in every recitation whether he is giving in- p0 rtantin struction primarily in early reading, litera- Da y- schools ' ture, history, or in some other study. Instructors in normal schools find that young teachers commit 196 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. one of their gravest errors at this point; for when one is not quite sure as to what his subject is, he fails to grasp his principal points fully enough to separate them clearly from all others. He is then in danger of drifting from thought to thought, and not accomplishing a definite piece of work. The proper state is reached when the teacher can say: ' ' It is this and not something else; and only such subject-matter will be admitted into the recitation as will contribute to this one end. ' ' I make no attempt to prove this statement, at present, owing to lack of time ; I merely assert that, if a teacher will keep his bearings and accomplish ends, he must carry clearly in mind the nature of each of his studies, and admit only such matter as is in accord with it. Applying this thought to the Sunday-school: if the Bible is at one time history, at another literature, and at a third abstract religious truth, the teacher is in danger of shifting from ore to the other, and pursu- ing no definite purpose. Let me say, without argument, that I conceive of Bible instruction as concerned primarily with history. I do not dare assert that most of the Bible Bible In- _ stmotion 1S history ; but so far as the presentation 01 primarily fa subject-matter to children is concerned, History, I believe that most good can be accom- plished by working principally with the historical portions. I therefore map out for myself a few of the great characters for study. Starting with the Patriarchs, I should choose Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, Moses and Joshua; the Judges would follow, and then would BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 197 come the Kings, especially Saul, David, and Solo- mon. In the New Testament, the prin- cipal topics would be the Life of Christ, with His Disciples, and that of St. Paul. This is a very brief summary of the selections, if we conceive of the Bible as containing for children primarily history, and that biographical history. We see that in determining the use of biography in religious teaching, we are first compelled to take some position in regard to the nature of the Bible content. Then, if it is chiefly history, we must decide whether it shall be biograpJiy or race-history; and if the latter, whether it shall be a simple narra- tive of the principal events in the development of the Jewish race, or rather the historical growth of a few great ideas, to which the race-development itself would be quite subordinate. Although, as already stated, I am considering the Bible to be history and have chosen to present it in biographical form, these facts do not by .. ... , Literature any means exclude all the literature and andunder- the abstract truths from the attention of ^g truths not excluded, children. The many events contained in the biographies need to be interpreted in some manner; that is, they must lead up to important generalizations of some kind. These would be the great religious truths that the Bible contains; and these truths are often presented in an especially attractive form, either in single verses or in whole chapters, the literature itself need not be neglected. Suppose, for example, that we are treating the Story of Joseph. The early part of it suggests numerous 198 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. verses. His early treatment by his brothers calls to mind first St. John xv. : " Whosoever hateth Illustrations, his brother is a murderer. ' ' When the children picture him in the pit, they can recall several verses to comfort him. They should answer in Scripture, when asked, what Commandments his brothers had broken. The relation between the historical incidents recited and the great Bible truths can further be emphasized by calling up in this con- nection Gal. vi. 7: " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap " ; Heb. xii. 6: " Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth " ; Prov. xxviii. 13 : " He that covereth his sins shall not prosper; but whosoever confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy." These are some of the verses that could well be used to express central thoughts connected with the Story of Joseph. Some of the Psalms and some selections from other literature might also express underlying thoughts of this historical narrative. Thus it is plain that in arranging for the Bible in- struction of children to be historical, much room is provided for Bible literature and abstract the ground- religious truths. But history shall consti- workl tute the groundwork or body of the in- struction, and only so much of the other two shall be admitted as is necessary in order to present, in proper form, the principal generalizations that the history suggests. This plan, if generally agreed upon, would eliminate much of the moralizing of the Sun- day-school, which accomplishes little more than the development of a positive dislike for such instruction. Thus far I have expressed a preference for BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 199 biography without giving reasons. Let me now attempt to prove, that biography is an especially interesting form of subject-matter. The ^^ little child wants to endow its playthings biographical with its own characteristics. He endows treatment - his doll with the ability to feel, to become sick, to be comforted, to take medicine, and to be made well again. So long as the objects about him lack life, they are unrelated to the child; but so soon as they are given personality, he is drawn Child uses toward them, he Iove3 and enjoys them. Personifica- This fact is so important in school work tion ' that good primary teachers regularly make use of personification in dealing with young children. The popularity of certain books is another proof that biography is particularly interesting. If boys and girls, eight to ten years of age, were asked to tell how a man might live, if he were placed on an island by himself, how he would make his clothing, obtain his food, etc., the problem might excite little in- terest. But the moment the situation is personified, the moment a man by the name of Robinson Crusoe is placed in that condition, and opportunity is given to follow him from day to day, the narrative is made highly entertaining. Boys and girls weep with Crusoe when he is seriously^ ill, and they rejoice when he becomes well again. Thus, feeling is pro-\ duced the moment personality is introduced. Omit' the thread of life due to personality, and we have ani essay. It may contain an equal amount of truth, and be just as clearly put ; but it has not that element which boys and girls most like. 206 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. Teachers of geography take advantage of this fact by using a book called " The Seven Little Sisters." Its purpose is the description of the prin- HenceGeog- c j pa i c li ma tes on the globe, and it is raphy even is taught by attained by relating some of the experiences Personifica- of jj ttle g j rls> who liye j n di ff erent parts Q f the world. There are several other books that are used in geography in the same manner. " Pilgrim's Progress is a story on the same plan. If the experiences of a Christian had been described, merely to tell the truth, and not to excite interest, this tale would have been very different. But by means of the personification of the various tempta- tions with which Christian meets, we see him vividly, and accompany him in his struggles with the most intense feeling. Perhaps no book illustrates this general thought more forcibly than does "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Our nation first truly felt the curse of slavery when this story became known. "Hiawatha" illustrates the same truth. In some schools it is now the custom to study Indian life in some detail, without any Indian in particular to talk about. But most teachers choose Hiawatha as the basis of such work. He represents Indian character- istics, and in following him children obtain an insight into the race-life that is tinged with emotion, learning to love certain attributes, while disliking others. This recalls the thought at the beginning of the lecture, that all education is aiming to reach our emotions. Knowledge is desirable, indeed, necessary; but knowledge, alone, lacks life. It is an interest in knowledge, a love for it, that is the BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 201. source of energy and action ; and these books, that arouse the feeling of love, through the attractiveness of a personality, are a most valuable means for the development of such a character as the school wants. School work in history is much influenced by the superior value of biography. Children are made acquainted with John Smith, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Jesuits, Washington, and ^^ Lincoln, often practically living with one of such men for weeks at a time, and learning to love some of the ideals for which they stood. Much the same idea is entering into Nature-study in the grades, and into science in the High-school. It used to be the plan in this field to cover Andin briefly most of the forms of life, at least Nature-study the various classes and orders. But there a is now a strong tendency, especially in the higher work, to concentrate largely on only a few types of life; for instance, on the Crayfish, as the repre- sentative of one large division, and another typical fish as representative of another. It is not true biography; but it approaches it, inasmuch as there is something like a personality present. I have merely attempted, by these examples, to show that biography is of special interest, and that we are building upon that fact in Day- , , . tr ti Why does school instruction. You might well inquire Biography why biography excites so much interest. interest? I know that I have no full answer to that question, but I should like to contribute two thoughts toward its solution. The first is the fact that there is such a close connection in the series of incidents that 202 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. make up each story. I am convinced that Sunday- school teachers, as a rule, do not realize the great importance of establishing such connection among the facts that they offer. Those of us who it gives facts have been connected with colleges or uni- connectedly, vers ities easily recall how a one-hour course in such institutions is usually abhorred, by students at least, and probably by the professors also. The reason is that a one-hour course, measuring one recitation period per week, has its periods so far apart that one loses its connections. No matter if a good lecture is delivered to-day, before another week rolls by it will have been so largely forgotten that the student will have to start in his subject anew. For this reason, it is not customary to have many one-hour courses. In Day-schools, it is a very common complaint, from instructors in music and art, that, because they are allowed only two hours per week, they tioTne E etd can accomplish but little. The children, between being so young, too, nearly forget between the periods what they have once learned. Judging Sunday-schools from this point of view, what conclusion do we reach ? The period of actual in- struction, coming once per week, seldom exceeds thirty minutes, and the attention of pupils is expected to be less fully concentrated than in other branches of study. Certainly if ever there is need of the help secured by a close connection, between topics from Sunday to Sunday, this is the time. Nevertheless, the subject-matter is not so related. A few years ago the highest unit, as a rule, was the one-day's BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 203 work; and probably a majority of Sunday-schools follow that plan at the present time. Instead of receiving some impetus from the preceding lesson, the work begins, each Sunday, anew. And, very often, even if a teacher ardently desired to obtain material help from the past lessons, it would be use- less to make the attempt, because the topics them- selves are unrelated. Yet it is certainly possible so to select and arrange subject-matter as to obtain a close sequence of thought from Sunday to Sunday, and to sustain a considerable degree of interest. That is very commonly done in teaching the story of Crusoe to seven-year old pupils in the Public schools. Suppose that a child has reached the point where Crusoe has managed to cut a suit of clothes from the hides of goats. When a new lesson is begun, interest is quickly established, for the moment the question is put, " Where did we leave Crusoe ? ", the answer is readily given. In the Sunday-school instruction that I have known, the most enjoyable part of the period usually came during the last few minutes. Cannot many of you teachers recall how you have yearned for just five minutes more ? You school Les- had worked your way up to your point, and a few minutes more seemed equal in worth to the preceding thirty. This difficulty will be partially met, if there is such a close connection between topics from Sunday to Sunday as good biography affords. The thread of thought could be speedily regained, and a high degree of momentum might be reached long before the close of the recitation 204 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. period. Not merely this: we can remember a large number of facts far more easily if they are woven into a narrative. Whatever is isolated is easily for- gotten, as, for instance, the brief news items, and " nuggets " from the newspapers. But that which is to prove deeply interesting, and to be long held in memory, must constitute part of an extensive chain or series or complex of thought. It is chiefly this kind of knowledge that can have much effect upon conduct. The work of tying thought together is one of the largest duties of a teacher, and is beginning to be so recognised throughout the coun- try. Indeed, knowledge is nothing more than related thought; and unrelated facts, or even small groups of unrelated facts, are unworthy of being called knowledge. Until the Sunday-school instructor, therefore, has made provision for a very close relation of topics from week to week, he has neglected one of the first essentials of good teaching. We have now seen one of the reasons for urging the importance of biography. Another reason is the fact that biography is remarkably concrete. 2. Because z> r s Biography Concrete subject-matter is the kind that is concrete, children especially like; and, what is more, it is the kind that they must have if they are ever to reach generalization. Yet Sunday-school instruction is prevailingly abstract. There is no truth better fixed in all science than that of Induc- tion. Every principle of the physical world is reached and explained through concrete data; there is no other way for the mind to obtain them. And if we, as teachers, offer such generalizations, without BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 205 the concrete data, we offer only empty words to the learner. It may be that he has already collected sufficient data to interpret the words himself, and in that case he is profited ; but even then he shows no exception to the law. Literature accepts the same general truth. Any drama of Shakespeare, or any good novel with hun- dreds of phases, aims to present very few Literature large thoughts, or underlying truths to the accepts this reader. Most of the space is occupied P rinci P le - with concrete details, with incidents of one sort or another, that are necessary as a groundwork. Prob- ably there are one hundred pages of such matter to one of abstraction, simply because the human mind requires such an abundance of concrete facts, as the basis of broad generalization. Contrast this with Sunday-school practice. A few days ago, in preparation for this lecture, I searched about for a sample of the Sunday-school Lessons, that are ordinarily presented. I gimda _ found a Quarterly in recent use, whose schools lessons varied from 9 to 17 verses, averag- lgn01 ing about 12. The average number of moral truths suggested, to be drawn from each lesson, was five and one-half, and the actual space occupied by them was about one-third of that occupied by the verses. There is certainly little of the inductive spirit in that kind of instruction. I was much impressed with the importance of this point during the past Ahuse illus- week, while listening to a class, composed ^he Match largely of experienced Day-school teachers. Girl." About thirty of them were discussing the method of* 206 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. presenting Literature to children, and one was outlin- ing his treatment of the fairy tale, ' ' The Little Match Girl." It is a story well suited to children seven years of age, and the young man in question briefly related how the little girl was attempting in vain to sell matches on a cold, snowy afternoon in a crowded city. Finally, as it grew dark, she started across the street just as a carriage came hurrying along, and in her haste to escape injury she lost one of her slippers. At this point, after having consumed per- haps two minutes with the narrative, the young man paused, and suggested that if a class of children were present, he would next ask them the following ques- tions : 4 ' What do you think of the people who rode in that carriage ? What should they have done ? Why didn't they get out and help her ? What do you think of such hard-hearted people?" Then, after telling of some of her further vain attempts to sell matches, he again interrupted the story with the question : * ' Do you think the people might have bought some ? Were they cruel in not buying some ? What is your opinion about that ? ' ' The young man himself was entirely inexperienced in teaching; but among the others present there was no tendency whatever to tolerate such instruction. The feeling was strong that, if one is presenting a story, he should do so with few or no interruptions for moralizing, unless the pupils themselves plainly express a demand for such conversation. Attention to the moral should rather be given at the close of the narrative. But more important than that, these teachers had also reached the conclusion that if the BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 207 narrative occupied as much as ten recitation periods, one additional period should prove sufficient for the moral ; or, in other words, the ratio between the time devoted to the concrete to abstract, story and that to a moral truth should be fully ten to one. Even then, after having laid such a good basis for a generalization, moralizing should be altogether omitted, unless the teacher is convinced that he has the full confidence of the children, and that the story is well understood and appreciated by them. It was generally agreed that, otherwise, dis- cussion of moral truths and attempts to apply them to the lives of the children are likely to result in more harm than good. You recall that, at the beginning of my remarks, I proposed to base most of what I said upon two truths, namely, that religious instruction is controlled by the same psychological principles as any other instruction ; and that a deep interest should be the highest immediate aim of the teacher of religion. , If these statements are really true, and if the teachers above referred to were sound in their views as I believe they were we reach some important con- clusions. Most of the time given to the ^ence Re- Bible instruction of children should be con- ligiousln- sumed with narratives and not with abstrac- tions; very little moralizing, at the proper mainly nar- . r _ rative and time, is far better than frequent moral talks. not moral- Most effective work is accomplished when izin &' one prepares the ground well by means of stories, and is watchful enough to take advantage of a few 208 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. fitting opportunities for the consideration of abstract religious truths. According to what has preceded, Sunday-school instruction should consist mainly of history from week to week. In following the lives of Moses, Joshua, David, etc., very vivid pictures should be built up, and children should really feel the incidents portrayed in the lives of their heroes. Then they are in a position to appreciate references to under- lying religious thoughts, and at such times conversa- tions, touching deep religious truths and their application to their own lives, are fully in place. While thus advocating Biography, I do not forget that it is not the highest form of historical study. In following the development of a whole nation, we are pursuing broader lines of work than in observing the life of an individual. But that is employment better suited to adults than to children. There is one objection to biographical study that should be borne in mind. That is the tendency, while dealing with a great hero, to forget the mass f the P e P le - The Olle ma " is separated from society and idolized, while proper teaching of history brings pupils into the closest touch with great social problems. The Hebrew characters are, however, to some extent exceptional, for they live for their people. Joseph, for example, gives his life for his race, and it is possible to bring out that thought frequently. These biographies furnish an excellent outline for BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 209 the other Bible facts that are later to be acquired. That is one element of their worth. When 3, Biography children have become men and women, forms good groundwork they are greatly in need of a framework on for other which to fit whatever additional facts they facts> learn. Biographical study involves a fair classifica- tion of knowledge, for the ideas are necessarily arranged in great series. A striking difficulty with the majority of Sunday-school teachers is the fact that their knowledge is in a chaotic state. Having studied one lesson at a time, with little reference to what preceded or followed, they may have become acquainted with many details, but these are not organ- ized, and their knowledge lacks unity. If most of what we as children learned in the .Sunday-school had been centred about eight or a dozen biographies, we might have had a real system of events in which innumerable other fragments of knowledge, that have in fact been lost, might have been tied. The need in biographical study of delaying to teach the moral or religious truth until the narrative is reasonably complete has already been re- 4 ^j ferred to. But this is by no means one of helpful in the minor elements of worth in biography. It might further be mentioned that since it is so easy and natural to compare great men, a biographical arrangement of subject-matter makes special provi-/ sion for reviews. This itself is one of the most valu- able tests of the proper arrangement of a curriculum. I have only one other suggestion. It is so easy to comprehend what is included under a dozen biographies, and relatively so easy to amass that 210 BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. amount of knowledge, that it might be in place, in 5, Good for ^ le near future, to require all who desire Examinations to teach in Sunday-schools to pass an ex- for Sunday- . . r ^... . school teach- animation upon that portion ot .bible ers - subject-matter. As was said at the begin- ning* good intentions do not guarantee good re- sults in instruction. For that purpose clear know- ledge is necessary, and obedience to law. Sunday- school instructors are probably even more in need of organized knowledge of Bible facts than of method. Yet it has been very difficult to map out a certain quantity of matter which any teacher should possess as a minimum requirement. This, it seems to me, might be a practical minimum. And if teachers passed through an examination in the prin- cipal biographies in the Bible, they would certainly be far better fitted to teach religion than they now are. If I were asked at what age I should recommend the exclusive use of biography in the Sunday-school, I should say that, having the same problem in the Day-school work in regard to the biography there taught, our answer is that we should give biography Age for until perhaps twelve years of age. Many Biography, would prefer to continue it, I think, throughout the grades of the Common-school, or at least until the last year, when the pupil is thirteen years of age. But inasmuch as so many Sunday- school teachers have not yet put the different facts together that make up the biographies of the Bible, they could well afford to continue somewhat longer with biography. BIOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 211 I have said enough about the personality of the teacher. If the children have great confidence in her, then her mere assertion of moral and ... t 1-1 i 1 i Teachers religious truths is likely to have much mu stdeal weight. But as an instructor, she is deal- Chiefly with ing primarily with facts, the truths con- tained in the Bible. She may affirm all that she well can. That is one side of her influence. But her actual instruction must deal with this subject-matter, and the only way by which she can influence, that is, reach the understanding and feeling and life, in the presentation of the subject-matter, is to follow the development of the mind. She is there subjected entirely to mental laws. I wish that I could know whether you feel that my idea in regard to the rela- tive time devoted to moralizing in Sunday-schools is correct, and whether my experience is exceptional or not. But I have attended at least one class in Sunday-school, as a child, where nearly every verse was supposed to teach an abstract truth, so that when each one was read, the teacher asked, " Now what do we learn from that ? ' ' Again I repeat that the plan of work probably originated in the supposi- tion that the Bible conveys mainly abstract religious truth, and that each verse is a unit in presenting it. My desire is to suggest that each verse is not neces- sarily related to any religious truth directly. It may be merely one small item in a group of facts which together lead to such a truth. IX. THE USE OF GEOGRAPHY IN RELI- GIOUS INSTRUCTION. By Professor CHARLES FOSTER KENT, of Brown University. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE IX. Importance of Biblical Geography. Illustrations of its Use in Sunday-school. It makes History real and living. Geography of Palestine moulded the character and history of its people. In Geography the Past and Present meet. How to make its results of practical value to students. Its importance for a General Education. Biblical Geography incompletely taught in Sunday-schools. Good School-libraries important to reach best results. Suggested Books for School-libraries on Palestine, Egypt, Baby- lonia, and Asia Minor. Wall Maps, Colton's. etc. Palestine Exploration Fund, its Maps and Books. The Divisions or Departments of Biblical Geography. Descriptive Geography. Palestine, Egypt, Assyria Physical Geography. Palestine. The Six Zones or Divisions of Palestine. The Rivers of Palestine. Egypt and Babylonia. Manufacture of Physical or Bas-relief Maps by Pupils. Geological Geography. Commercial Geography. Racial Geography. Historical Geography. General Suggestions on Study of Biblical Geography. Make its scope comprehensive. Study the earth in its relation to man upon it. Remember that Geography is but a Step to Bible-study. Answer to Question : "Does Scientific Study produce Personal Re- ligious Interest ? " Personal Faith is not unsettled. New Interest in Bible is created. The Majority, electing College Bible Courses, not those en- tering the Ministry. Bible Students in the Universities. Number growing rapidly. True Scientific Methods the only ones to apply. Answer to Question as to Natural Boundary between Samaria and Judea. It is a case of merging, rather than of true boundary. THE USE OF GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. MODERN investigation is demonstrating more and more clearly to how great an extent the faith as well as the history of every people is determined by their environment. Fortunately that chapter of revelation, written -so many ages ago by the hand of God on the surface of the earth, and which we call Biblical . . .... Importance geography, can be read as distinctly to-day O f Biblical as three thousand years ago. The noble results of the scientists who have laboured, especially during the past century, enable us to appreciate its significance and meaning as never before in human history. No longer do we regard the earth as man's foe, jealously withholding from him her treasures and secrets, but rather as his true friend and teacher rigorous at times, but always just and thorough, if he will but learn. In this age, in which almost every department of genuine scientific investigation is throwing its floods of new light upon the pages of the Bible, geography, in the broad sense in which that term is now used, brings to the students of God's Word its rich contri- 215 216 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. bution; and we miss much if we do not avail our- selves of all that it offers. It is sufficient merely to suggest a few of the many ways in which the study of Biblical geography can be made of the greatest value to the earnest scholar and practical teacher. No longer is it possible to see with the physical eye the peoples whose life and thoughts are recorded in the Bible ; but we may view through our own eyes or those of modern travellers the scenes of their activity. A personal interest is at once aroused, which is shared by the youngest as well as the oldest pupil. Thus Biblical geography furnishes a natural and concrete introduction to each department of Bible-study. One of my legal friends, not long ago, was asked, not because of his especial acquaintance with the Bible, but because of his inventive spirit S\tfnse i0nS anc * earnestness > to assume charge of a difficult Bible-class. It was not the tradi- tional class of incorrigibles, but rather a representa- tive class with which we, as superintendents and teachers, have to deal constantly a class of boys from fourteen to sixteen, coming from homes of cul- ture, acquainted with the elements of Bible history and literature; boys looking forward to college and business life; with ambitions, in touch with the mod- ern spirit, but boys, nevertheless, whom none of the many teachers who had attempted it had been able to hold ; boys, just cutting loose from their moorings in the Sunday-school, who present the most difficult problem with which we have to deal. My friend realized that methods other than the ordinary must GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 217 be adopted, and proposed that they study ancient Jerusalem. They began, of course, with the Jeru- salem of to-day. With the aid of maps and guide- books they studied the city, until none of them would have been lost in its maze of streets and alleys. Not satisfied with a mere knowledge of the surface, they began to dig beneath the modern town, following the results of the Palestine Exploration Society, tracing the walls of the ancient city and becoming acquainted with its contents and environ- ment, until in time they were so enthusiastic over the City of Jerusalem, that not only did they meet each Sunday afternoon, but in addition they were frequently found during the week at the home of their teacher. When they had mastered Jerusalem, ancient and modern, they themselves suggested that they take up the study of some one of the books of the Bible which were most closely associated with Jerusalem. Naturally they selected the Gospel of St. John, and they burrowed through the wealth of learning and religious teaching contained in that marvellous book, until as the months went by they came naturally and almost unconsciously into touch with the Mind of the Master. If the enthusiasm of the teacher was any guide, nothing could have kept the members of the class from their Bible-work ; for often have I seen him, as he went down to his office in the suburban train, talking with a brother lawyer in regard to some question raised by the Book of John. I have seen him keep a line of clients wait- ing, while he presented some of his conclusions in regard to the interpretation of a certain passage. 218 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. At present the class are studying Hebrew history. They started with Jerusalem, with something con- crete; by natural stages they became interested in new subjects, until step by step they are covering the Old and the New Testament. Biblical geography also provides the only effective corrective to one of the greatest dangers threatening all study of the Bible. Unconsciously and Makes His- J toryreal almost inevitably, children, at least, rele- and imng, g ate t ] le even ts and characters of that ancient Oriental world (so different from the one with which they are familiar) to a nebulous realm, far removed from earth and the realities of life. Biblical geography not only assigns them to a definite place, but also takes them from the land of clouds and makes them real and living. It further establishes their reality, by revealing the! conditions and forces which produced those events \ and shaped those characters. The location of the land of Canaan in the centre of a circle of hostile nations shows at once why it was absolutely neces- sary for the Hebrews, if they were to maintain their independence, to unite under a king like Saul, and not only to defend themselves, but also to extend their conquests until they became masters of Pales- tine, from the coast plains on the west to the desert on the east. The contrast between the narrow, intense, bigoted Jews of New Testament times, and the fickle, self-indulgent, generous Samaritans is explained when we compare the rocky, unproduc- tive, sombre hills of Judea with the open, rolling, richly fruitful fields of Samaria. Man in antiquity GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 219 certainly was influenced far more than to-day by his environment ; and yet we must still go to the Scottish highlands to understand Scotch character, or'to sea- girt Holland to appreciate the Dutch. The background of the thought and revelation of the Bible is the life of the peoples who figured in it, and the background of their life and history is the land in which they lived. As we are O f Palestine coming universally to realize that the his- moulded the torical is the only true method by which to a nd history study the Bible, even so, as a logical sequence, we must recognise that its his- tory can never be thoroughly or half understood without an intimate knowledge of its geography. Not only upon the history and character of every people has geography left its stamp, but also upon all human thought and literature. Pre-eminently is this true of the Bible, for no people of antiquity lived in closer touch with Nature than did the Hebrews. The topography and" natural characteristics of Pales- tine are reflected in almost every psalm, prophecy, and parable which they have given us. The cedars of Lebanon, Mt. Hermon, the flowing springs, the restless sea, the lion of the wilderness, the eagle of the mountains, the lily of the valley, the humble sparrows of Palestine, are as familiar to us through the literature of the Bible, as the scenes which greet our eyes each day. Nature was the great storehouse from which the Biblical writers drew their varied figures and illustrations. Hence the study of that Nature is one of the most important and illuminating commentaries upon the marvellous literature which 220 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. they have given us. The study of geography throws back the curtain and reveals the theatre and stage- setting amidst which the greatest drama of human history was enacted. It makes clear the actual rela- tions of the different actors to each other. With the aid of our enlightened imagination we can make them live, and lo ! that ancient life is again a reality. The picturesque valley of Michmash ceases to be merely a lonely glen, and suddenly becomes the scene of that courageous attack of Jonathan upon the Philistine garrison which turned the tide of battle and gave the Hebrews their independence. The Jerusalem of to-day grim, stony, dirty, and un- attractive in itself has been the theatre of that which was basest and crudest and meanest, and at the same time of all that was noblest and bravest and best in human history. On these theatres the past is brought into close and vital relations with the present. On the plain of Megiddo Thotmes III., Necho, and Napoleon , walk in the same well-beaten paths. After In Q-eography, r past and journeying over the hot plains of Samaria, present meet, ^ traveller f ee ls, as he sits by the well of Sychar, the same thirst as prompted the Saviour to speak to the woman whom He once found there drawing water. Visiting in person, or through the eyes of geographers viewing those Oriental lands, we find the wide chasm which yawns between that ancient life and our own suddenly bridged, and we ourselves indeed live in the past, and for the first time understand its life, think its thoughts, and appreciate the rare simplicity, beauty, and power of GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 221 its literature. Above all God's revelation, recorded in the Bible, ceases to be a distant theological ab- straction, and becomes a personal, objective reality. Realizing the value and importance of the study of Biblical geography, the practical question at once arises, How can its results be brought to Howmake the great body of students who command its results our earnest attention ? Although it may %*%? seem aside from our purpose, I cannot dents, refrain from emphasizing the need of a more thorough study of Bible lands in our public and preparatory schools. The field of Biblical geography is broad, and its bounds are constantly being extended. With all the other opportunities and demands upon the short Sunday-school hour, it is impossible to go into the details of this study. They properly belong to the secular schools. The importance of the history and literature of which they are the background certainly justifies their claim for a place side by side with the geography of Greece, Italy, and England. Unfortunately that place is not now accorded them. Together with the Hebrew and Jewish classics they have been almost entirely excluded from our secular schools. It is a significant fact for a general that the province of Victoria, Australia, education - which a few years ago decreed that the name of Christ should be expurgated from all text-books, is already seriously agitating the question of introduc- ing Bible-study into the Public-schools. It is an anomalous state of affairs which exists to-day throughout the Christian world: while we compel our pupils to study the pagan, French, 222 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. German, and English classics, we almost completely ignore that body of literature and that history which have done more to mould our modern life and thought than any others. The forces which drove the Bible from our Public- schools have spent themselves, and in the light of modern methods of study the old objections are no longer valid. Shall we all who love truth unite, irrespective of creed, in restoring the Bible to its true place ? Already in most of our leading colleges and universities the restoration has been effected, and the large number of men electing the Biblical courses demonstrates the wisdom of the step. When once the restoration is effected in our primary secular schools, the Sunday-school teacher will have what is now so sadly lacking a basis of knowledge on the part of the pupil, upon which to build. One of the greatest defects in our Sunday- school system of to-day is that, in our commendable eagerness to mould the moral character of our scholars, we seek to enforce ethical truths by means of facts and illustrations with which they and often we ourselves are only imperfectly familiar. The spirit of the age calls for more fact, if not less preaching, and we will fall far short of our aim if we refuse to recognise its demand. No one will deny that at present Biblical geography is ordinarily taught in our Sunday-schools without Biblical Geo- system and in a haphazard, incomplete oonroietel manner. The reason is chiefly because taught in jt has no definite place in the Sunday- schools. school curriculum. It only finds a place GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 223 in the ordinary classroom when an event must be localized. No time is given for that broad, compre- hensive study which simplifies, co-ordinates, and illuminates all details. Until the Public-school re- lieves us of the responsibility, each Sunday-school teacher, or at least each graded Sunday-school, should devote certain time better months than weeks, for the ultimate profit in interest and intelli- gence will richly repay to the systematic study of Biblical geography. Geography, in the modern scientific sense, is such a new study that it is not surprising that thoroughly satisfactory text-books are not at hand. When we once fully appreciate the need, they will be speedily forthcoming. Advanced students &ood gchool are better provided with books to-day libraries im- than the primary department. Since we por1 have no one text-book or books which meet that need, we are obliged to depend upon reference libraries. Our Sunday-schools should, without exception, be equipped with complete reference libraries, containing all the really valuable books bearing upon Bible-study, and many duplicates of the most useful. It is a most unfortunate anomaly or medievalism in our modern Sunday-school system that in this age when our homes are filled with more good and in- teresting literature than we can possibly find time to read, not only our Mission-schools, where conditions are different, but also the Sunday-schools in which you and I are interested, have libraries filled with story-books, not always of the highest character, 224 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. while in most cases you may search in vain for up- to-date reference-books, bearing upon that subject which is supposed to be the chief object of Sunday- school instruction. I think at this point it will be of practical value to speak somewhat in detail of those books which should find such a place on our shelves and Suggested especially in our Sunday-school libraries, sahool-li- The historical geography by George Adam OPaiestine Smith * s * n manv ways the most important contribution ever made to the geographical study of Palestine. With the soul of a scholar, and with that picturesque style which characterizes all that comes from his pen, he leads us through Pales- tine, not aimlessly, not merely as travellers; but with a broad outlook he gives us definite impressions of its different zones, and points out, with his rare skill, their distinctive characteristics and the influ- ences which they have exerted upon the people who have lived among their hills and valleys. Unfor- tunately it is a book whose price perhaps precludes putting it into the hands of every scholar ; but it cer- tainly should find a place in our Sunday-school libraries. Another important book has been recently issued by Townsend MacCoun, who approaches his theme, ' * The Holy Land in Geography and His- tory, ' ' not with the technical knowledge of a Biblical specialist, but with the preparation of a practical maker of geographies and maps. In the details of the maps, in the originality which he has manifested, in the practical way he presents the facts, he has given, especially in his first volume, which deals with GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 225 the physical geography, an exceedingly useful hand- book for Bible teachers and scholars. Some of you are familiar with Hurlburt and Vin- cent's " Manual of Bible Geography." While there is much that is good in it, I regret to say that it does not represent the results of modern investiga- tion, which are in themselves helpful and stimulat- ing. While it may be useful for primary pupils, the advanced students demand something more funda- mental and suggestive. Thompson's "The Land and the Book" will never cease to have a real value. It lacks the scientific arrangement of the work of Professor Smith ; but we are able, looking through the eyes of this man, who was a keen observer of life, to travel through Palestine, and see its sights and almost feel that we are there in person. The same is true of Dean Stanley's work, old but valuable, " Sinai and Palestine," for the graphic pen of that gifted English scholar has illuminated for all time the land of sacred memories. As we pass beyond the sphere of Palestine (for our subject is broad to-day) to the study of Egypt, which is so closely related to Palestine, I urge you all to read the opening chapters of Professor Erman's " Egyptian Life. " Especially in his description of Egypt do we find much that is stimulating and exceedingly fascinating. The same is true of Douglas's " History of Civili- zation " (in the first volume, chapter 2). As we pass to Babylonia, we have rich literature, coming from the great host of explorers who have 226 GEOCRJPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. delved below the surface and have given us pen- pictures of that which the spade has un- (c) Babylonia, _ T7 1t . . . covered. We are all interested in the volumes published by Rev. John P. Peters, D.D., giving us the results of the explorations of the ex- pedition sent out by the University of Pennsylvania. For the study of Asia Minor, we are much better equipped than ever before, as a result of the original work of Professor Ramsey. His ' ' Geography of (d) Asia Asia Minor " is exceedingly valuable, and Minor, for the missionary journeys of St. Paul, we all must have at hand his "Travels of Paul." I would also recommend Stanford's "Compendium of Geography, ' ' especially in its studies in Greece and Italy. In Wall Maps, I regret to say that we are not well equipped. The maps which are in many ways the best yet published are those issued by Wall Maps, ', r 1111 ^i Colton. They are valuable because they can be seen at a distance, because they present the broad outlines, the salient points in the landscape, and leave out the details; but they are not up-to- date. They do not fairly represent the modern con- ceptions of Biblical history, and do little towards introducing us to the physical geography of Pales- tine. Other maps available are open to the same general criticism. It is with pleasure that I speak of the work of the Palestine Palestine Exploration Fund, familiar, I Exploration am sure, to most of us. Its chief geo- graphical results are made accessible to all in the great map of Palestine, based upon careful sur- GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 227 veys conducted by the Fund. It will remain for a long time the basis of all other maps of Palestine. The Wall Map contains too many details to be useful except for personal reference ; but the large bas-relief map, although expensive, is the most profitable help which a Sunday-school or Bible Class can possibly acquire. Smaller sizes are issued, and may be advantageously put in the hands of students, but the large relief map, showing the hills and valleys, making Palestine's contour familiar through the eye to the youngest student, is invalu- able for the classroom. Besides these excellent maps, which have added so much to our knowledge, we place the books which the Fund has also issued. Two or three are especially serviceable. I refer to Con- der's "Tent Life in Palestine," which we may use side by side with Thompson's " The Land and the Book ' ' in studying the land as the scientific traveller sees it. The recent volume by Dr. Bliss on "Ex- cavations at Jerusalem ' ' enables us to reconstruct now the southern walls of the city, and to trace with comparative definiteness the outlines of the Jerusalem of David and Nehemiah. In addition, the Palestine Exploration Fund issues a Quarterly Statement, which keeps us in touch with the latest results of excavation. Many of them are most suggestive and stimulating, especially at this time, when the Fund is trying to identify the old Philistine town of Qath. As we pass from the consideration of helps to that of method. I can only hope to offer a few practical suggestions. As geography has been reduced to an 228 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. exact science, its content has been greatly extend- DeDartments e< ^' Four or five distinct departments are of Biblical now included under it, and each presents lp y ' its peculiar problems and results. The first is that of Descriptive Geography, which treats of 1, Descriptive tne relations of seas and mountains and Geography, cities. While in many ways the least inter- esting, it is one of the most important departments. I recall a description of Palestine which I happened to overhear in one of our city Bible-classes, con- ducted by a theological student. After much dis- cussion, the class concluded that the Holy Land was about 400 miles long, and the Sea of Galilee 50 miles long. From practical experience with college classes, I have become convinced that the same fallacies are deep-seated. The reason, of course, is not difficult to find. The maps of Palestine are usually so greatly enlarged that they give a false impression of its relative size, which can only be corrected by studying. Two wall maps should be the possession of every Sunday-school class: the one of Palestine, and the other of the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. No event of Biblical his- tory should be studied without being localized. By the use of the map the teacher imparts facts through the medium of the eyes as well as the ears, and at the same time commands the attention of the whole class. Where wall maps cannot be conveniently used, ask your pupils, as you begin, for example, the study of the Life of Christ, to draw a map of Palestine, not presenting minutiae, but indicating the location of GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 229 the larger cities, the mountains, the rivers, and the seas. If they seem incapable themselves of drawing a correct map, give them tracing-paper, and direc- tions so that from a convenient map they can copy the outlines. Then, as the study progresses, ask them at each stage to indicate the Journeys of the Master, and the places at which He taught and per- formed His miracles. I am assured, from practical experience, that at the end of this study you will find that there is a definiteness, an interest, a back- ground of knowledge in the minds of your scholars, which will make the acts, and teachings, and per- sonality of Jesus a living reality. Map-making, in connection with the study of St. Paul's Missionary Travels, will prove equally profitable. When the landmarks and boundaries are fixed, we should always endeavour to illuminate the Descriptive Department of Geography by pointing out the signi- ficance of location and relative distances. The land of Palestine itself is a superb illustration. (a) Palestine, Do we not see, as students of geography, the significance of its boundaries ? Here is a land, bounded on the west by the Great Sea and on the east by the trackless desert a narrow isthmus con- necting the two great centres of ancient civilization, the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the valley of the Nile. Nature destined it to be the great highway over which nations must pass for commerce and conquest. As we study the location of the homes of the Hebrews, high up among the hills, we can foresee exclusion for a period with opportunities to grow and develop apart from the GEOGRAPHY IN RZUGtOUS INSTRUCTION. great stream of the world, while the testimony of later history is not needed to make it evident that Palestine, the key to the East and West, is destined to be the pathway of marching armies, the battle- field of mighty nations, and that its soil and peoples will be the object of fierce contention. As we turn to the land of Egypt, * ' The Land of the River, ' ' we find that on both the east and west it is bounded by the barren desert, which effectually guarded it from all danger of attack from these quarters. Thus its location at once explains how it was possible for the inhabitants of the Nile, without interruption or attack, to build up that civilization which survived through the ages. A study of its location also discloses the Achilles' Heel of Egypt, the narrow isthmus connecting Africa with Asia, through which came its later con- querors and those Semitic invaders who mingled their blood and civilization with that of the resident peoples, making the population and life of the Nile Valley a strange composite. Again, as we study the territory of Assyria, located as it was on the edge of the broad valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, bounded on the c) ssym, ^^ ^y the mountains which gradually lead up to Central Asia, in antiquity the teeming centre of human population, we can see in imagination, streaming down from those heights, the fierce in- vaders, eager to seize the attractive Land of the Plain. We can see the Assyrians taking up the sword to protect themselves, perforce becoming a warlike people. Having acquired the art of war and GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 23* tasted the fruits of victory, it was but natural that they should set out upon that career of conquest which made them masters of Southwestern Asia and a portion of Africa. Even more interesting- than descriptive geography is that great field which we designate as Physical Geography. It possesses a peculiar fas- cination for all, because it brings us into jj- Geography, vital touch with Nature herself, because each land possesses a marked individuality, and because from these physical characteristics came the influences which moulded the life of peoples who lived among its mountains and valleys. To-day, as never before, we recognise that the physical contour of the earth is the potter's wheel with which the Infinite Potter shapes the different members of His great creation. Consequently we study the physical geography of Palestine not merely with . - (A) Palestine i scientific interest, but because it is the first chapter in God's revelation. Although so old, it is a chapter which we may easily read to-day, because it is written on the rocks and the hills and the valleys of Palestine. At first that land seems but a confused series of valleys and hills and elevated plateaus, but a closer study reveals an order, and soon six distinct divisions or zones are dis- i tss i x tinguished. When we understand the zon Si bounds and characteristics of each of these, our in- timate and intelligent acquaintance with Palestine is established. The first zone includes the <- a) Firgt so-called coast plains, along the Eastern zone - Mediterranean. Beginning on the north, there is a 232 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. i plain only five to ten miles in width, shut in by moun- tains which rise abruptly on the east, a fertile terri- tory, but too small to support more than a limited population. This narrow strip of land, opening to the sea, both inviting and compelling inhabitants to go forth and find their food and their fortunes on the sea, was the cradle of those ancient mariners, the Phoenicians. Further south, the plain of Acre broadens until it ends abruptly at the base of Mt. Carmel, and on the east merges into the plain of Esdraelon, which itself constitutes one of the zones of Palestine. Around the northwestern base of Mt. Carmel runs a very narrow strip of land, connecting the coast plains on the north and south. To the south of the mountain, which is in reality a bold elevated plateau crowned with fertility, lies the ever- widening plain of Sharon, in ancient times inter- spersed with forest and fruitful fields, to-day a great undulatory flower-bed, dotted with the black "tents of Kedar ' ' and a few r fellahin villages. Below the plain of Sharon, the headlands of Judah stand back twenty to twenty-five miles from the sea, leaving a rolling, healthful, fruitful plain, which at an early date became the home of the Philistines. Like all the coast plains, it was exposed to attack from every side. The necessity of constantly being on the defence developed a brave nation of warriors, who dwelt in strong fenced cities and struck many a deadly blow against the Hebrews living among the eastern hills. The second zone of Palestine is the district lying between the Philistine plain and the central uplands, GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 233 known as the Shephelah or foot-hills. It is not a land of natural defences, but open and roll- Q,) Second ing. Here raged, during the barbarous zone ' period of the Judges, the intermittent warfare between the highlanders and lowlanders. The third great zone of Palestine, which we desig- nate as the central plateau, is separated into three distinct divisions, each with characteristics ( c ) ^rd clearly marked. The northern division is zonei Galilee, which is watered by the streams which flow from Mt. Hermon. It consists of a series of elevated plateaus, with broad deep valleys, capable of sup- porting a vast population, and studded with orchards, cultivated fields, and thickly clustered cities. Galilee gradually merges into the plain of Esdraelon on the south, which in turn bounds Samaria on the north. Samaria with its fruitful valleys, with its rounded hills, some of them rising to the height of two thousand feet, but covered to their tops with trees and fields and provided with copious springs, is a fair land, but open to the outside world, whether friendly or hostile. The influence of their physical environ- ment upon the character and history of the Israelites is clearly marked. They were a pleasure-loving people, eager for alliances with their powerful neigh- bours, open to foreign influences, and naturally the first to receive the blows of Assyria, and the first to fall before them. They presented a marked contrast to the peoples who inhabited the hills to the south. As we pass below Bethel, the landscape becomes more grim, the valleys more narrow, the hills more rocky, and we realize that we are in the land of Judea, 234 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. the land of the shepherd rather than the paradise of the agriculturist; Judea, which borders on the desert, where life is a desperate struggle; Judea, which pro- duced such intense, courageous men as Isaiah and the prophet Amos. Naturally the southerners were slowest to adopt the agricultural civilization of Canaan, while they retained more of the life of the desert and clung more tenaciously to the principles of independence and the pure faith in Jehovah. Secluded and protected by their natural defences of headland, sea, and desert, they fell last into the hands of foreign conquerors and so survived nearly a century and a half after their northern kinsmen had ceased to constitute a nation. Going still further eastward, we come to the next great zone of Palestine. In striking contrast to the (d) Fourth three divisions which we have already con- zone, sidered is that great chasm in the earth's surface which we know as the Valley of the Jordan, along which the river which gives it its name flows towards the earth's centre, plunging down over twelve hundred feet below the level of the ocean, until it reaches the sea of death. No region in the ancient world possesses greater scientific and dramatic interest than this fourth zone of Palestine. Its chief historic significance lies in the fact that in early times its depths effectually separated the Hebrews of the east and west, making it necessary for them each to develop their civilization independ- ently; while in later generations it protected the Jews from the incursions of the hostile people of the desert, GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 235 Climbing up the hills of Moab and Gilead, we come to the fifth zone of Palestine, and are in the midst of rolling, grass-covered hills, pierced (e) Fifth by deep ravines, through which dashing zone, torrents pour their waters into the Jordan. Here the nomad from the desert receives his first lessons in agriculture. Here the Hebrews lingered for a time, learning valuable lessons and gaining strength before they streamed across the Jordan to possess the land of Canaan. Here the half-tribe of Manas- seh, and the clans of Gad and Reuben found their permanent homes. The sixth and last zone of Palestine, which, unlike the others, cuts across the central plateau from east to west, we know as the plain of Esdraelon. ^ gj xtll It is a rough, three-cornered triangle, with zone - one angle at the extreme northwestern end of Mt. Carmel, another deep down in the hills of Samaria, and the third running up past Mt. Tabor and Galilee. In appearance it is a great, level, treeless plain, watered by the muddy Kishon and its confluents. Strategically it is the key to Palestine, for broad valleys connect it in every direction with the other zones. Across it ran the great highways of com- merce. It was also most natural that it should have been the great battle-field of Palestine. Thus this land of sacred associations no longer appears to us to be a mere confusion of hills and valleys, but a miniature continent with its distinct zones, each with their marked peculiarities and inde- pendent moulding influences, each producing different types of men and life. 236 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. As we study the rivers of Palestine, we note the same suggestive facts: no rivers inviting commerce I ts pierce the land ; the only stream (the rivers, Jordan) which could thus be utilized flows to the Dead Sea, whose barren, gloomy shores are rarely trodden by the foot of man. Thus the very drainage system of Palestine determined the life of the Hebrew people, shutting them in by themselves, until the great stream of the world's history should take them and bear them out to new experiences and new life. If we find the physical contour of Palestine is sug- gestive, equally so is that of the strange "Land of the River, ' ' exempt from rain during most of the year, and fed instead with moisture and fertility by the waters which come down from Central Africa. As we study its peculiar contour, we see again how it was possible to develop there an early civilization, and how the incentives were at hand for men to strive and toil for the noble in art and civilization. Even more suggestive is the physical contour of ancient Babylonia. Lying between the two great (0) Baby- rivers, it was originally in part submerged lonia, and seemingly useless. The long struggle required to bring it into a state of cultivation not only gave to its conquerors a dwelling-place almost unequalled, but also developed a sturdy, energetic, remarkable race of men. For building purposes they found the wonderful brick-making material, and in the beds of the rivers clay on which they could easily inscribe their thoughts. From the mountains to the GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 237 north and east came the invaders, who gave them the incentive to build and to use the materials placed by Nature in their hands. The western land, opened for commerce and for conquest, invited them ever to strive for greater attainments. Thus we see, in God's great Providence, that the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates prepared the way for the first lessons in human civilization, which we can trace back to-day, in the light of modern excavations, so many thousand years. If we are awake to the value of the study of physical contour, it is possible for us with the aid of modern methods to fix its important Manufacture results in the minds of our pupils, not only f ndus e f J bas-relief by the aid of bas-relief maps (which have maps, been suggested), but also by their own efforts im- pelling them to make bas-relief maps for themselves. The process is simple: a shallow case, putty, per- haps coloured ; a bas-relief map as a guide to suggest the general outlines ; the facility which comes from trying and training; and before long you will find your students reproducing in miniature the land of Palestine, travelling in imagination among its hills and valleys, learning themselves the lessons which that land teaches. Incidentally you will find that some of them will provide your classes with bas- relief maps which will be of lasting helpfulness. The Geological Formations also present many suggestive facts. A broad outlook will help us to grasp the details. Underneath Palestine, extending from the Taurus Mountains in the north to the Sinaitic peninsula in the 238 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. south, is found first granite ; then a layer of limestone supplemented in the east by loose quartz and sand- stone, and by the black volcanic rock. It explains at once why we find in the valleys of Palestine so few inscriptions. It makes the wonder all the greater that such a vast volume of literature has been pre- served, representing the thought of that early people. We can appreciate the difficulties under which they laboured. Unlike the people of the valley of the Euphrates, who had easily moulded clay at hand, the Hebrews must cut their inscriptions in the soft friable limestone or in the hard black basaltic rock, both giving very unsatisfactory results. Thus we can clearly understand why we have so few monu- mental remains from the Hebrews, and why they learned the lesson of writing so late. We can also appreciate why they treasured with such fidelity in their memory and by the hands of their scribes their sacred writings and thus preserved them intact to the present. If the time permitted, we would take up the study of the great arteries and highways oi Palestine. Of those months which some of us as teachers 4, Com- mercial are going to devote to the historical study Geography, of Bible land ^ ^ us devote a port ion to studying the highways, which represent the com- merce and the conquest of ancient times: those highways which ran along the Arabian Desert, down to the land of Egypt ; that which ran from Damascus on the north ; that other highway which ran from the coast of Egypt, touching Southern Palestine ; and then turn towards Southern Egypt itself. We find GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 239 the question raised, oftentimes, "Why did Jesus leave Nazareth among the hills, and live at Caper- naum ? ' ' The answer is to be found in the fact, that Capernaum was on the highway which ran from Damascus down through Palestine to Egypt. He chose Capernaum that He might be in the centre of commercial life, that He might be in touch with the great stream that went through it. So we find the commercial geography of these ancient lands throwing floods of light on the thought of national development and the development of litera- ture. In connection with the Missionary Journeys of St. Paul, note how he followed the lines of the world's commerce. In the map of his journeys, you have the map of commercial enterprise on the Eastern Mediterranean. With profit we might explore the great field of Racial Geography. Propound to yourselves and your students, " What was the home of the Semitic people ? " ' ' From what centre Q eog ^ 1 L did they spread?" "What was the course of these migrations ? " ' ' What were the dominant races ? ' Trace, for example, the peoples which finally settled in Palestine. First came the Phoenicians, who occupied the fertile coast plains; then their kinsmen, the Canaanites, who early seized the rich inland plains. Following them, long after according to their traditions, came the ancestors of the Hebrews. Finding Palestine already crowded, they passed on to their temporary dwelling-place on the borders of Egypt. Trace the migrations of the Aramaeans, as they moved westward and southward 240 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. to conquer the territory immediately north of Pales- tine and to build up a powerful kingdom with its capital at Damascus. Trace the flood coming from the north, which left its deposit on the southern coast plains in the person of the Philistines. Note how the horde of northern invaders was stayed at last by Cyrus the Persian. Note how Eastern civilization and influence still moved victoriously westward, until in time it was met by the Greek. By Alex- ander, the tide, which had so long been setting westward, was turned back, and the Greek race and civilization swept over Southwestern Asia, leaving lasting deposits in, and especially on the outskirts of, Palestine. Then beginning with the earth itself, having become acquainted with its physical contour and its peoples, study the varied political boun- 6. Historical d ar j es the Historical Geography of Pales- G-eography, tine. Perhaps of all the fields which we have considered, none is less supplied with useful maps than the great field of historical geography; for each period calls for a most carefully prepared map. As we take up the successive stages of Hebrew and Jewish history, it is necessary that we ourselves, with our classes, develop the varied changes in the commercial and racial geography, noting also those forces other than the spirit of man which moulded nations and determined their boun- daries. Thus, when we come to historical geogra- phy, the other departments of geography merge, and we have a united whole. In the short space which remains may I present a GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 241 few general suggestions ? Shall we endeavour, in the first place, to make our study compre- General hensive ? Comprehensive, in that we do s^gestions, not dip in here and there at random, but rather try to take broad outlooks. It is much easier to under- stand the geography of Palestine from Make study some mountain-top, like Mt. Hermon or com-prehen- Mt. Tabor, than it is from deep down in sive the valleys. First study the general outlines, then their relations to each other, then their significance as a composite whole; and then, when you have fixed those in your minds and in the minds of your students, you are ready to study and understand the details. In all our investigation, do we also fully realize that the object of geography is not merely acquaint- ance with this or that portion of the earth's surface, but rather to study the earth in its earth in its relation to man ; to study descriptive and relation to physical geography because of the light which they throw upon man's development and thought ? The point of view should be that of man, and all should therefore lead up to man as the goal of the study. Historical, commercial, and racial geography are but the records, written in vanishing lines upon the face of the earth, of man's activity. It may, in conclusion, be well to emphasize the true relation of geography to Bible-study. Geography It is not an end in itself. We make a mis- but a step take if we keep our students always study- ing geography merely. It is only a means to an end, it is a background, it is the stepping- 242 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INS 'I RUCTION. stone to the consideration of the life of a people ; and the knowledge of the life of a people who inhabit a land is the introduction to the study of their thought < and their faith; and the life and faith and thought of the Hebrew race present to us the message of the Eternal. Therefore the geography of the lands which moulded the people of the Bible, which deter- mined to a great extent their character, which reveal many of the motives and forces which, in the hands of the Creator, moulded their life, their history, their thought, and their faith, is the most illuminating and fascinating commentary upon His Word which God has placed in our hands. May He grant that we may use it faithfully, intelligently, and successfully! "I would like to ask about the results that this system is going to produce, with reference to the length of time required for instruction. "DoesScien- It is very important to get truth into the tific Study m inds of students, but Herbert Spencer produce Per- sonal Keli- has admitted that information does not giousjnter- proc ] u ce action. I understand that this scientific method does give a good deal of interest to the constructive imagination, but how much life it also gives I am not quite sure. Some sceptical, inquiring minds do not get much impression of scientific truth, unless they get it from the teacher. I should like to illustrate by a few of the sceptical, inquiring minds: there are many students in our colleges who are of that class. Now, from Professor Kent's observation, I should like to know if studying about the Bible has given GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 24$ these minds a personal impression of the power of the vital truth of the supernatural life in Christ. What interest comes into the student's life from this study ? ' ' This question is an exceedingly important one. I wish we had the students here to answer the ques- tion, because they would answer best. I can tell you of the character of the students Answer> themselves, which is suggestive. We have in the first place many men who were trained in their homes to study the Bible. They have also received in the Sunday-schools, of course, a certain prepara- tion which they find useful in their study. In an experience with hundreds of students, I do not recall a single instance of a case that has come to my attention of a man whose faith has been , Personal unsettled. The only approximation to that faith not has been in the case of a man, weak in the unsettled< faith, who said, "It is going to shake so many of my conclusions, that I will not go on." I am not sure but that ' * the latter end of that man was worse than the first." But men who have gone on, men who have passed through the so-called destructive period, and have seen the great constructive trend of modern Biblical study, these men come to me and say: " I don't believe this and that as . I did before, but I do find I have a new in Bible desire to enter into Sunday-school work. I feel that I have a mission to perform. I find new interest in teaching. I find that there is a new interest on the part of the pupils I find that where hitherto I had no success as a teacher, I now have 244 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. success." So much for the men that perhaps need it the least. I am surprised and gratified to find that in our colleges a very large proportion of the men who are taking the general courses in Biblical literature are not those who are going on to enter the ministry, or who are necessarily known as religious ; but they are thoughtful men, who want to know the truth, men who have rebelled perhaps against the way in which Bible truth has been presented to them ; men who, if you ask them at the beginning of their Biblical study, will say they have no religion at all, but men who, unconsciously perhaps to themselves, are being brought into touch with the truth, The majority, and find themselves on the side of truth, lege Biblical an< ^ tnus are drawn into the vital, living Courses, do work. I recall the words of cheer and en- not enter the Ministry, couragement of a recent President of Brown University. Since this was a personal statement, I feel a great deal of hesitation in men- tioning it, but I think it partly answers the question. He said that the Biblical work (including the work of the Biblical Research Club, which brings to the students a large number of very helpful lectures each year) was in his opinion as powerful a religious factor in the life of Brown University as a certain other prominent institution which would naturally be men- tioned in that connection. That is the testimony, it seems to me, which comes from all the presidents and professors and students of our universities, where regular Biblical departments are established. And what is the reason ? It is not because the Biblical GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 245 professors are preachers. It is not because ordinarily we try to impress a moral upon our students. It is because by the use of modern methods, in all earnestness and fidelity, we endeavour to lead them to the truth, and believe that when one has once found the truth, imperfect though that finding must always be, the truth itself will speak, will draw, will influence, will inspire, far more than any additional words of the teacher. Especially to educated university men, Bible- study is genuinely interesting. The students tell their own story, it seems to me. Students do not elect courses unless they consider them of practical value. Fortunately, in most of our colleges and universities, the Biblical work is entirely elective, and usually confined to the junior and senior years. In many of our modern universities, while some of the other courses have fallen off in numbers, the classes in Biblical study have doubled each . T T Bible stu- year. At Harvard, the classes number dents in between one hundred and a hundred and universities, fifty. At Yale, they number between a hundred and a hundred and seventy-five. At Brown, we have over one hundred taking Biblical courses this term, of whom fully eighty-five are not contemplating entering the Ministry; which fact seems to me sug- gestive. They do not elect them because they are easy courses, for one of the greatest obstacles which we have to deal with in our Bible-study, which is not confined to the university or the Bible-class, is the idea that the Bible can be studied somehow with- out any effort, without any time, without any know- 246 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. ledge. To dispel that illusion, we are obliged to make those courses among the most difficult in the college curriculum. Yet the men continue to elect them. And why ? We believe, because they help them. It seems to me that such courses alone will save our thoughtful, educated young men of to-day from the threshold of scepticism. In the study of history, we are accustomed to apply certain methods. They are the only methods that we ourselves would trust, to get at the facts. In literature, ' they are obliged to study the question of intrinsic value. They appreciate the necessity of studying questions of detail, which, though not the most im- portant, throw light upon questions which are im- portant. They acquire scientific habits of study. Is it in keeping with human nature and the tific'Methods mm d of to-day to confine those methods the only ones entirely to so-called secular history and to apply, literature, and say, when it comes to Biblical teaching, * ' We will not apply those methods; we will trust them in this, but we will not trust them in that field ' ' ? All the truth has not yet been found, nor is it all encased in creeds and dogmatic theologies. We cannot, and would not if we could, exclude scientific methods from the Biblical field. We need in all our Sunday-school classes to-day teachers to take the young man by the hand and say, ' * We will apply those methods with the same earnestness, zeal, and consecration to the study of that ancient life and literature," instead of saying, " We will have nothing to do with them." The latter mistake has been made for the last gen- GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 247 eration or 'two, but it is being corrected to-day by earnest scholars and teachers, in the spirit of hu- mility, in the spirit of carefulness, of self-sacrificing effort, and always with enthusiasm. We believe in truth, we believe in the Bible because it is God's Word, we believe in a God back of the Bible, and therefore we are not afraid of the application of true methods which we trust in other lines of investiga- tion. We are going forward shoulder to shoulder, trying to find the truth, assured that not one particle of truth will be lost, that the old truth will only reappear in different clothing, adapted to the life of to-day ; that all the change will only result in adapt- ing it to the new methods of thought and ideas. Fifteen or twenty years hence, perhaps sooner, we are all going to say, ' ' That is just what I always believed. It is only expressed in a different form." Then we shall all realize that faithful men, whose opportunities have enabled them to be leaders in this movement for truth, have been doing, some- times amidst opposition, an important work; and we shall see that, after all, this present din and smoke and dust conceals no deadlier foe than the opponent of progress ; that all we are trying to do is to build a new and larger house for truth. The question is very suggestive. Are there other questions ? I do feel most strongly the vastness of the subject. We have only dipped into it here and there. I was not sure, at each step, that I was meeting the needs of this audience ; but when you ask questions, I feel that we are getting at the heart of the matter. 248 GEOGRAPHY IN RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. 1 ' Is there a natural boundary between Question, . Samaria and Judea ? No, it is a case of merging. Samaria merges into Judea. As you go southward, you gradually miss the springs and the verdure-covered hills. The valleys become narrower. The real boundary is the valley of Michmash, which runs up from the Jordan. When you pass that deep canon, you come to Judea proper. The fact that there was no natural boundary explains how con- stant was the warfare between the North and the South during much of their history. There was no such natural division between Samaria and Judea as there was, for example, between Galilee and Samaria. X. THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE. By Professor RICHARD G. MOULTON, M.A., of Chicago Uni- versity. SYNOPSIS OF LECTURE X. The Literary Study of the Bible, What is it ? The Fundamental Principle that there is intimate Connection between Matter and Form in Literature. Principle illustrated by Solomon's Song. Two Views of its Interpretation. Illustrated by application made of Bible Verses. Also by what is the True Literary Form of Psalm VIII. Three Main Forms of Bible-study, Devotional, Higher Criticism, and Literary. Differentiation of each form. The three forms illustrated. Devotional. Possible errors shown by study of Book of Job. Also by error in Quotation from Shakespeare. Critical. Illustrate^by Book of Micah. Literary. Shown in the same Book. Our Right to the Library Study of the Bible. In the " Aji/e of Commentary " the proper Form became ob- scuredy The Thi^ee Steps towards Recovery of Form. How to engage in Study of the Bible as Literature. Suitable Printing required. Illustration of present imperfect Printing. -Study of Bible by Books, rather than by Verses. Illustration from Deuteronomy. The Oratory of Deuteronomy. Analysis of the Book of Deuteronomy. Principle enunciated. Use of Bible as a Library. Contents of the Bible Library. Literary Study of the Bible. The Three Stages. Stage of Stories. Illustrated by Genesis. Stage of Masterpieces. Illustrated by Deborah's Song. Stage of Complete Literary Groups. Illustrated by Bible History in the Old Testament. Analysis of the Pentateuch. Illustrated by Bible Philosophy. Analysis of the Books of Wisdom, bnclusion. THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. I DEEPLY appreciate the opportunity of speaking to those who are gathered in connection with these lectures ; the more so, because I am aware that the studies I am here to represent have only an indirect connection with that which is -the immediate subject of these lectures. I am to speak of the Bible as Literature. Now it is true that Sunday-schools do not expect to teach the Bible as literature. All I claim is that the literary study of the Bible has a collateral interest for those who are concerned with Sunday-school training; that it is a subject which they cannot afford to neglect. To reach the connection between the study I am representing and the immediate purpose of these lectures, we have not far to seek. There is the great fact that the Christian revelation has been conveyed in the form of literature. That being so, who can deny that literary study is an adjunct of Christian education of the education that is dis- tinctively Christian ? But then there is a great area of education of education that we want which cannot be called distinctively Christian. Here a second consideration arises: the general literary 251 252 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. culture of this time suffers far more by the neglect of the literary study of the Bible than does even the education that is distinctively Christian. Those two links are sufficient to connect the studies that I am discussing- with the main purpose of these lectures. The first thing I want to make clear is this : that we understand the term * * literary study of the Bible " in a clear and definite sense. The What is the . " Literary phrase is used in many different meanings, Bible'' ? ^ anc * n ne Can ^ nc * any ^ au ^ wit ^ that ' For if the Bible be literature, then in a certain sense every kind of Biblical study may be called literary study. But I say that I want to advocate a distinct and specific literary study of the Bible, and it is the study of its literary form. Literary form is the essence of the study to which I am inviting you this afternoon. When we talk of other literatures, what do we understand ? We know that Greek literature is made up of the tragedies of ^Eschylus, the dramas of Euripides, the epic poems of .Homer, the history of Herodotus, the philosophic dialogues of Plato, and a great many other literary types. When we talk of German literature, we understand, again, dramas and epics and essays and philosophical treatises, and many other literary types. If we talk of French literature, we mean all these varieties of literary form. If, then, the Bible is justly called literature, we ought to be prepared to find that the Bible is made up of epics, and lyrics, and dramas, and essays, and philosophic treatises, and epistles, and a great many other of these literary forms. Now the specific THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 253 literary study of the Bible, to which I direct your attention to-day, is the study of these great literary forms in connection with Scripture, epic, lyric, dramatic, philosophic, and the like: the study of these forms and of their numerous subdivisions, and of the literary mechanism by which these literary forms realize themselves. And the foundation prin- ciple of this particular literary study of the Bible is this : that a clear grasp of the outward literary form is essential to the understanding of the matter and the spirit. May I assume that fundamental principle ? I fear not. My experience is that very few people have recognised this intimate connection in Thefunda- literature between matter and form. They mental prin- know perfectly well for I am speaking of Clpe ' educated people that a man cannot be sure that he understands an English sentence unless he is able to parse it : but it does not occur to them to go on from grammar to more purely literary form, and say, ' ' You cannot be sure that you have grasped litera- ture unless .you have clearly understood the outward literary technical form." And therefore I should like to dwell upon this foundatiqnjrinciple for a short time : that, whether you are taking broad views of whole pieces of literature, or whether you are studying minute sections, little texts or verses, in both cases alike, the clear grasp of the outward tech- nical form is essential to the matter and the spirit. I will illustrate. Iri the first place, I will suppose that you are taking broad views of whole books of literature at once. Now there is in the Holy Scrip- 254 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. tures a certain book called ''Solomon's Song," Principle or "The Song of Songs," a book very mysterious to the ordinary reader. It so happens that literary experts are di- vided into two opposite schools with regard to the exact literary form of that book. One school says that Solomon's Song is a drama. The other school says Solomon's Song is not a drama, but is a series of lyric idylls. Now, mark, that is only a distinction of literary technique between drama and lyric idylls. I am not going to discuss which of these views is correct. My point is, what a difference it makes to the book which of these two views you accept. Those who think that Solomon's Song is a drama are practically agreed as to the plot of that drama. They say it is this : that Solomon and a certain humble shepherd lover are contending for the love of the fair Shulamite, the heroine of this poem. Solomon and the humble shepherd lover contend for her love, and in the latter part of the poem in what our modern phrase would call the Fifth Act Solomon gives way, and the humble shepherd and the Shulamite are united in wedlock. Now, let us look at the other side. Those who say that the work is a series of lyric . idylls have clearly a very different instrument of inter- Second view, . . . T pretation to bring to bear upon it. In a drama you understand that the incidents must appear in their proper order, in the order of time. We would distinguish a drama, for example, from a novel. If you were reading a novel you might, in Chapter XX, find some great crisis, and the heroine is deliv- THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 255 ered by the hero, supposed at the moment to be on the other side of the world. That is Chapter XX. Now in Chapter XXI the story goes back in time, to explain how this hero, supposed to be in Australia, came in reality to be in New York. It is quite pos- sible for a novel to go back, but you can see that it is impossible for a drama, which presents scenes, to go back in time. It appears then that the incidents in a drama must appear in the order of time, but in a series of lyric idylls the story may refer to events apart from the order of time. Thus I am saying that those who take the view that Solomon's Song is a series of lyric idylls have a very different instru- ment of interpretation to bring to bear upon that poem, with this result: that, according to this view of the book, Solomon is himself the humble shepherd lover. The story now becomes this: that King Solomon, visiting his vineyards upon Mount Lebanon, came by surprise upon the fair Shulamite, who fled from him. Then he wooed her in the disguise of a humble Shepherd, and won her love. Then he came in all his state, to claim her as his queen, and they are actually being united in the royal palace when the poem opens. Now, remember, I am not discussing which of the two views is correct: but I have brought out, have I not ? what an enormous difference it makes to the poem which of those technical views you take up. The whole story not some trifling matter of inter- pretation, but the whole story comes out quite differently, according as you assume that the poem is a drama or assume that it is a series of lyric idylls. 256 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. This is our principle : a clear grasp of the outward technical form is essential to the matter and the spirit of the whole poem. I will next suppose it is a question of what we call a verse, in the Bible. You have selected a verse for your meditation. I will suppose that the verse is this : ' * Out of the mouth of babes and Illustrated sucklings hast Thou ordained strength, taon" of verses, because of* Thine adversaries." You want to interpret that verse. Turn to your commentators. Every commentator has a different interpretation. One tells you that it refers to a historic incident: but those who take that view do not seem to agree what the historic incident is. Another commentator will tell you that it is a metaphor. Another will say it is a prophecy: we know it is used as prophecy, but he thinks prophecy is the original meaning. Now my point is that all these commentators are neglecting our fundamental principle of looking to the exact technical literary form. The Eighth Psalm, in which that verse occurs, is, I would suggest, erroneously printed in our ordinary Bibles. Observe, I am not discussing any difference of translation : take any translation you please. But I say the passage is presented in wrong literary form. In most Bibles the Eighth Psalm appears as a series of equal paragraphs, laid out in parallel lines from beginning to end. Now the true literary form of the Eighth Psalm is un- doubtedly what we call an " envelope figure. " The meaning of the very technical term ' ' envelope figure " is, a little poem in which the first line and THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 257 the last line are identical, and all that comes be- tween is, as it were, " enveloped " between The lite that common opening and close: that is, form of all that comes between is to be read in the light of the common opening and close. As the psalm is printed in the ordinary Bibles, a series of equal parallels, the opening apostrophe is made to read thus : " O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth ! who hast set Thy glory above the heavens." Accordingly the second verse, which presumably opens the general thought of the psalm, becomes what I have quoted : ' * Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength, because of Thine adversaries. ' ' But now if you present that poem in its true literary form, as an envelope, then the opening apostrophe becomes no more than this : " O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth ! ' ' We know that no more than this is the opening apostrophe, because these words recur at the close, and the meaning of an envelope figure is that the opening and the close are identical. If then the opening be, as I say, "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth ! ' ' then what follows, what presumably opens the thought of the psalm, is this: " Who hast set Thy glory above the heavens, out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength ! ' ' That the Architect of the mighty heavens should have selected man, a mere babe and suckling in compari- son, to be His representative, that is the thought 258 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. of the psalm. And now the whole poem flashes into organic unity. "When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy hands, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained, what is man, that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that Thou visitest him ? Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels," and so on. The whole psalm becomes a clear unit when once you have repre- sented it in its true literary form. You have no need to seek for historical references, you have no need to seek for deep metaphors. The meaning of the -whole is as clear as can be, if only you read it/ in the true technical form of an envelope figure. This is an illustration of what I am calling the fundamental principle of that literary study of the Bible to which I am inviting you : that the clear grasp of the technical literary form is essential to grasping the matter and the spirit. Whether you are dealing with great books of literature, or whether you are dealing -with little verses, a knowledge of the literary form is essential to a grasp of the matter and the spirit. Now in this specific sense the literary study of the Bible stands as one of the three main forms of Bible- Three main stu dy- By the other two I mean, in the forms of first place, the Devotional study of Scrip- u y> ture ; in the second place, that which has come to be known amongst us of late years as the Higher Criticism. I am not discussing which of the three is the more important. We would all agree that the devotional use of Scripture must have the first place. But I am distinguishing, and plead- THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 259 ing for, the distinction of literary study in the sense that I have described, from the devotional use of Scripture, on the one side, and the Higher Criticism, on the other side. The devotional use of Scripture well, we all understand what that is. You read portions of Scripture with your soul in a devotional spirit, seeking to bring your soul into tune ^onal Itudy, with what you read, as God's own message to you. That is the devotional use of Scripture. The Higher Criticism I understand as a purely his- torical analysis of Scripture. Those who belong to that school of thinking might not agree with me : I am speaking from the outside, But as I survey Bible-study as a whole, it appears to me that what we have come to call the Higher Criticism is a strictly historical analysis of Scripture one that sets before itself historical problems, and solves them by historical methods. The Higher Criticism deals with questions of this kind. The books of the Bible, are they by the authors whose names have been traditionally attached to them ? Do they belong to the ages to which we have been accustomed to ascribe them ? Nay, are they books at all, or are they compilations from various sources, which need splitting up into frag- ments, the different fragments having very different degrees of authority, validity, and authenticity ? Now those, you see, are purely historical questions, and those who deal with them deal with them, quite rightly, by historical methods. We concede that these matters are inevitable. Historical questions 260 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. must be faced and met with historical ma- chinery. But what I am anxious to bring out is, that the literary study of the Bible, in the sense I have described, is something entirely distinct, something that it would be desirable to differentiate both from the devotional use of Scripture, on the one side, and from historical analysis of Scripture, on the other side. I want to point out that both of these, the devotional use and the Higher Criticism, stand in need of the literary study of the Bible. Both may go wrong I mean, may go wrong in their own department of devotional exercise or historical analysis if they have over- looked that which I am claiming, in the literary study of the Bible. And this is so important that I propose to illus- trate it. First, I will take the devotional use of The three Scripture. I want to show how this, in its kinds of sphere of devotional exercise, may go study illus- trated, (a) wrong by ignoring the literary form of Devotional, Scripture. I will suppose a plain, straight- forward Christian, one who makes no pretensions to scholarship, but who of course has his rights to the devotional use of Scripture, like the wisest I will suppose that he sits down to read a chapter of the Bible'. He is reading in a devotional spirit, that is to say, he is seeking to bring his soul into tune with what he reads, as God's own message to him. And in doing this he feels himself very safe. Now I want to suggest to you that our plain Christian is not as safe as he thinks. For suppose that the chapter THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 261 he has sat down to read is a chapter from the Book of Job, and he has omitted to observe that it is a continuation of the preceding chapter, which opened with the words, "Then answered Eliphaz the Temanite. ' ' So that he is reading the words of Eliphaz the Temanite. Now in the last chapter of Job, as you all know, God is represented **. r J r T u Book of Job, as saying that the three friends of Job, Eliphaz and the other two, have not said of Him the thing that is right. So that our plain, straightfor- ward Christian, in his devotional use of Scripture, has been trying to bring home to himself, as God's mes- sage, something spoken by a speaker whom God Himself repudiates. Clearly there is something wrong somewhere. How has he gone wrong this plain, straightforward Christian, in his devotional use of Scripture ? I say, by overlooking a point of liter- ary form : by overlooking the dramatic character of the Book of Job. There is, as everybody understands when his attention is called to it, a great difference between dramatic and other literature, in this way: if you are reading a work of philosophy say a work of Herbert Spencer or John Stuart Mill then any sentence that you come upon represents the mind of the author. But if you read a sentence in a drama, does that sentence necessarily represent the mind of the author ? " ' Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe,' as Shakespeare says." Shakespeare never said it. That is a common mistake. You will find that 262 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. couplet in the plays of Shakespeare, but Shakespeare does not say it: Shakespeare makes some- ShakesDeare, , . body else say it. And does it make no difference when you find that the somebody else who is made to say those words is the greatest villain that history or fiction has ever portrayed ? It is obvious, when attention is called to it, that in dealing with drama you may not assume that the words you find represent the mind of the author. You must see into whose mouth the words are put : and if they are put into the mouth of some one evil and tyrannous, opposed to the general character of the author, they are more likely to represent the opposite of what he thinks than his own thoughts. Thus our plain, straightforward Christian has, in his devotional exer- cises, gone wrong, it seems to me, through ignoring this point of literary form. He has read words in the Bible as though they belonged to philosophy or essay, and overlooked the fact that they belonged to drama, and are to be interpreted from the dramatic standpoint. So that we see the devotional use of Scripture cannot dispense with the literary study of the Bible. But now I go to the other side the Higher Criti- cism : that' is, the historical analysis. And I will not, this time, take a plain, straightforward (b) Critical. . . . * Christian, but I will take one of the great- est of the historians one of those to whom the Higher Criticism owes 'most. And I am bold enough to say to you that Wellhausen goes wrong in his own department of history through ignoring a point of literary form. The passage I have in my mind THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 263 belongs to the latter part of what is our Book of Micah: but without your referring to your Bibles, I can give you the general drift of it. If you read the last two chapters, as they appear in our modern Bibles, you find that in the midst of your reading there comes a sudden and startling change. For some time you have been reading of nothing but terror, woe, and distress. All of a sudden, in the very next verse, you come to buoyancy, and hope, and confidence. Now of course, startling changes need explanation. My suggestion is that the Higher Criti- cism the historical analysis looks only to history for explanation, and finding this startling change from distress to hope, the critics are driven by their methods to say, "Why, this hopeful passage must have come in by mistake. It is an interpolation and, moreover, an interpolation of a different age, because the age of the prophet Micah would not warrant this buoyancy of spirit, this hopefulness." And therefore Wellhausen, followed by the greater part of the historical critics, holds that that part of Micah is the interpolation of a later age. And I quote Wellhausen in particular, because he puts it so epigrammatically: "Between verses six and seven there yawns a century. ' ' Now, the literary study of the Bible says : ' ' No, between verses six and seven there yawns a change of speakers. " _. . /,,. , . (c) Literary, This part of Micah is dramatic. You are not left to infer this : you are absolutely told that it is so. All this part of the Book of Micah opens with this title : ' ' The voice of the Lord crieth to the city, and the man of wisdom will see His name." Now, 264 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. any one who is familiar with prophetic literature will recognise at once in those words the title of a prophetic drama one of the many prophetic dramas in our Old Testament. He will also recognise that the title of this drama warns the reader to expect an addition to the usual dramatis personce. In the prophetic drama the dramatis personce usually con- sist of these the Prophet, God, and the guilty Nation. But in these words, "The voice of the Lord crieth to the city, and the man of wisdom will see His name," you have promised you an addition to the usual dramatis personce, in the Man of Wisdom the faithful remnant, the favoured one in whose behalf Divine interposition is to take place. Now, this being the title of the drama, all that follows the title- verse bears out the description. Following the title- verse you have, in the first place, Divine denuncia- tion of Israel as a corrupt nation, and a warning of impending evil. Then follows the speech of the guilty nation words of woe ; how all is over, and the chance of salvation gone ; nothing left but cor- ruption: " Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confi- dence in a guide : keep the doors of thy mouth from even the wife of thy bosom." Then the Man of Wisdom speaks: "But as for me, I will look unto the Lord. Rejoice not over me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise." Between the two verses there is not an interval of time, there is nothing more than a change of speakers. The thing is perfectly obvious to those who, not confining themselves to historical methods, will also keep their eyes upon the literary form. THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 265 So the literary study of the Bible, in the sense that I have designated the study of literary form, follows upon the principle that form is essential to matter. And it is one of the three main divisions of Bible- study. I do not claim for it any greater importance than for the other two, but I do claim for it atten- tion, and my claim goes further: that neither the devotional use of the Bible, in its area of devotional exercises, nor the historical analysis of the Bible, in this department of the Higher Criticism neither of these can afford to do without the literary study of the Bible. Without it, each is liable to go wrong,/ even in its own sphere. Such, then, is the literary study of the Bible, as I understand it. But, at this point, I think I ought to meet an objection, I won't say in every mind, but an objection that will make itself a literary prominent in many minds. You will say, * ' Is not such literary study of the Bible a new thing ? Is it not against anything that connects itself with Scripture, that it should be new?" Now, it is perfectly true that the literary study of the Bible, as I have defined it, is a new thing: but a glance at the history of Scripture is sufficient to explain that. No one questions that the original authors of the Bible, quite apart from inspiration of a _ In the "Age more sacred character, were also men 01 ofCommen- the highest literary power. No one, ^\^~ surely, will question that this age in which became ob- we live is an age that can and does appre- s ciate literature. But between our modern times 266 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. and the times of the original writers of Holy Scrip- ture there intervenes a long roll of centuries, which, I think, are best described by the phrase, " The Age of Commentary. ' ' In this intervening period shall I say twenty centuries, talking in round numbers ? in this intervening period, between the time of the original writers of Scripture and what we call modern times, the age of commentary has obscured literary form. It is an age that includes what we call the Middle Ages of Europe, and extends to the age of rabbinical discussions. It is fair to say that, in this long period of time, those who discussed Scripture had no conception whatever of the Bible as litera- ture. It did not belong to their habits of thought. Think of the rabbinical commentaries. Their treat- ment of Scripture was to superimpose upon the written word interminable verbal comments. The slightest clause was sufficient as a foundation for long and interminable controversy. When you come to the Middle Ages of Europe, you find that when they refer to Scripture they do not refer to it in a literary sense. You do not find the doctors of the Middle Ages discussing St. Paul and Isaiah, or arguing about the Epistle to the Galatians. They simply think of individual clauses, verses, sentences. Indeed, the whole habit of their minds was to look upon Scripture as a series of propositions. When Martin Luther, representing the very heart of the Middle Ages, enters upon his work in the Church, what does he do ? Does he write a theological work ? Does he write a book at all ? He did this afterwards : but what he does while he is still under THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 267 the influence of the Middle Ages is to nail on the door of a church ninety-five propositions separate sentences or texts, numbered I, 2, 3, 4, up to 95 ; and he is prepared to discuss with the whole world on any one of those ninety-five propositions. Luther's adversary puts one hundred and three propositions on the door of another church, and he is ready to fight these before the whole world. Their way of looking at Scripture was wholly prepositional . So, putting together the Middle Ages of Europe and the ages of the rabbis, you see they are entitled to the name of the age of commentary. There was not the slightest conception of the Bible as literature: but they looked upon the Bible as materials for commentary, or, in other words, texts for comment. All this was, no doubt, a state of things altogether favourable to the preservation of the Sacred Word, this minute attention to clauses and verses. But literary form, literary distinctions between dramas and essays and poems and the like all these lie buried beneath the monotonous surface of texts, which appear in these verses divided off and num- bered i, 2, 3, 4, just like Luther's ninety-five pro- positions. It takes a long time to recover from a burial of twenty centuries. The first step in recovering this submerged literary form was taken by Bishop Lowth some century and more after our King James translation. FiTstste The proper distinction between verse and towards prose had been unrecognised until he redis- covered it. And the secojoxl step was taken within 268 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. my own memory, and probably in that of many who Second are here, in the Revised Lectionary of the step, Church of England ; for the chief difference of the new lectionary was that it had shaken itself free of chapters. And the third step was taken in the Revised Version of the Bible, which has gone Third far to free itself from divisions. These are step, the s i ow steps, extending over centuries, that have been taken in recovering the literary form submerged under that age of commentary. But the greater part still remains to be done, and we must recover the full form, the. dramatic form, the form of essay, the form of philosophical treatise, the form of song, we must restore every possibility of literary form that the commentaries of centuries have taken from us, before we can expect to arrive at the proper interpretation, before we can apply the outward literary form to the interpretation of the matter and the spirit of Scripture. Now I turn more particularly to practice. As a How to en- P rac tical matter, how are we to set about gage in lit- the literary study of the Bible in the strict SlT* 7 sense in which ! define it; ? I note three points. In the first place, we must make use of all the devices of modern printing to bring out the true l, Use literary form. Shall I shock you if I say, suitable printing, what I am accustomed to say that the Bible is the worst-printed book in the world ? Not, of course, as regards paper, or typography, or bind- ing. If you think that literature consists in typo- graphy and printing and binding, then when you ^B OF THE UMIV THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 269 have bought a Bible you have a right to be satisfied. But in everything else, the Bible is the worst-printed book in the world. The most trifling poem sent to a local newspaper is printed with more attention to literary form than the great literature of the Holy Scriptures. Imagine this. Imagine a few plays of Shakespeare, a few poems of Wordsworth, a few essays of Emer- son, one of Motley's histories imagine all these printed in a single volume. Then imagine ;n lllgtration that the printers, in order to save space, of present blot out the distinction between one speech and another in the dramas, knock out the names of the speakers, knock out the distinctions between one poem and another, and the titles of the poems ; knock out the distinctions between verse and prose, and print these dramas, and poems, and essays, and histories, all in solid type like the columns of the newspaper, without the newspaper titles. Imagine, further, if you can !_J*l! a great strain upon your imagination imagine further that, in order to have this matter brought into this solid form, it occurs to somebody that it might be very useful as exercises in parsing for children, and therefore the solid matter is broken up into nice little verses and sentences, of a length suitable for use in parsing, and the whole divided into twenty or thirty such exercises. If your im- agination can go as far as that, then you have the exact literary form in which our Bibles are printed. Dramatic form, lyric form, distinction of speakers, distinction of titles, and what not, all struck out, the 270 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. whole thing printed solid ; and yet not solid ; broken up into verses and texts, not, I grant, for purposes of parsing, but the injury to literary form is precisely the same. I am saying, then, that one of the practical steps in the proper study of the Bible is to restore the / I ) literary form, print the poems as poems, the essays as essays, and the letters as letters, etc. That, I may say, is a task which I have essayed in the editing of the Modern Reader's Bible. But what I have endeavoured to do must be done by others. It will be done, I hope, before long by authority; and the Bibles that are in regular use amongst us will come to be printed in the proper literary form. Passing over this, which is a matter for the few, I come to my second practical suggestion, one which appeals to the many or to all. It is a sim- 2, Study by , .. , , r books not pJe practical principle, a mere rule of thumb, and yet it is one so important that I believe on it may be founded the whole system of the literary study of the Bible. And it is this: that whereas in traditional use the unit has been a verse, in the literary study of the Bible the unit must "Be a book. A book at a sitting, that is my rule of thumb. I say, in traditional usage the unit has been a verse. Is not this a fact ? Nothing more harmful ever happened to the Bible than the division I have spoken of into verses into texts for comment. The result is that most people think of the Bible as a collection of isolated verses, isolated texts. I speak with all reverence when I say it is as if the Bible were a Divine scrap-book, Now, in place of texts, THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 271 let us have whole books. I mean by a * book ' a whole poem, a whole song, a whole essay, a whole epistle, and the like. Are you using the Bible as authority in matters of theology ? Then do not search all over the Bible for texts to support the particular doctrine, but look at an epistle as a whole at a prophecy, or unit of prophecy, as a whole. Are you seeking to enjoy the Bible ? Do not sit down and read a chapter, but take some literary unit, a poem, as a whole, or a particular division of history. Dare I go further ? Are you seeking a subject for a sermon ? Would that you might be induced not always to preach from texts, but some- times to take as your theme a whole book of Scrip- ture! Seek to bring into the compass of the ser- mon's length the spirit and matter of a complete work. And the dullest of your audience will rouse up and bless you. This, then, is the simple practical principle: a whole book at a sitting. I have said that I know not anything more important than this in the prac- tical work we have to do. May I give an example ? Perhaps no book of the Bible can better illustrate this point than the Book of Deuteronomy. Just fix your attention upon the history of the epoch when the Book of Deuteronomy first ap- Illustration from Deu- pears in history. Observe, I don t say, teronomy, when it was first written : that is quite another question. But when the Book of Deutero- nomy first appears in history, it was I use the word advisedly the most sensational book that had ever been thrown into the world, As the result of that 272 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. book a whole nation rushed into a spiritual revolu- tion a revolution that went to the farthest bound of Judea. Of course, spiritual revolutions that are rushed are not always the best. But Israel had caught the flame, and it never entirely went out. Prophets like Jeremiah their thought and their language ring through and through with the influence of this newly discovered Deuteronomy. The pious Israelite read portions of it every day of his life. In the time of our Lord it still appeared to be the favourite book of devotion, v Yet the modern Chris- tian, in his devotional use of Scripture, what use does he make of the Book of Deuteronomy ? If your experience is the same as mine, you will be aware that he usually has a vague idea that Deuteronomy has something to do with law. I have heard it called a dull book: this most sensational of books is looked upon by the ordinary reader as uninterest- ing. Turn now to the Higher Criticism, and you find the Book of Deuteronomy a storm-centre of con- troversy. But observe this : that if you examine any historical analysis of the book, I venture to say you will find five-sixths of it occupied with just fifteen chapters in Deuteronomy, because these chapters do present historical difficulties. For all the rest of the Book of Deuteronomy, the Higher Criticism discusses it as so much ' hortatory matter. ' Now, in the kind of study I am advocating, it is just this ' hortatory matter ' that is the main consideration. From the literary point of view, the Book of Deu- teronomy is the oldest, grandest oratory. Its title should be, ' ' Deuteronomy, or, The Orations and THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 273 Songs of Moses. ' ' Considered simply as oratory, if I may speak my own opinion, there is nothing in Greek or English to surpass it. This much, how- ever, you can learn if your literary sense is alert, by simply dipping into Deutero- Oratory of Deuteronomy. nomy. But if, instead of dipping into it, you read it through to the end, you learn some- thing else. You learn that it is oratory, growing gradually into drama; for it is a series of orations, presenting a great situation one of the most terribly pathetic of all situations. In all that vast assembly, Moses is the only one who understands what the promised land is, and Moses is the only one who must never enter it. This pathetic situation breaks into the majesty of his periods. ''The Lord was angry with me for your sakes ' ' : that is the phrase under which Moses veils the breakdown of his whole lifework. All the way through the majestic periods, this pathetic note is forever sounding, and as you pass from the beginning of the book to the end, you are growing nearer and nearer the climax. The first of the orations brings out the deposition of Moses from his office of leader. The second is the handing over of the Book of the Covenant hitherto spoken by word of mouth, now for the first time seen in writing the handing over of the Book of the Covenant to the custody of the Levites and Elders. The third of these orations is in Analysis of connection with that first of Commination the Book> Services, the ceremony of the blessing and the curse. And you may search literature through and through, and you will find no language that comes 274 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE near the scathing denunciation with which that third oration reaches its climax. There is the fourth ora- tion, entitled the Covenant in the land of Moab. From oratory the book springs to song. The im- pulse comes to Moses to put his words in the form of poetry, and we have his song of Jehovah the Rock. And then you have the finale. The whole nation knows how Moses is going on that journey from which he shall never return, and all are anxious to catch the last glimpse of him. And because the people are so numerous, the heads of the tribes come out from among the people and line the path by which their leader will pass. You catch the step of Moses, slowly traversing the way between those heads of the tribes, and scattering to each burning words words of fire which were the pro- phetic war-cries of the tribes, until he has tra- versed the whole line, and turns to lift his hands in the final blessing: " There is none like unto God, O Jeshuron, Who rideth upon the heaven for thy help, And in his excellency upon the skies. The eternal God is thy dwelling place, And underneath are the everlasting arms." Then Moses turns and passes on that journey on which none may accompany him. And from that grand outburst of poetry you drop to simple, bare prose, fittest of all tones for the purpose of conveying the solitary ascent of the mountain, the long gazing over the promised land, the death far from his people, the burial in the sepulchre which no man knoweth; THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 275 ' * and the days of the weeping and mourning for Moses were ended." I say, this book, neglected by the ordinary Chris- tian, discussed for its historical difficulties by the Critical School, is one of the oldest, greatest literary treasures magnificent oratory, growing gradually into the greatest of dramatic climaxes. You get that by reading a book at a sitting. Here, then, we have the main principle that I would lay down. If you like, I will put it for you in technical language. Not the interpretation of exegesis, but the interpretation of perspec- p r i nc i p i e tive. Exegesis is the Greek for a person- enunciated, ally conducted tour the personally conducted tour that takes you into every remote point of the un- known land, and flashes up for you every darkest corner. Without this on the part of some one or other you can have no other kind of sight. But the age of commentary has gone on so long that the materials collected for illumination have blotted out the thing to be illuminated, and we want now to supplement the interpretation of exegesis with the interpretation of perspective the book-at-a-sitting plan. Take your stand at a sufficient distance to be able to survey the whole at one view. Sweep through your book the first time: of course it leaves you a great deal that you do not understand. Sweep through a second time, and difficulties of the first reading have vanished in the light of the whole. Sweep through it again, and yet again: each time you gain a clearer view, and from first to last what you gain is a hold on the book as a whole. 276 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. The third point needs only mention. Apply this to the Bible as a whole. The Bible disappears as a ~ book, to reappear as a library. And in Bible as a the literary study of Scripture, of course this library must be handled in a literary sense of division ; the history by itself, the wisdom by itself, the poetry and idylls by themselves, prophecy by itself, and so on. Thus the Library of the Holy Sciptures would be somewhat as below. Here must be distinguished to the eye, Story [narrative appealing , to the imagination and emotions], History [narrative appealing to the sense of record], and the Historic Documents [such as in modern books would make up Appendices and Foot-notes]. Whereas Historic Criticism deals with the Bible as materials with which to investigate past history, the literary study recognises " The History of the People of Israel as Presented by Itself." This makes a beautiful and philosophical unity, when the different parts are divided according to their bearing upon the central idea of a Chosen People conscious of a sacred mission. Bible History. Genesis The Foundation of the Chosen People. The Exodus [Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers']. The migration to the Land of Promise. Constitutional History. [Deuteronomy, or the Farewell of Moses: Orations and Songs illus- trating a crisis of the history.] The Judges \_Judges, Joshua, part of Samuel]. The struggle from a Theocracy to a Secular Monarchy. The Kings and Prophets [part of Samuel, Kings']. The Secular Monarchy and Theocracy side by side. The Chronicles The Ecclesiastical History of Israel. Wisdom, or Bible Philosophy. The Proverbs Miscellaneous Observations of Life, with Adoration of Supreme Wisdom. [In short literary forms.] Ecclesiasticus Miscellaneous Observations of Life, with Adoration of Supreme Wisdom. [In longer literary forms.] Ecclesiastes Observation turned upon Supreme Wisdom, and breaking down in religious despair. THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 277 Wisdom of Solomon Observation directed upon Life as enlarged by the idea of Immortality, and recovering its tone of Adoration. The Book of Job Various attitudes to questions of Life embodied in different speakers of a drama. [To which may be added, in the New Testament : Wisdom Christianized (Epistles of St. James and First St. John) Wis- dom applied to the Life of Christ in the Gospel of St. Matthew. ~\ Poetry. The Psalms The Lamentations. Biblical Idylls [Solomon's Song, Ruth, Esther, Tobif\. Prophecy. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the (so-called) Minor Prophets. New Testament. St. Luke and St. Paul : The History of the New Testament Church as presented by Itself. \The Gospels and Acts, with the Pauline Epistles inserted at their proper places : thus a counterpart to Old Testament History.] The writings of St. John. Other Gospels and Epistles. I come now to that which is the real purpose of our lecture, and for which I have been preparing in all I have said the application of all this to Christian education. You will not expect from me any detail of the plan. I simply want to lay down the general principle thoroughly here as to the way in which you will apply this literary study of the Bible to education of different grades. I recognise three stages: the stage of stories, the stage of masterpieces, the stage of complete literary groups. First, the stage of stories. Literary I take the distinction between story and stages, history. It is very important to insist up- on this, because I believe the distinction is very 278 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. little understood, or, rather, is misunderstood. Most people seem to imagine that the story is something 1. Stage that is not true something which is made of Stories, U p by somebody, out of his own head, whereas history, we know, is all true. Now I want to say that the distinction between history and story is not that at all. As a matter of fact, the differ- ence between story and history is a question of the mode in which it is put before us. Narrative that addresses itself to our sense of record is history. Narrative that presents itself to imagination and emotion, to the creative faculties that is story. This distinction between history and story has application, of course, to the Sacred Scriptures. But there is a difference between story in the Bible and story in other literature. In most literatures the two things are perfectly separate, and are left to separate literary men. A class of poets and fictionists repre- sent one, a class of grave historians represent another. It is one of the literary peculiarities of Scripture that story and history are combined. The Bible is a rich story-book, but the stories gravitate to that history of which they form a part. Indeed, in your ordinary Bibles there is nothing to distinguish what is story and what is history. And that is a pity, because you must give a totally different mental attitude to the two. Just as, in using a microscope, you alter the focus for each new object that you look at, so you want to bring a totally different attitude of mind to bear upon story from the attitude of mind you have had in studying history. You sit down to read the Book of Genesis. You THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 279 will find it for the most part traversing long- periods of time in a few lines. All of a sudden you come to the name Joseph, and the whole character of what you are reading transforms itself. You get more interested. There is personality. There are moving spectacles of life in the background. There are mysteries of dream- land becoming clear as events fulfil them. Sudden mutations from a prison to a prime minister's throne; strange double situations, where Joseph recognises his brothers and is not recognised by them ; divine Providence coming as a climax, bringing out how the cruel act of the brethren has led simply to pro- viding the salvation for Egypt and all the world ; all these followed by the peaceful conclusion. You go on reading Genesis, and you will find yourself deal- ing in a few paragraphs with economic changes that must have taken centuries to have made themselves felt. There is thus a marked distinction between the portion relating to Joseph and what preceded and what followed it: this is the distinction between story and history. The Bible is rich in stories, but the stories have\ merged themselves in the history of which they are \ a part. The story is used as a mode of historic em- > phasis ; and in any properly printed Bible you ought to have something it might be no more than a title to warn you where you pass from story to history, that you may change your mental focus. Story, in the sense in which I am speaking of it, is the natural food for children. Thus you want, as your first stage in the literary study of the Bible, Bible stories, 280 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. isolated from the history to which they belong, and Titie-divi- presented by themselves. You want not sions, very much teaching with these stories. The youthful mind studies life : these stories give you palpable life, ready for any degree of teaching and criticism you desire. And what you do in this way of criticism ought to have reference to this great prin- ciple, that our first duty to a story is to love it. But one thing more may be done in this first stage of stories. While the stories themselves should always be left as they stand, yet in the selection of them a great deal may be done. They should be so selected as to illustrate the grand divisions of history. And so, in the first stage, the young mind will uncon- sciously be studying history all the while that it is appreciating story; that is, the stories will illuminate the great features of the historic periods which at a later stage the reader will be called upon to correlate for himself. He will find, when he comes to study history as such, that he is moving from one to another of the incidents with which he has already become familiar. The second stage I call the stage of masterpieces. Story is only one of the literary forms of Scripture. You have, of course, oratory; you have 2, Stage of ' y ' /. Master- lyric, you have dramatic essays, philosophy, pieces, anc [ ^ Q j^e. In what we call the second stage you want to accustom the youthful mind to take an interest in literary forms as such, always remem- bering our foundation principle, that a grasp of the literary form is essential for the matter and the spirit. Now literary forms are best taught by masterpieces. THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 281 I use the term ' ' masterpieces ' ' simply to imply that certain things are more suitable than others for giving a grasp of the form, which is what we are looking for. These masterpieces must be absorbed. They must be studied and studied, and assimilated, to such an extent that not simply the matter, but the form itself, becomes dear to the youthful mind. Thus, to take a brief illustration : among the lyrics of Scripture there is nothing greater than Deborah's Song. But it is one thing to read Deborah's Song as it appears in its prose form in the fifth ,,, chapter of the Book of Judges. It is quite by Deborah's another thing to see Deborah's Song pre- sented in its true literary form, as an antiphonal chorus: a chorus of women, led by Deborah, and a chorus of men, led by Barak and how they answer one another; and then unite. Now these choruses of men and women clash with one another, then they unite in an apostrophe to Heaven. The chorus of men describe the miserable condition of Israel, the chorus of women break in with the words "I Deborah arose, a mother in Israel." The chorus of men appeal to the men that ride upon white asses and sit in judgment, the chorus of women cry to the assemblies of women in the places of drawing water. Then you have the gathering of the tribes. You have the chorus representing the tribes that came to the battle, and those that refused, and those that changed their minds. The men sing, ' ' By the waters of Reuben there were great re- solves." The women reply sarcastically, "Why then staid ye by the sheepfolds, to hear the pipings 282 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. for the flocks ? ' ' And the men answer, ' ' By the watercourses of Reuben there were great searchings of heart. ' ' The men describe the kings coming to fight: the women chime in, "The stars in their courses fought against Sisera." The men shout, "Curse ye Meroz, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof, because they came not to the help of the Lord." The men describe the strange ending of Sisera, how Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, received him : " She put her hand to the nail, Her right hand to the workman's hammer ; And with the hammer she smote Sisera, She smote through his head, Yea, she struck and pierced through his temples. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay ; At her feet he bowed, he fell, Where he bowed, there he fell down dead." The women, with delicate imagery, picture the mother of Sisera looking through the lattice, and saying: "Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why tarry the wheels of his chariot ? ' ' They repre- sent the mother and her wise ladies questioning among themselves, while waiting for the spoil. And then all together join in the final cry to Heaven : "So perish all Thine enemies ; but let those that love the Lord rejoice as the sun, when he goeth forth in his might." I say that Deborah's Song read as prose, in the fifth chapter of Judges, is a very different thing from Deborah's Song presented in its true literary form, with these clashing choruses of men and women. It is such effects as these that THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 283 we should seek to bring out in this stage of study of masterpieces. We proceed towards the third stage, the stage of the complete literary group. We may deal now with Scripture as it stands, but not in historical ,. . . , i- i r ,-u 3l Sta S eof divisions, not in divisions made for theo- the complete logical purposes, but in the proper literary Literary divisions the study of history as history, of drama as drama, of prophecy as prophecy, of philosophy as philosophy. Let me take an example. Nothing, perhaps, illus- trates our subject the distinction between literary and other studies better than the study of illustrated Bible History. In the first place, the great by Bible History in historic tract that stretches from Genesis to old Testa- the Chronicles, and on to Nehemiah and mentt Ezra this must be presented properly to the eye. We must have a distinction made to the eye between the historic narrative, and the appendices of statistical reference, and the stories which are used to illustrate the history. That is one thing. But there is some- thing more than that. In the historic analysis of Scripture, these historical parts are used as mate- rials from which to work up to the actual history. Literary study of the Bible takes quite a different view. Here it makes no matter what your historical view of the Bible is whether you look upon its his- torical books as representing the actual facts, or whether you look upon them as accretions of a later age, or whether you cannot make up your mind between the one view and the other. The literary study of the historic books takes them as the history 284 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. of the people of Israel, presented by themselves. It is not a question, " How far does this present the actual history ? " Be that as it may, in the Bible we find the history of Israel as understood by the people themselves. A grand piece of literature is this first portion of Scripture, a grand piece of historical literature, bringing out the nation's sense of its divine mission. First you have Genesis, the formation of the chosen people. Then the Exodus (not the Biblical Exodus, but Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers) ; this is the journey to the Land of Promise, and at the same time the period of constitutional development, where all the constitutional documentary history is found massed Analysis of together. Story is used here, as ever, to Pentateuch, illuminate. At the beginning, you have the story of the plagues of Egypt, in which you see Israel as a horde of slaves under the taskmaster. Near the close, you have the grander story of Balaam: a man coming to curse Israel, who is over- powered by the spectacle of their greatness, and turns his curse into a blessing. At that point you break off from history to oratory: you have the ora- tions and songs of Moses, constituting his farewell to Israel. For the next division of the history, we have the Books of Joshua and Judges. There you will find the struggle between the theocracy, or government by an invisible God, and the tendency to assimilate Israel to surrounding nations. The next grand division is the Kings and the Prophets, where the tendency to secular government is repre- sented in kingship, and the prophets stand forth to THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 285 represent the original theocracy; so together they are like the government and opposition of modern constitutional countries. And then, a little later, there comes the time when, on returning from exile, they are no longer a nation, but only a Church. This gives us the Chronicles, with the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the ecclesiastical history of Israel. We must then study the historical parts of Scripture as a literary whole, and from the lite- rary point of view. I will take just one more illustration : the wisdom or philosophy of the Bible. I venture to say that no literature of the world has a philoso- r Illustrated phical literature which makes so periect by Bible and complete a unity. If you were study- philos P li y' ing this from the point of view of historic analysis, your attention would be called to such points as the dates of the various books, the circumstances of the age, how a book was influenced by the secular litera- ture and thought of its times, and the like. All that is perfectly proper in its own sphere. What I want is to show how very different a thing is what I am calling the literary unity of Biblical wisdom . Through it all runs a distinction between the two meanings of the term * * wisdom. ' ' You might call it * * wisdom with a small w, and Wisdom with a capital W. " The wisdom with a small w is the wise observation of human life and conduct. The Wisdom with the capital W who shall define that ? The sense of harmony and unity running through the whole uni- verse, and man's inner nature: something like what \ we mean by Providence. 286 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. Now with this thought before us, observe the separate books. First, you have the Proverbs- isolated observations of life, in the very shortest of literary forms, proverbs and epigrams, with hymns of adoration to the great Wisdom, the Wisdom that runs through the universe. In Ecclesiasticus, the second of these books of wisdom, you have again isolated observations of life, but in longer Analysis of the Books of literary forms: the maxim and the essay Wisdom, come in. But here, again, you have hymns of adoration to the Wisdom that runs through the universe as a whole. The third book is Ecclesiastes. Here you have this great literary interest, that for the first time analytical observation is turned upon the universe as a whole, and not simply upon life and conduct. The literary observa- tion turned upon the universe as a whole breaks down in religious despair. You no longer have hymns of adoration to Wisdom: but instead you find elegies on the theme, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. ' ' But now comes the corrective, in the fourth book, the Wisdom of Solomon, from the Apocrypha. Once more observation is turned upon the universe as a whole, but it is a universe enlarged by the thought of immortality. The opening words are, " God made not death, neither hath He pleasure when the wicked perish: for righteousness is im- mortal." With this enlarged conception of human life, observation may rest upon it, and see again wisdom ; and the whole resolves into a great scheme of Providence. Four separate works represent four different philosophical attitudes. Then comes the THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. 287 grand climax. The Book of Job takes these four different philosophical attitudes, and puts them into the mouth of four different speakers, in a drama, and draws them into unity in a dramatic plot. Now I say, in no other literature of this world will we find so perfect a literary unity running through its wisdom and philosophy. Shall I, in concliasion^ be confronted with this objection, that what I have advocated is ''reading the Bible like any other book ' ' ? My Conclusion, answer is, " Do you or do you not believe that the Christian Revelation is conveyed to us in the form of literature ? ' ' Once you grant that, then I say you must commence with the literature. You must first deal with the books as books : and when you have grasped their outward literary form, then you go on to their matter and spirit. ' * First that which is natural; afterwards that which is spiritual." First in time, I mean ; afterwards, in time, that which is spiritual. I have never known any excep- tion to the experience that attention to the literary form brings a harvest of spiritual force. And let me end as I began. You who are specially concerned with the organization of Sunday- school teaching, look for a moment outside your immediate sphere. Are you, of all people, content with the secularization of literary culture ? For that is what it comes to. We are accustomed I don't speak of Sunday-schools now we are accustomed, in the schemes of our high schools and colleges and universities, to send our young people, for their literary culture, to literatures which spiritually are 288 THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE. at the opposite poles from ourselves to the great literatures of Greece and Rome, which spiritually are negative to us; where the highest passion is sensu- ous passion, the highest conception of Providence is mocking fate, where philosophies are philosophies in which God is a traditional accident: and all the while we have in our own very hands, being familiar with it from our very childhood, one of the oldest, grandest literatures, in which lyrics are not inferior to the lyrics of Greece, oratory is equal to anything that the world has ever produced, philosophy has an application to our actual life ; which gives us dramas such as no theatre could ever attempt dramas in which all space is the stage, all time is the period, and God Himself is one of the chief actors. Is it not reasonable that we should accustom those who are seeking higher education to associate literary beauty with that which is in harmony with our spiritual feeling, and not simply with that which is opposed to it ? And you whose immediate concern is to deal with the teaching of Sunday-schools, see, in carrying out your tasks, that you lay a foundation for bringing together, in later life, the study of the Classics and the literary study of the Bible. . OF THE UNIVERSITY *$& TOPICAL INDEX. I. History of Religious Education. Beginnings in Jewish system, p. 107 ff. Origin of Teaching Function of the Church, p. 23 ff. Religious Education in the early Church, p. 109. " " in the Middle Ages, pp. 26, 28. Effect of the Reformation, p. 6 f. Origin of Religious Instruction in England, p. 49 ff. First Sunday-schools, p. 55 f. Work of Dupanloup in France, p. no f. II. Present Condition of Religious Education. The Public School and Religion, pp. 8 ff., 34. Age of Revivals past, p. 71 f. Religious Instruction in England, p. 52 ff. " " in France, p. 56. " " in Germany, p. 57 ff. America and Europe compared, p. 62 ff. Responsibility of the Sunday-school, p. 15. Biblical Study in the Universities, p. 244 f. Lack of pedagogical training for the Ministry, p. in. Need of the Church for Educators, p. 127. Need of better religious Pedagogy, pp. 65 f., 75, 126, 165 f. Danger of Secularization in Literary Study, p. 287 f. III. Organization of Religious Education. Religious Education part of Education as a whole, pp. 3, 6, 27, 106, 133. 289 29 TOPICAL INDEX. The Agencies for Religious Education, p. 15. The Sunday-school essential to the Church, p. 107. Organization of the Sunday-school, pp. 15 ff., 85 f. Training of Sunday-school Teachers, p. 40. Examinations for Sunday-school Teachers, p. 212. Payment for Sunday-school Teachers, p. 17. Confirmation Instruction, p. 97 f. Systematic Instruction of a Congregation, p. 90 ff. IV. Content of Religious Education. Definition and Purpose of Religious Education, pp. 4 f., 62, 79 f., 105 f., 133, 196. Division into a) Character material, p. 81 f. b] Church material, p. 82 f. Courses of Study, pp. 17, 66, 86 ff., 91, 113 ff., 127 ff. Necessity of a curriculum for Sunday-schools, p. 112. Religious Study of Nature, pp. 121 f., 174 f. Sacred Geography, p. 122 f., Lect. IX. Religious Study of History, p. 123 ff. Christian Ethics, p. 124 f. V. Methods of Education in Particular Subjects. a) The Catechism, pp. 40, 86 f., 90, 113 f., 149. b) The Prayer-book, pp. 92 , 125 f. c) The Church Year, p. 94. d) The Bible. Value of Bible Study, pp. 41, 118 ff. How to teach it, pp. 114 f., 118 ff., 158 f., 178 f., 197 ff. Literary Study of Bible, Lect. X. Forms of Literature, p. 252 f., 276 f. Importance of, pp. 253 ff., 260 ff. Differentiated from other main forms: a) Devotional Study, p. 260 ff. b} Critical Study, p. 262 ff. Lack of appreciation for in Past, p. 265 ff. Beginnings and growth, p. 267 f. A Book as a Unit, p. 270 f. Bible a Library, p. 276 f. TOPICAL INDEX. 29! Three Stages of Literary Study: a) Story and History, p. 278 f. b) Masterpieces, p. 280 ff. c) Literary Groups, p. 283 ff. Proper Printing of Bible, p. 268 f. Reading like any other Book, p. 287. Influence of Scientific Study on Piety, p. 242. Reliance on Scientific Methods, p. 246 f. Danger of Unreality in Teaching, p. 136. Supported by Psychology, p. 186 f. Geography of the Bible, Lect. IX. Its Contributions, p. 215 ff. Illustration of Helpfulness of, p. 216 f. Antidote to Unreality, pp. 218, 220. Influence on Character and History, pp. 219 f., 241. Important for General Education, p. 22 if. As a Sunday-school Course, pp. 222 f., 241 f. Authorities on, for Sunday-school Library, p. 224 ff. Maps of, pp. 226 f., 228. Departments of : a) Descriptive, p. 228 ff. b) Physical, p. 231 ff. c) Geological, p. 237 f. d) Commercial, p. 238 f, e) Racial, p. 239 f. f) Historical, p. 240! Geographical Zones in Palestine, p. 231 ff. Advantage of Map-drawing, p. 229. Making Bas-relief Maps, p. 237. e} Christ, p. 159. VI. The Science of Teaching. Instruction based on Laws of Mind, p. 195. The three Problems of Instruction, p. 133 f. Two Ways of Learning, pp. 134 f., 142. Dramatic Imagination, p. 134! The Teacher a Creator, p. 135. The Art of Story-telling, pp. 137-145. Reality, p. 137 ff. 292 TOPICAL INDEX. Reserve in using imagination, p. 142. Clear notion of meaning, pp. 143, 145, 148. Difference in titles, p. 144. Dangers : too much meaning, p. 144 f. wrong interpretations, p. 145. Importance of Biography, pp. 197-213. Value of Personification, p. 201 ff. Why Biography interests, pp. 203 ff. , 206. Danger in it, p. 210. Useful for Reviews, p. 211. Age for Biographical Teaching, p. 212. Knowing the pupil, p. I49f. The Common Denominator, p. 150 f. Preparation necessary to receive Truth, p. 153 f. Lines of Insight needful, p. 155. Connection between Lessons, p. 204 ff. 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His ' Saint Peter and the First Years of Christianity ' will have raised the expectations of students who have known it, but we think that even they will be hardly prepared for so delight- ful and interesting a book as this of the life of St. Paul. . . . The setting and presentation of St. Paul's The Last Years of St. Paul. By the Abbe CONSTANT FOUARD. Translated, with the Author's Sanction, by GEORGE F. X. GRIFFITH. With Maps and Plans. Small 8vo, gilt top. $2.00. [Just Published. The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul. By JAMES SMITH, of Jordan-hill. With Dissertations on the Life and Writings of St. Luke, and the Ships and Navigations of the Ancients. With Numerous Illustrations. Crown 8vo. $2.00. life is delightfully fresh and interest- ing. . . . We feel that we know St. Paul better than we did before we took up the Abbe's work. " There are good maps, a full in- dex, and an abundant supply of notes and references. . . . On the whole, we believe there are few lives of St. Paul which the ordinary Bible student will find more attrac- tive and helpful than this." Longmans, Green, & Go's Publications. The Art of Teaching. By DAVID SALMON, Principal of Swansea Training College. Croi 8vo. 289 pages. $1.25. This book is devoted to the exposition of teaching as a Technical A founded on experience, philosophical principle and scientific observatic In the Introduction the author adopts Milton's definition of " a compl< and generous education," but points out that the school teacher is rea only one factor in physical, moral, and intellectual culture, and that, ev to be efficiently so, he has need of professional training. His aim must directed to secure the utility, discipline, and pleasure of the taught results of exercised activity. The author takes up in successive chapters (1) Order, Attention, and Discipline, and gives rules applicable to t regulated and successful exercise of these that they may become habitur- (2) Oral Questioning how to proceed with and succeed in it, and what avoid while engaged in the process ; (3) Object Lessons what to aim at giving them, and how to accomplish the intended result ; (4) Readir Spelling, Writing, and Arithmetic how they should be taught, and t relative merits of various methods of procedure ; (5) English, includi Composition, Grammar, and Literature ; (6) Geography, and how to ma the teaching of it educative and valuable ; (7) History, and the methods giving it a living (not a bookAvorm) interest ; (8) the Education of Infants as a speciality. \From the New York Nation^\ Salmon's contributions to elementary school literature are many and va able. It suffices to mention his ''Object Lessons," "School Grammai "School Composition," "Stories from Early English History." He \ now collected into the volume before us his views on the " Art of Teac ing." The treatment of the subject is orderly, thorough, authoritative. 1 takes up first the fundamental matters of order, attention, discipline. Th comes a charming discussion of the art of oral questioning. Next follows estimate of the claims upon attention of the main subjects of elementary stuc with invaluable hints as to the teaching of each. The subjects treated ai Reading, Spelling, Writing, Arithmetic, English, Geography, History. T] is, indeed, familiar ground, but the treatment is so able, so acute, so co prehensive, that there is constant variety and constant interest. A v< valuable portion of the volume is the section of sixty pages on Infant EC cation. Not only are the history and development of the kindergarten h( admirably discussed, but the original and valuable contributions of Engla to the Education of young children are set forth. Most wise and helpful Salmon's discussion of the best ways of teaching the elementary studii This portion of the book is a true teachers' manual. It is a genuine pleasi to commend without qualification this admirable manual. It is a wort companion to Fitch's "Lectures on Teaching," and, like that book, oug to be on every teacher's shelf. H. C. Missimer, Superintendent of Public Schools, Erie, Pa.: "I have read Salmon's ' Art of Teach- ing,' and believe it to be the best work on the subject yet published. It is simple, direct, clear, practical, a has evidently been written by o who has had experience with eve problem and difficulty of the scho< room." Longmans, Green, & Go's Publications. Teaching and School Organization. A Manual of Practice, with Especial Reference to Secondary Instruc- tion. Edited by P. A. BARNETT. Crown 8vo. 438 pages. $2.00. The object of this Manual is to collect and co-ordinate for the use of students and teachers, the experience of persons of authority in special branches of educational practice, and to cover as nearly as possible the whole field of the work of Secondary Schools of both higher and lower grades. The subjects treated in the 22 chapters are as follows : The Criterion in Education Organization and Curricula in Boys' Schools Kindergarten Reading Drawing and Writing Arithmetic and Mathematics English Grammar and Composition English Literature Modern History Ancient History Geography Classics Science Modern Languages Vocal Music Discipline Ineffectiveness of Teaching Specialization School Libraries School Hygiene Apparatus and Furniture Organization and Curricula in Girls' Schools. A Manual of Clay-Modelling for Teachers and Scholars. BY MARY LOUISA HERMIONE UNWIN. With 66 Illustrations and a Preface by T. G. ROOFER, M.A. Balliol College, Oxford. I2mo. $1.00. The course set forth in this Manual is suitable for children of six or seven years of age and upwards. It is a great advantage to young children to learn to handle the clay and to become accustomed to using it. They may begin with the simple'st objects, such as beads, round or flat, of different sizes ; cherries with string or wicker stalks ; a sausage, or cigar ; a small saucer, or a basket, a bun, or an open pea-pod with loose peas in it made separately ; a pat of butter, or a cottage loaf , are also suitable. For the work of advanced pupils, or for the higher classes in schools, more difficult subjects may be attempted. Kindergarten Guide. By Lois BATES With numerous Illustrations, chiefly in half-tone, and 16 colored plates. Crown 8vo. 388 pages. $1.50.* In addition to a full description of the kindergarten gifts and occupations, the book shows how ordinary subjects may be taught on kindergarten principles. Churchman, New York: "A long needed hand-book for the kinder- garten teacher. . . . The whole course of instruction is elaborately explained with full illustrations, so that the teacher possesses, in this I2mo volume, a complete compendium for her work." Journal of Education, Boston, Mass.: " Never before has there been so full, varied, and detailed a treatment of the subject from the standpoint of teacher, parent, and child. No family in which there are little children hould be without this sum of all kindergarten virtues," Longmans, Green, & Co's Publications. EPOCHS OF CHURCH HISTORY. Edited by the Right Rev. MANDELL CREIGHTON, D.D., Lord Bish< of London. I2mo. Each volume. 80 cents. The English Church in Other Lands. By the Rev. H. W. TUCKE M.A. The History of the Reformation in England. By the Re GEORGE G. PERRY, M.A. The Church of the Early Fathers. By the Rev. ALFRED PLUMME D.D. The Evangelical Revival in the Eighteenth Century. By t Rev. J. H. OVERTON, M.A. The University of Oxford. By the Hon. G. C. BRODRICK, D.C L. The University of Cambridge. By J. BASS MULLINGER, M.A. The English Church in the Middle Ages. By the Rev. W. HUN M.A. The Church and the Eastern Empire. By the Rev. H. F. TOZE M.A. The Church and the Roman Empire. By the Rev. A. CARR. The Church and the Puritans, 1570-1660. By H. OFFLEY WAK MAN, M.A. Hildebrand and His Times. By the Rev. W. R. W. STEPHENS, M.. The Popes and the Hohenstaufen. By UGO BALZANI. The Counter=Reformation. By ADOLPHUS WILLIAM WARD, Litt. ] Wycliffe and Movements for Reform. By REGINALD L. POOL M.A. The Arian Controversy. By H. M. GWATKIN, M.A. OF THE **)> -^- -- ' ^ Messrs. Longmans, Green, & Co. will be happy to send the Catalogue, describing more than 1,000 text-books and works of reference, to any teacher on request, UNIVERSITY OJt CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 2 4 19 4? l0 Dec'50l-' f\^ 60rt51U ' DEC 10 1952 U LD 21-100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476 , 'V * . .!* '*. ':t -' ' : V